Friday, September 7, 2018
Sexual stigma
1 Corinthians 5:9,10
I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people. Yet I certainly did not mean with the sexually immoral people of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world.
A few weeks ago, I asked a group of religious leaders if they knew which men in their congregations were having sex with men. There was an awkward silence, a bit more silence, then mumbling, then mutterings of “we don’t know” and then a lone minister in the back raised his hand tentatively.
I was standing at the podium in the Pakatuh Salon of the Guyana Marriott Hotel facing a group of religious leaders that had been gathered by The Pan Caribbean Partnership against HIV and AIDS (PANCAP). My broad assignment was to give a “Theological or Spiritual Reflection on the issues of Justice, Stigma, and Discrimination.”
The feigned ignorance was upsetting. My response to the claims of ignorance was that it was not possible that there were no men in their congregations that were not having sex with men. If, however, there were no men who are having sex with men then their ministries were not reaching out to people in need of ministry.
The church today is quick to stigmatise and discriminate against those people whose sexual preferences, choices, and orientations are not in keeping with ours. One of the main obstacles to the control of the continued spread of HIV/AIDS is stigma and discrimination against men who have sex with men. Stigma and discrimination cause these men to stay underground and it is difficult to educate, support, and treat people who are operating underground.
The church is often unwelcoming to the sinners we are supposed to reach out to. We are selective about which parts of the world we are going to in response to our Lord’s command to go “into all the world.” All the world doesn’t seem to include lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders, queers and others of that population. But there is nothing that gives us the right to make such a choice.
Paul had written a letter to the church at Corinth, before the one we know as First Corinthians, and had tackled this matter of sex and homosexuals. Clearly, from our key verse today, the Corinthians misunderstood what he meant, just the way so many are misunderstanding now. Paul wants us to ferret out those who are in church but doing immoral things on the down-low. But instead, we have ignored immorality in church and shunned those outside.
The popular thing for the church these days is to join marches and protests against the LGBTQ+ community with respect to their advocacy for rights under the law, rather than provide safe places for ministry to them.
Failure to do research and to teach have brought us to a place where we think that homosexuality is a new phenomenon. Homosexuality was a very common matter at the time of the early church. It was widely practised and a matter of common discussion. The historians tell us that the Romans learned it from the Greeks, so the Graeco-Roman context in which the apostles planted churches was one in which sexual practices, outside of marriage between one man and one woman, were prevalent.
For example, one of the greatest works of literature is Plato’s Symposium, its subject is love, homosexual love. In Symposium the character Phaedrus begins the subject this way, “I know not,” he says, “any greater blessing to a young man who is beginning life than a virtuous lover, or to the lover than a beloved boy” (Plato, Symposium 178 D).
It is in this environment that the apostle Paul seems almost indignant in his words to the Christians at Corinth, that they should not try to avoid the sexually immoral in the world outside the walls of the church. The church today is marching and signing petitions but Paul, in his time, was preaching Christ crucified. His position was clear, “For what have I to do with judging those also who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside?” 1 Corinthians 5:12.
It should be noted that LGBTQ+ rights were not an issue then because the LGBTQ+ community included the aristocracy, the military, the civil and the political leadership. Lucian, a satirist and rhetorician near to that time, captures it well in one of his pieces, The Lapiths 39. There, in a bit of dialogue, he makes that character Lycinus declare that “It were better not to need marriage, but to follow Plato and Socrates and to be content with the love of boys.”
One Historian, Gibbon, wrote, “Of the first fifteen Emperors, Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct. Julius Caesar was notoriously the lover of King Nicomedes of Bithynia. ‘The queen’s rival,’ they called him and his passion was the subject of the ribald songs the soldiers sang. Nero ‘married’ a castrated youth called Sporus and went in marriage procession with him throughout the streets of Rome, and he himself was ‘married’ to a freedman called Doryphorus.”
Paul, however, was convinced of the transformative power of the gospel and of the Holy Spirit working in the lives of believers that later he said that sinners, homosexuals included, had been changed and are now heirs of the kingdom too. “And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.” 1 Corinthians 6:11.
The church needs to be a safe and inviting place for the members of the LGBTQ community to come and find ministry.
Think on these things:
- Do you know of any male attending your church who has sex with other men?
- Would you consider yourself a member of the LGBTQ+ community?
- What does your church do to be open to LGBTQ+ persons who may be searching for ministry?
Prayer focus:
Let us pray today for the Holy Spirit to give revelation and for wisdom to minister effectively to the LGBTQ+ community around us.
In His Grace
Pastor Alex
