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 Today the youngest of our commentators, Daniel Gullotta, chances his life stepping in against the fundamentalist lions. He seeks to open-up an intelligent discussion on the vexed question of where homosexuality fits into God's plan of Creation. Daniel argues we need to start learning that it is part of God's plan and not some aberration... Pride or Prejudice? Homosexuality is one of the most dividing issues facing the Church as a whole today. All across the Church it would seem that lines are being drawn in the sand, forcing people to 'pick and chose' a side. For me as a member of the Anglican Church, this issue is one of our most pressing and most controversial. Where do we begin? Who is right? Who is wrong? What should we do? How should we feel? And where do we go from here? This essay will study and obverse the issue of homosexuality from the related 'echoes' as constructed by Patrick Oliver, providing the basis for my argument and how the Christian Tradition has approached, and how we should in the future. Designed by Patrick Oliver, the seven echoes are an attempt to give insight into the key elements of the Christian tradition, through seven major themes that run through the scriptures. According to Oliver, "These themes are not arbitrarily chosen, but come from a "marco" view of both the biblical writings and the great Christian spiritual authors through the centuries."[1] The Seven Echoes:
Reflecting through the first echo, Living Life-Death-Life, we are inspired (and shocked in many ways) to look at Jesus as the human face of God. In viewing the Incarnation, we learn the valuable secret that God loves humans and God loves human visual and touchable flesh. By doing so, it is clear that God limits himself to nothing.[2] The teaching that "You can't fall out of God" becomes ever so clear, understanding God as an Infinite Circle, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. When we release that within God there's everything, and outside of God's there's nothing, we must come to harsh reality that even gay men and women are in God and God in them.[3] They like every other thing in creation are a part of the one love and belong to the one God. They like the rest of us cannot fall out of the circle that is God. Seeing the Image of God… As the second echo stresses, it's about grace and not about collecting badges. Through the grace of God, we see, we receive and we understand what exactly the image and identity of God is and how our image and identity relates to God. It is in the image of God, we are given our permanent and unchanging identity. While we may struggle with our own image and our own identity, the image of God is never hidden from us. From the very first pages of the Bible, we learn the fundamental truth of Christianity, that God created everything and everyone in His image.[4] All too often we, as the Church, can forget the image of God is found everywhere, on the face on the beggar, the rapist, the murderer and let alone the homosexual.
Many people have been raised or are being raised with the idea that homosexual behaviour is condemned as ungodly, immoral and unnatural.[5] The Church's traditional view for people, who believe they are homosexual, is the path of self-denial and celibacy.[6] The idea that homosexual orientation is an automatic ordination of celibacy is a truly troubling one to me. Sebastian Moore remarks that "true celibates are rare — not in the sense of superior but in the sense that watchmakers are rare."[7] True celibacy is a difficult and dangerous lifestyle; one only needs to ask a celibate to get a small insight to complexity of it all. So if their sexual orientation and desire is unchangeable and is apart of their image and their identity, then it is in that image and in that identity that God has made them. It is important to remember that one must not let themselves close the door on a different or strange perspective. The idea of homosexuality itself is a very strange and very different concept itself, the idea that people of the same gender can attracted to one another. People commonly associate homosexuality with homosexual sexual behaviour; however the perspective goes so much deeper then that, believing that two people of the same gender can partake in an enduring loving relationship. This concept may seem strange to some, but we must always remember that life is so often never what you expect. Designer Love? The old romantic saying states "that love is blind". However this couldn't be more from the truth. Today we are scorned by the idea of a 'proper relationship', bombarded with images and ideas of what should and what shouldn't be. We are meant to follow this 'designer love' or 'designer sex' as Philip Yancey puts it, but the reality is that there is no such thing.[8] The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, warns about the danger of having a 'make believe' ideal about how marriage would be: Much more damage is done here by the insistence on a fantasy version of heterosexual marriage as the solitary ideal, when the facts of the situation are that an enormous number of "sanctioned" unions are a framework for violence and human destructiveness on a disturbing scale; sexual union is not delivered from moral danger and ambiguity by satisfying a formal socio-religious criterion. Decisions about sexual lifestyle, to repeat, are about how much we our bodily selves to mean, rather than what emotional needs we're meeting or what laws we're satisfying.[9] In the echo Engagement and Detachment, Oliver states that "Falling into love lets you see reality truly. You must love so you see what is." God manifests his love in everyway possible and we can see that in parental love, brotherly love, romantic love, physical love, so why then cannot He express His love through gay love? Breaking Bible Bashing… For centuries, the homosexual in God has been wounded and left to bleed. From a glance, it would seem that there are many places in the Hebrew Scriptures where one might interpret the text as condemning homosexuality. Most, of course, will mark the destruction of Sodom [Genesis 19:24-25] as the prime example, attributing its downfall with the homosexuality of its citizens.[10] However, a careful reading of these texts will show that inhospitality, pride, idol worship, and lack of consideration for the poor were their prime sins. If homosexuality was involved, it was obviously not consensual sexual activity; it was rape.[11] Another example used is the one found in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, which appears to condemn male homosexual behaviour, but in fact only refers to temple prostitution.[12] The same also goes for Paul's Letter to Romans and his First Corinthians, which refers to men forsaking the Kingdom to partake in the Greco-Roman temple cult rituals of the time which included temple prostitution.[13] Either way, they are ancient texts written by an ancient people with an ancient understanding of the world and human anatomy. Below, Archbishop Rowan Williams hits the issue' core: In a church that accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous biblical texts, or on a problematic and non-scriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures.[14] In this new light with these new understandings, we can begin the stages to caress the wounds that have been made. However the road to walk is going to be a long and hard one, and already has been so for centuries. In recent years, the banner of the anti-homosexuality gatherings by fundamentalist Christians has been "God hates fags!" They claim that they are prayerful, biblical and Christian, however I don't seem to recall Jesus walking around Palestine wearing a sign that said, "God hates Romans!" or "God hates Samaritans!" On the contrary, I recall Jesus saying, "Do not judge, and you will not be judged yourselves; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned yourselves." [Luke 6:37] As Sixth echo explains, there is a two sided coin in the Christian tradition, prayer and non-violence. We are reminded in a sense, as Christ reminds Peter to put his sword away in the face of conflict. As Oliver states, "Using force to get your way is incompatible with the way of Jesus."[15] But what is the way of Jesus? And so, in the face of this issue we must ask the immortal question that every Christian must ask one's self in the face of any issue, "What would Jesus do?" Neither Heterosexuality & Homosexuality… In Galatians 3:28, Paul writes, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus". This passage is one of the most important texts in the whole of Christendom as Eugene Rogers explains: The formula is to be taken as a warning. If the Jew/Gentile distinction is read in the way of Paul's opponent, then there is no salvation for the Gentiles as Gentiles, but only as circumcised as Jews. The salvation of almost all Christians, those who are not ethically Jews and do not observe Torah, depends on taking this verse very seriously. If Christians have endangered their salvation by ignoring the other members of the formula — if they took some 1900 years to overcome the pairs slave and free, male and female — that is no argument why they should continue to do so.[16] As Paul the Apostle welcomes the Gentiles into the Church, so must we today welcome the homosexuals. For Paul, a Jew, to do so was a radical thing and such a thing would have seen him considered a heretic and an apostate. Paul is breaking down everything that the world stands on and everything the world sees at face value. Paul is seeing what God sees. In Jesus there is nothing but their purest self and one's self is not defined by their status, by their culture nor even by their gender — nor even their sexuality. All are one in Jesus Christ and I am sure that in him, there is also neither heterosexual or homosexual.  FOOTNOTES:
©2009 Daniel Gullotta |
Living Life-Death-Life
It's about grace, not collecting badges
It's never what you expect
Engagement and detachment
The discovery and expansion of soulspace
The two sided coin: prayer and non-violence
There is only One
Daniel Gullotta is an occasional contributor to 
How economic inequality harms societies... We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust. Richard Wilkinson, is Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, and cofounder of The Equality Trust, a nonprofit that aims to reduce income inequality by educating and engaging the public while supporting political commitment to address the problem. 16m55s [String on the Catholica Forum where the general issue of wealth inequality and this documentary was first discussed 25Jan12] | [WATCH THE VIDEO]
Doco 035: 25Jan12
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