By Their Fruit

Two weeks ago I told you about a question a famous pastor took from his own congregation. Somebody asked him, straight out, what God thinks about homosexuality, and I told you I honored him for taking it, and I do. He laid down a ground rule first, and this morning I want to take him up on it. He said: we start with what the Bible says. Not what’s popular, not what the culture has decided. What the Bible says.

Church, that’s the right rule. It’s the only rule. So we’re going to follow it further than he followed it, not because I think he’s a bad teacher, because I don’t, but because the rule itself demands it. If we start with what the Bible says, we start with what the Bible says. All of it. In its own languages, in its own contexts, including the verses that make everybody squirm, his side and mine. And then, when the reading is done, I want to show you the test that Jesus himself gave us for settling which teaching stands. It’s in the sermon on the mount, and most folks have never once thought to apply it here.

The test

Matthew 7:15. Jesus is closing the greatest sermon ever preached, and he gives his people a warning about teachers: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.” And immediately, in the next breath, he tells us how to tell the sheep from the wolves. “You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16-20).

Notice what the test is not. It is not by their proof texts. Jesus doesn’t say you will know them by their hermeneutics. It is not by their tradition, not by their reputation, not by the size of their church. By their fruits. What does the teaching grow?

And here’s what I want you to notice that almost nobody notices. That test is a sword with two edges. Whatever teaching we weigh this morning, it cuts both directions. If I’m going to hold somebody else’s teaching up to the fruit test, mine goes up on the same table. Fair is fair. The Lord didn’t give us a test we could rig.

So here’s the order of the morning. First we do the reading. Then we run the test. And I’ll tell you where I land at the end, plainly, because you came for an answer and you’ll get one.

The reading, part one: the verses everybody quotes

Start where everybody starts: Sodom. Genesis 19. Two angels visit Lot, the men of the city surround the house and demand the visitors be brought out so they may assault them. It is one of the ugliest scenes in scripture, an attempted gang rape of strangers, and Lot, God help him, offers his own daughters to the mob, which tells you something about ancient hospitality that we don’t want to hear and should.

Now: does that story condemn what we’re talking about today, two people of the same sex who love each other and want to marry? Here’s the thing. The Bible itself tells us what the sin of Sodom was, in more than one place, and it isn’t shy about it. Ezekiel 16:49, speaking of Sodom by name: “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” Pride. Gluttony. Ease. Cruelty to the poor. That’s Sodom’s sin report, filed by a prophet of God, and when Jesus mentions Sodom he uses it as a warning about towns that reject his disciples’ message. The attempted assault is in the story, and it’s evil, and nobody in the history of Christianity ever built a whole sexual ethic on it until somebody needed a proof text. A story about a mob trying to rape visitors is not a verse about marriage.

Now somebody will say, what about the next verse, Ezekiel 16:50, where it says Sodom committed an abomination before the Lord, isn’t that the sexual word? Fair question, and here’s my answer. Abomination is a word the Old Testament spreads across a whole catalog of wrongs, pride among them, and Ezekiel has already told us what Sodom’s abomination was bound up with: pride and plenty and cruelty to the poor. But let’s go further and grant the hardest reading. Even if you take verse 50 as sexual, the act in the story is a mob attempting a gang rape of strangers. A story about assault doesn’t settle anything about two people who have loved each other faithfully for thirty years. It never has, and building an ethic on it took eighteen centuries and a culture war.

Next, Leviticus. Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. Two verses in the middle of the holiness code, and if you haven’t been to seminary let me translate that: the holiness code is the charter of ancient Israel’s set-apart life. Same book, one chapter over, as the rules about clothing and crops. Same neighborhood as no pork, no tattoos, no round haircuts. Chapters 18 and 20 both speak of a man lying with a male as with a woman, and call it an abomination, and I’m not going to pretend those verses aren’t there. They are. Here’s the honest reading, and you can check me on every word. The code governs Israel as a nation under a covenant nobody else was under. The word translated abomination is toevah. You’ll hear it said that toevah is only a ritual-purity word, the word used for the food Israel couldn’t touch, and Deuteronomy does use it that way. But be careful with the easy version, because Proverbs uses the same word for dishonest scales and for plain moral wrongs, and chapter 20 puts our verse in a list beside incest, with the death penalty attached. I’m not going to pretend the one word does my whole work for me. What I will tell you is what’s actually in the verses and what isn’t. They govern an act, in a world of temple prostitution and male cult shrine rooms, in a code built to keep Israel distinct from the nations around her. And if we’re keeping that code, we should be honest that we’d have to keep the rest of the list, starting with the fabric blends, because half this congregation is wearing one right now. Whatever those verses are doing, they are not describing a person born with an orientation toward committed love. That concept is not in the book.

Which brings me to the point I most want you to hear this morning, so let me slow down for it. The word homosexual did not exist in any language until 1869. And here’s the part that surprised me when I went looking. For most of the history of the English Bible, that word isn’t there either. The old King James read those two Greek words as abusers of themselves with mankind, clumsy, but a description of an act. Not until the middle of the twentieth century did a major translation reach for a category word, and even then it first printed sexual perverts, and the next generation of translators reached further, and the generation after that, the scholars, including conservative scholars, started easing back out of it again. That is a strange history for a word everybody quotes as if Moses wrote it himself. Now, I’ll say this fairly: the word history doesn’t win the case all by itself, and I’m not resting everything on it. Paul had no word for a lot of things we’d want his counsel on. It’s one argument in the stack, and the stack is the sermon. But the point underneath it stands. A person’s fixed orientation, the settled shape of whom they’re drawn to love, is not a modern invention of the counterculture. It’s a modern discovery, the way germs were a modern discovery. It was always true; we just learned the word for it. And you cannot read a word into a text that the text’s own language did not have. That’s not liberalism. That’s literacy.

The reading, part two: the New Testament verses

Now the verses Paul wrote, and I want to read them honestly, because Paul deserves better than the way both sides handle him.

Romans 1, starting at verse 26. Paul is building the longest argument in his letters, that all humanity stands in need of grace, and he traces a descent: humanity exchanged the glory of God for images, God gave them up, passions dishonored, women exchanged natural relations, men gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, committing shameless acts. It is the heaviest passage on the subject and we do not skip it and we do not soften it.

But look at what the passage actually describes. An escalation. Idolatry first, then lust, then excess, a society abandoning God and then abandoning itself, desire burning out of control. That’s the picture: consumed with passion. Burning. Whatever Paul is describing, he’s describing wantonness, the runaway kind.

And I want to name the hardest part of this passage myself, because you’ll hear it quoted and I’d rather you hear it from me. The exchange language. Paul says natural relations were exchanged for unnatural ones, and that word exchange is doing heavy lifting, and I won’t pretend it isn’t. Here’s my honest reading. In Paul’s sentence, the exchange happens in a world that has already traded the worship of God for idols, and the relations he describes are dishonorable passion, consumed, burning, without covenant and without love. It is desire running downhill. The exchange Paul paints runs through lust, and the love story of two people keeping vows for thirty years is simply not in the picture. Where in Paul’s burning paragraph is the faithful gay Christian who prays every morning, raises kids, and wants nothing but to sit in a pew and follow Jesus? Not there. Most historians would say such a person had no name in Paul’s world. He’s describing pagan excess, cult contexts, the bathhouse world of the empire. If we’re going to read scripture honestly, we have to let the text describe what it describes.

And one more thing about Romans 1, and this one is beautiful. The phrase Paul uses, against nature, is para physin. Natural relations, against nature. Hold that phrase. Because in Romans 11, Paul uses the exact same phrase for God’s own work: God grafted the wild olive shoots, the Gentiles, into the cultivated tree contrary to nature, para physin, to make them his people. Paul’s own grammar tells us that God does things contrary to nature, and what God does contrary to nature is called salvation. The word against nature is not, in Paul’s dictionary, a word for what God won’t do. It’s a word for how God keeps surprising us.

Then 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, and the two Greek words. Paul lists wrongdoers who won’t inherit the kingdom, and the list includes two rare terms that older English rendered with a phrase about men who lie with men. They’re called arsenokoitai and malakos. Arsenokoitai shows up nowhere in the literature we have before Paul, which means there’s no earlier usage on the shelf to settle what he meant by it, and scholars on both sides of this question read it differently. A strong line of scholarship hears in it the active and passive partners of exploitative relationships, the master and the boy, the owner and the owned, the adult men who kept adolescent boys as a matter of course in that world. Exploitation. Power. That’s the world Paul’s words lived in. And I’ll say it fairly: there are serious scholars, some of whom believe Paul coined the word straight out of the Greek Leviticus, who read it more broadly, and no parallel usage settles it one way or the other. What nobody can demonstrate is that Paul, writing lists about lust and exploitation in the world he lived in, had your neighbor in the fourth pew in view. And one more honest note about translation: for eighteen centuries the English Bibles read those two words as a phrase about an act. The word homosexual first went into an English verse in the nineteen seventies, and some of the newest translations are easing back out of it. Check the footnotes in your own study Bible. The translators themselves will tell you the word is disputed.

But now watch what Paul does in verse 11, because it’s the verse that cuts both ways and I want both edges. “And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.” I’ve heard that verse used as a door slam: such were some of you, so change. But stand it up straight. Paul is writing to the church at Corinth, a congregation so messy it would make this deacon board blanch, and he says: you were every kind of a mess, and you got washed, and now you’re family. It’s not a verse about keeping categories out. It’s a verse about how nobody in the family earned the seat, and how wide the tub was. If the Corinthians’ whole catalog of sin could be washed in one go, then the washing is bigger than the list, and the list was never the point.

There. Genesis, Leviticus, Romans, Corinthians. And the smaller ones, Jude and 2 Peter, lean on the Sodom story again, gang rape and strange flesh, and strange flesh in Jude most likely means the angels, the visitors the mob wanted to assault, the same story one more time. Neither letter says a word about marriage or orientation. Six passages, one by one, in their own words. I’m not telling you the questions all dissolve. I’m telling you that the mountain of certainty that gets preached at this topic is built on verses that honest readers still have to work to translate and to place, and any honest reader of the book knows it.

Running the test

Now the test. Jesus’ test. You will know a teaching by its fruit. And this is where I have to be a pastor and not a debater, because I’m going to describe real people, and some of them are in your families, and one of them, if you’re honest, is in your memory.

Run the traditional teaching through the test. The teaching that says same-sex attraction is itself the thing to be surrendered, and that every gay person is called to lifelong celibacy or to a marriage they cannot honestly enter. What has that teaching grown, these fifty years? I’ll tell you what I’ve seen in three decades of ministry, and I’ll start with the good, because there is good. It has grown some magnificent saints. Celibate men and women who took what they believed was their cross and carried it with a grace that shames me, who love the church that excludes them and pray for it by name. If you’re one of those, I see you, I honor you, and your calling is real and holy and mine to respect.

And the rest of the orchard. It has grown generations of gay kids who sat in pews like this one and heard themselves described as an abomination by the adults who were supposed to tell them about the love of God. It has grown kids who prayed the gay away every night until they finally concluded God wasn’t listening, or that they were too broken even for God, and there is a special desolation in that conclusion, because it isn’t a rejection of faith, it’s the fruit of faith applied to a lie. It has grown expulsions from families, kids on the street, young people put through conversion therapy and driven to despair. The studies are not close and the numbers are not pretty: gay kids raised in congregations that preach the traditional line attempt suicide at rates the rest of us cannot imagine, and the faith of their fathers did not protect them, it followed them into the dark and preached at them there. I’m not saying every traditional preacher is responsible for every one of those numbers. I’m saying Jesus told us the way to know a teaching, and we looked at the orchard, and this is what’s on the trees.

Now run mine. The teaching that says the orientation is not the sin, and the faithful committed love of two people of the same sex is not the sin either. What grows there? I’ve been in those congregations for years now. I’ve seen what’s on the trees. Love. Actual love, the 1 Corinthians 13 kind, patient and kind and not boastful, between people the traditional teaching said were incapable of it. Marriage vows kept, year after year, in numbers that, from everything I’ve watched up close, put a lot of straight marriages to shame. Children raised, prayed over, taught the catechism. Elders and deacons and Sunday school teachers who happen to be gay and who happen to be the most faithful servants in their congregations, which the people in those pews know because they’ve watched. The fruit of the Spirit, the list from Galatians 5, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. I have looked for the absence of that fruit in affirming congregations and I cannot find it. And I’ll say what my own side risks while I’m at it, because a test I won’t apply to myself is no test at all. An open church can slide into telling people whatever they came to hear, blessing whatever the culture already blessed, reading the book the way a lawyer reads a contract, hunting for the way out. The guard against that is the same guard there has always been: the whole book, read whole, sitting in judgment on our experience and not the other way around. What I find, when I look honestly, is people who were told they had no part in the kingdom, who stayed anyway, who kept praying anyway, and whose lives grew the evidence of the Spirit they were told they couldn’t have.

A tree is known by its fruit. Church, I ran the test. It’s your test too. Run it at home, run it honestly, both orchards, all the fruit. And keep one guardrail up while you run it: fruit testifies, but the book stays the judge. Experience can fool us. Peter’s own eyes could have fooled him on the rooftop. So we weigh the orchard with an open Bible in the other hand, and never the other way around. But I’ll tell you where the test landed me: one teaching has grown despair at scale, and the other has grown saints. I know which tree Jesus would call good, because he told me how to tell.

What this sermon is not saying

Let me put the fence up before we close, the way I try to do every week.

This sermon is not saying that anyone’s grandma is a bigot. If you hold the traditional view, the odds are good that you hold it out of obedience to the book, and I honor the obedience even where I’ve come to question the reading. You are welcome here, and you are not the enemy, and the people who disagree with you from this pulpit are going to keep loving you, because that’s the point of the whole thing.

And it’s not saying the Bible is wrong or lust is fine. The Bible is a library, three languages across a thousand years, and it has to be read like one. Read that way, honestly and in context, the case is not what the sound bite says, and that’s not softness on scripture, that’s the ground rule taken seriously. And lust is still lust, exploitation is still exploitation, faithlessness is still faithlessness, and every one of those is available in every marriage on this street. The gay couple across town has no corner on sin and no exemption from holiness, and neither does anybody else.

The question that’s left

So here it is, the answer I owe you. Is homosexuality a sin? No. Not the orientation, which nobody chose and nobody can unsay. Not the faithful, committed, covenant love between two people of the same sex, which bears the fruit Jesus told us to look for. Sin is what sin has always been, pride and lust and cruelty and the worship of the self, and those are freely available to every one of us without any particular orientation at all.

And let me draw the line where it actually sits, so nobody has to guess. The traditional view says the orientation isn’t the sin, the practice is, and it draws that line with two thousand years of faithful readers behind it. I’ve told you this morning why I can’t hold that line anymore: the committed love I’ve watched isn’t lust, and calling it lust is the error I can’t unsee. But you deserve to know exactly where we part ways, so there it is. If you hold that reading, you’re not my enemy and never have been. I’m just not able to preach it anymore, and I’d rather tell you so than slide it past you on a Sunday morning.

A pastor on a stage said his goal isn’t to be right, it’s to be more like Jesus. I’ve thought about that sentence for two weeks. Because the Jesus I read spent his whole ministry getting in trouble for the company he kept, eating with the people the categories said were out, touching the ones the law said were unclean, and when the faithful men asked him why, he told them stories about lost sheep and older brothers and banquet tables set for the people nobody invited. The categories never survived contact with him. And I don’t think they survive him now.

You will know them by their fruits. Look at the orchards. Then come and see whose tree is standing in the middle of the garden, with leaves for the healing of the nations, and every kind of people gathered under it, and not one of them earned the shade.

Amen.