The problem is that we cannot guarantee that these texts won’t be used simply because we don’t want them to be. Are folks really going to listen to us not to use Romans 1? Not likely. In that case, much good scholarship never makes it out the door.

I tend to be pessimistic, but I have been in parishes, and not simply in the Bay Area, that have preached liberative sermons addressing gay people. If they can preach a liberative sermon from say, Isaiah 56, why not revisit Romans 1-2?

I would be inclined to say bible studies are useful except that these are not necessarily liturgical contexts, and there is something to liturgy that is healing that simply engaging oneself intellectually on such matters won’t address.

The reason I’m so reluctant to get rid of the Romans piece is that those who proof text from it are the ones who most vitally need to here the point of the passage–we’re all sinners and fall short of the glory of God. When we point fingers and make of a text something that doesn’t include us as implicated (which Romans 1-2 does), in other words, we’re demonstrating our own sinfulness, or as Bonhoeffer would put it, we’re operating out of a stolen image of God in such a case.

Just thought you’d like to know….

They didn’t see the sin in the Christian interpretation of Matthew 27, either - until it was way, way too late.

If preachers want to preach on these verses - whether they’re in the Lectionary or not - what’s stopping them?

No preacher is going to follow anybody else’s schema for how they should preach - nor should they. They are human beings - and the Church is not a dictatorship. Preachers do the best they can with what they’ve got - and they’re not going to deal with this issue in the way you suggest. They have more important things to talk about - like Stewardship Drives, and parish squabbles, and (hopefully) the Good News of Christ, and poverty.

Dealing with this issue is not remotely relevant to most parish priests. And as Louie Crew writes, quoting Hank Aaron, the church is a “taillight” when it comes to what everybody else already recognizes. Nobody much cares about gay people - and it’s time to recognize that fact; they’re not going to stop getting married (nor should they) to support us.

This issue is simply not interesting to anybody else, and it will take another 100 years for the whole thing to shake out. Meantime, let’s not torture people with a “clobber verse” taken out of context (as all readings are, anyway) that everybody already knows about and that we are all talking about anyway.

Chrysostom was a vicious anti-Semite as well as a hateful anti-homosexual polemicist. (Here’s a nice sampling.) This, along with the rest of the Church’s actions and so-called “teaching” ended in the Holocaust.

The Church first needs to repent of its own sins before it deserves to be listened to on much of anything - something that hasn’t been forthcoming from most parts of it.

Still, when I hear clobber passages on homosexuality used as clobber passages, even with all of my education, the visceral reaction runs very deep, I almost start hyperventilating, which suggests to my mind that part of the healing needs to be public, liturgical, embodied, sacramental in scope because this stuff shapes us not only intellectually but wholly right down to each cell binding us.

In terms of public liturgy, it might be useful to engage these passages from the pulpit, which I’ve never witnessed; it might even be smart for the sensitive preacher to make sure that Romans 1:26 isn’t left on its own but that the entirety of Paul’s argument be read. Or in the case of anti-Judaism/anti-Semitism, that rather than try to fudge the texts to “Jewish authorities”, we deal with our interpretive history and the context that the text is addressing–that we don’t let it slip history (Tonia Oldenhage’s criticism of Ricoeurian hermeneutics) even as we interpret and are interpretted by the proclaiming and explication in preaching. All of this requires that preachers engage the texts, however, rather than use them as jumping off points for their own point of the day.

But more beautifully, I think would be for the preacher to engage the historical-cultural context (and interpretive history) in the passage–meaning dig deep a bit, seek to find underlying concern, and have us look around, see one another, the woman leading us in prayer today, the gay man greeting us, und so weite and then point us to the Table where we receive the Healing Sacrament par excellence and see one another face to face in Christ in the face of destroying ideologies.

After all, as noted in Alan Bray’s in “The Friend”, even when passages on sodomy were read and preached about in the late Medieval and early Modern period, many a couple that we might term gay more generally sex or no sex (which we can’t generally know anything about), would not have recognized themselves in the term “sodomy” which carried the weight of destroying community in social disorder because their love was not recognizable to themselves on those terms. Similar, perhaps to Chrysostom’s own comment on the passage in which he distinguishes between lust and love?

We cannot ignore them (or throw them out)–they are useful and inspired.

We cannot leave them interpretted simply in scholarly works on the Bible.

Even where the interpretation is condemnatory, we need to place that within the overall context of, say, Paul’s “method” of grace, possible concerns in Leviticus, interpretive history of Sodom even in Scripture, etc.

We must engage them publicly in worship where their usefulness in the light of those whom we assume they clobber becomes contradicted because we see them face to face.

Pastorally, I would be inclined to consider a rite of healing in which these passages are placed within the overall context of God’s work for us in Christ using other passages and prayers. Why not place Romans 1 with the Wisdom of Solomon, for example?

Certainly the orthodox side would need a good spokesperson–personality is just as much a part of debate as facts.

But really: why didn’t anyone in TEC challenge Spong to a debatae long ago? It could have been a really interesting and informative moment.

(You know what I heard an Orthodox guy say once? He said that he thought Spong would win in such a debate; imagine that. Is that what people are afraid of, do you think? I don’t think Spong is even that interesting, let alone formidable….)