During Advent we are to prepare ourselves for the coming of the Christ and the Kingdom of God on the Earth. This involves more than just a retelling of the birth story and reading various scriptures. It is more of an adjustment of attitude to especially focus on the spiritual rather than the material.

It was in this theological, spiritual, or philosophical vein that the group of RUMMIES who gathered at Caleb’s for our regular meeting got into a lengthy discussion of what sin is and how does the Methodist Church define it. In the broadest sense, sin is whatever separates us from God. In trying to interpret that into a more manageable form, we have the Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church and The Book of Discipline. Much of the discussions at General Conference for the past decade have focused on the wording of certain sections of the Book of Discipline.

In my reading for the first time of The General Rules of the Methodist Church issued by John Wesley in 1739 and the Articles of Religion, which are still part of the 2004 Book of Discipline, I was surprised (as I suppose most Methodists would be) to learn that we are advised against the wearing of any gold ornaments. To paraphrase Article VII, Original Sin is the corruption of the nature of every man…. and of his own nature inclined to evil, and that continually. Article XII says, “After we have received the Holy Ghost, we may depart from grace given, and fall in sin, and, by the grace of God, rise again and amend our lives,” which is another way of saying that we do not accept the concept of “once saved, always saved.”

After our discussion evolved into the circular logic of whether the church calls homosexuality a sin (officially not in keeping with Christian tradition) and whether it is the orientation or the behavior that is to be condemned, we got lost in trying to unravel the syllogisms of church doctrine. That is the tangle that has engaged a generation of Methodists trying to interpret the meaning of certain Biblical passages of scripture and the beliefs and official positions of the church regarding sexual morality. Aside from the obvious difficulties of trying to interpret scriptures without the benefit of understanding the cultural context in which they were written, the difficulties are compounded by trying to apply them to our own culture and civilization. What “truths” are absolute without regard to time or culture and which proscriptions in the Bible were more relevant only to their time? Why do we ignore the injunctions in Leviticus not to eat pork, and why do we rationalize Jesus’ clear condemnation of divorce?

The United Methodist Church web site’s discipleship resources list four “truths” that are accepted in understanding our relationship with God. They don’t say anything about sex or sexuality. During my weekly Disciples IV Bible study this week, we were studying the Song of Songs. The apparent embarrassment of some members of the blatant sexuality of the love poems raised questions of how they should be interpreted. We agreed that we felt that it was too much of a “stretch” to call them allegories of our love of God and only a metaphor of the intimacy, which we experience when we draw close to God and develop a personal relationship. The book clearly was out of keeping with the traditions of the time of arranged marriages, polygamy, and the subordinate position of women. So how did it get in the canon? Perhaps, it is because it presents an idealized and innocent version of love without all the lust, degradation, and commercialization of sex. We complain that our society has foisted upon us the strategy of “sex sells” as just another marketing technique, but we forget that temple prostitution was an accepted fact in many civilizations in Bible times. The Jews were unique in condemning it. So we had a very different discussion about sexuality, what the Bible says about it, and how we are to understand sexuality in our modern society.

So why is the Reconciling Movement so hung up on “promoting homosexuality?” Why do we endlessly debate the interpretation of certain biblical passages and shudder at the mere mention of same-sex marriages? One-man and one-woman marriages weren’t common in biblical times when the usual arrangement was one man and many women even though we find that abhorrent today.

As I’ve said many times before, the debate about the morality of the “homosexual lifestyle”, whatever that is, will go on and on in the church even though corporate American and society in general “got over it” 20 years ago. To put it in the simplest terms, the issue isn’t about the morality of sexual orientation or whether or not any part of it is a sin. We’re beyond parsing phrases and arguing about the science of cause and effect. The question is how can the church ignore the salvation of a large class of people who because of cultural bias are excluded from evangelistic outreach?

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Raleigh Mayor’s Unity Conference sponsored by the Human Relations Commission that was formed 30 years ago to promote racial harmony between blacks and whites in the community. Times have changed and Hispanics represent a larger minority, and Caucasians will become increasingly a minority of the American population, a prospect that threatens a lot of people. We are a nation of immigrants, and the Eastern European immigrants a century ago were just as discriminated against at the Latin American immigrants are today. Racial, ethnic, cultural, generational, and economic class divisions are part of the mix of our diverse society that gives it energy and optimism so that we are not bound by the traditions of the past. As one of the participants of the discussion at my table noted, we are called upon to have “courageous conversations” that not only bring forward the dialogue for racial harmony but also effect concrete changes in our society that promote equity and justice.

Can our church do any less?