Year 9-1
“Christian Church lives by God’s word, even on homosexuality”.
I challenge the accuracy of last week’s headline, because God’s Word is bigger than the Scriptures alone.
For the last 23 years I have written in my almost undecipherable long-hand scribbles a daily meditation based on the lectionary (prescribed yearly bible readings), some 400 words on weekdays and double that length on Sundays.
For this purpose I also consult other religious sources, one of which is the so-called Belgic confession, dating from 1566, before the Enlightenment clouded the religious scene. In connection with God’s word it says that “we know God:
First by the creation, preservation and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a most elegant book, in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God, his eternal power and divinity, as the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20: all these things are enough to convict men and leave them without excuse.”
That last lines suggest to me that the opposite is also true: those who regard creation as God’s work of art and live ecologically responsible, earn God’s grace.
This confessional statement continues: “we know him,
Second: He makes himself known to us more openly by his Holy and divine word as much as we need in this life, for his glory and for the salvation of his own.”
From this I conclude that God’s Word is two-fold, of which Creation is the most prominent, something the church usually ignores.
Creation-care makes sense, because it deals with the place where we live now and where we will be forever according to the Apostles’ Creed, which states: “I believe in the resurrection of the body and the Life Everlasting.”
Based on the primacy of the Created Word, I believe that where there are discrepancies between the Written Word – the Bible – and the Created Word – call it observed reality – the Created Word wins, of which the Creation Story, as told in Genesis 1 and 2, is a striking example.
We must not forget that the Bible is, in many ways, a product of inspired human action. It was, in its present format, constituted by the men – no women there, of course – at the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. The basic message of the Bible is that God created the world, that the human race took the wrong road, and that Jesus, God’s son, made it possible to go the Right Way again: it’s not a text book for science, history, or sexual orientation.
In John 3:16 Jesus says that God loves his cosmos so much that he offered his most precious possession, his only son, to die so that this well-ordered universe, where the plants flourish and the trees thrive, where the whales frolic and the humans are privileged to dwell and grow grapes and make wine that gladdens the heart, can again become pristine. Jesus died for everything created, including the human race.
I have read that homosexual situations occur among plants and animals, so it is not surprising that this same condition exists among humans. This makes sense because my deeply Christian homo-sexual friends tell me that they were born that way, which leads me to conclude that homosexuality in a monogamous relationship is not a sin.
What is sin is driving a car and switching on a light. That might surprise you because nobody can avoid doing this, yet by these actions we pollute and sin against the third commandment which reads: “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.”
Polluting offends God’s holiness because it destroys what he called good seven times in Genesis 1-2. We now face the consequences of these sins.
Romans 8:18-25 gives a moving account how creation is suffering from our cruel treatment and looks forward “with eager longing, with neck outstretched” to be liberated from the destruction we, polluting people, have imposed upon her. Creation looks for that same freedom, that same redemption, that Christians desire, which means that human deliverance and the deliverance of the environment go hand in hand, are two sides of the same coin, that you can’t have one without the other.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by Hitler in April 1945, wrote in an essay called “Dein Reich Komme” (Thy Kingdom Come) that God, Humans and the Earth are inseparable: “To think otherwise is Christian Secularism, a renunciation of God as the Lord of the Earth.”
Jesus told us to “Seek ye first the Kingdom.” This means that our first duty is to seek the wellness of creation, not exactly something the church in general sees as a priority. For the church to be Christian it must prepare its members to live so that when God’s Kingdom comes – the New Creation – the transition to that perfect state will be a natural next step.
That kingdom has lots of room, also for homosexuals, also for all of us who try to minimize pollution, but I am pretty sure that it has no place for people who pollute for the sole purpose of procuring a profit.