[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to the Collective Table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties Scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation, and even the podcast. So we're glad your here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: Good morning. How are you guys?
Listen, I always end up having to
[00:00:45] Speaker C: follow the most amazing people, so trust me, I am aware of how ridiculous it is that the straightest whitestone vanilla human being on the planet is now following that incredible panel. And so thank you for being here. Thank you for coming on Pride Sunday.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: I don't know how comfortable or uncomfortable you might be right now. If you're new to the Oceanside Sanctuary,
[00:01:18] Speaker C: you might be under the impression that
[00:01:20] Speaker A: church is where you come to be comforted.
But this is an expression of joy. And what isn't normal, what isn't usual,
[00:01:30] Speaker C: what isn't anointed by the powers that be as something that should be celebrated. So leaning into a celebration of queer identity and sexualities and genders is our way of proclaiming the extravagant love of God. And that makes a lot of people deeply uncomfortable. I don't know if you've noticed that.
And so if you are uncomfortable with
[00:01:51] Speaker A: this, even if you support this, even if you are in a place where you're saying to yourself, no, this is what I think is true, this is what I think is right. This is what I think I want to be a part of. And yet there's still a part of you that has a kind of internalized homophobia.
[00:02:06] Speaker C: If you're a member of the queer
[00:02:07] Speaker A: community or has a kind of residual judgment because you are raised in places
[00:02:12] Speaker C: that said that this is wrong, then
[00:02:15] Speaker A: my good news for you today is I'm going to do my best to
[00:02:19] Speaker C: make you even more uncomfortable in the next 20 minutes.
That's just fair warning.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: We've been in the midst of a
[00:02:31] Speaker C: teaching series called the Spirit of Action. We're going to continue with that series today.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: We're going to jump a bit out of chronological order here and skip forward
[00:02:38] Speaker C: to Acts, chapter 10, verses 44 to 48.
[00:02:42] Speaker A: By the way, those of you don't
[00:02:43] Speaker C: know, my name is Jason. I'm one of the co lead pastors here. Thank you for coming.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: And Acts chapter 10, verses 44 through 48 says this.
While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word.
The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out
[00:03:05] Speaker C: even on the Gentiles.
For they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. And then Peter said, can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?
[00:03:21] Speaker A: So he ordered them to be baptized
[00:03:22] Speaker C: in the name of Jesus Christ, and they invited him to stay for several days.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: This is our passage for today. I want to share a few things that are on my mind as we
[00:03:32] Speaker C: celebrate Pride Sunday and as we read this text together.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: Before I do, as usual, would you
[00:03:38] Speaker C: just please pray with me?
[00:03:40] Speaker A: God, we are so grateful for today
[00:03:42] Speaker C: for so many reasons, but especially because the house is packed with people who are tired of fear and hate and bigotry in the name of Christ.
And so I'm grateful that people who deeply love and seek to follow Jesus, who have been excluded and marginalized because of their sexuality or their gender, are able to come here to worship and to pray and to be fully and completely affirmed and included and celebrated.
As a declaration of what you're doing, I pray that you would help us to lean into that, into the possibility that this is, in fact what you're doing and what you've always been doing.
And we pray all this in Jesus name.
Amen.
Okay, so.
My story includes being raised, like many of you, being raised in sort of fundamentalist leaning evangelical churches that were, like, hyper concerned about people's sexuality. And what that produces is long winded conversations about what the Bible says or does not say about gay people or LGBTQ people or, you know, queer identities. And those conversations can become extraordinarily tiresome.
[00:05:19] Speaker A: And then I, of course, made the switch.
[00:05:21] Speaker C: You know, I, like, went to the dark side. I became a liberal progressive pastor, Janelle and I both.
[00:05:26] Speaker A: And that exposed us to, like, a whole new range of colleagues of fellow pastors and Christians and ministers on, like, the liberal mainline side of the equation. And one of the things that I have just been fascinated by, utterly floored by, actually, is that they often want to have the same tired, exhaustive, never ending conversation about the. What the Bible does or not does
[00:05:52] Speaker C: not say about gay people or gay
[00:05:54] Speaker A: sex or queer identities. And I understand, like, I get it, we take the Bible seriously in this church. We often say, if you've been through, like, our new member class or our leadership class, we will say that we have no creed but Christ, no law but love, no book but the Bible. And what we mean by that is
[00:06:13] Speaker C: not that we don't read other books,
[00:06:14] Speaker A: just that The Bible is sacred to us. It is indispensable to our faith. And so, of course, taking the Bible very seriously is very important.
I'm just tired of having that conversation.
[00:06:27] Speaker C: And so a few years ago, I
[00:06:29] Speaker A: was sitting down with a friend who
[00:06:30] Speaker C: is a pastor of a liberal mainline church.
[00:06:33] Speaker A: And people know that Janelle and I pastor this church, and people know that this church does things like this. And in the liberal mainline world world, this is still a bit controversial.
It is.
And so oftentimes when I sit down
[00:06:50] Speaker C: with those kinds of colleagues, they want
[00:06:51] Speaker A: to have that conversation with me.
And so this guy, who's great guy,
[00:06:56] Speaker C: good pastor, amazing human being, we sat down for lunch. We were just getting to know each other.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: Hadn't really gotten to know each other that well yet. And he said, so what do you think about, like, Romans Chapter one, gay marriage?
He's asking me because, like, because I pastored this church.
And I said, well, I think Paul was wrong.
Clearly I'm not trying hard enough to make you uncomfortable.
Boy, did that make him uncomfortable.
Because when a pastor says to another pastor, what do you think about Romans
[00:07:48] Speaker C: Chapter one, or, you know, the Greek
[00:07:51] Speaker A: use of Paul's invented word in first Timothy or first Corinthians, what they're inviting you into is a very particular conversation about the jot and tittle of the text. They want to talk to you about what the language means, what the words mean, what the ancient context of human sexuality might have meant, and what to do about Leviticus, chapter 18, and especially
[00:08:17] Speaker C: Romans chapter 1, verses 26 and 27.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: What do you think about these things? And so my favorite way of shutting down that conversation is to say, oh, I think Paul was wrong,
[00:08:31] Speaker C: or I think Moses was wrong.
And that's not usually received very well.
[00:08:41] Speaker A: And maybe you don't like it, that's okay.
[00:08:43] Speaker C: If you don't like it, that's fine.
I mostly am just kind of difficult
[00:08:49] Speaker A: and like to say difficult things. Whoa, whoa.
Truth be told.
[00:09:04] Speaker C: So I want to introduce to you maybe three ways that I've noticed that people have a tendency to read the Bible.
And so we're going to pred Sunday. This is like our second Easter, right? So we're just going to go a long time here.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: The first way that people tend to read the Bible is this kind of
[00:09:21] Speaker C: archetype that I like to think of as the child.
You read the Bible like a child.
If you were raised in a fundamentalist leaning tradition, you were taught to read the Bible like a child, which means you open the book and every Single word in here was written for you
[00:09:40] Speaker A: and reveals God's will for you.
[00:09:43] Speaker C: And you must obey it just the way a child must obey their parent when they reach out to touch the stove because the fire is just so fascinating.
[00:09:51] Speaker A: And you say, don't touch the stove, run in the street.
It's critically important that children obey when you tell them not to touch the stove or run in the street. And you were taught that the Bible reveals all the streets and all the stoves in your lives. So you must obey every word of it like an obedient child.
[00:10:15] Speaker C: When I first came to this church,
[00:10:16] Speaker A: I had a full time secretary.
That's hilarious, because really I worked for her.
I was part time and she was full time.
[00:10:25] Speaker C: She'd been here for 20 years, she was 80.
And we had these kinds of conversations all the time. And her favorite thing to say to me, she's a perfectly reasonable human being.
[00:10:36] Speaker A: But when we have these conversations, I would say, I don't know, what do
[00:10:39] Speaker C: you think about this? And she, her favorite saying, she must
[00:10:42] Speaker A: have said it to me a dozen times, was the Bible says it.
I believe it.
[00:10:48] Speaker C: That settles it.
[00:10:51] Speaker A: That is the essence of what it
[00:10:53] Speaker C: means to read the Bible like a child.
You have not brought a grown up perspective to the text.
And so when the Bible says in Leviticus chapter 18 that men should not have sex with men, or Romans chapter 1, verses 26 to 27, Paul seems to say the same thing. And he's sure to include women because Leviticus 18, interestingly enough, by the way, has nothing to say about women.
Then you just say, oh, well, it's what it says. We must obey it whether we like it or not.
The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it.
[00:11:32] Speaker A: The next sort of developmental stage of Bible reading, I'm going to call the geek.
Now, the geek is like the stereotypical man in his late 20s or early 20s or late teens who has discovered that he has abstract cognitive ability and a better than average use of language.
And therefore he can cosplay self mastery and dominance through his understanding of complex concepts.
Listen, listen.
There is nothing wrong with being a geek. I am a geek about plenty of things. You guys probably are too.
Brett Cottle, the other worship leader on this who was not on this stage. Right, because he's just a straight white
[00:12:23] Speaker C: guy like me, Right.
[00:12:26] Speaker A: He is a barbecue geek. I highly recommend you have his barbecue.
Thank God for geeks. The world needs geeks. But geeks have a tendency to read the Bible and dig into the cultural context, dig into the language and Wrestle with Paul's use of word arsakunotai, which is his invented term, which is essentially a slander, and try to understand all the ins and outs of the law
[00:12:58] Speaker C: that Leviticus 18, the entire chapter, in fact, is really not about sexuality.
[00:13:03] Speaker A: It is about putting sperm anywhere but in a woman's womb.
I told you I was gonna make this uncomfortable.
So there's a prohibition against ejaculating into the dirt. There's a prohibition against using your penis between two portions.
I told you. I told you.
I mean, I can't be the first pastor to say penis from the pulpit.
This explains, by the way, why Moses didn't write a prohibition against two women having sex because he did not care.
He didn't care if two women had sex because it didn't waste anything.
But listen, if you lived in the ancient near east and your tribe and
[00:14:03] Speaker C: your family were constantly under threat of being killed and eliminated at the hands of a rival tribe, if your life
[00:14:12] Speaker A: was constantly under threat, if you had
[00:14:14] Speaker C: 14 children and generally speaking, only half of them survived, perpetuating the species was incredibly important,
[00:14:24] Speaker A: you might say, hey, let's not waste that.
[00:14:30] Speaker C: There's a utility to that cultural prohibition.
It's not a bigotry, it's not a hatred. It's just a practical survival tool.
That's how all rules and laws and cultural context work. And because I'm a geek, right, because I am super into cultural anthropology and especially the anthropology of Christianity in Western civilization in the early 20th century, I swear to God that's true.
[00:15:02] Speaker A: I can't help but read these passages
[00:15:03] Speaker C: through that lens and recognize that these rules exist for a reason. And it's not to perpetuate our own bigotry.
Or nerds might also point out that Paul in Romans Chapter one is really
[00:15:18] Speaker A: not addressing homosexuality as we know it, or gay relationships or gay marriage as we know it, but that Paul is rather speaking to the power dynamics inherent in men who engage in forced sex
[00:15:31] Speaker C: with male prostitutes in temple worship in the Hellenized near east, that what he's condemning is essentially non consensual sex.
[00:15:46] Speaker A: And I think those are very good arguments, right? The argument from Leviticus 18 about the cultural context of what the utility of, like, sperm actually is. And I think the argument about Romans Chapter one about the context of worship in ancient Hellenistic temples and the four sects that was involved, I think those are compelling arguments. And if you want to be a geek about it, you are welcome to use those arguments to say, well, Paul never had homosexuality in our modern sense
[00:16:17] Speaker C: in mind, and neither did Moses.
[00:16:20] Speaker A: But I, because I'm difficult, will be the guy who points out to you that however true those arguments might be, Paul very likely was a homophobe.
The ancient near east was a deeply
[00:16:41] Speaker C: misogynistic and homophobic place to live.
[00:16:47] Speaker A: The idea that Paul, like, somehow would
[00:16:50] Speaker C: have been enlightened enough to recognize that two men could have a loving relationship or two women could have a loving relationship, or that our genders might be a social construct and that we ought to allow people to choose their gender identity because it affirms them and their life.
These are questions Paul never would have considered.
[00:17:11] Speaker A: And in a sense, we do a
[00:17:12] Speaker C: kind of ridiculous violence to the text when we try to impose those things on it.
[00:17:20] Speaker A: But, you know, if you're a Bible
[00:17:22] Speaker C: geek, those are helpful arguments. I think there's a third way to read the Bible.
Not as the child who obeys at all costs, no matter what, whatever you
[00:17:33] Speaker A: read, and also not as the geek who likes to wade into the details of the conversation, who, like the teacher of the law, approaches Jesus and tries to test Jesus and trap Jesus in arguments about the law.
I think there's another way to read
[00:17:51] Speaker C: Scripture, and that is as what I'll call the prophet.
Prophets don't obey no matter what, like children.
[00:18:02] Speaker A: And they don't lose themselves in the complexity of the text like geeks do. Which, by the way, that whole conversation
[00:18:11] Speaker C: is really a way of not having the conversation.
Have you ever noticed that prophets, on the other hand, by the way, can be geeks, but they see the bigger picture.
They understand what the points of rules actually might be.
In Matthew, chapter 12, verses 1 through 8, man came to Jesus, an expert in the law, and asked him why Jesus was insisting on gleaning food from the fields. This is a condemnation from the scribes and the Pharisees. What happens before this is Jesus and
[00:18:51] Speaker A: his disciples are gleaning wheat from the fields on the Sabbath, and they're condemned for eating on the Sabbath.
[00:18:58] Speaker C: And Jesus response to his accusers was,
[00:19:03] Speaker A: man was not made for the Sabbath. The Sabbath was made for man.
And I don't know that a more profound sentence has ever been uttered, because what Jesus exposes in that very quick little phrase is that the rules exist for us.
[00:19:25] Speaker C: We don't exist for the rules.
[00:19:28] Speaker A: The whole point of the rules is to create good conditions, good cultures, good societies, good families who exist for human good. The law, to use Paul's terminology because he was a good Jew, was created to perpetuate good. But what the prophets understand and we see this over and over and over again, and we see it, especially in Jesus, is that the law, however good it was intended, can also be used to harm us.
And all that's required is a little change in the context, a little change in the relationship, a little change in the situation. And the law no longer perpetuates what is good. Instead, it does what is harmful. And sometimes, because there are bad actors in the world, the law is not
[00:20:20] Speaker C: written from a place of good.
[00:20:21] Speaker A: It is written to oppress.
And so, because sometimes the law fails
[00:20:29] Speaker C: because circumstances change, and sometimes the law succeeds in achieving its oppressive intentions,
[00:20:39] Speaker A: the
[00:20:40] Speaker C: prophet recognizes that it's not the law we must obey. It's good that we must obey.
And the question then becomes, what is good in every situation?
This is what happens to Peter.
The story that we dropped into in
[00:20:58] Speaker A: Acts, chapter 10, verses 44 to 48, is the culmination of this amazing story where Peter, a little bit before this, is staying at a friend's house, and
[00:21:07] Speaker C: he's on a rooftop, and he gets very hungry.
[00:21:10] Speaker A: And he's apparently so hungry that he has, like, a vision.
And in the vision, God drops a sheet from heaven. And on that sheet from heaven are all the animals that a good Jew should never eat. You know, like pork and shrimp, like the good stuff.
And a booming voice from heaven says to Peter, take these animals, kill them and eat them. And Peter says, oh, no, not me, Lord. Never. I'm a good Jew. I don't eat those things.
And God says, do not call unclean
[00:21:44] Speaker C: what I have made clean.
[00:21:46] Speaker A: And then the vision ends, and Peter's like, what was that? I must really be hungry.
And then along comes a messenger from the house of this Roman soldier named Cornelius. And the messenger says, I've come from my master's house, Cornelius. He said to send for you. He's had a vision, and in that vision, a voice told him to go ask for Paul. So here I am asking for you. Paul goes. He shows up at Cornelius house a gentile, which is the human version of a shrimp. If you're Jewish,
[00:22:16] Speaker C: it is
[00:22:18] Speaker A: good. Jews are not allowed to rub shoulders with Gentiles. They're not allowed to eat with them. They're not allowed to hang out with them. They're not allowed to touch them. Paul shows up at the command of the Lord, and here he is in the house with somebody who's considered an unclean abomination.
[00:22:35] Speaker C: Peter says, well, I guess it's my
[00:22:36] Speaker A: job, because he's the child's.
Peter is the child on the roof no, no, no, I won't eat that.
[00:22:46] Speaker C: I'm a good Jew.
[00:22:47] Speaker A: My whole job is to obey.
And so Peter shows up as the
[00:22:51] Speaker C: child and says, well, I guess it's
[00:22:54] Speaker A: my job to convert these people into Judaism to bring the message of Jesus. Because for Peter, that's what he thought
[00:23:00] Speaker C: it meant to be a follower of Jesus. It meant to be a Jewish person.
[00:23:06] Speaker A: And as he begins to preach, before he's even done, before he delivers the message of the Gospel, the Holy Spirit
[00:23:13] Speaker C: falls upon Cornelius and his household, and
[00:23:18] Speaker A: they begin to demonstrate the evidence of
[00:23:20] Speaker C: the Spirit of God.
[00:23:21] Speaker A: And Peter stops. And in that moment, he ceases to be the child, and he becomes the
[00:23:27] Speaker C: prophet because he finally sees the bigger picture.
And here's how we know.
Because he says in verse 47, can
[00:23:39] Speaker A: anyone withhold the water for baptizing these
[00:23:44] Speaker C: people when they have already been baptized by the Holy Spirit?
Later, there's this enormous controversy over this,
[00:23:55] Speaker A: and both Peter and Paul show up
[00:23:57] Speaker C: at the first Christian argument. The Council at Jerusalem. It's called Peter and Paul both make the same argument.
[00:24:04] Speaker A: Hey, it's not up to us who gets to be a follower of Jesus. It's up to God's Spirit.
We don't get to decide who's in and who's out.
The Spirit includes people that we would
[00:24:21] Speaker C: exclude because the Spirit is doing it.
[00:24:25] Speaker A: We should probably get on board.
[00:24:30] Speaker C: This is what the Spirit of God is doing.
The Spirit of God is including all
[00:24:37] Speaker A: the people that you would rather not show up.
[00:24:43] Speaker C: The Spirit is including all the people that you and I would prefer to judge as being on the other side of real humanity, the people on the other side of what it means to be good and right and true and dignified and human and respectable.
Spirit of God is showing up and demonstrating the spirit of God's presence in those relationships.
[00:25:11] Speaker A: So here's the thing.
[00:25:14] Speaker C: This whole sort of approach to thinking about how we read the Bible, right? The child, the geek, the prophet.
This is a kind of developmental process.
[00:25:23] Speaker A: But like any good developmental process, when
[00:25:26] Speaker C: you learn to read the Bible as the geek, you don't leave behind the child.
You integrate it.
[00:25:36] Speaker A: You don't leave behind the geek.
[00:25:37] Speaker C: When you learn to see the bigger picture, you integrate that perspective, because sometimes
[00:25:43] Speaker A: it's important to obey.
Now, some of you will disagree with
[00:25:49] Speaker C: me on this, and I've seen how some of you drive, so I know that you'll disagree with me.
[00:25:54] Speaker A: But when you are driving a motor
[00:25:57] Speaker C: vehicle and you approach a busy intersection,
[00:26:00] Speaker A: it is the wrong time to pull out the motor vehicle. Code and adjudicate what red lights are for and green lights are for and yellow lights are for. It's better for you just to obey, stop.
When the light is red. Stop.
It's for your safety and for my safety, for all of our safety, that you obey traffic lights. And you don't, in that moment, decide to litigate whether or not the law is really good in that moment.
But what if you were driving your car?
[00:26:36] Speaker C: What if you were driving an ambulance and somebody in the back of that ambulance was bleeding out and you were on your way to the emergency room?
It's better for you to run those red lights.
[00:26:55] Speaker A: It's better for you to break the
[00:26:58] Speaker C: speed limit carefully, expertly.
But the person in the back of that ambulance does not exist for the traffic lights or the speed limit laws.
[00:27:14] Speaker A: Those things exist for us.
[00:27:18] Speaker C: Churches like this, we're like ambulances.
[00:27:24] Speaker A: And our queer siblings every day are being beaten and bloodied and assaulted. Their rights are being taken away. They are under threat every single day. You and I, if you're like me, if you're straight, you open your news feed and you see that there's a problem, but you don't feel it in
[00:27:46] Speaker C: your body the way our queer siblings do.
[00:27:53] Speaker A: This is an emergency.
And we better run those traffic lights
[00:27:58] Speaker C: and we better break those speed limits because it is the right thing to do.
Amen.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: Would you guys pray with me? Thank you so much, God, for today and for this opportunity for us to
[00:28:19] Speaker C: open this text and be challenged by this story of how your spirit is always including people who have been previously called an abomination.
How your spirit is always crossing boundaries of exclusion, to exclude, to include our siblings, wherever they might be, whatever culture, whatever language they speak, whatever their citizenship status, whatever their sexuality or gender. We are grateful that your spirit is constantly including and overcoming boundaries of judgment and violence.
We thank you that we have the opportunity to sing songs that help us to see that bigger picture and pray prayers that help us to see your bigger purposes.
It's our prayer today, God, that you would change our hearts.
That every last bit of discomfort with our queer siblings would be burned away like dross in the fire, and that all that would be left is the love that you have given us to share. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:29:45] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching. No matter when or where you're tuning in, to learn more about our community or to support the work we do, Visit
[email protected] We hope to see you again soon. Soon.
