The Gap in the Sermon on the Mount

And Jesus said unto them, "You have heard that it has been said, ‘You shall not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is abomination.’ But I say to you, if two men or two women come to the congregation and say that they wish to be united in marriage, fulfilling all the responsibilities expected thereof, so be it. Bless and support this union just as you would a union of a man with a woman."

Now before you get too scandalized by this, I am sure you realize that I am just making up a hypothetical scenario to add to the Sermon on the Mount. However, would it not have been a lot easier if Jesus had given us such a clear command? Of course, he could have also given us a command to carry on with that Leviticus 18:22 proscription, but he never did. Indeed, although he got asked about divorce and marriage, he never is recorded as having been asked about non-heterosexual issues.

So, what do we do when we don't have clear guidance from the Lord himself according to what is quoted in Scripture. I think we have to look at what Jesus said about the other commands of The Law he did, if you will, change. At the same time, he said he came to fulfill The Law, so how does that add up? To answer that, we have to look at what God and Jesus are all about as we understand it from Scripture.

In the 1st place, according to the biblical account, God is about creating order, beauty (everything was created good) and diversity (this not only happened in Genesis 1 to 2 but was reinforced in Genesis 11, the story of the Tower of Babel). Nowadays, with the LGBTQ umbrella, we have a lot of diversity in this area. Is there order? Not so much. There is a lot of chaos in this non-heterosexual world, but much of that is because we, the so-called straight society, have driven them underground and removed normal options of order, such as committed monogamous relationships, from them. Much of that is because of our society’s, including the church, tendency to reject these individuals unless they measure up to certain standards. We basically want them to repent of who they are and how they live. Is that good?

God is also about love, but that does not exist in a vacuum. It is love in voluntary committed relationship, whether that is our relationship to God as redeemed sinners, or to one another as married couples or members of a family or community. Indeed, Jesus summed up The Law as loving the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself, which was already stated in the Old Testament.

If we accept that the bottom line for God is a loving relationship, for which we believe he created us, who are we to deny individuals this just because they are different than us? If we accept these brothers and sisters who are Christians as being able to live in fulfilled relationships as we do, we would be fulfilling God's laws of order, beauty/goodness and love.