Un-Weaponizing Scripture--August 10, 2022
"Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit that kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, reviler, robbers--none of these will inherit the kingdom of God." [1 Corinthians 6:9-10]
Well, we're right back in the minefield again, aren't we?
Okay. Let's first pause, take a breath, and remember that the same God who has promised to walk with us through the valley of the shadow of death will walk with us through a passage of Scripture that can feel as daunting as a minefield. Inhale. Exhale. Okay. Let's take the next step.
I think I need, at least for my sake, to point out at least some of the obvious mines--places we can easily get hung up on in this passage so that we miss the bigger picture or end up weaponizing these verses against some group we may want to just write off as irredeemable. And I think we also need to do a quick context check to remember the bigger train of thought that Paul has been building on. So let's do those pieces.
For one, it is super easy to get hung up on the list Paul rattles off here about all those sinners who "will not inherit the kingdom of God." We can get obsessed over the whole list, or maybe just snarled up on a few in particular [the ones that have to do with same-sex relationships, for example, are quite often used to clobber people without honest exploration of what the words Paul uses here actually meant or mean]. And from there it is terrifyingly tempting to read this passage as Paul saying, "Here is a list of actions that if you do them you cannot be saved or go to heaven." And that seems to run counter to... well, just about every other thing Paul says in the rest of his writing, about how it's not our actions, our works, or our lists of good deeds that earn us salvation, but rather it's always been a gift of grace that God gives apart from our merit or achievements.
So here are some guardrails to chart out our path as we look at these verses, and in particular as we make some sense of the list of vices that Paul throws out ready-made like it's a standard rhetorical device [because a vice-list was a pretty standard rhetorical device in the day, it turns out]. For one, whatever Paul means here, I think it's fair to say that Paul is well aware he has also argued fiercely throughout his letters that nobody "earns" their way into God's good graces by their good behavior, and nobody's list of sins is more powerful than God's saving grace. Let's not try and pit Paul here against Paul in Romans, Paul in Galatians, or even Paul later in this very chapter, and make it sound like sometimes you have to earn your way into heaven by avoiding bad actions, and other times it's all a gift of grace. It's all grace, baby. It always has been. And Paul himself has said things like, "If someone, even an angel from heaven, tells you differently, you can tell them it's a bunch of baloney" [my loose translation from Galatians]. For that matter, Jesus knows a certain criminal on the cross next to him who has no chance to "repent" and be anything other than a convicted robber, brigand, and criminal, and yet Jesus promised him a spot at the table in Paradise on the very day they were dying on crosses. So, again, whatever Paul's point is here, the whole of Scripture sure doesn't teach that if you do a thing on Paul's no-no list, you are forever and ever doomed and excluded from the Reign of God.
Here's another thing we have to deal with in these two verses--and I'm sorry, but it's going to mean the harder work of a close reading, rather than just yanking words out of context to hit people with. Sometimes hard work, include the hard work of critical thinking and close reading, are necessary. Paul starts this whole little passage with the rhetorical question, "Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God?" That word "wrongdoer" is the same notion we looked at yesterday--it's the word for "doing injustice" or "acting unjustly toward." And that not only means it includes the many ways we break right relationships with one another or with God, but also it means that Paul's own readers are in his target sights here. He just said in the previous verse [which we looked at yesterday] to his readers there in Corinth, "You yourselves wrong [do injustice] and defraud." So if we read these sentences together, he's just called his readers--Christians, living in Corinth--a bunch of doers of "injustice" or "wrongdoers," and now here he says, "And don't you know that wrongdoers don't inherit the kingdom of God?" But he's clearly not telling his readers that they are all doomed to hell, either.
So maybe that gives us a bit more direction for taking another step in this minefield. Paul doesn't seem to be using his list of vices here to give us a list of people we are allowed to write off or hate as irredeemable. He's not saying, "You all who are reading this are lovely and perfect Respectable Religious people and you're all getting into the heaven club, but definitely not THOSE people--we are allowed to hate them, harass them, condemn them, or throw them away." And we know he's not because he's made it clear that his own readers are also still actively entangled in "wrongdoing," and yet they are the beloved of God nevertheless. Even though his readers are still--as in present-tense--wronging neighbors, doing injustice, and actively struggling with the relationship-breaking we call "sin," they are also as we'll see claimed, set apart, and made new in Christ Jesus. So we don't get to say, "Well maybe these Christians USED to do some bad things, but they must have stopped and adequately repented and now hav earned their way back in, and that's why Paul thinks they are still 'saved'." Paul talks about his readers as people who still are caught in "wrongdoing"--which is to say, they are "wrongdoers"--and also says that they are beloved, chosen, and holy before God... at the same time. In other words, the list of things you have done or even are still doing does not exclude you from being beloved, justified or saved [more on that tomorrow].
If you were hoping to find some Bible verses here that you could use to disqualify someone else, whose behavior you don't like, or even whose actions may be deplorable, from the grace of God and the gift of the kingdom, I'm sorry, Paul is not offering that. He is not doling out weaponized Scripture for you to use to clobber somebody else while you let yourself off the hook, and he never has been. If you are looking for an excuse to hate somebody else, please go elsewhere.
Okay then... what IS this passage all about, if I don't get to pull out my favorite stock-villain from Paul's list of vices to declare them damned forever? I think it has a great deal to with the trajectories we let our lives take. It's less, "If you did this thing one time, you're out of luck forever--you're stuck with the record of the worst thing you've ever done on your permanent record forever," and it's more about asking, "Where is your life pointed?" Or maybe more clearly, "What in your life doesn't align with way of Jesus? Because whatever leads you away from the way of Jesus leads us away from the Kingdom of God by definition--Jesus is what the Reign of God looks like, walking and talking in human life." And when we realize that, we can see clearly that once again, Paul doesn't single out a particular list of sex-related sins as worse or more grievous than, say, "greed" or people who abuse others with their words as "revilers" [interesting note here--the word translated "revilers" literally means "people whose speech is like a spear"]. Yeah, let's be clear about that. On Paul's list of "wrongdoers" who don't "inherit the kingdom of God" are people who use their words as weapons against others, right alongside the usual suspects folks some. folks like to highlight. Paul right here sure seems to put that abusive language on the same par as worshiping idols, being greedy, stealing from others, as well as sexual sins that exploit others. So once again, at the moment we have tried to pull verses from the Scriptures and clench our fists around them to attack someone else with, Paul pries the words from our hands and says, "No--you don't get to do that. That ain't of Jesus--and we are Jesus people."
I know there is more some may want me to say about the particular words Paul uses here relating to same-gender sexual relationships. And it's not that I want to sweep that conversation under the rug, but I do think it's a different kind of conversation than the one we're having in a devotional reading like this--both because it's a lot more technical in the Greek, and because our conversation in the twenty-first century about LGBTQIA Christians who are seeking to live faithfully and lovingly in this world is simply not the same as the set of questions Paul is addressing in the first century in an Empire and a culture where same-gendered sexual relationships were almost always exploitative and objectified people, without promises of faithfulness and love. Today, the question we have to deal with if we want to be honest is, "What about same-gendered relationships that are different than the exploitative, manipulative, or abusive situations that would have likely come to Paul's mind back in the first-century Roman Empire? What about people who love one another deeply, care for each other, and promise fidelity to one another, and are not exploiting or objectifying others in the abusive ways Paul would have been used to seeing?" And that requires us to recognize that there are some things that first century Paul was writing for his own context that do not line up complete with the questions being asked in this moment. It requires us to face, too, that Paul wrote as a pastor to the people in his actual experience, not that he was pretending to have every possible circumstance in mind as he wrote. He didn't--and taking his words out of the first century to place them in a set of circumstances he could not likely have imagined seems to be bad reading on our part.
It seems a little to me like if someone wrote in the late '30s, "Don't ever travel by blimp, because they are filled with hydrogen and could explode--just look at the Hindenburg disaster. That's why the only right way to travel in the sky is by airplane." If you had read that and then saw a blimp today you might forget that today blimps are not in danger of exploding like the Hindenburg, because we have learned you can fill them with helium and they will still fly without being susceptible to that kind of explosion. The warning in the '30s might have made a certain sense in its time if the speaker had only ever thought that there could be hydrogen blimps. Once you see that maybe the contemporary situation is different, you might apply that warning differently when you see the Goodyear blimp flying over a football stadium, because you know that a helium blimp isn't the same as the Hindenburg.
If you are interested in a closer look and a deeper conversation about the particular words and claims Paul is making here about same-gendered sexuality, and you'd like me to be a part of that conversation with you, reach out--let me know, and we can have those conversations, in all their nerdy technical nuance and in the larger picture of how we see the faces of those whose lives and identities are most at stake in that conversation.
But for now, the bottom line is that we are misusing a passage like this if our only impulse is to weaponize it against someone else who is different from me, and that Paul seems intent on getting us to take a more honest look at ourselves and our own actions--and the many ways each of us is still wrestling with wrongdoing, still tangled up in injustice, and still learning how to love rightly. That is enough work for us to occupy ourselves with for today... and probably for the foreseeable future.
The Scriptures may be a walking stick to keep our footing in the dark valley, or a staff to guard us from going astray. But we misuse them when we make them offensive weapons.
Lord God, keep us close to Jesus, and let that be enough on this day's journey.
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