The editor publishes my email address after each column for
the convenience of readers who wish to respond. Many do. One asked whether I
was aware of how many people disagree with me. I told him how affirming it was
to learn that.
I write to challenge prevailing attitudes and to make clear
not everybody in Wyoming thinks like those who have the loudest voices, hold
most of the public offices and preach from a majority of the pulpits. My goal
is to speak for the minority. Plenty of folks speak for the others.
Rev. Bob Norris’ guest column in last Sunday’s Wyoming Tribune-Eagle
challenged my beliefs. What I believe is that there’s a whole lot of
theological malpractice going on out there. I confess to not knowing whether
Rev. Norris and other evangelical preachers are the culprits or am I? I believe
we are all guessing and I am going to err on the side of acceptance and love.
Rev. Norris called my columns “omnipresent.” He criticized
the numbers of topics I write about, asking rhetorically, “Is there any area of
life that Rodger is not an expert on?”
Truthfully, I’m not an expert on much. But I am at a time of
life where I’m not asking anyone for a job or a vote, the politicians can’t
fire me or cut my budget. However, the good Lord gave me a lifetime of
experiences and an opportunity to speak from the perspective of what I learned
from each; thirty years in politics and law, eight years on Congressman Teno
Roncalio’s staff, a year directing Habitat for Humanity operations in poverty
and war-torn Nicaragua, eight years heading Wyoming’s child welfare agency and
mental health and substance abuse programs, three years in the middle of my
life attending seminary, earning a Master’s of Divinity degree used to serve as
a jail chaplain and now to pastor a church.
The gifts of those experiences would be wasted if I didn’t
use them to speak out now. They have allowed me to cross paths and have
relationships with many marginalized people including the homeless, the ill,
the captives and those with sexual orientations different from mine. My experiences
haven’t made me an expert but they taught me tolerance, empathy and compassion.
Together, they’ve given me a view of the world from which to speak about
injustices to the poor, the oppressed and victims of bigotry.
Rev. Norris resurrects our debate over same-sex marriage
during a seminar sponsored by the Wyoming Association of Churches a
year-and-a-half ago. We don’t share the same recollections from that event. My
lasting impression was not of Rev. Norris quoting scripture, but watching him
hold up two sections of garden hoses to crudely make his point that two “male”
fittings don’t go together. Maybe not Biblical but quite as much literal as offensive.
You see, Bob thinks Christians are stuck in a time warp,
required to cling to 4000 year-old thinking about matters such as
homosexuality. I think God gave us not only the Bible, but also a brain and
expects us to use both. Bob doesn’t share my belief that God continues to
reveal God-self to us even today.
Nor do we share Biblical interpretation. He interprets it
literally. Others choose to take the Bible literally or seriously. I cannot do
both. Bob’s right. Scripture contains several judgments about homosexuals
calling them an “abomination.” When every verse is read as literally as Bob
reads those, there’s a long list of abominations that no one takes seriously
anymore, not even Bob.
Scripture says it’s an abomination to lend money at interest. I haven’t
seen the Bible literalists in the halls of the legislature to stop payday loan
sharking. In the verses immediately following Leviticus’ judgment on
homosexuals, God also condemns holding a worker’s wages overnight, allowing cattle
to breed with a different kind, sowing fields with two kinds of seed, wearing
clothing made of two kinds of cloth, rounding off the edges of your beard, getting
tattoos, marrying divorced women, and “approaching” God if blind, lame, a dwarf,
a hunchback, or with crushed testicles.
We don’t take the Bible literally because Jesus didn’t. Jesus taught that
Biblical interpretation should be guided by the commandments to love of God and
one another, adding, “All the
Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Oh, and that name
calling, I simply borrowed from Jesus who called the Bible literalists “a brood
of vipers.”
I’ll start
taking Bible literalists more seriously when I hear them condemn all those
other behaviors the Bible calls abominations as strongly as they condemn homosexuals.
Until then Bob, dump the garden hose act and preach the Gospel.
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