The God Box (8 page)

"Maybe the story isn't really about homosexuality, but about rape. If the angels had78been female, and the men of Sodom said they wanted to 'know' them against their will, would people claim that the story shows heterosexuality is a sin?"Everyone in our circle turned to him, faces blank. It was the first time I'd ever heard anybody approach the story that way."The story is about homosexuality," Cliff insisted. "The angels weren't female. You're trying to change the story.""No, I'm not." Manuel replied. "I'm trying to look at it without a homophobe bias. The men of Sodom wanted to rape the strangers. The fact that the angels were men isn't the point. The point is that the people of the city wanted to hurt visiting strangers. The story isn't antigay; it's antiviolence."Cliff shook his head, unpersuaded. "The Bible says homosexuality is a sin." He quickly thumbed through his Bible to a page he'd marked. "Leviticus Eighteen-Twenty-two: 'You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.'"I slinked down in my seat, cowering at the verse.But Manuel shrugged, unfazed. "So, are lesbians okay?""You're mocking God's Word," Cliff said, his fists curling."No, I'm just trying to understand," Manuel retorted. "In Leviticus Eleven, the Bible indicates that eating any seafood other than fish is an abomination. So does anyone who eats shrimp commit a lesser abomination than homosexuality?""That's ridiculous," Elizabeth said, glaring at Manuel."The Bible," Cliff insisted, "is the inerrant Word of God."Manuel cocked his head. "And does that make you inerrant to interpret it?""God, I hope not," Dakota groaned, pushing back her red curls."I don't interpret the Bible," Cliff replied proudly. "I just believe it. I believe everything in this book." He pointed his Bible at Manuel. "Do jow believe everything in this book?"79In response, Manuel glanced around the group and back to Cliff. "Do you even know what 'abomination' means in the Old Testament? It meant unclean and impure. Leviticus describes an ancient code of cleanliness and ritual purity. It forbade sex between men because Jewish people of that time thought it was unclean, similar to talking to a Samaritan or eating shrimp or pork--not because those things were evil or wrong in themselves.

St. Paul clarified in Romans Fourteen-Fourteen, 'I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean.' Can't you understand that?""I understand," Cliff replied icily, reading again from his Bible, "Leviticus Twenty-Thirteen: 'If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them.'""Well, I'm gay." Manuel edged forward in his seat. "Do you think I should be put to death?"I sat listening, sure that Cliff would back down. I never expected the words that came out of his mouth: "That's what the Bible says.

It's our job to obey."The room fell silent as the rest of us sat startled. Even Elizabeth looked shocked.I sat up in disbelief. "You don't mean that.""And who should put me to death?" Manuel challenged Cliff. "You?"Cliff hesitated. Was he considering the possibility?Aaron Esposito spoke up. "The Bible also says, 'Thou shalt not kill.'"Cliff glared at him. "Obviously, it makes exceptions." "For gay people?" Manuel asked. Cliff nodded. "That's what it says."80Angie called out, "Guys, stop it. This is crazy." "Can I ask you something else?" Manuel said to Cliff. "Do you have a weekend job?""Yeah," Cliff replied cautiously. "Including Sundays?" "Sometimes.""Well, doesn't Exodus Thirty-five-Two proclaim that for working on the Sabbath you also should be put to death?""That's different," Elizabeth interjected. "In Mark, Jesus proclaims, 'The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.'"Manuel turned to her. "You mean Jesus corrected the inerrant word of God?""Jesus was the Word made flesh," Cliff replied, sounding almost enlightened."Exactly!" Manuel nearly leaped out of his seat. "Don't you get what that means? He showed us how to question, think, and not make an idol of the Bible. Time and again, he challenged those who followed the Law--including Leviticus--to look into their hearts. Is it such a stretch to think that if Jesus had said anything at all about homosexuality, it might've been that it's not the gender of your partner that matters, but what's in your heart?""Listen!" Cliff ordered Manuel. "If you don't believe in the Bible, then maybe you should just leave."Manuel gazed at the rest of us. "So, is this like a cult where you can't disagree?""Of course you can disagree," Angie encouraged him."Then I disagree." Manuel frowned at Cliff. "How can you proclaim the Bible inerrant and claim to take it literally, but pick and choose to believe one part and not the other?"

He glanced around our group. "I love the Bible. But I believe it's meant to soften our hearts, not harden them."81With that, he stood and grabbed his backpack."Manuel!" Angie called, but he was already out the door. She got up, glowering at Cliff, and followed after Manuel, still calling him. Dakota strode behind her, but not before telling Cliff, "You're a Neanderthal, you know that?"I wanted to follow too, and yet I remained seated, still too rattled from the debate."Let's get back to the story," Cliff told us, but Aaron spoke up: "I think we should stop for today.""Yeah,"

the rest of us agreed.One of the girls closed our meeting with a prayer. Then we replaced our chairs in order, and I headed home, exhausted.82

A NORTHER STARTED TO BLOW IN AS I DROVE HOME FROM BIBLE STUDY, STILL

FEELING A LITTLE UNNERVED BY CLIFF AND MANUEL'S SHOWDOWN OVER THE

SODOM STORY.When I got to my room, I went to my desk and gathered every Bible translation, concordance, dictionary, and commentary I owned. I also pulled up my favorite Bible website, determined to figure out for myself what the story of Sodom was really about."Jesus, please guide me," I prayed. "I'm trying hard to understand, but I need your help." Then I opened my Bible to Genesis 18, the chapter immediately preceding the angels' trip to Sodom, as Manuel had suggested.The passage began with Abraham sitting at the door of his tent in the heat of the day. He lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men stood in front of him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them, and bowed himself to the earth, and said, "My lord, if I have found favor in your sight, do not pass by your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree, while I fetch a morsel of bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on..."Apparently, one of the three men was the Lord and the other83two were angels. After a meal, the visitors turned their attention to Sodom, to which they were traveling, and the Lord confided in Abraham his plans for the city: "Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomor'rah is great and their sin is very grave, I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry which has come to me; and if not, I will know."As I read the passage, I wondered, why wasn't the "very grave" sin identified? It seemed odd that the Lord didn't know what was going on in the world and had to check on reports. Wasn't the Creator all-knowing? I kept reading.The two angels turned and headed toward Sodom, but Abraham still stood before the Lord, concerned about his nephew, Lot, and his family, who lived in Sodom. Abraham drew near to God and began to bargain, reminding him of his divine and righteous nature: "Wilt thou indeed destroy the righteous with the wicked?

Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; wilt thou then destroy the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from thee to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from thee! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?"The Lord, apparently persuaded by Abraham, agreed, "If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake."Abraham continued to bargain God down, to forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty, and finally ten. Then the Lord went his way, Abraham returned to his home, and I turned the tissue-thin page to the next chapter, 19.As I reread our Bible study passage, the whole Sodom story seemed even more twisted than before.

Once more I wondered, could all the males in the city, young and old, have been gay? One of my commentaries suggested that the original language could be84interpreted as meaning that both the men and women of Sodom wanted to "know" the angels. But that only furthered Manuel's argument that the story wasn't about homosexuality, but about rape.I also recalled Dakota's point: How could Lot have offered up his daughters? What kind of dad would do that? How could God consider him righteous and spare him?Then there were the verses where the angels tell Lot's family, "Flee for your life; do not look back or stop anywhere in the valley; flee to the hills, lest you be consumed. . ."But Lot's wife behind him looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.God turned Lot's wife to salt simply because she looked back? Wasn't that a bit harsh?Then the story got even more confusing. Lot and his two daughters went to live in caves, and the daughters conspired: "Our father is old, and there is not a man on earth to come in to us after the manner of all the earth. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve offspring through our father"Wait a minute. Were these the same two daughters that God supposedly spared for being righteous? Yet they got their very own dad drunk and had sex with him without even his knowledge or consent. Wasn't that considered rape?Through their incest the daughters bore two sons, who became the fathers of the Moabites and Ammonites. And that was the full story of Sodom, so often held up as a condemnation of homosexuality.I leaned back in my desk chair, staring at my cherished Bible. How could anyone take a story about mob violence, attempted gang rape, a God who doesn't know what's going on, sin that isn't specified, a woman being nuked to salt, and daughter-father incest, and use that story to condemn homosexuality?85And yet, hadn't I been taught for years to read the story that way?I recalled Manuel's photo of his boyfriend and him at prom, wearing tuxes and smiles. How was that anything like the story of Sodom?In Sunday school on various occasions my teachers had explained that we needed to view certain practices accepted in the Bible, such as polygamy and slavery, in their historical-cultural context. But then didn't everything in the Bible need to be viewed in context, including attitudes toward homosexuality?To be sure that I wasn't making a mistake, I decided to search my concordance for every other Biblical reference to Sodom I could find.In Isaiah i and 3, the prophet implied that Sodom was destroyed for a bunch of evildoings and a failure to do good; seek justice, correct oppression ... But there was no reference even hinting at homosexuality.The book of Jeremiah compared the prophets of Jerusalem to the Sodomites: I have seen a horrible thing: they commit adultery and walk in lies; they strengthen the hands of evildoers, so that no one turns from his wickedness; all of them have become like Sodom to me, and its inhabitants like Gomor'rah. Again, no link to homosexuality.Ezekiel stated, Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, surfeit of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty, and did abominable things before me; therefore I removed them, when I saw it. Once again, no mention of homosexuality.In Zephaniah, I found this passage: Moab shall become like Sodom, and the Ammonites like Gomor'rah, a land possessed by nettles and salt pits, and a waste for ever. . . This shall be their lot in return for their pride, because they scoffed and boasted against the people of the LORD of hosts. But weren't the Moabites and Ammonites the86descendents of Lot and his daughters, who had been spared for supposedly being righteous?In Judges 19, a story almost identical to Genesis 19 occurs, about a city named Gibeah, in which a Levite and his concubine are given hospitality by an old man. The men of Gibeah gather, demanding, "Bring out the man who came into your house, that we may know him." Instead, the old man hands over the concubine, who is raped so savagely that she dies. That grisly story reminded me of Manuel's question: If the angels in the Sodom story had been female (like the concubine), would heterosexuality be condemned? Not likely. Was that why I never heard anyone cite the Gibeah story?Finally, even in Matthew 10, when Jesus himself sent out his disciples to do God's work, he alluded to Sodom, not in terms of homosexuality, but in terms of inhospitality: "If any one will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomor'rah than for that town."No reference to sex, but a clear warning against failing to welcome God's messengers.If homosexuality truly was the sin of Sodom, then why did no other book in the Bible mention anything about homosexuality or even homosexual rape in relation to the Sodom story? Instead, each additional reference created a clearer image of the Sodomites as prideful, unjust, unwelcoming, and inhospitable to strangers, to the point of violence.So, was the story of Sodom really about God's wrath over homosexuality?I closed my Bible, exhausted and yet also unexpectedly calmed. Verses of Scripture that had frightened me for years suddenly seemed far less intimidating. After all, I'd never threatened87or abused strangers--or anyone. Even if I didn't like somebody, I tried to be nice. And I had definitely never ever even imagined raping someone.After today's Bible study, even the ominous injunctions of Leviticus no longer seemed quite so menacing. Nevertheless, when my cell phone rang, I jumped.It was Angie: "Dakota and I decided we need to start a GSA.""Huh?" I gripped the phone, recalling what the initials stood for: gay-straight alliance."After today's Bible study," Angie explained, "we think we need to do something before somebody gets killed. So we're going to start a GSA. We want you to help us."I sat up in my desk chair. My calm of a moment earlier evaporated as my confusion returned. "You serious?""Yep. Dakota's looking up stuff about GSAs on the Web right now. We'll talk about it at lunch tomorrow, okay?"By the time I said prayers that night, my head was once again a jumble of thoughts: about Bible study, Cliffs belief that gay people should be killed, Manuel opening my eyes to reading Bible passages in a way I'd never read them before, and my best friends' plan to start a GSA.