Sermon Tone Analysis

Things to Keep in Mind

Audience/People

Context

Time Period

Translation/Interpretation

The Culture/Nuances

The Setting

Personal Bias/Perceptions

What is it that we as an affirming church are advocating for?

What is it that we accept & affirm?

God’s enveloping love & acceptance for all who

What do we not affirm?

Abuse

Illegality

Immorality

Sodom & Gomorrah

Looking At The Story

God had already decided to destroy the city prior to this incident.

The men’s aggressive actions are preceded by lavish displays of hospitality from Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 18) and Lot (Genesis 19).

These preceding accounts place the focus on the men of Sodom’s violent, disgraceful treatment of strangers.

In Genesis 19, God sends two angels disguised as men to Sodom, where the men of Sodom threaten to rape them.

God then destroys the city with fire and brimstone.

Same-sex rape was a common tactic of aggression and humiliation in the ancient world.

Gang rape is completely different from loving relationships based on consent, much less mutuality and commitment.

Other References to Sodom

The word "abomination" (toevah) is used 117 times in the Old Testament - 111 of those uses have no connection to same-sex behavior.

This phrase is not a specific reference to same-sex behavior.

Some translations render this as "unnatural desire," but it literally means "different flesh" (sarkos heteras).

This phrase likely refers to the attempted rape of angels, given that Jude 6 refers to the Nephilim of Genesis 6 ("the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling").

Out of more than 20 references to Sodom and Gomorrah in the rest of Scripture, none mention same-sex behavior as even part of the reason for Sodom’s destruction.

But haven’t Christians always understood the sin of Sodom to be same-sex behavior?

No.

That was not the original interpretation of the Sodom story, which dates back to the 14th century BC.

Isaiah 1 equates the sin of Sodom with oppressing marginalized groups, murder, and theft.

Jeremiah 23:14 links it with adultery, idolatry, and power abuses.

Amos 4:1-11 and Zephaniah 2:8-11 compare it to the oppression of the poor, as well as prideful and mocking behavior.

Other Jewish Writings

Other Jewish writings say God loathed the people of Sodom "on account of their arrogance" (Sirach 16:8) and punished them "for having received strangers with hostility" (Wisdom 19:15).

When did Christians start to interpret the story as being about same-sex behavior?

No Jewish literature until the writings of Philo in the first century connected the sin of Sodom to same-sex behavior specifically.

Even then, the same-sex reading of the story did not become the mainstream interpretation among Christians until the time of Augustine in the early fifth century.

The term "sodomy" was not coined until the 11th century, and even then, it was widely used to refer to all non-procreative sexual acts (including heterosexual acts), not same-sex relations specifically.

The earliest Christians read the Sodom story as a parable about inhospitality, arrogance, and violence, not same-sex behavior.

The Bible never teaches that same-sex behavior was even part of Sodom's sin.

The Prohibitions in Leviticus

Audience:

Delivered to Moses for the Israelite Community

Israelites still in the Wilderness and will be for the next 45 years

Purpose is to give the commandments that will ensure the tangible benefits & divine protection/presence of God in the tabernacle.

Practically was written to instruct the new nation of Israel in proper worship, right living to reflect the character of God.

Why is Leviticus so Important?

“The book of Leviticus was the first book studied by a Jewish child; yet is often among the last books of the Bible to be studied by a Christian.”2

Today’s readers are often put off by the book’s lists of laws regarding diet, sacrifice, and social behavior.

But within these highly detailed directives we discover the holiness—the separateness, distinction, and utter “otherness”—of God.

And we learn how sin devastates humanity’s relationship with their Creator.

God established the sacrificial system so that His covenant people might enjoy His fellowship through worship; it also allowed for repentance and renewal:

When an Israelite worshiper laid his hand on the animal victim, he identified himself with the animal as his substitute . . .

this accomplished a symbolic transfer of his sin and a legal transfer of his guilt to the animal victim.

God then accepted the slaughter of the animal . . .

as a ransom payment for the particular sin which occasioned it.3

Many years after Moses wrote Leviticus, Jesus came to offer Himself as the ultimate sacrifice, holy and perfect, once for all, fulfilling the Law and rendering future animal sacrifices unnecessary and void (Hebrews 10:10).

Abomination

The word “abomination” is found, of course, in the King James translation of Leviticus 18:22, a translation which reads, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it [is] abomination.”

Yet this is a thoroughly misleading rendition of the word toevah, which, while we may not know exactly what it means, definitely does not mean “abomination.”

An “abomination” conjures up images of things which should not exist on the face of the earth: three-legged babies, oceans choked with oil, or Cheez-Whiz.

And indeed, this is how many religious people regard gays and lesbians.

It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.

Homosexuality is unnatural, a perversion, a disease, an abomination.

Yet a close reading of the term toevah suggests an entirely different meaning: something permitted to one group, and forbidden to another.

Though there is (probably) no etymological relationship, toevah means taboo.

The term toevah (and its plural, toevot) occurs 103 times in the Hebrew Bible, and almost always has the connotation of a non-Israelite cultic practice.

In the Torah, the primary toevah is avodah zara, foreign forms of worship, and most other toevot flow from it.

The Israelites are instructed not to commit toevah because other nations do so.

Deuteronomy 18:9-12 makes this quite clear:

In all these cases, toevah refers to a foreign cultic behavior wrongly practiced by Israelites and Israelite kings.

Toevah or Abomination is not Always Bad

An Example of something ok for the Hebrews but not ok for the Egyptians

Perhaps few people were more superstitious than the Egyptians.

Almost every production of nature was an object of their religious worship: the sun, moon, planets, stars, the river Nile, animals of all sorts, from the human being to the monkey, dog, cat, and ibis, and even the onions and leeks which grew in their gardens.

Jupiter was adored by them under the form of a ram, Apollo under the form of a crow, Bacchus under that of a goat, and Juno under that of a heifer.

The reason why the Egyptians worshipped those animals is given by Eusebius, viz., that when the giants made war on the gods, they were obliged to take refuge in Egypt, and assume the shapes or disguise themselves under different kinds of animals in order to escape.

Jupiter hid himself in the body of a ram, Apollo in that of a crow, Bacchus in a goat, Diana in a cat, Juno in a white heifer, Venus in a fish, and Mercury in the bird ibis

What is one of the biggest cultural & physical distinctions for the Jewish people?

It’s commemorated on the 8th day after birth?

Now, if by “abomination,” the King James means a cultural prohibition—something which a particular culture abhors but another culture enjoys—then the term makes sense.

But in common venacular, the term has come to mean much more than that.

Today, it connotes something horrible, something contrary to the order of nature itself, or God’s plan, or the institution of the family, or whatever.

It is this malleability of meaning, and its close association with disgust, that makes “abomination” a particularly abominable word to use.

The term implies that homosexuality has no place under the sun (despite its presence in over 300 animal species), and that it is an abomination against the Divine order itself.

Again, toevah as used in the scripture is typically is not a good thing—but it may also refer to things where cultural separations are dictated.

The Canaanites used homosexual acts as part of their pagan rituals.

Therefore the Israelites were prohibited from doing this, not because it was an act between two men but because it was symbolic of pagan ritual.

In today's world this prohibition now has no meaning [and homosexual sex is permitted].

- Rabbi Michele Brand Medwin

But Christians have never lived under the Old Testament law.

The Old Testament contains 613 commandments for God’s people to follow.

Leviticus includes rules about offerings, clean and unclean foods, diseases, bodily discharges, sexual taboos, and priestly conduct.

But the New Testament teaches that Christ’s death and resurrection fulfilled the law, which is why its many rules and regulations have never applied to Christians.

Prohibitions of things like mixed fabrics were part of the ceremonial law, but wasn’t the prohibition of male same-sex relations part of the moral law?

Some argue that all laws related to sexual conduct carry over to the New Testament, but Leviticus also prohibits sex during a woman’s menstrual period (Leviticus 18:19), which most Christians do not regard as sinful.