Fifth Sunday After Pentecost

Today's text is Genesis 16:1-3, read by Russell Alexander. This morning's sermon was delivered by Rev. Dr. Phil Snider.

Lead Pastor: Rev. Dr. Phil Snider (he/him)

Associate Pastor: Rev. Emily Bowen-Marler (she/her)

Youth Director: Paije Luth (she/her)

Children’s Church Coordinator: Valerie Bush (she/her)

Executive Assistant: Wacey Rivale (she/her)

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

The reading today is from the scripture of Genesis chapter 16 verses 1 through 3. Now Zarai, Abram's wife, bore him no children. She had an Egyptian slave whose name was Hagar, and Sarai said to Abram, You see that the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go into my slave. It may be that I shall obtain children by her. And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. So after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her slave, and gave her to her husband, Abram, as a wife. May we hear what the scripture is saying to the church.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

So today, we were hoping it would be last Sunday, but today we're starting our new summer sermon series. It's titled What the Bible Really Says About. And then each week we're going to take a look at a number of hotly contested subjects in American society and see what the Bible actually has to say about them. There's a lot of things that people say the Bible says about stuff, but what does the Bible actually say about these kinds of things? One of the real challenges that we face in trying to unpack what the Bible actually says about a lot of these hotly contested topics is a lot of times it's easy to take very modern ideas and assumptions about things and read that back into the biblical text and think that that's what that must mean, when in fact, oftentimes that's not very reflective of what the biblical text actually has to say. So this morning's topic on marriage equality is like a prime example of that happening. We hear a lot about traditional family values and biblical family values. And we're told that when it comes to a biblical marriage, well, in the Bible, that consists of marriage between one man and one woman. Full stop, end of story. Like that Bible, uh like that bumper sticker when I was a kid. I think there's a t-shirt today. The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it. But as you likely already know, and as we will quickly discover this morning, things are not nearly as clear-cut as a lot of folks would lead us to believe. Now, those of us who are in favor of marriage equality, especially for our LGBTQ beloveds, well, we are often criticized. We are told that what we're doing is just allowing modern culture to shape our beliefs and try to say that's what the Bible says. We're being led astray instead of actually paying attention to what the Bible says. But the truth of the matter is that those who say that the traditional biblical view of marriage consists of a relationship between one man and one woman, well, these folks are actually taking very, very modern ideas and assumptions and reading those back into the Bible far more. And so I just kind of want to begin by stating something up front that might surprise many of us to hear, especially here in the Bible Belt. And that's to say that the Bible, not one time, ever, from Genesis to Revelation, from the beginning to the end, not one time ever, ever. Emphasis on the word, ever. Not one time does the Bible ever condemn relationships between people of the same gender that are built on mutuality, respect, and love. Not one time. Does the Bible condemn acts of aggression and violence and domination among people of the same gender? Absolutely. As we would today. But it never condemns relationships between people of the same gender that are built on mutuality, love, and respect. If you try to find that condemnation in the Bible, you will not. You will find condemnations of behaviors that are rooted in violence and domination and exploitation, but you will never find condemnation of relationships between two people of the same gender rooted in mutuality, respect, and love. Now, one of the hardest parts about looking to the Bible for advice about marriage, is that really honestly? I mean, this scripture passage from Genesis 16 is kind of a little foreshadowing or a little tell. There aren't really a whole lot of role model marriages out there in the Bible for us to emulate. I mean, like, even the folks who say that biblical marriage consists of only one man and one woman, they have to concede that in the Bible times, in these cases, women were property. Women were property. So if you wish to argue for restoring the ideas surrounding biblical marriage from the Bible, you have to go back to the idea of women being property, commodities to be exchanged, bought, and sold. Technically speaking, there is no word for marriage in the Hebrew language. The Old Testament, which uh is what Christians often refer to as the Hebrew Bible, which was written in the Hebrew language, does not have a Hebrew word for marriage. The term usually used for marriage is lokuk, which means to take. As in a father takes a spouse or a man takes a wife. Even the word husband never appears in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew word that is usually translated as husband is Baal, meaning Lord or Master. Booze. It gets better. There's no way around just the very basic concept whenever people are talking about restoring biblical marriage. And that's the idea that marriage in the Bible is a property exchange, a contractual agreement. Who gives this woman to be married to this man? Literally, who gives this woman? The woman does not have the agency. She is property. A woman's status was defined by her relationship to a man, and property passed from men to men, fathers to eldest sons. Women being excluded. But I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. We are gonna have an installment in this sermon series on whether or not women should be in ministry, and surprise, surprise, it will have a lot to do with the patriarchy and misogyny that has oftentimes um clouded a lot of the biblical witness and the Christian traditions. Uh, and so we'll have a sermon about that. Um so we really need you to save your voice for that one. Um I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. Uh, if we're gonna unpack what the Bible actually says about marriage equality, we need to begin by taking a look at what the Bible has to say about marriage just in general. And we'll quickly learn that it's not just one thing. Okay, so let's begin in the book of Genesis, chapter 2, verse 24. When people invoke the traditional view of marriage from the Bible, this is generally what they mean: one man and one woman. But if we move forward a couple of chapters to Genesis 4.19, we're introduced to the idea of polygamy, or more accurately, polygamy, because it was only men who could have multiple partners, not women. As we'll see, sometimes this is two wives, other times it's hundreds of wives, but it's multiple wives. And so we have marriage so far in Genesis, and we are just, you know, four chapters in, between one man and one woman, as well as the idea of polygony. And now let's take a look at that uh verse that Russell read earlier in worship today. It's a haunting verse from Genesis chapter 16, one through three. Here we see Abraham marrying his wife's enslaved woman, Hagar. So here in this passage, Sarah gives her enslaved woman Hagar to Abraham, or Sarai and Abram before their names were changed, to be his wife. So this is marriage between a man and a woman and her slave. So I mean, are these the biblical concepts of marriage that people want to go back to? Honest question. So we'll, yeah, some of that we'll unpack. Um and next in another haunting verse, some of these are hard to read. Uh, even as I was putting these slides together, um you kind of feel the weight. Uh the Bible, it's PG 13, it's R, it's it's full of stuff. Um in this haunting verse, we see a male soldier's instructions for marrying a prisoner of war. Suppose you see among the captives a beautiful woman whom you desire and want to marry, and so you bring her home to your house. She shall shave her head, pair her nails, discard her captive's garb, and remain in your house a full month mourning for her father and mother. After that you may go into her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. That one is from Deuteronomy 21, 11 through 13. It's a male soldier plus a prisoner of war. And if we move forward, one chapter to Deuteronomy 22, we encounter a verse that is indicative of even more violence. This one is um very hard to read. If a man meets a virgin who is not engaged and seizes her and lies with her, and they are discovered, the man who lay with her shall give fifty shekels of silver to the young woman's father, and she shall become his wife because he violated her, he shall not be permitted to divorce her as long as he lives. And again, I ask, is this the biblical concept of marriage people want to get back to? Then in Deuteronomy 25, we hear about the practice of Leverite marriage. This is when a married man dies without children, and his brothers are supposed to lie. That's the biblical term for, you know, supposed to lie with his widow until she conceives so that the family line can continue. And if we move ahead to 1 Kings, we encounter the example of King Solomon, who is married to 700 princesses and 300 concubines. So if you're keeping count at this point along the way, there's been marriage between one man and one woman, with the woman being property, polygamy with the women being property, marriage between a man, a woman, and those they've enslaved against the agency of the enslaved, with all the women being property, marriage between a soldier and his enslaved property taken as a prisoner of war, between a man and a woman he violates and takes as property, between brothers of a deceased man and his widow, between a man and multiple princesses and concubines, all his property. So if you ever wonder why at Brentwood, whenever we read scripture verses and we say, May we hear what the Spirit is saying to the church? Like there's like kind of the traditional liturgical refrain in that moment is the word of the Lord, then the people say, Thanks be to God. But like sometimes what the Spirit is unpacking, what the Spirit is helping us understand is maybe we can learn from things in the biblical text that maybe we should not emulate. So maybe what the Spirit says is to read a text through the lens of love. So one of the very simple ways we try to name that every Sunday at Brentwood, whenever scripture is read, we say, may we hear what the Spirit is saying to the church. In other words, what is the spirit of love guiding us and instructing us to understand about this text? Um, people are often like, oh yeah, but that's all the Old Testament. You know, it it's no longer relevant, it doesn't matter anymore. What matters is the New Testament. Now, conveniently, what they don't tell you is that, you know, they'll only say that until there's another passage from the Old Testament they want to use to support their views, and then all of a sudden the Old Testament matters again, like magically. Um, but that's just kind of how that plays out. But if we do look to the New Testament, if we look to the Gospels, we immediately see that Jesus has some very harsh words about all of this. Like many other Jewish reformers, Jesus viewed marital practices like these as highly problematic. This leads the scholar and pastor, the Reverend Melissa Flora Bixler, to say the gospels are profoundly pessimistic about marriage. Jesus is not married, he has no children. I would go as far as to say that Jesus is anti-family. He calls disciples to abandon their families, including their marriages, to follow him. He tells future believers to do likewise. Jesus has harsh words for his family when they make an appeal to their kinship-based preferential treatment. So what's going on here? Why is Jesus so anti-family? It's because in his world, the family system and structure was built around hierarchies, around certain people being property, being commodities that can be exchanged. And Jesus flat out rejects that as going against the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is not rooted on hierarchies and property, and some people being more powerful than others. Jesus himself chooses not to get married, not to participate in any kind of system like that. He is not gonna participate in any kind of property exchange involving human lives. Now, here's one of my favorite things about some of the oldest, sorry, yeah, some of the, yeah, I gotta get this right. Okay. Some of the passages that were written in the New Testament, the last, like some of the latest passages in the New Testament that were written. Turns out, like in the uh early days of Christianity, there were um emerged a movement where folks were really frustrated at single women for not getting married. And so some of the uh books in the Bible that were written very late, um, there's a lot of shade thrown at single women because they refused to get married. And why do they refuse to get married? Because they refused to participate in a property exchange. They refuse to give themselves over to that, to be property. This is one of the ways they resisted empire. And this is maybe a good time to remember the significance of the narrative surrounding Mary's virgin birth. Mary, the mother of Jesus. Her virgin birth signals is that it means she was not owned by a man. If she is a virgin, it means she was not owned by a man. The early church was anti-empire from the start. And Jesus reserved some of his harshest words for any system built around hierarchy, whether it be religious, societal, communal, family, whatever. He says those who want to be his disciples should abandon their families if they're built around these hierarchies. As St. Paul puts it in the book of Galatians, one of the earliest writings in the Christian church, in the communities of Christ, there is no longer slave or free, male or female, Jew or Gentile. All those hierarchies break down. The kingdom of God, the kingdom of God is rooted in mutuality and love, not domination and hierarchy. According to the words of Jesus and the Gospels, in the kingdom of heaven, people do not marry and are not given in marriage. The kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of heaven, it's not built on property exchanges. The kingdom of heaven is not built on inequality. The kingdom of heaven does not bless marriages that are based on patriarchy and sexism. In the kingdom of heaven, we are like the angels, all on equal footing, none more valuable than the other. And I will read that passage in the next slide. For when people rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven. In the kingdom of heaven, patriarchy and hierarchy, it breaks down. And the other time that Jesus mentions marriage in the Gospels is when he is supporting women who have been denied agency in a patriarchal system that allows men to easily discard them. Jesus' prohibition against divorce was rooted in his desire for women to have agency and to not easily be victims of an unjust system that takes advantage of them and robs them of their agency. In the ancient world, a man could just get a divorce. And that would leave the woman very vulnerable, and she would have no say in the matter. Jesus condemns the practice of just casually having men use their agency to leave women vulnerable, all the while women's agency is denied. That's why he speaks out against the problematic practices of men just casually divorcing their wife, leaving her economically vulnerable. He's standing up for women's agency in a society that robbed women of agency. And if we apply this, if we apply the same ethic today, we can easily imagine Jesus saying to those who are part of an abusive marriage, or maybe a marriage that is built on hierarchies, that they do not have to stay in a relationship that brings harm. They have agency. God's love cares for them. God's love does not deny agency, even though the world around us oftentimes tries to. Okay, so my next line was specifically written for last Sunday, which was Father's Day. And so like I think it still has impact today, but you know, um, the downside of preaching the sermon is that you know some of the lines are designed for specific Sundays. But of course, the upside, I mean, it was chaos last Sunday. I didn't like it. But y'all, I didn't have to work on a whole new sermon, which was kind of awesome. Um, but this line was written specifically for last Sunday's Father's Day during Pride Month, knowing that we are a congregation that celebrates marriage equality, including marriages with two dads. So if you are part of a relationship that is not built on domination, that is not built on violence, that is not built on hierarchy, but is rather built on mutuality and love and dignity and respect, then celebrate. Celebrate, you are already living into the kinds of relationships that Jesus envisioned in the kingdom of heaven. And whether you're married, whether you're single, if you choose to build a world rooted in mutuality and love and respect, then you stand with Jesus and those early Christian communities who resisted empire at every turn. So let's celebrate marriage equality. Not because we're trying to be anti Bible, but because we're trying to live into all that is evoked in Jesus' vision of the kingdom of heaven built on mutuality, love, and respect. Amen.