I don’t remember exactly when or where I first heard this phrase, but I distinctly remember it being bandied about amid the religious debates over homosexuality when I was coming of age in Mississippi in the 1990s. It was abundantly clear to me from a young age that for the Christian communities in my neck of the woods, there was a lot at stake with regard to same-sex relationships and how the Holy Scriptures—and the creation stories specifically—were brought to bear on them.
Where the phrase originated, however, is really not the point. I bring it up because I found myself confronting this uncomfortable slogan from my past as we read the second creation story a couple of weeks ago. While the underlying sentiment of this refrain has been used in oppressive and harmful ways against LGBTQ people, and that is inexcusable, it nonetheless points to a reality of the biblical creation accounts that I find myself grappling with anew as we embark on our journey through the great narratives of the Old Testament. I’ve been an openly gay man for almost half of my 40 years, and while I thought I had squared the Biblical creation accounts with my own sexuality, for some reason, hearing the Genesis 2 account of how God created “woman” to be “man’s partner” had a particularly isolating effect on me this time. And perhaps because I’m in a relatively new, happy, life-affirming, committed relationship with another man, the verse “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh” really stung when I heard it read aloud in church a couple of weeks ago.
At the recent Faith Forums, Blair has prefaced our conversations with a reminder that we are gathered in a “safe space,” a reminder that I think we would all agree is important. But what exactly does it mean that our space is “safe”? More than anything, what I hope it means is that we can have difficult conversations about the Bible—conversations rooted in potential disagreement or incompatible interpretations—and then proceed upstairs immediately afterward to pray, sing and receive the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist together, regardless of the content or difficulty of those conversations.
When I think about the “Adam & Steve” debate, my biggest fear is not that I won’t be able to change the minds of those who might use this slogan to defend their understanding of Scripture. My biggest fear is that I won’t be able to have a conversation with them at all. I spent this past summer in a part of the Anglican Communion that, for the most part, was comprised of folks who had different ideas than I did, not only about same-sex relationships, but also about biblical interpretation and broad range of theological concepts. What I regret is that I never mustered up the courage to have conversations about these topics with them. I never reached across these lines of difference to see whether the faith that united us was stronger than the differences that divided us. That was a missed opportunity because, the truth is, I need practice at having these difficult conversations so that I can more fully live into my baptismal promises to “continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship…to seek and serve Christ in all persons…[and] to respect the dignity of every human being.”
As Blair has also pointed out in our Faith Forums, the Episcopal Church is a corner of Christianity that creates a lot of room for interpreting the Bible. Our Catechism in The Book of Common Prayer reminds us that we believe the Bible to be the “Word of God,” not because it is infallible and dictated word-for-word, but because “God inspired [the Bible’s] human authors and because God still speaks to us through the Bible.” While this definition gives us a certain amount of freedom, along with that that freedom comes room—perhaps even an obligation—to disagree and challenge each other. While we may agree that God still speaks to us through the Bible, we will inevitably disagree about what we perceive God to be saying. My prayer is that when we do disagree, that we will have the courage to do so openly and charitably, trusting that out of these disagreements our faith might be strengthened and we might learn something about how to model Christian community in the world.
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