Three Times Holy, a song

Holy, three times holy, holy
Holy three times holy, holy
Holy, holy, holy
Holy, three times holy, holy

Blessed are the Peacemakers: Toward an Integrative Perspective on Same-Sex Sexuality (III)

Today is November 1. In just 10 days, our society will be observing Remembrance Day, the national day set aside to commemorate our fallen soldiers—especially those who fought and died in World War I and II, but also, more broadly, our war-dead from all of the many armed conflicts the nation of Canada has participated in around the world and across the decades. As this day approaches, I am faced, as a pastor, with the low-grade spiritual struggle I wrestle with every year in the lead up to November 11.

Should I wear a poppy to church or not?

A little back ground may be in order, if you welcomed the above question with arched eyebrows, wondering, either: “Well, why on earth wouldn’t you?” or “How on earth could you?”

You see: I believe that the Bible is the inspired, authoritative word of God, that it is useful for teaching us how to live ethically in God’s world (as Paul says, it is useful for training in righteousness). And I’ve read enough of the Bible to believe very strongly that it teaches that human beings ought not to kill one another. That killing is, in fact, contrary to the Creator’s intention for human life together, that more violence is not God’s way to respond to the problem of violence, that the same God who speaks against sexual immorality in the Scriptures also says, very clearly, that we shall not kill.

As an interpretive aside, I should clarify a few things. Occasionally people will argue that the sixth commandment—God’s prohibition against killing—is more accurately translated as “murder,” and it does not apply to other kinds of killing, such as capital punishment or killing in war. Certainly, there’s some small case to be made in this regard. The Ten Commandments first appear in Exodus 20, and the word used there that usually gets translated as “kill” in most English versions is the Hebrew verb râtsach. In the Hebrew Bible, râtsach is most commonly used to describe intentional, unlawful killing—murder—not killing generally (which is usually described by the Hebrew verb harag). Having said that, though, râtsach is also used throughout Torah when it has unintentional or accidental killing in mind (e.g. Numbers 35). It is also used to describe the killing of someone who has accidentally killed a close family member of yours (the so-called avenger of blood); and within certain contexts, this kind of râtsach, a revenge-killing, is presented as entirely lawful (See, e.g. Numbers 35:17), even when the death they are avenging was accidental. So we can’t settle the question of whether Commandment Six is referring only to unlawful murder on linguistic grounds alone. We need to look at the wider witness of Scripture.

When we do look at the wider witness of the Bible, the case seems pretty strong to me that in the overall arc of the story it tells, killing is not, and never was God’s intention for us. This is assumed in the story of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4:1-15). It is explicitly stated in God’s covenant with Noah (Genesis 9:5-6). And God’s prophets envision a time when God’s intention for peaceful human co-existence will be gloriously realized (e.g., Isaiah 2:1-12).

The case gets even more clear when we get to the New Testament, where the pacifist tendencies of the Scripture are reiterated and strengthened. Jesus blessed the peacemakers (Matt 5:9). He taught that the Old Testament prohibition against killing even included harboring hatred in your heart for your fellow human being (Matt 5:21). He commanded his followers not to (violently) resist the evil person and to offer the left cheek to the person who slaps them on the right. He famously warned his disciples that those who lived by the sword will die by the sword. And from the witness of the Book of Acts, it seems his first followers followed his teaching literally, and spread the Gospel in the face of intense violence, without ever once resorting to violence themselves.

The whole of the Scripture, in other words, is clearly oriented towards pacifism, the non-violent resistance of violent aggression. Its basic assumption is that this phenomenon of human beings settling their differences by killing one another was emphatically not something God had in mind when he created us in the beginning.

And yet, as I mentioned at the beginning, I wrestle every year with the question of whether I ought to wear a poppy in church. The source of my wrestling is this: on the one hand, the poppy commemorates the bravery, self-sacrifice, and loyalty of men and women who literally gave up their own lives, seeking by violent means to resist and defeat a violent aggressor. And our nation is a peaceful, prosperous, safe and secure place to live as a result of their sacrifice. It is good citizenship to acknowledge this, to express gratitude for it, to commemorate it and even (if solemnly) to celebrate it. I have known many Christians who have served in the military or have had loved ones who served. The FMCiC has ordained ministers who serve as chaplains in the Canadian Armed Forces. And many of the things that the poppy honors: fidelity, courage, self-sacrifice, faithfulness, hope, and love, are either explicitly Christian virtues, or, if not that, certainly “Christian adjacent.”

In the church circles I minister in, many folks would notice it if the pastor did not wear a poppy in church on or around Remembrance Day; it’s not impossible that some would comment on it disapprovingly. Certainly, no one would speak negatively about the pastor if he did wear a one. And few would bat an eye for a millisecond if the church service closest to Novemebr 11 included a moment of silence for the war-dead. Most would expect it.

All this is true, even though the poppy explicitly commemorates the fact that men and women, at the behest of the state, sought by violent means to resist and overcome a violent aggressor. It is a commemoration of war, worn in honor of our national war heroes, who used violence to preserve our freedom, our property, our way of life. And to whatever extent it does this, it is honoring something that—in terms of the clear and explicit teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ—is not the Creator’s intention for human beings.

I want to be clear here. Some Christian traditions are strictly pacifist, and would argue that a thing like a poppy, and more importantly, the sentiment that the poppy represents, has no place on the lapel of a Bible-believing follower of Jesus Christ.

I am not a pacifist. I am aware of the carefully articulated and nuanced theology of “Just War” that has developed among Christians over the millennia, which suggests that, even though killing contravenes one of God’s clearly stated intentions for human beings, still, there are times and circumstances where it is the better of two evils, so to speak. If, by acting with force, one might stop greater violence from occurring, such force can be seen to be theologically justified, provided it is deployed according to strict guidelines that reflect other biblical principles (that it’s not more forceful than necessary, for instance, or that all non-violent means of resolution have been exhausted).

For the most part, I find the arguments that underly the “Just War” tradition to be convincing. I am even able to identify many moral goods that can emerge in the midst of war—acts of courage and self-giving, loyalty to friends, commitment to a cause, resilience and fortitude. All these are virtues I am willing to honor unabashedly, even though I still roundly condemn the context of violence which brought them into being and made it necessary that they be modeled.

In other words, when it comes to war and the teaching of the Bible, I have done what almost all Christians do (excepting those who have opted to walk a path of true pacifism): we have integrated what we know to be the witness of the Scripture on the question of war, on the one hand, with our lived experience in the world, on the other. We know in general terms what our Creator’s intention for human life is—that none should kill, or feel the need to—but we also know by lived experience that the world simply does not always “live up” to the Creator’s intention for it, and it’s not always clear how, exactly, we should best live in relation to the witness of the Scripture on the question of violence.

And so, wise Christians try to find ways to hold these two realities in tension—the pacifist orientation of the Bible, on the one hand, and the apparent reality that, this side of the Second Coming, there are occasions where the pacifist option seems only to exacerbate and permit the evil of violence, that there are times when war may be the wisest Christian response to the horrors of violence, because our lived experience in the world does not always fit neatly into the clear categories of Scripture.

Christians going to war, in other words, or serving in the Armed Forces, or wearing poppies to honor those who have, are all instances of Christians taking an “integrative” perspective on the problem of responding to violence with violence: we don’t deny that the Scripture clearly teaches that its not God’s heart for us, but we have integrated this fact with our lived experience, which leads us to believe that, even so, sometimes it is necessary.

In framing the issue like this, I am not trying to argue, necessarily, that non-pacifist Christians are right to adopt this kind of an “integrative view” of war. I myself am not a pacifist, but my point here is only that, most of us do this kind of “integration” quite instinctively and without much reflection when it comes to the issue of war. It comes so naturally to us, in fact, that very few of us ever even stop to wonder why we are so ready to honor something that so clearly contravenes the heart of God as revealed in Scripture.

Of course, this is series is about developing a wise, Christian response to the question of same-sex sexuality and LGBTQ+ experience, not about war. If you’ve stuck with me this far, however, perhaps you can see where I am going with this, and why I dove so deeply into the issue of war and pacifism. It’s because I am proposing that we can do something similar when it comes to the issue of same-sex sexuality and the Bible, holding together, without compromising either, our convictions about the biblical witness, on the one hand, and our lived-experience of real life in the Creator’s world, on the other. We can, and should, hold those two things in tension, and then wisely find a way forward that honors both: acknowledging that the Bible clearly presents opposite-sex sex as the creator's intention for sex, but also recognizing that our lived experience of our sexuality in the Creator's world is such that there may be circumstances where the wisest and most compassionate thing to do is to honor and bless relationships that lie outside this basic intention.

In coming posts, I will offer some other, real-life examples of times and places where Christians do this kind of “integrative work” without even realizing it, before moving on to what I believe an "integrative approach" might look like when it comes to the question of same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ identities. I start with the question of pacifism and war, however, because that issue, it seems, has been settled for so long that it’s almost startling to have it pointed out how “integrative” non-pacifist Christians actually are.

I would hope that, if we can adopt an integrative approach to an issue as fraught and painful as the problem of war, we should be able to do something similar with the question of same-sex sexuality. I would humbly suggest that, if we can with the one but can’t with the other, we may be guilty of straining the gnat while swallowing a camel, loading burdens on the backs of others we ourselves are unwilling to bear, tithing on our dill and mint but leaving the weightier matters of the law undone; guilty, in other words, of plain, old-fashioned hypocrisy.

<<<previous