Episodes
Sunday Apr 15, 2018
Abomination
Sunday Apr 15, 2018
Sunday Apr 15, 2018
Abomination
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC, April 15, 2018, the second Sunday after Easter. Polyphony sermon series.
Texts: Proverbs 6:16-19, Luke 16:13-15
When you hear the word “abomination” what immediately comes to mind? I imagine that for many people in the general population the word abomination conjures something related to sex or intimate relationships. There are heavy religious overtones to the word and, in my experience, in Christian contexts, it is most often used by those who are uncomfortable with or downright hateful toward LGBTQ people. There will be many here today who have been told directly or indirectly that their attraction to persons of the same gender or their own gender identity is abomination or—even worse—that they themselves are “an abomination.” So what comes to mind when these beloved ones hear the word may be a painful memory or a sharp pang of anger, fear, or clinging shame.
The temptation for me today is to attempt a full-scale apologetic treatise against the mis-interpretations and applications of scripture related to LGBTQ folks—to highlight the ways that the Bible has been used as a sword instead of a plowshare, as a “weapon of oppression rather than as a tool for liberation.”[i] But, thankfully Pastor Will has, at the ready, a list of books for personal study, and there is currently a Wednesday evening class you can join here at Foundry exploring this very topic—and in a way that will be much more helpful than what I could manage today. My goal instead is to help us look at this one word “abomination” and explore whether there is any good use for such a dangerous word that has been used to do so much damage.
I began my study by looking at all 113 instances of the word translated “abomination” in English in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. In both Hebrew and Greek (it appears mostly in Hebrew) the word means something like “detestable or loathsome things or acts.” I decided to organize my findings into categories of context including 1) any direct reference to sex, 2) religious impurity, 3) idolatry, and 4) injustice/harm. In which of these categories do you think the word “abomination” shows up most frequently?
The runaway winner is idolatry. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering that the first of the ten commandments is to “have no other God before me.” (Ex 20:3-4) For some, that may sound kind of scary and controlling—like jealousy of the icky kind. But here’s the preface to that commandment: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” (Ex 20:2) That, not to mention the full sweep of the biblical story, clues us into the fact that God’s jealousy is not about holding us hostage but setting us free. God knows that the promises of life, mercy, and hope are fulfilled as we receive God’s love, love God back, and love others as God loves us. Idols are dead, their promises are empty. And yet, our religious history reveals that the rulers of Israel consistently turned to idols, putting their trust in wealth, foreign powers, military might, pagan gods, and themselves instead of God. It generally didn’t end well.
In 2 Chronicles we read of one king who tried to remedy this, “Josiah took away all the abominations from all the territory that belonged to the people of Israel, and made all who were in Israel worship the Lord their God.” (2 Chr 34:33) The abomination here are the idols.
And the prophetic texts are clear on this point as well. Jeremiah writes, “the people of Judah have done evil in my sight, says the Lord; they have set their abominations in the house that is called by my name, defiling it. And they go on building the high place of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire—which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind.” (Jer 7:30-31) In the context of idolatry, abomination refers to both the idols themselves and the practices related to idol worship.
Our Gospel passage today is a direct descendent of this ancient struggle. The temptation to make wealth and prized possessions an idol is a perennial challenge. Jesus taught simply, “You cannot serve God and wealth.” Based on this teaching here are some contemporary idols and practices related to idol worship: greed, the hoarding of wealth, the sacrifice of workers’ health and the health of the environment on the altar of shareholder profits, tax policies favoring the rich, payday lenders taking advantage of the already struggling, the usury of credit card interest rates, advertising schemes that convince us to spend money on things we don’t need, health insurance companies who drop coverage for those who need it most, somehow finding plenty of money for sports and bombs and not enough for education and senior services and mental healthcare, and on and on it could go. Human possessions that become idols promise life and hope and joy and all the while steal those things. That idolatry and the practices of wealth worship are detestable… abomination.
The second highest category in which the word “abomination” appeared is in passages related to injustice and unrighteousness. Our passage from Proverbs is a good example of how this shows up in the Bible. Here are the seven things listed as abomination to God:
haughty eyes, a lying tongue,
and hands that shed innocent blood,
a heart that devises wicked plans,
feet that hurry to run to evil,
a lying witness who testifies falsely,
and one who sows discord in a family.
Did any of that come to mind when you heard the word abomination? And where are all the folks who say they are fundamentalist and “Bible-believing” when it comes to calling out those who are arrogant, who lie, who do violence to the innocent, who scheme in back alleys and backrooms, who don’t resist but embrace evil, who slander others and stir up conflict? The bible clearly says these are abomination.
Coming in third on the category list is religious purity—this is the usage in heavy rotation in the book of Leviticus. It is that book to which folks often turn when they want to assign the word abomination to LGBTQ people. But what is abomination really about in Leviticus?
“Leviticus 20:25-26 captures the meaning of ‘abomination.’ It reads: ‘You shall therefore make a distinction between the clean animal and the unclean, and between the unclean bird and the clean; you shall not bring abomination on yourselves by animal or by bird or by anything with which the ground teems, which I have set apart for you to hold unclean. You shall be holy to me; for I the Lord am holy, and have separated you from the peoples to be mine.’ Evidently, ‘abominable’ is just another word for ‘unclean.’ An ‘abomination’ is a violation of the purity rules that governed Israelite society and kept the Israelites different from the other peoples.”[ii]
There are a variety of things that contributed toward something being categorized in ancient Hebrew culture as clean or unclean, pure or “dirty”—perhaps some of them based on the social norms of the day, the perception of primitive science, the understanding of health or safety, or the association with pagan rites (not all of which were benign dancing about with flowers in your hair, but rather could be brutal). Regardless, the general concern of these ancient purity rules seems to be keeping Israel different from the Gentiles through adherence to a set of norms derived from a worldview that is beyond our full comprehension today.
We may recoil at that and want to focus on what brings us together rather than what makes us different. But healthy communities do have boundaries and practices that give shape to shared life. The early church stood out in the culture in which they lived because they were trying to be different in a good way. Grace, mercy, forgiveness, love, generosity, the valuing of women and children, the boundary crossing welcome and embrace of Gentiles, the emphasis on the dignity and value of every member of society regardless of class or caste or ethnicity, covenantal marriage relationships that were loving and just—all of these things were particular marks or at least aspirations of early Christian community—things that made Christians different than other groups. The old rules governing a person’s inclusion in the people of God shifted dramatically among Jesus’s disciples. In the book of Acts, Peter has a vision clearly shifting the Levitical purity rules around food (Acts 10:9-16) and then later declares, “God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.” (Acts 10:28) Why do some Christians still call other people “unclean” or “abomination” when the Bible is so clear that’s not OK? It seems to me that behavior is what steps outside the boundaries set by Jesus; calling another person abomination makes one impure in the technical sense if “impure” is that which sets you at odds with the Christian identity embodied by Jesus.
So, abomination in the Bible is most often associated with idolatry, then with injustice and doing harm, less with impurity, and finally…at the bottom of the list and with only the paltriest number of references is anything to do with sex. I imagine that most folks would find that surprising. It is true that pagan practices likely included sexual activity, temple prostitution, unjust and manipulative sexual relationships between adults and young servants or slaves. So this might be inferred in some passages related to idolatry. The few direct references however are found in the concern over what is clean and unclean. As one scholar points out, we might be able to wrap our heads around this by thinking of what we call “dirty.” “What a culture considers dirty is usually something that makes its members uncomfortable.” Uncomfortable feelings can arise for all sorts of reasons—something is different from what we expect, a thing stirs something within us that we don’t understand, we witness others become uncomfortable… “Being ‘dirty’ does involve uncomfortable feelings—and those feelings [can be] learned…”[iii]
The sad truth is that in our culture lots of us are uncomfortable with our bodies and with sex and so from an early age we pass on the idea that parts of our bodies and sex in general is “dirty.” And when you then add to that an awareness of the reality of sexual attraction outside the historically accepted cultural “norm,” you multiply the level of discomfort. Let’s face it, our Christian tradition has not done a good job of helping us claim our human sexuality as “clean” and as a gift. Wittingly or unwittingly our supposedly incarnational spiritual tradition has created discomfort around physical intimacy and desire and then not done a good job of helping folks work through that discomfort. Christianity hasn’t helped us engage what Carl Jung termed our “shadow” or understand (much less embrace) the variety of created natures human beings embody. And so we zero in on the fear and “abomination” gets assigned to the thing that makes us most uncomfortable…And then some people pick up the word and use it as a weapon to keep the fearful thing or person away or separate or ashamed.
This behavior, however, is abomination. It is doing harm. And as is so often the sad, exhausting case, Christian people expend precious energy hurting members of their own family instead of turning together toward the clear source of concern, that is, toward the biblical revelation of what abomination really is: a culture marked by rampant idolatry that manipulates our priorities and values, separates us from intimacy with God, and leads to gross injustices and harm toward others and the planet. //
It was enlightening for me to do even this cursory biblical study of this word. Abomination is never going to be considered a beautiful word like “grace” or “love.” But there is a good use for it in all its challenge. When we speak of abomination at Foundry let’s be clear that, as a Bible-believing congregation, we’re speaking about idolatry and injustice. And that any other use is, well…abomination.
[i] Marilyn Bennett Alexander and James Preston, We Were Baptized Too: Claiming God’s Grace for Lesbians and Gays, (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), xvii.
[ii] Daniel A. Helminiak, Ph.D., What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality, (New Mexico: Alamo Square Press, 2000), 56.
[iii] Ibid., 62.
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