Bruised and blessed by scripture

By the time I got to seminary, I’d had years of experience defending myself against Christianized homophobia. My life was a walking answer to “How do you reconcile your sexuality with the Bible?”

My best answer was that the scriptures had nothing to say on same-gender relationships. The Bible couldn’t speak on queer people in the same way that we could not ask it about best practices for automotive design; the information simply wasn’t there. The writers of the scriptures had no working concept of sexual orientation or gender identity, nor did their interpreters for the next 1,800 years. Even the instructions for heterosexuality were ragingly outdated; women have the right to initiate divorce now, for example. And who was going to keep track of who sat in what chair during what time of the month? The Bible was a collection of our faith ancestors’ best attempts to describe their encounters with the divine, but just as we were hindered by our own time and place, so were they. The culture was just too far away for us to derive anything meaningful from it, not without a significant amount of context, and even then all that we knew should always be questioned.

This was the interpretation I rested in for years. It protected me from the spiritual violence dealt upon my fellow queer family; it resonated with my understanding of feminist critiques of the texts. It wasn’t impossible to still find meaning in the Bible; it was like a museum piece, one that still confessed to realities about humanity and, if investigated well enough, to how that humanity had once experienced God. There was enough in religious practice—worship, prayer, fellowship—to keep me grounded even when Bible study set my teeth on edge. I developed a spiritual allergy to words like inspired. I felt anxious and itchy around people who talked about “their walk with the Lord” or who came to worship carrying heavily highlighted Bibles. As a seminarian and then an intern pastor, this distrust was a constant companion.