12 July 2026

The Bible on Homosexuality

Romans 1:18-32

Before I get started on this message on the Bible and homosexuality, I need to say one thing: I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind. I couldn’t even if I wanted to. That’s not how minds generally work. Neurologists have shown that our decisions are, by and large, made by the part of our brain that deals with emotions. The part of our brain that deals with logic and reason – the pre-frontal cortex – generally comes into play after we’ve already decided what we think. Arguments don’t change our minds; they’re more likely to make us feel attacked and dig in our heels more firmly. But wait, some of you might be thinking, a lot of people have changed their minds about homosexuality in the past twenty years. How did that happen? 

One of the distinctive teachings of Methodism, going back to John Wesley himself, is the acknowledgement that we all have more than one source of authority. It’s sometimes called the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral,” and it’s pictured on the front of your bulletin. Wesley taught that in issues related to faith, we should start with the Bible, but that our interpretation of the Bible is inevitably influenced by other authoritative voices, like the tradition that we inherited, science and reason, and our own personal experience. Of those four sources of authority, the one that is most likely to change one’s mind is not a new tradition – that’s a contradiction in terms anyway – or a new scripture or a new argument. No, what changes our minds is new experiences. I’ll come back to that in a bit. 

For now, though, just know that I’m not trying to argue anyone out of their opinion. On a question like this, which has been a hot-button issue for decades, people already know what they think. I certainly do. In fact, you all know what I think, too. My purpose today is not to influence your opinion, but simply to lay out how somebody like me who claims to cherish the Bible as inspired by God can hold the views that I do. So, as Wesley suggested, let’s start with scripture. We read now from Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 1, verses 18-32.

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. 19For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; 21for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. 22Claiming to be wise, they became fools; 23and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.

24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, 25because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

26 For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, 27and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. 29They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, 30slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious towards parents, 31foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die—yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.

This is the most quoted passage on homosexuality in the Bible, but we actually have time today to deal with all the scriptures that deal specifically with homosexuality. In the Torah, in Leviticus 18:22, we read You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. This is repeated in slightly different words a couple of chapters later in Leviticus 20. Then in the New Testament we have this passage in Romans 1, and two similar passages in 1 Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1. In all three New Testament passages, homosexuality is included alongside lists of typical human sins, ranging from murder to gossip. That’s pretty much it for the Bible on homosexuality, which, by itself, is significant. As much time as the modern church has spent fighting over this, you would get the impression that it’s a huge biblical issue. It isn’t. It’s four or five passages, none of which are from Jesus, who says nothing about homosexuality at all. But, having said that, we should point out that while the references are few, they are consistent. Every time the Bible mentions homosexuality, it takes the view that it is at least a sin, or even an “abomination.” 

What do I do with that? Well, throughout this on-again, off-again sermon series on difficult passages in the Bible, I have been presenting the view that the revealed truth of God that is to be found in scripture is filtered through the historical and social context of the human writers. The social assumptions of those writers are not eternal truth, so our job as faithful readers is to try to separate the revelation from its social context. We have used this approach in dealing with such issues as the Bible’s apparent acceptance of slavery, the view expressed in some places in the Bible that women are inferior to men, and the passages that present God as commanding genocide. All those, we said, reflected historical worldviews, not the will of God. So will this method work here as well?

I think so. Let’s start with the context of the laws of Leviticus. These laws are given in a section describing a specific worldview, that the world consists of clear, distinct, well-defined, and unchanging categories. A place for everything and everything in its place. This is seen as the design of God. The laws all around our two verses are focused on defining what is clean and what is unclean, and as a general rule, anything that fudges those categories or doesn’t fit one of them exactly is unclean. Fish that don’t have scales are unclean. Animals with scales that are not fish – that is, reptiles – are unclean. Animals that live in the water but are not fish, like shellfish, are unclean. In fact, shellfish are called abominations. Animals that fly but don’t have feathers: unclean. Here’s one that’s more random. Animals that chew the cud and have cloven hooves – like sheep and goats and cows – are clean. Animals that have one of those traits but not the other, like pigs that have cloven hooves but don’t chew the cud, are unclean. Also, don’t mix categories. Don’t mix wheat flour and barley flour. Don’t weave clothes of both cotton and linen. One or the other; not both. Within that worldview, it’s not hard to see where homosexuality would fit, or rather not fit. It breaks usual categories. It’s as bad as lobster.

One thing you may have noticed is that none of us feel the slightest need to follow most of those biblical rules today. For this, we can thank both the New Testament and science. The New Testament makes it clear that we are no longer under the Old Testament rules of what is clean and unclean. Jesus says it. Paul says it. In Acts, a voice from heaven tells Peter, “What God has called clean, you shall not call unclean.” God doesn’t care about our invented categories. And from science we have learned that the world is not made up of eternal, fixed categories, anyway. We’re all in process. Dogs used to be wolves, birds used to be reptiles, tangelos are a thing. Somehow the platypus exists. And maybe the categories of male and female are not as rigidly impermeable as we used to think. So, for us to reject all the dietary laws and fabric blend guidelines of Leviticus but to hang on the stuff about homosexuality is a little inconsistent.

But, for what it’s worth, that’s exactly what Paul does. He rejects all the dietary laws but he holds on to the one about homosexuality. Why does he treat that as different? Well, look at the list in which homosexual behavior is included:  Every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips. slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious towards parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. What do all these sins from Romans 1 have in common? Well, they are all actions that harm others. And they are all actions that are choices. We can choose not to gossip. Or, you know, commit murder. In short, Paul gets rid of every holiness law that calls us to reject something just because of what it is, like shellfish, but he holds on to laws that he sees as personal choices that harm others. From the larger passage, it’s clear that Paul thinks of homosexuality as fitting that description as well: something that one person does to another, and something that is a personal choice. But what if Paul’s wrong? What about homosexuality that is not a harm to others – like a couple in a committed marriage? And even more importantly, what if homosexuality isn’t a choice? 

Many of us in this room, including me, grew up in a time when homosexuality was a weird thing that we talked about sometimes – usually coarsely, in locker room jokes – but that none of us had ever encountered. We thought. I probably was more clueless than most because I was also Southern Baptist, and there was no such thing as a gay Southern Baptist. I thought. Having never met a gay person (I thought), it was easy to dismiss it as an aberration, a sinful choice that some confused people made. But in the past fifty years, that context has changed. Slowly at first, and then in a rush within the last twenty years, a lot of people that we didn’t know were gay have stepped out of the closet. Homosexuality is not an abstract concept to me anymore. It is my seminary friend and long-time church co-worker Martha. It is my college friend who was driven into alcoholism by the pain of hiding who he was from his Oklahoma Baptist family, and who now is twenty years sober, working as an addiction counselor, attending an Episcopal church, and occasionally assuming the persona of Miss Constance Havoc in drag shows. Homosexuality is people in my family and people in my church. None of them chose to be gay. Many of them, in fact, chose not to be gay as hard as they could, but it didn’t work. Their coming out was not making a choice; it was accepting reality. This is what changed my mind. Not a re-reading of scripture or new scientific evidence, but simply the new experience of hearing the stories of my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters in Christ.

So now I do look at those biblical passages that condemn homosexuality differently. I see them as reflecting a different time and worldview, not a decree of God. Moreover, I see those passages as insignificant beside the wealth of scriptures that identify each of us as children of God, made in God’s own image, and passages that call us to extend love, care, and welcome to everyone, especially those who have not been welcomed by others. No one is sinful simply because of how they are made. No one is born an abomination. “Abomination” is not something that any of us is, but rather something we can make ourselves to be: by choosing to harm others. Paul was right about that. I can’t help feeling that if half the energy that the church has spent condemning homosexuality had been focused instead on the rest of Romans 1 – slander and gossip and contentiousness – then the church would be in a very different place right now.

I need to add one more thing before I close though. I was able to dismiss these passages against homosexuality because of my belief that the Bible contains some things that are not from God. Not everyone is able to do that. Some people’s faith is built at least partly on their conviction that they have a book that is divine in every word, and if that were taken away their faith would crumble. People in that position may feel they have no choice but to treat homosexuality as a sin. This does not mean that these are people of hate. They, like me, are trying to live their lives according to their understanding of scripture; they just see the Bible as a different kind of book than I do. Many of them, like some of my gay and lesbian acquaintances, are members of my own family, and I love them, too. I know I’m never going to change their minds – like I said, that’s not how minds work. But they don’t have to be like me for me to love them.

That’s the whole point.