A Community Seeking Queer Liberation in the Bible
This past Thursday night we kicked off our June Sessions “The Bible is Queer” with some great conversation about queer heroes in the Bible and same-sex relationships. Some of us found ourselves at home with this new lens and others of us were more uncomfortable with some biblical interpretations. There were a lot of different reactions, and we love that we get to be a part of this curious community that seeks God’s love, inclusion, and liberation. It’s complex and we are doing it!
As we are a faith community wrestling with the Bible, I thought I’d remind us that when it comes to the Bible there are a lot of different decisions we can make. Interpretations of the Bible can range from taking a surface read of the text literally, to contextualizing and nuancing the text, to saying “this text is just not for me,” and so much more. Across our different approaches to the Bible, I have found that being honest about the biases we bring to the text benefits everyone.
Rachel Held Evans reminds us,
“The truth is, you can bend Scripture to say just about anything you want it to say. You can bend it until it breaks. For those who count the Bible as sacred, interpretation is not a matter of whether to pick and choose, but how to pick and choose. We’re all selective. We all wrestle with how to interpret and apply the Bible to our lives. We all go to the text looking for something, and we all have a tendency to find it. So the question we have to ask ourselves is this: are we reading with the prejudice of love, with Christ as our model, or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed? Are we seeking to enslave or liberate, burden or set free?”
In this month of “The Bible is Queer” we are bringing a bias of queer liberation. We’ve spent time deconstructing the harmful, dehumanizing, and oppressive narratives of Christianity and the Bible that have hurt many of us, and now we are excited to reimagine and rebuild. We are playing with possibilities and searching to see if this book contains good news for the queer community (which we enthusiastically believe it does!). In many ways, we are “queering” the text. It’s not a perfect process—it’s messy, it’s curious, it’s colorful, it’s exploratory, and it’s imaginative.
It is normal to feel disoriented when we approach the Bible in a new way. A way to deal with that disorientation is to befriend the discomfort and keep paying attention to your reactions and emotions. Wherever you are in this process, you are not alone. The beauty of being in a community (like this one) is we get to explore, learn, and grow together. So, keep asking what is the lens or bias you bring to the text? What are you searching for in the Bible and does it bring liberation?
