from Gay Christian Movement Watch:
Like the racists of the jim crow era who falsely claimed the bible supported slavery and subjugation of black people, a United Methodist pastor in Dallas says God has made homosexuality “clean”.
According to a story in the Dallas Morning News, Rev. Diana Holbert told her diverse East Dallas congregation that homosexuality is not a big issue in the Bible and that Christians should be more focused on subjects such as health care, greed in the corporate world, and the welfare of children.
Before the sermon, Holbert told listeners that she only wanted to hear from them if they had a positive response to her message. She couldnt bear any “negativity.”
She based her sermon [pdf] on Acts 10:9-28, 34-48. “‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane,’ ” Holbert said.
So does Holbert’s revisioning of Acts 10 lend itself to even the slightest sound teaching? Of course not.
Like the slave masters before her, Holbert uses a sleight of mouth to arrive at her conclusion that God made homosexuality clean. False teachers in the gay christian movement shamelessly employ a form of allegorical perspective which allows an individual the unrestricted freedom to remove real or apparent contradictions between Scriptures and current beliefs. This is how they neuter parts of the Bible that stand in the way of their cleverly crafted, but false beliefs. Practitioners of this roguish form of interpretation replace clear scriptural truth and revelation with whatever cultural context fits their presupposed ideology.
Using allegorical liberties, Holbert repositions Cornelius the centurion alongside gays creating a false parallel between the two based on the broadest commonality possible.
God often moves beyond our boundaries, guiding us to accept and to include those on the margins. We see Jesus doing that over and over with the company he kept, especially as he shared a meal, caught in the act of radical hospitality with the discards of society.
God doesn’t discard or discriminate. “The Holy Spirit is no respecter of persons,” I often heard at Hamilton Park. “If you’re not careful, the Holy Spirit might just jump on you!” It’s a scary thing, this Holy Spirit that interrupts. Scary until you realize that the Spirit is motivated 100% by love, sent by a trustworthy God to a people who think they have all the answers. I like the interruptions of this Spirit that draws us in its tether.
I wont go into how she mischaracterizes the Holy Spirit. But the only observable commonalities between Cornelius and gays are that they are human. Being human has no inherent qualifications of holiness. Respect, yes. Holiness, no. What’s more Cornelius wasn’t committing sexual immorality as a gentile, the bias against him was only because he was a gentile. Race and gender are immutable human characteristics. Sexual conduct isnt. One can change from heterosexual to homosexual and vice versa or engage in no sexual activity at all simply by choice. Thus, the comparison between Cornelius and homosexuals is a patently false one. We explained the Apostles’ restrictions to the gentiles in this post Are gay christians the new gentiles?
Holbert peppers her faux sermon with tired cultural arguments intended to divert attention from the fact that she’s doing a shell game with the scriptures in front of her. Such arguments do nothing but hype the emotional sensitivities of the listeners and keep them in “happy” in bondage. And she has the nerve to call Dr. Jeffries “anti-scholastic.”
And what about the word itself getting caught in biblical interpretation? The word “homosexuality” never occurs once in either Testament. It would appear that this issue is a tempest in this teapot.
The chronological appearance of a word in our lexicon does not invalidate its meaning. If it did, the word gay would be invalid as well. The word gay, in association with same gender conduct, first appeared in contemporary lexicons in 1889 and was used by a male prostitute. In America, the consensus is that it was not used publicly in this context until the 1930s. What’s more the word “gay” does not appear in either biblical testament. So if we must invalidate use of the word homosexuality simply because it doesn’t occur in the bible, we must invalidate use of the word gay which also doesnt exist in scripture.
But don’t expect to hear this from Holbert or the other progay lemmings currently running around the church preaching about “love”. Their agenda is clear: dismantle God’s word no matter how low they have to stoop to do it.
