(Let's see if I can do this.) Sin.
1. Okay, it seems to be assumed by a great number of people, among them smart people who love Jesus, that engaging in sexual activity other than in a marriage between one man and one woman is a sin.
2. Leaving aside the question of why sexual matters get so much press, especially when there is no chance that the kind of sex in question here will produce a baby, it might be helpful to think about what happens to the concept of sin, when Gentiles are welcomed into the temple (well, actually into the little local church), as no less siblings in Christ than anyone else, without ceasing to be Gentiles.
3. Of course, the OT (especially the "law of Moses") provides abundant material showing that Gentiles may not be welcomed into the temple without ceasing to be Gentiles in every way that is significant for lived life (going so far as to submit to male circumcision, as a "sign").
4. The gospel welcomes Gentiles into fellowship with God, declaring that there is "now" no difference between them and those who are more genetically and behaviorally children of Israel, just as there is now no difference between slaves and free persons, or between females and males.
5. This "now" has to do with the advent of Jesus Christ, the advent that occurs on Holy Week, in particular on Easter Sunday, on which day God is glorified in the body mutilated on Good Friday and left to rot in a tomb all day on Holy Saturday.
6. How could that make a difference? Well, because of the way sin had been understood. Sin is in the OT a vague term that could apply to obviously "spiritual" matters, like idolatry, i.e., a failure to love God as God without competitor, or to various kinds of bodily defilements. That is, "sin" may be a matter of the "heart" or the integrity of the body. A loss of bodily integrity is called "impurity" in typical English translations. It is, sort of, sin by association, since it bars one from the temple.
7. Again, the word "sin" (sometimes imagined as a weight one must carry and sometimes, in later OT books, as debt that must be repaid) extends across the whole breadth of Ancient Israel's understanding of the pathway to fellowship with God. It may not be in the full sense impurity, but since impurity bars one from the temple, where holiness is imparted, impurity gets stained by the term.
8. When Jesus is crucified, he is made in every way impure. According to all that everyone in Israel knew was holy he loses his bodily integrity, his access to the holy God and thus to salvation, his ties to all his relations, everything. He is made utterly unclean, impure, untouchable by holy people and a holy God.
9. But all this happens to him, because he is faithful to the call of his "Father." That is, he places his trust, his future, his hope, in God, despite the fact that God is leading him into absolute dereliction, absolute abandonment from God. His love for God, his self-emptying, his hoping only in the faithfulness of the God who leads him into hopelessness, is what results in his utter loss of purity.
10. The climactic moment in this gospel story is that the God to whom Jesus is faithful is faithful to him, in spite of all expectations. Jesus, in all his impurity, defilement, abasement, dereliction, is embraced by God, held close by God, bathed in God's tears, that is, his mutilated body is glorified, it becomes the dwelling place of God's very holiness. This utterly defiled peasant shines with the light of the holy God.
11. The gospel message is thus that the way to the holy God, the way to holiness, the way to sanctification, the way to salvation, is not through some effort to achieve "integrity" or "purity" or "wholeness" or "well being," it is by trusting in the God who so loves us creatures that our mutilated flesh will not bar us from glory.
12. Gentiles, who are by definition impure, as long as they remain Gentiles, are called to give themselves to the good news of the gospel and to forget about conforming to the law of Israel that would define what is "pure" and what is "impure." (That is the reason for all of those passages in the works of Paul about circumcision.)
13. When Isaiah prophesied that one day every faithful Gentile and eunuch would be welcomed into the temple, regardless of their "impurity," he was looking to what came to be named "Easter." It is significant that Jesus quotes this passage from Isaiah as he overturns tables outside the temple.
14. Just as Gentiles are accepted into the church, because of the glorification of the mutilated body of Jesus, so also are eunuchs. Eunuchs are males who have by design or accident been rendered impotent, unable to father children.
15. The question here is if the gospel that welcomes Gentiles and eunuchs into the church and onto the path to sainthood, without asking them to stop being Gentiles or to get testicle transplant surgery, also welcomes same-gender couples into the church and onto the path to sainthood, without ceasing to be same-gender couples.
16. There is a longstanding Protestant notion that the only condition to salvation is the grace of God and the faith that this Holy Spirit works in our hearts. This is often called the doctrine of sola gratia sola fide. Wesleyans sometimes in agreeing to this phrasing want to stress that this is a concrete bodily faith, one that is to be lived out concretely, but not to the extent that some other condition to salvation is imposed. They also say that all sanctification—through and beyond entire sanctification—is by grace through faith, as well.
17. To the question, "Can you be a Christian and be queer?," is to be answered, "Why are you so worried about this 'can'?" To follow Jesus (as Mark 8 tells us) is to take up the instruments by which this world tortures us and follow him. On that road nobody asks what we can get by with. The only question is, where is Jesus going and how may I go with him? Don't ask Gentiles to get circumcised and don't ask eunuchs to get testicle transplant surgery and don't ask queer people to become straight.
I'll stop there. There's more to say, but this is mega-long already. Thanks to the, like, three people that read all the way to here. (There are almost certainly typos up there. I'll fix them, as I notice them.)
I hope it’s clear that these mini-treatises on sin are directed toward the question, if it is possible for somebody to be LGBTQIA+ and non-celebrate and perform works of faith, to minister, to follow Christ, to be a saint, to be a martyr to Jesus.
I'm going to write a little more on the topic of sin. Please keep in mind that I am aiming to steer as far as possible away from "sin" as a kind of emotionally loaded near-synonym for (as I once read in the Kankakee Journal) "a moral no-no." Be clear, the only theological understanding of sin that doesn't call for an eye-roll is one that places it vis-à-vis God. That is, it is not a sin unless it is an act that breaks from God or, in an "improper" sense (to use Wesley's problematic term), is consistent with an act that breaks from God.
1. In the temple ritual of Ancient Israel there is a difference between sin as impurity and sin as faithlessness. The former is what I recently described as "sin by association" and is thus not "sin properly so-called." It still bars one from the temple and the possibility of being hallowed. That is, since we are here to be holy (as God is holy), impurity is a massive barrier not only to worshiping God, but also to our teleios, our becoming what we were created to become. (This language could use some editorial work to make it seem less as an account of some teleology, in the traditional Western sense.)
2. Sin in the "proper" sense (again, using Wesley's problematic terminology) is faithlessness.
3. With the resurrection of the mutilated body of Jesus, the condition for fellowship with God and thus for holiness is no longer purity, but simply faithfulness.
4. This does not mean, however, that purity is abandoned as no longer important.
5. Purity remains in the gospel in two ways: (a) as "purity of heart," that is, as a faithfulness that leaves nothing out, that is in that sense "entire," and (b) as the concern of "the flesh," that is of life this side of the coming of the Reign of God. I'm going to focus for a while on the latter.
6. It is, in the gospel, no longer necessary to be "whole" in any ordinary sense of the term. The abandonment of purity as a condition for receiving "sanctification" means the abandonment of "wholeness" as such a condition. Indeed, the gospel is above all the announcement that God calls all the impure of the world to the coming of the Reign of God, the coming of the Day of the Lord, that is, a radical apocalyptic salvation, which we may know "in part" in this present evil age. The only condition now is that we receive it—which temple officials and Roman functionaries were unwilling to do.
7. Though there is salvation in the gospel, in this present evil age we find ourselves still in "the flesh." "The flesh" is a technical term in Ancient Israel that indicated our vulnerability. That we are flesh signifies that we are subject to injury, disease, starvation, and death. We have work to do in the flesh, work to do in service of the coming of God's Reign, and so, to that extent, we must be concerned with well-being, with wholeness, that is, with "purity."
8. Purity (and it's at most "relative purity") of the psycho and somatic kind is necessary in order to continue functioning. Compassion calls upon us to care for the well being of others and, in order to care for the well being of others, to care for ourselves.
9. And so, Paul, Mr. Salvation by Grace Through Faith, knowing that we don't have to survive, still takes up a collection for the hungry poor, as he journeys around the eastern Mediterranean.
10. So, the church has the task to care for the sick and distressed, the lonely and the hungry, the old and the very young, and everyone else, not for the sake of aiding them in their quest for purity, for wholeness, for well being, in the ordinary senses of those terms. Rather the church is tasked with calling the world to a complex work that slowly or suddenly learns that none of us has to survive, but that God loves us and God's future is not diminished by the marks this present evil world leaves on our bodies.
11. That is why it is such a beautiful thing to imagine the work of Mother Teresa, who cared for people who would never contribute to anything, people who would soon die. There is no teleology to that work. It is an act of love that will not let them die alone, that will bathe hot faces with cool water and change soiled bedding, not to manipulate the dying into saying some canned prayer of repentance, but to join the crucified Christ there and trust that he will never leave or forsake them. Calculative "Christianity" has no room for such unproductive bodies. The gospel does. In fact, it is to these that the church is particularly sent.
I'm stopping there for today. I'll soon (tomorrow) deal with sin as faithlessness. I hope everyone knows that I'm not making any authoritative claims here. I'm just saying what I'm come to after a lifetime of thinking. That I would spend a lifetime thinking shows how far I am from the kind of compliance that people like Carla Sunberg would have me nail myself to. (Once more, I'll check for typos later.)
I'll continue my lengthening little treatise on sin in a more systematic way tomorrow. In the meantime, it's probably time to step off the main road and mention something about "the unforgivable sin." Here goes! (You know, there are landmines everywhere in this stuff!)
1. To recap way too briefly, with the gospel there is no longer any condition for entering into the *holiness* of God, that is, into what is most unqualifiedly *God* about God, except faithfulness to the faithfulness of God. Jesus doesn't just exemplify this faithfulness (in both ways), he embodies it. He is in this way different from Adam and all Adam's other children (see Philippians 2).
2. A little more recap: The condition for entering into the holiness of God, as it is laid out in the "Mosaic Law," was "purity." That doesn't have to be thought of in absolute terms or as something childish. "Purity" in fact is what all of us want; that is, purity is well being. Nobody wants to be sick or diseased or misformed or infected or injured or an outsider. We want to be whole, whole as one person and as a member of a "community" (a word I like less and less all the time).
3. Last bit of recap: When God embraces and thus glorifies the crucified Jesus—dead in a cold tomb, his body mutilated, an outcast, garbage, despicable—and does so without making his body whole, God performs the "new covenant" that purity is no longer a condition to be met in order to enter into God's glory, in order to be made holy.
4. Now, this is what I want now to say: When God embraces those who are technically unclean (like us "Scots-Irish" Gentiles) and asks them to be faithful to God's faithful freedom always to hold open the enormous gates of the New Jerusalem, God declares that nothing will ever separate them from the love of God in Christ Jesus (see Romans .
5. Unforgiving people, addicted to one or another Roman or Israelite or American subculture, will always be disturbed by the impure people who stagger on the path to more and more holiness, a holiness that does not need the staggering holy one to stop being impure (other than "in heart"). That means that even very strongly asserted commands in the Levitical law, shouted to ensure the purity of Israel so that Israel may become holy as God is holy, even those commands need not be followed and are not followed, say, by ("Scots-Irish") Gentiles.
6. When it was noticed that Jesus was gathering into the site of the coming Reign of God people who turned the stomachs of the card-carrying "holy" people of his day, these Pharisees declared that it was by the power of Beelzebub that Jesus performed his works. (Do I have to say explicitly how closely this comes to the rhetoric of "false teachers" that homophobes are inclined to whip out when they feel afraid?)
7. His response—a response that'd better send a wave of horror through the bodies of those who would burn alive Dee Kelley, and gentle people like him—was this: "I tell you, people will be forgiven for every sin and blasphemy, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come."
8. Am I saying that those who do not praise God for every forevermore non-celibate LGBTQIA+ person who enters onto the path of holiness, that those people have committed the sin against the Holy Spirit? Yes, I am.
9. Does that mean they are going to hell? (I suppose somebody will think that I will discard the doctrine of hell here. Sorry to disappoint you, but I still have a doctrine of hell, just one that would not make the bloodthirsty happy.) Well, it does mean this, but in a very restricted sense. Sin against the Holy Spirit is sin against the spiritus, the pneuma, the ruach, that is, the wind. The wind does not ever become something past. You can't put wind in a jar, you can't "contain" the wind. That means that sin against the Holy Spirit happens *now* or it doesn't happen at all. As long as you would block your queer siblings in Christ from the path of holiness, you blaspheme the Holy Spirit. The Spirit will not leave you alone, however. And in every new *now* you are given space to begin anew, to die to your dead, unforgiven self, take up your cross alongside queer people who have taken up theirs, and follow Jesus to crucifixion among thieves, blasphemers, and other queer people.
That's enough for now.
On a rare stormy summer morning in San Diego, I'll continue my expanding off-the-cuff treatise on sin (getting close to the question of non-celibate queer saints). If somebody comes across this and hasn't read the previous installments of these theses (proposed for disputation), feel free to read this, but, if you're up for it, there are something like three earlier status lines with stuff out of which what I say below emerges:
1. Recap: Everybody wants to be whole. It's what it means to be "flesh." We work all day long every day to make ourselves and those we love healthier, happier, and better adjusted.
2. Recap: The purity laws of the OT are guides in achieving well being, wholeness. To be "pure" is to be "whole." The law lays out the parameters of wholeness and provides ways of restoring well being, say, if contact is made with something defiling.
3. Recap: Access to the temple and the holiness of God is available only to those who are pure, who have well being, wholeness. Impurity is not sin properly so called, but it is sin by association. Sin in the proper sense is an unfaithfulness to the faithfulness of God. Nonetheless, the impure cannot make their way to the site of salvation, of sanctification, since only the pure may approach the holy God at the center of the temple complex.
4. Recap: In this way, impurity is a terrible impediment to the life and hope that God grants, as God grants holiness to God's creatures. Isaiah (and other prophets) predict that a day is coming when God will no longer demand that those who enter the temple be pure. God will one day open the temple doors to faithful Gentiles and eunuchs. Jesus declares, as he overturns tables on the edge of the temple during Holy Week, that the day has come when the temple doors are to be opened to such faithful Gentiles and eunuchs.
5. Recap: To enter the gospel is to enter into a holiness that does not require purity (other than purity of heart). That is the body-blow significance of the glorification of the mutilated, abandoned, abased, discarded body of Jesus. The doors of the temple are thrown open to strangers and queers when Jesus invites Thomas to inspect his wounds.
6. The beginning (more or less) of the new stuff: So, the gospel invites us to let loose of the obsession with becoming whole. It doesn't deny that wholeness, well being, is a good thing. It just declares that it is not a condition for entry into God's holiness and thus for being hallowed. If we are here to be holy (and isn't that what Holiness people claim, sometimes, to believe?), this is good news indeed. And so, Paul was adamant that it is an unnecessary obstacle, in fact a great danger, to demand that Gentiles be circumcised, for it tempts us to believe (and technically requires) that the law must be kept, to the letter.
7. There is, however, one condition in the gospel for concrete entry into God's holiness and thus for our sanctification: faithfulness to the faithfulness of God. This is not some abstract, inner, private, throwing of a volitional switch, but a bodily move. We are, as bodily creatures, to abandon ourselves, with all of our obligations and relations, to the faithful God. That in particular means that we are to enter into solidarity with those excluded by the Law's demand for well being.
8. This also means refusing to claim that it is by the power of Beelzebub that the unclean are welcomed into the church, but instead *actively* welcoming them into the church—without, please note, demanding that they stop being unclean. Jesus calls the refusal to rejoice as the unclean are thus welcomed into the arms of God, "blasphemy against the Holy Spirit."
9. If, to use the language of John Wesley again, sin properly so-called (and Nate is right that sin is all about "property," and so, I am liking this phrasing more and more) is being unfaithful to the faithfulness of God, what is called for is quite the opposite, viz., faithfulness *to* the faithfulness of God. It is here that the doctrine of sanctification begins to become more and more explicitly operative (more on *entire* sanctification maybe tomorrow).
10. What is to be imagined is that God casts down and kicks away every condition for the incursion of God's love, of God's grace, of God's holiness, of the Holy Spirit, but a prayerful gratitude (however meager, however mustard-seed-like). In other words, God's giving-forth ("forgiveness") moves our way; all we have to do is stop fighting it and she will do the rest. (If any of y'all want to argue about the extent to which we are involved in this work, let's do that later.)
11. This event by which we come to be faithful to the faithfulness of God is prayerful metanoia. Insofar as one moves from faithlessness to faithfulness, this metanoia is a con-version, a turning around. However, every moment of life lived toward God, whether a moment of conversion or not, is to be a meta-noia, a mind pilgrimaging toward God, the Holy One.
12. Here, as John Wesley, again, says quite clearly, sins properly so-called cease. As long as we are faithful to the faithfulness of God, we do not sin, properly so-called. Our not sinning may be a meager faithfulness, as meager as a mustard seed, but it is still faithfulness, as long as it is pilgrimaging toward God (meta-noia).
13. Sin properly so-called is not ever to be confused with a mode of life that disrupts well being, so long as the one performing that life is faithful. Thus, poor gravediggers don't have to stop contacting corpses and Gentiles don't have to get circumcised.
Okay, more tomorrow. (I think I can get to "entire sanctification" then.)
Okay, the next installment on the doctrine of sin on the way to saying why I know in my bones that queer people are to be invited onto the path of holiness without either ceasing to be queer or becoming celibate. I'll try to keep the recaps shorter.
1. Context: Please do not hear me separating the body and the soul. I have learned from the Ancient Israelites that there is no such separation. I have learned from their poetry and prayers and sagas that humans are bodies that hunger and thirst and exert and care and think and feel, that get wounded and sick, and that hope that one day life will not be so agonizingly hard.
2. More context: And so, as I move toward articulating the doctrine of entire sanctification, what I am talking about is a "body," particular and social, becoming a "living sacrifice."
3. Recap: It is a good thing to be whole, healthy, well adjusted, that is, pure. In ancient Israel purity was a huge concern, just as it is with us (even though we hate that word), as health care expenses reveal.
4. Recap: Well being was the condition in Ancient Israel for entry into sanctifying proximity to God. If you were "impure" (say, a woman who perpetually menstruated), you were barred from the temple. If your testicles had been crushed (a subject given quite frequent attention in the law), you were barred from the temple. If you had a skin disease, like leprosy (which is perhaps a perfect illustration of unwholeness, since the skin opens and the borders of the body are opened to the outside), you were barred from the temple.
5. Recap: When the mutilated body of Jesus is bathed with God's holiness and it is glorified, this condition for entry into intimacy with God is cast into the sea. One need no longer be pure, whole, healthy, intact, to become holy. (So, please, stop quoting Leviticus in your unrelenting and idiotic hate speech!)
6. Mostly new stuff starts here: Since the only condition now for entering into God's glory and being glorified, that is, sanctified, hallowed, is faithfulness to the faithfulness of God, sin properly so-called (to use Wesley's term) has nothing directly to do with purity laws. Sin properly so-called is refusing the Holy Spirit, that is, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, that is, faithlessness to the faithfulness of God.
(7. I'm going to skip explicit discussion of "original sin" for now. It's actually quite relevant, but I'm afraid it would be a distraction.)
8. Since our quest for wholeness may be characterized negatively as a fear of disease, injury, and death, turning to the God of Jesus, the God who moves into solidarity with the people who are most threatened by disease, injury, and death, is terrifying. I mean, how do you market Jesus's command, "take up your cross and follow me!"?
9. Because of our fear of the loss of well being (purity), to turn to the God of Jesus is to "turn around," it is to be "converted." However, this life-change of direction never becomes easy, even after years of "following" Jesus. And so, every moment of such a life is to be a metanoia (a term that may be taken to mean, "a mind in pursuit," and that is the Greek translation in the Septuagint of a Hebrew word signifying "to sigh"). The gospel calls for pursuit, movement, out-going, journey.
10. The difficulty of this journey into the holiness of the God of Jesus means that we are not only to "turn around," we are also to learn more and more to lean into the holy God into whom we travel.
11. The "turning around" is what Wesleyan-Holiness folks sometimes call justification, redemption, salvation, new birth, etc.
12. The learning to lean into the holy God into whom we travel is called sanctification. There is "initial sanctification," "gradual sanctification," and "entire sanctification." These terms are gesturing toward the dynamics of life in Christ.
13. Initial sanctification is where we find ourselves when we first "turn around." We move no longer *away from* God, but instead move *toward* God. However, because it is no mean task to follow the crucified one to Golgotha, it is unkind to expect anyone right away to have a life bent toward crucifixion among the world's outcasts. It is kinder and more humane (and truer to what we have all seen) to expect those who have turned to the God of Jesus still to lean toward protecting their own skin, toward the struggle to survive. And so, it is helpful to imagine initial sanctification as a turning to God, but leaning away from God.
14. Gradual sanctification is the process (yes, I'm saying that you find that language in Wesley and in Wesleyans and in me, but I am no "Process Theist"!) and moving more and more headlong into the God hallowed among thieves and other outcasts. It may be imagined as our continuing to move out into the coming of the holy God of Jesus and leaning more and more into that holy God.
15. "Entire sanctification" is a hard phrase. So also are its synonyms: "Christian perfection," "perfect love," etc. It is important not to think of what this term gestures toward as a coming to the end of the road. It is not in any sense a stopping point. If anything, it is the beginning of something. (It helps me to remember that Marx referred to everything before the advent of his imagined "classless society" as "prehistory." It doesn't mean "game over," but "let's get going!" And I think it's helpful to look for help in understanding theology among those churchy people are want to despise.)
16. Entire sanctification is that moment, preceded by "gradual sanctification," in which, while moving toward the God of Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday, we come at last to *lean into* that God, to journey headlong into that God.
17. That is, entire sanctification is a change of "attitude," of "disposition," of "inclination." These words are all about the *quality* of one's journey into the God of the gospel, the God who even now is coming, the God of the New Jerusalem. It doesn't make anybody better than anyone else. In fact it may make folks a little careless and obnoxious.
18. It is important to understand that none of this is to be understood individualistically. We are social creatures. Our lives are entangled in one another. The way I travel is inseparable from the way you travel. The more intimately we are entangled in one another, the more your journey and mine cannot be separated. That is why I have maintained for decades now that not only particular human beings are to be called to be entirely sanctified, but so also are little local churches. A church is not only to be moving in the direction of God's solidarity with the crucified of the world, it is also to be rushing headlong into that solidarity.
Okay, enough for today. I'll say more tomorrow. I am getting much closer to addressing the question about our queer siblings, but all this has to be said first. (I'll check for typos soon.)
Here is the latest installment of my growing FB treatise on sin. I expect to begin to address the question that gave rise to these installments today, viz., are non-celibate queer people to be invited onto the path into holiness, without ceasing to be non-celibate queer people. I'll make the recaps as close to really short as I can.
1. Recap: We are bodies all the way down. Among the good and noble tasks of life is to pursue well being (physiologically, psychologically, sociologically, etc.). The Ancient Israelites knew that, too. That's why they attended so closely to "purity," a term that simply signifies "wholeness."
2. Recap: When God raised the mutilated body of Jesus from the grave, without closing his wounds, a new covenant was made. It was henceforth no longer necessary to be "pure" (healthy) in order to enter into God's glory/holiness and be made holy, sanctified. The only condition is what Paul calls being "in Christ." And you "die" to get there. ("Die" is not a bad word for this, since what Paul is talking about is setting out on a path that you'd better expect will kill you, as it did Jesus.)
3. Recap: All this is what it means (to use the Protestant line) that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone—but, please note, this is a bodily faith, not some private individual "decision," but one that works, because, you know, faith without works is dead, or, only the dead do not work.
4. Transition: I'm going to quote the first nine verses of Ephesians 2 now. Please read them and read them thoughtfully, as if you'd never read them before. They are really good. (I'll quote verse 10 soon. It's also very important. I just want the body blow of the first 9 verses to be felt as strongly as possible first.)
"You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast."
Then please read the book of Galatians, the whole thing.
And remember that at the end of chapter 7 of Romans Paul draws attention to the way "the law" heightens my aggressive self-assertion, my carnal drive to have, to own, to *be*. The law comes, he says, and I *covet*, I seize it, to make it my own, to guarantee my survival, to secure my power and to protect my vulnerability. What is remarkable about Jesus is that he did not covet, even when he knew that his path took him into absolute violation with the law, into condemnation, forsakenness, damnation. Instead, he followed God, "the Father," to Golgotha.
5. All this means that in Christ—in the Spirit that in Christ declares that I don't have to survive—we are blinded to the law, that is, by the bright light of the glory of God that shines from the mutilated body of the resurrected Jesus. As we behold that body—no longer in anyway intact—we love him, we love the God disclosed in that body and we love those this God loves, giving our future lives to the coming of this God who does not demand that we be whole. And all this by the Spirit of resurrection
6. Let me be clear, I do not think that Paul is disagreeing with those in Corinth that "all things are lawful," because when that is not true, we covet, we seize the law that would tell us how to score salvation. All things are lawful, there is now no condemnation. But, Paul says quickly thereafter, that not all things are helpful, not all things are acts of love, not all things are an abandonment of the lust for survival and self-righteousness, not all things are on the path into the holy God, not all things are demonstrative of the "peace" (shalom) of God that eludes the understanding, that doesn't look like peace, that looks like a mutilated body.
7. But we are still "flesh." We are still vulnerable. We will quickly waste away and be too weak to hold out a cup of cold water to our thirsty neighbors, if we do not ourselves eat and drink. We don't have to survive, but only those who have not yet died are in a position to work. Therefore, we have a relative concern with "well being." We work out short or long lists of what we are to do and what we are not to do, all subject to change (perhaps every four years). When this concern over keeping ourselves in a position to be helpful to others becomes a kind of "end in itself," or even a minor obstacle to being helpful, it is time for a reckoning and our siblings in Christ are there to help us understand. Now, all of this is dangerous, but it's what friends do, that is, they work together.
8. None of this is individualistic. These are words to be contextualized in a little local church. They are not "the pastor's" job. The pastor's job is simply to watch over the liturgy of the eucharist, a liturgy that operates all week long. It is the job of every body-part of the little local (mutilated) body of Christ.
9. So, should queer people marry one another, say, one woman marrying another? (Please listen all the way through.) Probably not. Paul is quite adamant in 1 Corinthians 7 that it is best for the church that its members not marry. When you marry, your devotion to your spouse will become an obstacle to your faithfulness to the gospel. You will find that work is to be done—to be a "little Christ" to your neighbor or enemy—but your care for your spouse will keep you from doing so. But there are circumstances, Paul says, that make marriage the lesser of two evils. And so, he's okay with it, so long as it is not considered either a permanent relationship nor a competitor with the gospel.
From 1 Corinthians 7:
I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.
10. The coming question was not there for Paul, but it is here for us. It was not there for Paul for a great variety of reasons, one of which is that most people in his world didn't live long and they also were much more tightly bound to one another. Our world is fractured into little isolated individuals whose relationships are less and less intimate. We live in a world that out of anxiety defined genders more and more narrowly, tell everyone within hearing range what it is to be "a real man" and what it is to be "a real woman" and how unsettling it even to imagine anything in between or someplace else in this inhumane categorization. Our world is a world tumbling into the darkness, as monetized, capitalist economics turns us into goods to be exploited on the way to a profitable quarter, as nation states squeeze more and more tightly, breaking lines of relation, neighborhoods, small towns, unions, and other organizations, breaking them apart into isolated individuals. And we live ridiculously long. If an elder in a Galilean village at the time of Jesus would have been about 30-years-old, one now (in certain ways) is 80! Ours, that is, is a very different world than the first century Mediterranean one, and the phenomenon of a monogamous, faithful, loving marriage between one man and another or between one woman and another (etc.) is upon us in ways that it was never there for anyone who heard or spoke or read or performed the gospel, in a house church or village assembly, in the first century.
The question is this: If, though not to be preferred, one man and one woman may be permitted to be married and to take up the good work of the gospel in a local church, are we to invite one woman and another or one man and another (etc.) to be married and to take up the good work of the gospel in a local church?
Enough for now. I'll do my best to address soon those passages in the NT that seem to say "No!" to that last question. (I'll work on correcting typos soon.)
I'm getting closer to the stuff that lazy people itch to fight over. I know it's probably not going to do much good if debaters find in this post the opportunity to get all "major premise + minor premise = conclusion"-y, but before whipping out your favorite proof texts, please go back and at least skim the installments in this from-the-hip treatise on the doctrine of sin (vis-à-vis the question of non-celibate queer saints). Anyway, here's the next installment. (All the installments can be found at craigkeen.net, under "Table Talk," if you're interested.)
1. Recap: We are bodies all the way down, not temporarily embodied spirits impatiently waiting until the day when we shake off this mortal coil and fly away to a spirit world.
2. Recap: Since the advent of the crucifixion/resurrection of Jesus, purity (wholeness, bodily integrity, well being) is no longer a condition for entry into the glory of God and thus for being made holy—and thus "saved." The mutilated body of Jesus is the epitome of dis-integrity, of impurity, and when it is bathed in God's glory, God's dis-closed holiness, and is itself hallowed, made holy, glorified, a new covenant dawns, in which purity (well being) is not longer a condition for being made holy. Nor is it necessary to become pure (to become no longer mutilated) subsequently. The "purity" found in the resurrected body of Jesus is utterly unlike the purity that we could ever spot or understand. It is a "shalom," a peace, but one that "passeth understanding," one that makes no sense except in fellowship with that resurrected body. (That was a long paragraph.)
3. Recap: Thus Paul tells us (see Ephesians 2) that we are saved by grace through faith. Salvation (that is, sanctification, hallowing) is a gift of God, it is the coming of an open space in which God loves, embraces, shelters, God's children, no matter how caked with the muck of pig sties. And so, to quote Paul positively, in Christ everything is lawful, there is now no condemnation, there is no reason to "covet" (that's Paul's word at the end of Romans 7) the means to salvation. Salvation is a gift. Receive it with joy!
4. Mostly new stuff: Though all things are lawful, again quoting Paul, not all things are helpful. There is no condemnation if you eat meat sacrificed to idols (a much bigger deal in Ancient Rome than I was taught in college), but it isn't always helpful to eat meat sacrificed to idols. I mean, God has embraced you with God's holy love and called you into that love. Don't flaunt it. Look around you, learn the people you see, be careful around them. If those people are jerks who like to show off their well being (see all the put-downs of Pharisees in the gospels), then eat meat sacrificed to idols quite openly in their field of vision—and laugh and let grease fall all over your shirt. But if the people around you are having a really hard time pulling themselves loose from a pagan culture (where everybody goes on cruises and besides cruises are cheap!), then stick to food less easily associated with pagan practice and belief.
5. We are all still vulnerable people, that is, we are flesh. And we are still limited in our understanding. Because we are flesh and because we are ignorant and often foolish, it is helpful for churches to receive guidance through the complex waters of "all things are lawful, but not all things are helpful." That is why there are all those lists of things (in Paul's or Peter's letters or in James or elsewhere in the New Testament) that we are not to do, for example, "works of the flesh."
6. In other words, Stanley Hauerwas is right that there is no "Christ" except where he is clothed in "culture." To that extent, Hauerwas's unrelenting critique of H. Richard Niebuhr's *Christ and Culture* is quite helpful. The church, as the body of Christ, is free, but it is also located, geographically, socially, culturally, economically, politically, etc. As the church struggles to put into practice the "freedom of the Christian" (to use Luther's phrase), it comes up with particular directives. From this hard work a "Christian culture" is constructed. That's always how it goes. And so, Hauerwas has critiqued the way especially American Christianity has sold its soul to the characteristic culture(s) of America, especially its militarism, but also its capitalism, but above all its individualism.
7. Where Stanley Hauerwas might lead us (and quite often has led us) astray, however, is in his inattention to the apocalyptic heart of the gospel. It is indeed true that "Christ" comes always clothed in culture, that we will not understand the mystery of Christ except as the gospel passes through our culturally specific structures of understanding. However, Christ is also the judge of every set of cultural structures. That judgment is not a kind of line-by-line critique, but a full detonation of the power of the Spirit of "the fire next time." Every culture is devastated by the "No!" of judgment. That is, every culture is to be crucified with Christ. Thus the theologian must feel some strange kinship with the nihilist.
8. Still, Christ (and all the world, with its "old covenant") is crucified (now) only as bathed in God's glory—and all that is crucified is in God's embrace raised from the dead with Christ. That means that a culture (like "America" or "Swaziland") is never given the stamp of approval. It is embraced, certainly, like the world where meat is sacrificed to idols, but only as a structure that is passing away (see 1 Corinthians 7).
9. The New Testament in this way provides guidance to first century Galileans and Corinthians and Romans and "the Hebrews" and, of course, Gentiles. Our problem is that, as hard as we try, we have a very tough time reconstructing those worlds. For example, it strikes us as so odd that there could be a controversy over eating "meat sacrificed to idols." It strikes us as odd that there could be concern over the length of the hair of women and men, or how much women should speak in church, or whether somebody should be circumcised, or whether anybody should drink blood. And we have a very hard time knowing what is referred to by the English phrases used to translate the Greek, like, "sexual immorality" and "homosexuality" and "adultery" and "prostitutes" and "sodomites" and other terms that are found in lists (e.g., in the writings of Paul, the most wild-eyed proponent in the New Testament of salvation by grace alone through faith alone).
10. Since we are lazy and we easily forget that Paul has so emphatically warned us against attaching ourselves to law-keeping as a way to salvation (or a way of living out salvation) and has told us that covetousness follows attachment to law-keeping, because we have forgotten all that, we are inclined to turn to NT lists that are to guide people as they work at concretizing their freedom in Christ.
Well, I got this far today, but I am by no means done. More, then, tomorrow. (I hope at least that it is becoming more evident where I am going.)
I'm getting a late start on this most recent installment on the doctrine of sin. That means that I will be interrupted more frequently as I write this. Sorry if that has an effect on the fluency of what gets typed here this time.
1. Recap: We are bodies all the way down, muscles, blood, skin, bones, and social relations with historical complications. We are not souls temporarily wrapped in matter, one day to be set free to an airy spiritual realm.
2. Recap: As bodies, we are vulnerable. That is what Ancient Israel understood the word "flesh" to signify. Because we are flesh and thus are vulnerable, it takes hard work to achieve well being. The word "purity" is used, especially in the OT, for this well being.
3. Recap: Ancient Israel monitored the well being of its people. Its organization of the temple activity leaned hard on the question of the well being of the people. The task of life is to holy. The only way to be holy is to enter the disclosed holiness (the "glory") of God. However, no one can enter the disclosed holiness of God except those who are pure, who have well being. The impure are barred from holiness and thus from the end toward which human beings are created.
4. Recap: When the mutilated—that is, the "impure"—body of Jesus is raised from the dead (N.B.!) without being restored to purity, to wholeness, to integrity, to well being, the condition for entering God's disclosed holiness laid down in the covenant with Israel is abolished. No one has to be whole (pure) in order to enter into God's glory. The gospel is that all those who are battered and bruised, broken and cut, despised and rejected, defiled and mutilated, are welcomed into the body of Christ, the new temple of the New Covenant.
5. Recap: There is in the New Covenant one condition, however, for entering God's glory, for sanctification, viz., faithfulness to the faithfulness of God. That means loving the God who is love and thus loving those God loves, especially the "impure" (since impure people creep out card-carrying pure people).
6. Recap: There is now no more condemnation, everything is lawful, but not everything is "helpful," since not everything is faithful to the faithfulness of God, not everything is an act of love as God loves.
7. Recap: To work out what is helpful where everything is lawful, the church sizes up its world, its time and place, its culture, and it experiments tentatively in Christian-culture-building. And so, people are told not to drink blood or not to cut their hair or to cut their hair or not to speak in church or to speak in church, whatever. The Christian culture worked out in the first century in the ancient Mediterranean world was for that time. Some of it works long after that time. Some of it works even now in places here and there around the world. Some of it works everywhere around the world, even now. Some of it doesn't.
8. Mostly new stuff: The heart of the gospel is that no one is to be judged on how well they align with a law, any law. It is fine to unsettle the law by saying things like "all the law is summed up in the commands, love God and love your neighbor," but even that is not to be made into a pair of propositions to cling to in order to feel good about yourself. Paul is clear (though probably not clear enough) at the end of chapter 7 of Romans that, when you have a legal proposition that you can seize (mentally or whatever), lay claim to, and wear like a badge, you "covet." To covet is to desire to have, to own, to possess, and to be righteous, to *be*.
9. To follow Jesus, is to set out to die with him in solidarity with the outcasts of the world. It is dangerous work and it looks like anything but happy middle class Evangelical megachurch praise "worship," that is, not worship, but catharsis ("not that there's anything wrong with that").
10. That means that any experiment in Christian culture is relativized, made secondary (at best) to the urgency of living and dying with the people Jesus lived and died with, that is, the "unclean." And the point of living and dying with these people (that is, us) is not to clean them up, but to perform God's "Yes!" to them *as unclean*. (It is way too easy to confuse all this with some "morality." The icon to imagine every step of the way here is the mutilated body of Jesus shining with the light of God's glory and proclaiming bodily to all the world that nobody has to be whole, nobody has to survive, to be gathered into God's Reign.)
11. To see a "sinner" is not with superpowers to see some deep inner invisible soul that is to be loved while everything about that person is hated ("love the sinner and hate the sin"). It is to love the entirety of that history that stands right there and to love what God will have done with it all—WITH IT ALL!
I'm not done with this, but I'm going to post it now. I'll try to finish it later today. Sam Powell and I are meeting for lunch in a few minutes. (Sam and I were once described at a Nazarene Theology Conference by GS Eugene Stowe as "young Turks.")
Since the snakes are crawling out of the tall grass and thrusting their open mouths at passersby, in this latest installment today of this growing saga on the doctrine of sin, I'm going to talk about the three passages in the New Testament that are most frequently cited as proof positive that the phrase "non-celibate queer sainthood" is an oxymoron. Of course, throughout this shoot-from-the-hip treatise, I've maintained that it is not. I will recap only very little. If you are immediately confused by my saying this stuff, check out what I say on sin in one of the documents filed under Table Talk in craigkeen.net. I will delete snakebites.
1. Recap: Bodies are a big deal, because we are bodies all the way down, not immaterial spirits hanging around material bodies until we get to die and go to heaven (if we're lucky).
2. Recap: When Jesus is raised from the dead (and that means bathed with the holy life of God, the glory of God, the Holy Spirit), his mutilated body is glorified, made holy, without being restored to wholeness/purity.
3. Recap: That means that purity/well-being is no longer a condition that must be met before we enter into the glory of God to be made holy. Jesus glorified is just as unclean, impure, defiled, outcast, as he was as he lay dead in the tomb all day on Holy Saturday. When God bathes him—utterly impure—in holiness, God declares that every impure creature may step into God's glory and be made holy. The only qualification comes to light in the extended articulations of what it means to "step into." To step into God's glory is to be faithful to the faithfulness of God, to love God and with God to love those God loves and to love them in the manner God loves them.
4. That also means that none of the passages in the old covenant, the Old Testament, that seem to condemn sex between two persons of the same gender, are any longer relevant in the new covenant, the New Testament. Even if sex between two men or between two women were condemned, say, in Leviticus, since they are impure acts that make actors impure, they no longer count in the New Creation, among creatures embraced with God's embrace of the impure body of Jesus—just as declarations that eunuchs or Gentiles or menstruating women or eaters of rabbit meat or wearers of two kinds of fabrics or gravediggers no longer count, that is, declarations in Leviticus that all those people are unclean no longer count in the new covenant.
Now, the verses, all in "Paul":
5. Romans 1:24, 26–27, 32: "Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves. . . . For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and 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. . . . They 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."
First, whatever Paul is saying here, he is not saying, "Here is a law. Memorize it, remember it, and do it! If you don't obey this law, you will die [or be damned, or whatever]!" Paul makes clear enough at the end of the seventh chapter of this very NT book that anyone to seizes upon a law and seeks to avoid condemnation or gain salvation by abiding by it will be sadly disappointed. The grasping, holding, "keeping," the law is an act of covetousness. The law mightily condemns covetousness, the desire to grasp, hold, keep, the desire to win, the desire to be saved, the desire to *be*. And so, by trying to keep the law, one violates it. "Salvation" comes rather as one lets the question of salvation go, as did Jesus as he "set his face" toward Jerusalem, walked into the home of those who wanted him dead, overturned tables at the temple, all knowing he would be seized and broken. Philippians 2 is an account of what it takes to "have the mind of Christ." It is being obedient to God even when being obedient to God takes you right into what you know will damn you to hell, "even [mutilating, defiling] death on a cross." We, too, are to do our work where we will be defiled, made impure, discarded.
Second, Romans 1 is to be found in an extended passage in which Paul shows that both the outsiders *and* the insiders of Israel have failed to find righteousness and that it is only through the love of the God who is glorified in the law-condemned Jesus that they have hope. Therefore, it would be so foolish to look at Romans 1 as a kind of road map to righteousness. You are just as likely to become a damnable human being by avoiding the behavior of the pagans as you are by engaging in it.
Third, I have suspected for some time that Paul is quoting Roman statespersons in this passage. They were quite critical of the behavior that Paul describes. And the language about the way God's invisible nature is known is so very un-Pauline. But I am not a good enough classicist to know. (See Michel Foucault, *History of Sexuality*.) In any case, Romans 1 is pointing out that pagans have no hope in their paganism. They, too, have plummeted into "impurity," un-wholeness, ill-health.
Fourth, just to say it straight out, the damnable offense that Paul describes here is "impurity." Jesus is no less impure as he dies on the cross and is thrown into his borrowed tomb. Salvation through Christ is for the impure.
6. 1 Corinthians 6:9–12: "Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.
‘All things are lawful for me’, but not all things are beneficial. ‘All things are lawful for me’, but I will not be dominated by anything."
First, the analysis of passages like this one calls for an expertise I do not have. I do not well enough know the world of Corinth in the first century. However, it is also to be said that, though there are classicists and 1 Corinthian specialists and anthropologists and archeologists and others who know way more than I do about first century Corinth, none of them know that world well enough to say what Paul is referring to or *how* he is referring to it. Whatever he is saying, he is not telling people that they'd better fear the consequences of breaking the laws that condemn these behaviors. To do that is, again, to covet—a damnable offense.
Second, whatever Paul is talking about here (and, again, nobody actually knows with anything like certainty, pederasty?) he is not talking about two people of the same gender in a lifetime relationship with each other who have given their lives to the way of Jesus, who together have drawn closer and closer to the way of Jesus and together have suffered with sufferers, inside and outside their local church, who have together prayed that God would strengthen them so that they might live and die among the most vulnerable people of this world, who out of faithfulness to the faithfulness of God have held each other in their arms as they have been tormented by those who hate the gospel, and have given their lives as a testimony to the gospel. That is, whatever else Paul is talking about here, he is not talking about non-celibate saints and martyrs.
Third, whatever Paul is saying in the first portion of this passage, he says near its end (it seems to me) that the question at issue is, what is "beneficial"? "All things are lawful." Okay, good. What things are faithful to the way of Jesus into solidarity with the abused of the world? "All things are lawful," but some things dominate us, bind us, throw up obstacles to the way of testimony to Jesus's solidarity with the poor.
7. 1 Timothy 1:8–11: "Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it legitimately. This means understanding that the law is laid down not for the innocent but for the lawless and disobedient, for the godless and sinful, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their father or mother, for murderers, fornicators, sodomites, slave-traders, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to the sound teaching that conforms to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me."
First, this passage is speaking of the way the law functions not in the church, but in the "world." If you are already on the path into greater and greater intimacy with the holy God, you have no particular use for the law. The ones who do are the ones who are "disobedient" and unconcerned with what the law gestures toward. So, for those who daily abandon themselves to the way of Christ, the list in this passage is not helpful.
Second, not wanting to repeat everything said on this subject above, nobody knows with anything like certainty what these terms signify, especially that unhappy term "sodomites." Educated guesses are possible, but they remain guesses.
Okay, that's it for now. If there is some passage I have not addressed (and that's really possible), ask about it below.
Warning: if you comment in ways that I expect will hurt our queer siblings in Christ or the people who love them, I will delete your comment. (If I can remember how to block people, I will do that, too.) This is not to stifle discussion. It is to quiet jerks.
(I don't think I mentioned this above, but in case it would be helpful to anyone to read all these installments on sin, they are filed under Table Talk here: craigkeen.net.)
More on the doctrine of sin. I'm going to skip the recaps. I tried last time to make them shorter and the snakes ignored them anyway. So, let me just say that every installment is to be found under "Table Talk" at craigkeen.net. Go there and see what I said earlier and will lean on as I write more today and any other day I keep doing this. (Also see Johan Tredoux's wonderfully helpful summary of what I've said so far; here, I think: https://www.facebook.com/.../pfbid02eQffGHaYPRN8H4qqz3aQ5...)
1. The church is tasked with a great number of tasks: (a) to be a safe space for people fleeing persecution at the hands of states, gangs, lynch mobs, or ecclesiasts; (b) to be a hospital where people who are doing pretty well care for people who are wounded or sick or dying; (c) to be a gathering of people who in their woundedness lead other wounded people toward greater well being; (d) to be a place where those without the prospect of recovery are accompanied to the moment of death, so they will not die alone; and (e) to be a journeying people who together bear witness (cf. martyreō) that in Christ, by participating in Christ, it, they, need not survive, that entering into solidarity with the outcasts of the world means that each of us is to expect not only to live with them, but also, with Christ, to die with them. (Of course, there are organizations, such as one with a headquarters among other corporation headquarters in a very Red State, that claim to be "churches" or "Churches" that have no serious interest in any of these things. They do good things, and all that, but their interest is above all in surviving, and, you know, not getting sued.)
2. When you walk or bike or drive down the street and pass by a building with a sign out front announcing that it is a church, there is no guarantee that all the things listed in "1" above will be at play there. What is especially disappointing is to read about a "church" with a certain name, to read how that name came to the church's early founders, to expect to find that kind of thing going on inside, and to go in and see no sign of it. (That happens when you walk into an "Evangelical Quaker" church on Veterans Day and find that it is celebrating the heroes of nationalistic wars. That also happens when you walk into a "Nazarene" church and find that it is just another Evangelical church idling in neutral.)
3. So, the question for members of a local Church of the Nazarene is, what kind of church do you pray to be? It is not hard to find accounts of the naming of this body. It was named to stress the despicable status of Jesus, "can anything good come out of Nazareth?," and his solidarity with "the lowly," with those polite society scorns. It was named as a reminder that the calling of the Church of the Nazarene is with Jesus so to stand and fall with the battered of the world that it, too, must expect not to prosper in this world, but to suffer and die with the suffering and dying, knowing that it is God who raises the defiled and mutilated bodies of the dead, not some General Counsel.
4. There are many problems with Old School Holiness, with the doctrine of entire sanctification as it was preached abusively in brush arbor and "Indoor Camp-" meetings. But the doctrine itself is wonderfully reminiscent of the call of Jesus. It absolutely has to be stripped of its individualism and privatism. It absolutely has to be remembered that local churches, and not just local church members, are called to be entirely sanctified. But above all it absolutely has to be proclaimed as a call to martyrdom, just as the church—until sellout Protestantism made Christianity safe for budding capitalists—proclaimed the manner of witness to the faithfulness of Jesus to be particularly well displayed in the saintly lives and deaths of "the martyrs." The doctrine of entire sanctification is all about entering into the journey of Jesus to the cross, where his life in solidarity with the impure of the world ended with a death in absolute solidarity with them.
5. But this is a treatise on sin (even if shot-from-the-hip)! Isn't entire sanctification all about the eradication of sin?! My response (and where I've been going all this time): Yea, verily! But let us not forget that in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition "sin," that is, "original sin," the "sin" eradicated by the Holy Spirit in entire sanctification, is a "disposition," an "attitude," a "manner of leaning," a "posture." Sin in this discourse in our "leaning away from God," even as we are traveling "toward God." "Original sin" (what I'll just call "sin" for a while) dominates a life (say, the life of a local church) that has not been brought to a metanoia, a pursuit of God, which in the moment of initial opening to God may be called a "turning," a "conversion." But metanoia is to characterize every moment of a (more or less) holy life, even if one's (or a church's) life has been an unbroken series of moves of participation in the faithfulness of Jesus; it's just not to be called "conversion" every time.
6. The doctrine of entire sanctification is a movement toward God, a following of Jesus to Golgotha, a participation in the faithfulness of Jesus, that in following also (and here's that metaphor again) "leans" into that journey, leans into the direction of our life together as a church. That's all. It's way less dramatic than some evangelists might want to make out, but it makes all the difference, because entire sanctification is displayed, certainly ambiguously, but in its ambiguity, as a life that truly is poised to die with the outcasts of the world, that is a life that bears witness to the crucifixion of Jesus among thieves, strangers, and queers, that is, it is a martyr life of a martyr church.
7. Churches that see themselves as happy places where stressful people might go to get a little comfort may well be churches. And certainly every church is to be a happy place where comfort is offered, where members are patient and kind, loving and caring, where the sick are led, if possible, to health, and the dying will not die alone. But for the Church of the Nazarene (and other bodies that remember the work of John Wesley and people like Reuben Welch) all of that is on the way to the call of Jesus, as he turned his face toward Golgotha, at the end of Mark 8: "‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?'"
8. Woe to those who would kick our queer siblings in Christ off the path to which Jesus calls them, too! Woe to those who would impose on them a burden they themselves do not carry! Woe to those who would deny the peace that passeth understanding to Gentiles, eunuchs, menstruating women, eaters of pork, the uncircumcised, and the queer! Woe to you, for you blaspheme the Holy Spirit no less than did the Pharisees of Matthew 12!
Enough for now.