Spring Convocation    April 30, 2003
Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg                                      

by the Rev. Dr. Elizabeth Huwiler,
Professor, Old Testament and Hebrew,
Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia  

Here’s the short version of the Lutheran lens, as I understand it: 

We live in a world that was created very good, is thoroughly fallen, and has been wonderfully redeemed.  Each one of us was created very good, is thoroughly fallen, and has been wonderfully redeemed.  Our sexuality was created very good, is thoroughly fallen, and has been wonderfully redeemed.

But it’s probably not enough to say that and sit down.  The ELCA has been struggling with the question: In the area of human sexuality, what teaching and practice will enable us to live most faithfully as church, witnessing to God’s wonderful redemption of this thoroughly fallen world in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ? 

The Bible I understand to be, among other things, the record of arguments within ancient Israel and the early Church about how to understand God and what it means to be the people of God.  One of the ways the Bible functions as authority is by authorizing our arguments in its tradition.  I don’t mean just enabling us to enter into arguments among different biblical authors and texts; I mean serving as a model for faithful arguing when we disagree among ourselves about something that may not even have been an issue in the Bible.  And one of the things I am going to do today is not just tell you about biblical voices and what they say that is relevant to sexuality.  Rather, in the tradition of the biblical authors themselves, I am going to take part in our current argument about sexuality among God’s people.  I know that very different arguments could be (in fact, have been) made; and I want to say to those of you who may disagree passionately with me: I know you too are people of God, wonderfully redeemed by the cross and resurrection of Christ; even though you may be dead wrong about human sexuality, you are still my sisters and brothers in Jesus Christ.    I hope that you can affirm the same about me.  The way our Lutheran “lens” figures into this is that it predisposes the way we participate in biblical arguments—but still, we will argue about just how it predisposes us, and what the implications are.

I know too that although our general topic is sexuality, our burning question is not about heterosexual marriage or divorce or remarriage but about sexual minorities, especially at the moment gay and lesbian people.  And so after looking at what the Bible has to say that relates to human sexuality (which is mostly in a presumed framework of heterosexuality), I will ask us to consider the implications for our church’s decision about how fully and openly to welcome lesbian and gay people into our assemblies and onto our rosters of ordained and lay professionals, and how appropriate it is to invoke God’s blessing and pledge the community’s support to their commitments.

Created very good
The Bible situates sexuality at the beginning, in creation.  Both of the creation texts that begin the book of Genesis have sexual dimensions.  First, the Priestly account treats creation as a process of cosmic distinctions and correspondences.  Humans are created at the end of God’s work, just before the Sabbath rest:

 Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." So God created humankind in the divine image, created them in the image of God; created them male and female. God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."  (Genesis 1:25-28)[1]

In a formed but empty cosmos, God has an interest in filling up the earth, and decrees that it will happen through reproduction.  So with plants there is repeated reference to the fruit in the seed.  With humans there is a command, reminiscent of one to other animals, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. 

The other creation passage referring to sexuality is from Genesis 2, the Yahwistic story of Eden:

Then the LORD God said, "It is not good that the human should be alone; I will make a helper to be a partner for the human." So out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the human to name them; and whatever the human called every living creature, that was its name. The human gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the human there was not found a helper to be a partner. So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the human, and God took one of the ribs from the sleeping human and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib taken from the human the LORD God made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken." Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his woman, and they become one flesh. And the man and his woman were both naked, and were not ashamed.  (Genesis 2:18-25) 

The Eden text presents sexuality without reference to procreation but as a remedy for the very first “not good” in creation: human loneliness.  The Yahwist makes it sound as though God recognizes the need for companionship, but isn’t sure what kind of being is best suited to be a companion; when an animal won’t do, God performs the first surgery.  After the operation, instead of one human creature, there are two; and some scholars argue instead of a sexually undifferentiated earthling there are male and female.[2]  The man is delighted with how like him the woman is: “This one is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.”  The narrator makes a comment: “That’s why a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his woman, and the two become one flesh.”  This is often read as an institution of marriage, but it does not explicitly mention marriage or most of the social concerns surrounding marriage—that the coupling will be lifelong or exclusive, or that children are expected or hoped for, or that the two have any economic or other obligations to each other.  Biblical Hebrew, by the way, does not have a word for “wife” other than the word for “woman.”  Usually translators use “woman” when the word is used alone or with the definite article, and “wife” when it’s used with a possessive pronoun.  There’s nothing wrong with that convention; I didn’t follow it here in order to point up that there’s nothing in the text that explicitly speaks of marriage.

In Israel’s presentation of the beginning, the Priestly and Yahwistic texts are bumped up against each other, offering two alternative or complementary reasons for the existence of human sexuality: in order that the world might be adequately populated, or for the sake of companionship and redress of human loneliness.  The Priestly command to be fruitful and multiply is reflected a few times later in the canonical scriptures, at times of significant depopulation of either the whole world (after the flood, Genesis 9:1,7) or Israel/Judah (after the exile, 36:8-10).  It is not brought up otherwise.  That is, the biblical writers don’t present the idea that God always wants there to be more and more people on earth, or even in Israel.  The concern for offspring is, however, a strong element of the ancestral narratives in Genesis and a recurrent motif in texts about later times.  The assumption is that everyone would want children; children are understood as a blessing and not conceiving is negative.  Particularly during the periods of Israelite life in which subsistence agriculture was the norm and infant and child mortality was high, this high social evaluation of children would have corresponded with economic benefit.[3]  Desire for offspring is not a general concern in the New Testament, most of which reflects an expectation that the present age was about to end. 

In our own culture, sexuality has come to reflect more and more the Yahwistic emphasis on companionship.  Reliable contraception has made it possible even for married heterosexual couples to experience a lifetime of sexual intimacy without ever procreating, and reproductive technology has made it possible to procreate without sexual intercourse.

How helpful are these creation texts in our quest for the teaching and practice that will enable us to live most faithfully as church, witnessing within this thoroughly fallen world to God’s wonderful redemption in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ?  They set a baseline for the “very good” potential of human sexuality, but one that is too often a matter of yearning rather than fulfillment in our thoroughly fallen yet wonderfully redeemed world.

Thoroughly fallen

We are all too familiar with the negative aspects of human sexual relationships described in the aftermath of the “tree of knowledge” episode in Genesis 3.[4]  The consequences to the woman are the ones with sexual implications: childbirth will be painful and dangerous, and she will desire her man, who will dominate her.  These distortions of humankind’s very good sexuality are vividly developed in narrative, and controlled in legal texts.

Reality of sexual aggression.  In Genesis 3, the woman is told that she will desire a man who will dominate her.  This suggests that sexual aggression is a behavior of men over against women.  But the authors of biblical narratives are able to imagine sexual aggressors not only as men dominating women (e.g., Shechem and Dinah in Genesis 34, David and Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11, Amnon and Tamar in 2 Samuel 13) but also women acting aggressively toward men (e.g., Leah and Rachel deciding which of them will have sex with Jacob in Genesis 30, Tamar enticing Judah in Genesis 38, Potiphar’s wife trying to seduce Joseph in Genesis 39).  Genesis 19 also presents an image of male-against-male sexual aggression.  In legal texts, the male is the presumed aggressor (e.g., Deuteronomy 22:23-28).  In wisdom literature, sexual aggression is depicted as the behavior of a woman toward an innocent young man (especially Proverbs 7, but see also Proverbs 9:13-18, Ecclesiastes 7:26).

Commodification of female sexuality.  Israel’s regulations about marriage, adultery, divorce, and levirate widowhood suggest that marriage is a transfer of ownership of a woman’s sexuality from her father to her husband.[5]  The rights of the husband and father are primary; if the interests of the woman are relevant, they are presumed to match those of the controlling man in her life.  The Israelites ordered their society around male-headed extended families.  In order to have a social place, a woman had to be part of one of those families.  People who were not part of such families (widows, orphans, and resident aliens in typical Deuteronomic terminology) were in a very tenuous situation.[6]

Treatment of female sexuality as male property leads to the entrapment of women in abusive situations.  Legally we might think of Deuteronomy 22, in which a man who rapes a virgin is required to marry her and forbidden from ever divorcing her, a command that from our perspective may look more punitive toward the victim than toward the perpetrator.  A narrative example is the divine command to Hagar to return to Sarai and Abram even though she was being treated badly (Genesis 16).

Purity laws and maintaining distinctions.  The legal codes of ancient Israel have several concerns.  One of them is maintaining proper distinctions, especially safeguarding the boundary between sacred and profane spheres.  Those who approached the holy, especially priests as people who navigated the boundary, had to take particular care not to bring contamination from the profane world into the holy places. 

One aspect of this purity thinking has to do with cleanliness and health.  One thinks particularly of the regulations about leprosy, that is to say, skin ailments of humans and moldy growths on fabrics and buildings (Leviticus 13-14.

The insistence on purity has the clearest connection to sexuality in the understanding of sexual emissions and menstrual blood as contaminants that rendered a person ritually unclean and required both time and ritual bathing before the person was pure enough to engage in religious ritual.

In one strain of Israelite thought, the entire land and not just the temple was a holy place, and all Israel was a nation of priests.  In this way of thinking, the distinction between the holy and the profane was not that between God and Israel so much as that between Israel and the nations.  It is within this context that we can best understand the Holiness Code of Leviticus 17-26.  This code prohibits sexual partnerships that are inappropriate for a holy people in a holy land, in the context of other forbidden behaviors and combinations. 

Parts of the Holiness Code, including many of the prohibitions against sexual liaisons with near relatives, would also be appropriate in surrounding cultures, and that represents one important aspect of biblical morality: affirming what is understood to be positive in the social codes of the larger world.  But mixed into that is a contrasting dynamic, which is establishing the distinctiveness of Israelite behavior over against that of surrounding cultures.  Reading the text from the perspective of the twenty-first century, with incomplete understanding of what is affirmed and rejected in the cultures surrounding the Israelites, it is not always easy to separate particular injunctions into those two groups.

Prophetic imagery.  In the prophets, sexual language is frequently used symbolically.  Marriage is a metaphor for the relationship between God and Israel, and almost always is used negatively.  The language of adultery and promiscuity is used to symbolize the worship of other gods.  It is used that way so pervasively that scholars have some difficulty determining the extent to which sexual activities were (as was long thought) worship practices in the surrounding nations and the extent to which that language is being used symbolically.  The reading of religious apostasy as sexual infidelity can help shape a system in which regulating sexual behavior is an element of religious fidelity, although the two dynamics are distinct.

To summarize: the fallenness of human sexuality is most clearly demonstrated scripturally in the reality of sexual aggression, the commodification of female sexuality, and the enforcement of purity laws; and this fallenness is reinforced by the symbolic use of the imagery of female sexual infidelity for religious apostasy.

Wonderfully redeemed

So much for fallen sexuality.  What about its wonderful redemption?  The Bible has one extended text about human sexuality that, even in a dangerous world, presents it as overwhelmingly positive.  Here is how it begins:

The Song of Songs, which is Solomon's. 

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine,
your anointing oils are fragrant, your name is perfume poured out;
therefore the maidens love you. 

Draw me after you, let’s hurry!
The king has brought me into his chambers.
We will exult and rejoice in you; we will extol your love more than wine;

they are right to love you.
I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem,
like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon.

Do not gaze at me because I am dark, because the sun has gazed on me. My mother's sons were angry with me;
they made me keeper of the vineyards, but my own vineyard I have not kept!

Tell me, you whom my soul loves,
where you pasture your flock, where you make it lie down at noon;
for why should I be like one who is veiled beside the flocks of your companions?

If you do not know, O fairest among women,
follow the tracks of the flock, and pasture your kids beside the shepherds' tents. 
I compare you, my love, to a mare among Pharaoh's chariots.

Your cheeks are comely with ornaments, your neck with strings of jewels. We will make you ornaments of gold, studded with silver.
While the king was on his couch, my nard gave forth its fragrance.

My beloved is to me a bag of myrrh that lies between my breasts.
My beloved is to me a cluster of henna blossoms in the vineyards of
En-gedi. 

Ah, you are beautiful, my love; ah, you are beautiful; your eyes are doves. Ah, you are beautiful, my beloved, truly lovely. Our couch is green;
the beams of our house are cedar, our rafters are pine. 

The Song of Songs has not played a major role in discussions of sexuality in Judaism or Christianity, including Lutheranism.  But I believe it can be a helpful text, at least in a destabilizing kind of way.  For one thing, it’s entirely too easy, in our longing for explicit guidance in our discussions of sexuality, to gravitate to legal texts—which this emphatically is not.  It can also be tempting to make grand generalizations about sexuality in the Bible: we might assume it’s always about procreation, or always about marriage and family, or always about safeguarding one or another set of boundaries.  The Song of Songs is a text in which sexuality is about desire and delight, with an undercurrent of danger.  It deals with sexuality as part of our creatureliness.  It is not explicitly concerned with procreation (although the setting is one of springtime fecundity throughout the natural world).  Nor does it speak of financial obligation, establishing a household, and other things that might make it particularly appropriate for setting up a marriage.  So if we bring assumptions about “the biblical view” of sexuality, this text can be a reality check.  The Song of Songs is not of direct help in our quest to know the teachings and practices around sexuality in our very good, thoroughly fallen, wonderfully redeemed world.  But it does warn us against viewing sexuality so fully in the sphere of fallenness that we cannot rejoice when desire and delight break into our world through the redemptive goodness of God.

The people of Judea and Galilee in Jesus’ time were heirs to the Israelite traditions about holiness and contamination.  The priests and levites of the temple hierarchy carried on most clearly the traditions about particular holiness of the priestly caste and the environs of the temple itself.  Pharisaism was a lay movement that developed the ideal of the holiness of the whole people.  Both groups had concerns about contamination of the holy by things unclean.

The Gospel narratives present Jesus as transgressing against the ideals of both these groups.  Here are two narratives from Mark’s Gospel that would have been at least offensive and probably frightening to those who fear contamination:

A leper came to [Jesus] begging him, and kneeling he said to him, "If you choose, you can make me clean." Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, "I do choose. Be made clean!" Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, "See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them." But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter. (Mark 1:40-45)

Mark 5:25 Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. 26 She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. 27 She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, 28 for she said, "If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well." 29 Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. 30 Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, "Who touched my clothes?" 31 And his disciples said to him, "You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, 'Who touched me?'" 32 He looked all around to see who had done it. 33 But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. 34 He said to her, "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease."

 In both these narratives, touch is significant.  In the story about the leper, Jesus chooses to touch someone considered a contaminant, and in so doing heals him.  In the story about the woman with the hemorrhage, she is the one who chooses to touch him.  And again, healing happens.  What these stories suggest is that in Jesus, not only do the unclean ones pose no threat of contamination to Jesus.  Rather, it’s as though his wholeness (and holiness) contaminates them with health: the direction of infection is reversed.  In Jesus, contact with the holy, rather than being potentially deadly, is healing.

 Jesus’ offense against the particular holiness of the temple is presented in the narratives about its cleansing.  This is Matthew’s version:

 Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves.  He said to them, "It is written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer'; but you are making it a den of robbers."  The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them.  But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did, and heard the children crying out in the temple, "Hosanna to the Son of David," they became angry (Matthew 21:12-15). 

Not only is Jesus’ undoing of temple order presented as a sanctification of it; but the newly sanctified temple becomes a place where people with physical disabilities come and in Jesus are healed, while children sing.

For Christians, the fact of the incarnation is a profound and complete breach of the separation between the divine and human spheres safeguarded by levitical legislation.  That breach is underscored in the Passion narrative by the tearing of the temple curtain. 

The organization of society into families with a male head of household may have been challenged by the early Jesus movement.  The Synoptic gospels remember Jesus as undoing some of the traditional family relationships.  Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza argue that the hierarchic structure of the family is part of what is challenged by the Jesus movement with its discipleship of equals.[7]  Even the language of “brother” and “sister” for members of the church suggests that it is a kind of replacement family.  Jesus’ teaching about marriage and divorce reinterprets marriage and adultery so that they are about faithfulness in relationships rather than about property rights (in all the synoptic gospels but most clearly in Mark 10:1-12).  The communal life of the early church as described in Acts, whether reflecting a memory or an ideal, also suggests a kind of undoing of the traditional family and a recreating of “family” in the congregational community.

As the church continued and the parousia was ever delayed, stable family environments again became a concern.  This is reflected particularly in the household codes of the epistles—which, like the codes of ancient Israel, partly reflect the morality of the surrounding social world and partly try to establish some distinctiveness to Christian behavior.   

The Johannine theology of loving interrelationship between Father and Son expands to include the love of God in Christ for Christians.  It then enables our love for God, and through God for one another.  This Johannine vision of life in Christ offers another image of the redemption of all our relationships in the One who was lifted up in the glory of the cross. 

To summarize: wholly redeemed sexuality is a vision in both testaments, with some aspects claimed as present reality for those in Christ.  The Gospels present the purity concerns of the Hebrew scriptures as undone in the person of Jesus, and offer congregational community as an egalitarian substitute for the hierarchic pattern of traditional families. 

Conclusion
What does any of this have to do with issues of gay and lesbian people in the church?  Does it have any bearing on how best to live out our identity as church with or as sexual minorities?

The greatest difficulty in preparing this lecture has been that the question about sexuality in the church (especially whom to include and how) is a question of ordering a moral society.  And the Bible, while it gives examples of how people of God have done that, is not a rulebook to the ethical life.  In particular, since we are looking through a Lutheran lens, we must admit that a moralizing reading is not at the heart of our use of the Bible.  So we must still ask: how does the biblical presentation of ourselves as created very good, and thoroughly fallen, and wonderfully redeemed, relate to the church in which we are now struggling to live faithfully?  In particular, is our denominational discrimination against sexual minority persons a necessary aspect of upholding the goodness of creation in our thoroughly fallen world?  Or is the discrimination itself an example of that fallenness, in which we are unable to love as God loves, with heart wide open? 

Reading through my Lutheran lens, I do not see a difference in either fallenness or redemption between heterosexual and homosexual relationships.  As fallen as my own marriage is, it is not beyond redemption.  And I believe that the partnerships between same-sex couples share in the same aspects of fallenness and redemption.  Respect for our partners, faithfulness to our commitments, a mutuality that increases our joys and shares our burdens—these are aspects of redeemed sexual partnerships that help us to glimpse the “very good.”   

Some of you may be surprised at the things I have not talked about.  I supposed that you are not entirely new to this issue.  Here are some of the facts and arguments with which most of us are probably already familiar and about which I thought we’d be unlikely to change our minds today. 

We can acknowledge that there are texts, both in the legal collections of the Hebrew scriptures and in Paul’s epistles, that are used to argue that homosexual behavior is antithetical to the divine will—that people who engage in sexually intimate acts with people of the same sex are choosing to behave in a sinful way. 

Let’s also admit that the widespread acceptance of the existence of homosexual orientation is fairly recent, even among social scientists and medical professionals.  Because of that, some people argue that when biblical texts refer to homosexual behavior as “an abomination” or “contrary to nature,” they are expressing outdated scientific beliefs.  For such interpreters (including me), accepting the legitimacy of gay and lesbian relationships can be something like accepting the findings of tens of thousands of years of archaeology, even though it doesn’t fit biblical chronology.  Others would argue that homosexual relations are always wrong, even given the reality of homosexual orientation.  In such an understanding, it is wrong to act on desire for intimacy with another person of your own sex, just as it would be wrong to act on a desire to steal your neighbor’s Land Rover. 

Let’s also acknowledge the argument that publicly practiced homosexual behavior in antiquity was often coercive—the rape of conquered men in wartime, for example, or the imposition of sex by mature men on young boys.  When this awareness is combined with the recognition that the ancients did not know about homosexual orientation, it leads some of us to believe that the behaviors forbidden in these biblical texts are inherently abusive ones, and do not correspond to having a life partner of the same sex. 

Finally, let’s note that especially in modern times, antipathy toward homosexuality has been reinforced by the use of the word “sodomy,” with its implication that Genesis 19 presents homosexual intercourse as the sin that brought about the destruction of the city of Sodom.  Both inner-biblical interpretation and critical readings show that the central sin was the threat of violence against visitors to whom hospitality was due.  The fact that the threatened violence was homosexual rape no doubt exacerbated the crime; but I would argue, with many interpreters, that a rejection of homosexual rape does not imply the rejection of homosexual intimacy.

And so: I think the texts that have been used in the discussion have not been very useful with our particular Lutheran lens. 

And yet, same-sex relationships remain troubling for many in the church.  Is a gay or lesbian orientation fallen in a way that is beyond even the power of God in Jesus Christ to purify?  Is it necessary to insist that people who are not heterosexual must either role-play straights or be celibate?[8] 

I am convinced that it is as true for those of you who are sexual minorities as it is for heterosexuals: your sexuality too is not only thoroughly fallen, but in Christ Jesus wonderfully redeemed. 

Some interpreters have suggested that homosexuality is the principal area in which the taboos of the ancient purity laws are still functionally powerful in contemporary society.  Certainly, it appears to be difficult for some folks to even to imagine the possibility of thinking of lesbian or gay sexuality as wonderfully redeemed.  Some have also suggested that the early Jewish Christians faced a similar struggle with the question of whether to include in the assembly Gentiles who did not concert to Judaism, undergo circumcision if male, and live by purity regulations.[9]  They may have heard stories about Jesus breaking taboos—but even so, the thought of Gentiles sharing in the sacred without benefit of either circumcision or ritual bathing after menstruation made them recoil in disgust. 

I suspect that these interpreters are onto something.  And so I close with Peter explaining himself to his Jerusalem colleagues in Acts 11:

Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God.  So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, saying, "Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?"  Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying,  "I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me.  As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air.  I also heard a voice saying to me, 'Get up, Peter; kill and eat.'  But I replied, 'By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.'  But a second time the voice answered from heaven, 'What God has made clean, you must not call profane.'  This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven.  At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the house where we were.  The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man's house.  He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, 'Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.'  And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning.  And I remembered how the Lord had said, 'John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.' If then God gave them the same gift that God gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?"

Of course we are not done arguing about whether God has made gay and lesbian sexuality clean.  But for those of us who believe so: What God has made clean, we must not call profane.  If God gave lesbian and gay Christians the same gifts that God gave straight Christians, who are we that we can hinder God?