See if you recognize this story.
Two angelic men come into an isolated town. They have nothing to sell, no servants, and no apparent business to conduct of any kind. They stand in the center of town, just watching the people.
Men in the town notice them. They do not like what they see. Two strangers in their midst – could these “pretty boys” spread their perceived perversion to others? They had to be taught a lesson.
In the cover of darkness, the men of the town gather at the place these two strangers were staying. They demand that the owner of the house send out the angelic men so they can be taught that their kind is not welcome in this town. The men of the town are intent on punishing and humiliating them so that they never return.
In this town, any stranger is suspect. But men perceived as gay are definitely not to be tolerated.
It took me several years to climb back up the slippery slope that mislabeled this story. It is the story of Sodom in a way that takes in all the facts told in Genesis much more accurately than the way it is usually understood.
If anything, the word “Sodomy” should be referring to gay bashing, not being gay. The slippery slope that has led to much suffering and death for the gay community began only in the years soon after Jesus when a philosopher of the time became disgusted with the extremes to which Roman citizens took their homosexual activities in public. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah had never been used that way by Jewish or Christian writers until then.
Christianity has been sliding down this slope for two millennia. We have a long climb to get back to understanding the story properly and correcting our perceptions of homosexuality. The story was told as a cautionary tale about abusing the strangers in your midst, not as a condemnation of strangers, no matter how strange they may seem to you.
As the Supreme Court considers the validity of the Affordable Care Act, there is talk about a slippery slope of government mandates. The argument, simply put, is once we allow the government to force us each to buy health insurance will we be forced to do more and more things by the government, like eat broccoli. (Seriously, it is the example used.)
I have been pondering a few other slippery slopes. These are slopes we have been sliding down for quite some time.
The first one is about naming God. The “proper name” of God used in ancient Hebrew texts is HWHY, read as YHWH, the root from which the word Jehovah was later formed. When this word was translated as the LORD (all caps to indicate the presence of the original word), we began a slippery slope.
Consider that the Jewish Rabbis who translated the Hebrew into Greek translated YHWH as Being. This was much more accurate and did not have the associations with the use of the LORD that YHWH has. With YHWH there is no “the” to single out and contrast with other entities. There is no gender or hierarchy in Being as there is implied with LORD.
If our word for God did not have the exclusivity implied by “the”, but simply meant Being or Life, would we have the “everybody else is wrong” arrogance that warps the message of universal grace our sacred scriptures teach?
If there was no gender in our word for God, would we have the gender and sexuality obsessions that mar Christendom’s attitudes toward women and other sexualities?
If there was no hierarchical inference in our word for God, could it be used to prop up oppressive, institutional powers?
If we could get back to the original sense of the word, the “hear, O Israel, the LORD, your God is one”, would be understood as, “hear, O Israel, your God is the unity of all life”.
Yes we have to watch out for slippery slopes. When we find we have been sliding down one, we need to stop the slide and begin to climb back up the slope.
pioneermeditations 