2 Comments to 'Which is a worse sin? Divorce or gay marriage?'
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Which is a worse sin? Divorce or gay marriage?
Posted By katie allison granju
A WBIR.com blogger ponders:
What about divorce? I see more and more divorced men and women serving in the church and I know in Timothy it states many of the positions have to be a man of one wife. Now we get into interpretation don’t we? Is it one current wife? Let’s look at that for a moment.
Jesus clearly stated that a writ of divorce was a sin and something created by man to put away his wife and is not honored by God. He also said that when a man and woman were joined together, no one can pull them apart and they are wed within the body of Christ, the church and such derision can not exist in the body of Christ. So is it not a sin for a man or woman to marry after they have divorced? There are so many things I see Christians do that are hurting their witness to the lost and to see them shouting God will smite you! At the top of their lungs because a gay couple wants to get married is just so ludicrous.
May 30th, 2008
In my never-ending fight against the excesses of Christian fundamentalism, I would like to weigh-in on this issue.
This is one of the places where Jesus personally went to great pains to further clarify an issue in the Old Testament. The few pastors who are brave enough to admit it will tell you that this was very important to Jesus and that we have “cultured it out of our lives” for the sake of convenience in today’s world. In a world that prizes instant deletion on the computer and throw-away cups, we have also introduced and pursued the concept of instant throw-away of people.
Just to give you an idea of how serious infidelity and divorce were considered to be in English Christendom 500 years ago, the legal term “treason” included marital infidelity, and the penalty was drawing and quartering. For those of you who do not know what that penalty was, they would hang you by the neck until nearly dead but still barely concious. When you came around enough to be aware of what was going on, they would rip your abdomen open with a sharp knife and throw your still living and feeling intestines onto a hot bed of coals. Then while you were still alive, they would chop your body into pieces.
Also, in Dante’s conception of a layer-cake hell, the lowest and worst layer was reserved for those people who could be termed “traitors.” He did not mean just political traitors. These were also the people who had committed the sin of infidelity towards the reasonable and loving expectations of their fellow human beings: Judas towards Jesus, husband toward wife, rich towards poor, Hitler towards those who depend on a fair government for personal protection. You get the picture.
As for whether God sees divorce as more or less of a sin than homosexuality, I do not know because I am not God. However, I will say this about Christian fundamentalists who hate homosexuals—and I do not accept that time-worn crap about hating the sin and loving the sinner. We all live inside the circle of sin—even the fundamentalists who are so convinced that they personally have somehow “arrived.” They must remember that they too are sinners within this circle and that they do not know whether or if their sin is weighed by God as being greater or lesser than that of the homosexual. None of us do. However, from the Bible, we do know that we are REQUIRED to love these people. Getting someone fired from their job because they are queer is not an expression of love. All those other things you would like to do to them or have done to them are not an expression of love. They are not an expression of fidelity towards your fellow man.
On a final note here, have you ever wondered what happened to Jesus’s dad. Joseph. He appears in the nativity story and stays in Jesus’s life up until age 12, and then he is gone from the Bible. For years now, the Christian fundamentalists, especially the Southern Baptists, have given Joseph the “easy out” by quoting those very early scriptures that say or imply that Joseph was an honorable man. They argue, “Surely, if Joseph was an honorable man in his early years, he must have been in his later years too. Therefore, the reason we hear nothing else about him must be because he died.” Truthfully, no one really knows.
Personally, I have long held to the theory that Joseph divorced Mary and split sometime after Jesus was 12 years old. The extremely vehement way that Jesus deals on the divorce issue and the raw passion that is there bespeaks great personal hurt—as if he has seen and experienced firsthand the awful pain and misery, especially for women, that comes with divorce. I think we may be seeing Jesus upfront and very personal on this issue because of his experience with his own earthly dad and mom. Just a theory—but I think a pretty doggone good one.
Very well put, Aulder Guy.
http://home.comcast.net/~cheneworth/_resources/baptists.jpg