The Living Waters

There are only a few passages in the Bible that refer to same-gender sexual acts. The one most people think of is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19. Surely, they say, here God says homosexuality is wrong when he destroys Sodom because of their homosexuality. A logical response to this is "Surely all heterosexuality is wrong because God does not approve of heterosexual rape."

The story of Sodom is not about homosexuality. It's about inhospitality. The inhospitality is expressed as a same-gender gang rape threat.

If we read the passage in context, it is a parallel to the preceding chapter, "the hospitality of Abraham." Three visitors come to Abraham, he welcomes them and is given the promise of a son in his old age. Two of these three visitors then go to Sodom, where Abraham's nephew Lot welcomes them, but all the men in the town arrive to challenge that welcome. They want to "know" the visitors. The word translated "to know" sometimes means sexual knowledge. It is likely that they mean same-gender rape, the ultimate put-down (to treat a man like a woman) that was used to humiliate a defeated enemy. This is not referring to a homosexual orientation or a loving same-gender relationship. This is talking about heterosexual men abusing power in violent same-gender rape. To say this is wrong and sinful and that God condemns it, is not to say that homosexuality is any of those things.

Lot refuses to surrender the visitors and offers his two virgin daughters instead. That this behavior is not condemned by the Bible is usually ignored by people trying to prove homosexuality is a sin. Likewise the apparent acceptance of incest between these same daughters and Lot in the story that follows is ignored. To be consistent, a biblical literalist (who does not accept that some things in the Bible are a result of the culture and time and not of God's will) ought to take the whole passage: accepting that same-gender rape is wrong and that incest and offering ones daughters to a violent mob are okay. But homophobic people are not known for their logic.

Nor do they seem to take what the Bible says elsewhere about Sodom as important. Other biblical references, such as Ezekiel 16:49, are clear that the sin of Sodom is about hospitality not about sex. In Luke's Gospel (10:12), Jesus also understands the sin of Sodom to be inhospitality. In fact, Jesus says nothing anywhere in the Bible about homosexuality, but he has a lot to say about the importance of welcoming people.

According to the Bible, the sin of Sodom is failure to welcome people who are different. By biblical standards, then, those who fail to welcome GLBT people are the real sodomites that the Bible condemns.