Week 22 - LGBTQ+ Inclusion: David and Jonathan

[Music] hello and welcome to our second week on the theme of lgbtq plus inclusion for awakened you know a lot of times people will look at the Bible and they'll say there's no example of same gender relationships in the Bible but that's just not true and we need look no further than the relationship between David and Jonathan now it's true that David was married to multiple women there's also this whole other morally problematic mess of David Desiring ba Sheba and raping her but the text clearly describes a special relationship between David and Jonathan that was almost certainly romantic I say that because the text says that David's love for Jonathan surpassed his love of women and there are at least six highly erotic passages about David and Jonathan and those passages mirror the kind of language that we find in homoerotic poetry in the ancient near East and it seems pretty clear that the author was suggesting that David and Jonathan had a romantic relationship now look in the ancient world this wasn't all that uncommon and that didn't necessarily Define who you were and how you interacted with the world these types of relationships were also fairly common in Greco Roman culture as well they didn't understand sexual orientation and gender identity in the same way that we do today and so it's not surprising that the way the text talks about these things is different than we might expect them to be talked about today but I think it's certainly fair to say that David and Jonathan almost certainly had a romantic relationship with one another during this time when we're looking at biblical texts and talking about lgbtq plus inclusion our spiritual practice is to think about the quotes from some influential lgbtq+ folks and think about how those relate to our lives and to the biblical text and this week we're talking about a quote from James Baldwin and James Baldwin said this he says you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world but then you read it was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive and all the people who have ever been alive and to me whenever Baldwin is talking about this he is reminding us that we don't face our struggles alone that sometimes we can think that we are going through everything by ourselves or that we are facing a unique set of circumstances that no one has ever faced before and certainly it's true that all of our lives are different that all of our experiences are different that everything that we've been through makes the way that we respond to certain situations different there are no universalized experiences however it's also true that the human condition is beautiful and wonderful and terrible and sad and hard and all the things and that people have been trying to make sense of the world since we've been around and so I think that folks in the lgbtq plus Community who are struggling with Identity or embracing identity and rejoicing in identity can find some solidarity in the fact that there are biblical examples of these types of relationships and identities as well whether we find folks like Jonathan and and David who are in a same gender romantic relationship that is uh consensual or whether we find examples like uh unic in the gospel of Matthew who may likely have been someone who we might consider say asexual today that there are all types of examples of lgbtq plus folks in the text and not just in the Bible itself but as we read the work of of theologians and Christians and just people throughout history there's a realization I think that the struggles we have are not ours alone but we are all in this life together and we are all connected what do you make of Baldwin quote or what do you make of the story of David and Jonathan are there stories in the biblical text where you have found Hope and acceptance and affirmation perhaps particularly of the lgbtq plus community in the biblical text I find Hope of radical inclusion and incredible hospitality and of course God's all encompassing love and I give thanks for that may it be so amen