I AM HAVING a sort of lapsing Lent this year, a combination of wifi trouble, financial trouble, etc. For which I apologize, I'd expected to be full back into The Prophetic Imagination at this point in the year.
Today's the Tuesday after the Second Sunday in Lent, the Catholic lectionary starts with Isaiah
Hear the word of the LORD,
princes of Sodom!
Listen to the instruction of our God,
people of Gomorrah!
Wash yourselves clean!
Put away your misdeeds from before my eyes;
cease doing evil; learn to do good.
Make justice your aim: redress the wronged,
hear the orphan’s plea, defend the widow.
Which identifies the sin of Sodom as injustice to the destitute, the impoverished, those without the financial and personal security of having an adult male to protect them in ancient Mediterranean life. It's ironic, in a way, considering in the story of Sodom that Lott had offered his daughters to the crowd of men who came to attack his house guests, but let's pass that by as a problem I'm not equipped to address.
Walter Brueggeman's excellent Gift and Task, for this day, using a Protestant lectionary, includes 1 Corinthians 5:1-8 which is Paul dealing with the rumor of a man in the Corinthian Church who is sleeping with his step-mother, for once it's not LGBTQ people on the spot, and advising them to confront him and if he won't cut it out to get shut of him - while looking it up I got a pretty vernacular translation I'd never heard of that isn't far removed from that language. He uses poetic language about handing the guy over to Satan so he can have his body destroyed to save his soul, which has all kinds of interesting theological implications. Paul tends to get a lot more worked up over sexual shenanigans than Jesus did in the Gospels. A lot of the trouble for me and my fellow LGBTQs comes from Paul's attitude on that. Interestingly enough, when it comes to Jesus saying something of that sort, on the rare occasions he did, it was straight people getting divorced and remarried that was the issue. The implications of that being more in line with the passage from Isaiah about people made vulnerable by the social-economic system through abandonment by a spouse so he can take up with a new wife or the other woman having the same effect in the husband's new relationship. At least that's what I get from it.
This is relevant to me because I know a man, a fellow musician, an LGBTQ person who got too old to marry when that right became available to him and through a number of circumstances never could have married someone with a stable enough income to pay into Social Security, etc. getting coverage due to marriage. And who now finds himself outside of the social safety net with increasing illness and financial need, on the verge of destitution. A position I could easily have been in, myself, and which I'm sure many others are. The assumptions of normal things for straight people, people not afflicted with the functional disability that having a life in the arts easily becomes - someday I'd like to write an article about the state of most professional musicians teeth - are no help at all to many people who are still outside of the social norm. I think that's a condition that has grown instead of diminished since the 1970s, even with the ACA, even with Medicare and Medicaid.
I don't have any answers for him, I wish I could provide him with a marriage that would secure those things for him by the mere artifice of signing a wedding certificate. But that's not possible, either. And I'm sure Paul would be scandalized though I'm willing to bet Jesus would get it. I don't mean to be too hard on Paul, he's a lot better than I used to think of him, before I really read him with some good commentaries to explain things I was too ignorant to notice. But some of the stuff he said has really hurt a lot of us.
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