Siya Khumalo | Which interpretation of the Bible allows Gerry Elsdon to be a female pastor AND homophobic?

Pastor Gerry Elsdon should have thought a little longer about what she was saying when she made homophobic comments on a TV show- and perhaps even done a little research, writes Siya Khumalo. 

"Phat Joe breaks bread with a list of celebs known for their strong opinions and often unpopular beliefs," says the TV show blurb for Cheeky Palate. 

This description manages to be a lie and an understatement at the same time. It also leaves out, that along with bread, conversationalists break rules on common decency.   

Except at those moments where naked bigotry was challenged, the discussion that transpired during the premiere episode of "Cheeky Palate", which included traditional healer Gogo Dineo Ndlanzi, motivational speaker Joshua Maponga, businesswoman Nobuntu Webster, singer Zwai Bala and Pastor Gerry Elsdon (previously Rantseli), did not showcase "strong opinions": hate-talking a group whose members are already targets of violence is punching down, and that's the behaviour of cowards with lazy thought processes - not strong opinion-ation. 

As for unpopular: homophobic statements are popular among bigots, but race straight past unpopular to evil for everyone else. 

"Real Madrid is the greatest football club that's ever existed" is an unpopular opinion: carrying the most homophobic interpretation of an ancient text over into 21st-century theology is hypocritical and malicious, and should be treated like racism and sexism. 

Elsdon won't get away with self-servingly interpreting away the colonial Christian tradition of barring women from the pulpit without extending the courtesy to other excluded groups. I hereby invite Elsdon to turn to the first chapter of the longest letter in the New Testament, Apostle Paul's Epistle to the Romans, to read a passage that's believed to be definitive proof that the Bible condemns sexual and gender diversity:  

Before giddily affirming the notion that scripture condemns homosexuality, as Elsdon was doing at this table, let's get clear about something else: who is the "them" being described as under God's condemnation? You want to sit down for this: 

It's every single person in the world who happens to not be Jewish. Wild, right? 

Romans was written as rhetoric, to be "performed" dramatically, before an audience likely consisting of - and this is a demographological expression that appears in the Epistle about 30 times in some formulation or another - Jewish as well as non-Jewish converts to the Christian faith. One of the problems this long "script" was confronting through the reader's (or possibly readers') performance(s) was the cultural hostility between these groups. This recurring social challenge is referenced directly and indirectly in other New Testament passages, listed in canonical order:

This list is by no means exhaustive. 

To understand how old and entrenched the problem was, one could read the Old Testament book of Jonah written five centuries before Christ, when the Israelites were the geopolitical rag doll of non-Jewish nations. 

One could read the 137th Psalm from which we get the song, "By the rivers of Babylon". 

After dredging up ancient grudges about the actions of Esau's (or Edom's) children, who screamed for the destruction of Jerusalem, this lovely piece of scripture culminates in the benediction that goes, "Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction: blessed is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us.  Blessed is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks".

By Christ's time, the Roman Empire was being the bane of the Jews' existence, regularly crucifying dissidents (crucifixion being a sign of God-forsakenness) and forcing them to carry soldiers' wares, trade in currencies with the Caesar's face on their coins (which went against the Judaic ban on graven images), and countenance dietary differences and disagreements on circumcision. 

This is why the thing Jesus prayed for more repeatedly than anything else in his longest prayer was the unity of the coming multi-ethnic church - "that they may be one".

Non-Jews are often lumped together with the Greeks in the New Testament (which is written in Greek) because Rome's roads spread Greek culture and Hellenism around the ancient world. Greek culture revealed in homoeroticism, and the Roman Empire either weaponised it or steeped it in decadence - or did both by giving men unlimited access to the bodies of those subordinate to them in rank. With this power was the social right to treat women and male slaves "like women". 

It's said that before his Damascus Road conversion, Saul the Pharisee would have likely prayed a prayer that went, "Blessed art you, O God, for not making me a non-Jew, a slave, or woman". After his conversion, Paul the Apostle wrote, "There is now no longer Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor male and female". 

Ever since Moses proscribed "lying with a man as with a woman" (and John's Gospel warns that those who trust in adherence to Moses' rules will be accused by Moses on the Last Day), the Israelites' recognition of the general need for laws preventing the weaponisation of sex, as seen in Sodom and Gomorrah, stood in tension with the progressive urge to question why heterosexual relations were characterised as men enjoying "the natural use of the woman" as per Paul in Romans. 

READ | Siya Khumalo: But do you have to know God to be gay?

His purpose (in spelling out how everyone in his community thought about the sexual behaviour of the Greeks) was uncovering the cognitive dissonance that held their racism together, and induce a questioning of old assumptions about right and wrong. 

"What advantage then has the Jew?" he asks. "What profit is there in circumcision?" 

These questions call into question the cultural assumption that religious moralism is endorsed by God. 

Paul speaks of "sinning" (verb) when he quotes the questions he anticipates his interlocutors would ask, but of "sin" (noun, a nature) when he gives his own perspective, because the actions of others only bother us if our self-righteous natures don't bother us. 

The person doing the judging is the only sinner he or she ought to be concerned about, not "them".  Or as Paul puts it in Romans 2, which is the conclusion of the rhetorical trap he lays in Romans 1, "You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself". 

The book is a dialogue of perspectives, and they aren't all correct. 

Self-righteousness brings about tribalism, racism and homophobia, and in this "discussion", homophobia is seemingly commended long enough to lure the self-righteous into showing their hypocrisy. But what people who take that line at face value miss, is that they're endorsing a homophobia that once legitimised their own exclusion from the Christian church, as non-Jewish people. 

We, non-Jews, were once the "them" who were considered incapable of grasping the significance of Christ in God's dealings with the Jews because God supposedly handed us ("them") over to vices like "turning aside from the natural use of the woman". 

Genetically, non-Jewish female pastors have less than no leg to stand on preaching homophobic interpretations of the Bible. 

Religious law worsens self-righteousness, or as Paul puts it in Romans 5:20, "The law entered that sin might increase".   

If, like Elsdon, you have a divorce in your past (with allegations that you were unfaithful) the Matthew 19 discussion on divorce, remarriage and infidelity has a thing or two to tell you about gender-non conforming people.

Much of the problem, as I explained in "You Have To Be Gay To Know God" and to various groups consisting of ministers and theologians, is a flawed hamartiology (study of sin) matching incomplete atonement theories resulting in a systematic theology that worsens, rather than resolves, sociological challenges. 

We've seen this with slavery, apartheid and, lately, discrimination against the LGBTI community.  I'd be happy to flesh this out in person for pastors like Elsdon.