The Bible tells a story of inclusion (Giovanni 10: 7-16)

Biblical reflections* of Austen Hartke ** published on his personal website (United States) on April 16, 2019, freely translated by Maria Alessia Nanna

Last February I had the honor of being invited to keep a homily at the Lutheran Church of Elk River, in Minnesota. A series of sermons were underway on how to read the Bible, they asked me to choose a recurring theme in the Scriptures; Obviously I chose the inclusion!

John 10:7-16

So Jesus said to them again: «In truth, in truth I tell you: I am the door of the sheep. All those who came before me were thieves and brigands, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the door; If one enters through me, he will be saved; It will enter, will come out and find grazing. The thief does not come except to steal, kill and destroy; But I came to have life and have it in abundance. I am the good shepherd; The good shepherd lays his life for the sheep. But the mercenary, who is not a shepherd and who do not belong the sheep, sees the wolf coming, leaves the sheep and runs away; And the wolf kidnaps and disperses the sheep. Now the mercenary escapes, because it is a mercenary and does not take care of the sheep. I am the good shepherd, and I know my sheep and mine know me, as the father knows me and I know the father, and I lay my life for the sheep. I also have other sheep that are not of this ovile; Even those I have to collect, and they will listen to my voice, and there will be only one flock and only one shepherd.

Good morning everyone and everyone! This morning I would like to start by telling you a story of when I was a child. In reality I don't remember this episode, but it is that kind of stories that your parents tell so many times that they become part of the myths and family legends.

I had to be about three years and, as they tell, one day my mother entered the living room and saw me while jumping up and down from our great blue armchair.

He immediately turned to me calling me with my full name, and said: "Stop jumping up and down from that armchair!". I obeyed, and my mother returned to her office. Ten minutes later, my mother heard a squeezed noise repeated by the living room, got up and returned to the living room, where she found me jump up and down from a smaller green armchair. “What did I just tell you??” He asked me, partly angry and confused about why I didn't listen to her. And apparently, I stopped skipping the time to indicate the opposite side of the room and say: "You told me to stop jumping on that armchair!".

Since then my mother has always said joking that, with such an eye for the quibbles, as a big one I would have become a lawyer.

In the end, however, I did not study law: I went to the seminary, surprising almost all the people who know me, because for the whole adolescence and the first years of my adult life I had felt pain and frustration because of the version of Christianity with whom I had grown up, who did not support LGBT people.

Now, after the seminar, and as a bisexual and transgender openly person, I spend a lot of time talking to other people of the Bible and the way we implement the rules and instructions we find.

When I speak in churches and organizations that do not know LGBTQ+issues, one of the first points that people raise are the verses that historically have been used against people of several sexuality and gender identity. We call those verses “the stick-verses”, because they are often used as a weapon to force LGBTQ+ people to silence or submission.

But, as you have learned during this recent series of sermons with the shepherd Nathan, the Bible is not a unitary text block, made in the same era, in the same place and with a meaning that never changes over time!

Since we Christians do not follow every single rule and suggestion of the Bible, we had to find ways to understand which parts of the Bible can be the most important or relevant for us.

One of the ways we have devised is to ask ourselves if a certain topic in the Bible is specific and appears only once or two, or if it is repeated several times in the entire canon of the Scriptures. When we read the Bible, it can be helpful to look for recurring themes.

As in the history of before, when my mother enters the room the first time and tells me not to jump “in that chair”, I am sure that I don't have to jump on that specific armchair, but I will have doubts regarding the other armchairs. Instead, when my mother enters the second time and makes it clear that it intends to all armchairs, a scheme is created that offers us more clarity.

We try to better understand this scheme by examining three different examples, all from the 19th chapter of the Levitic book. Let's start with Levitico 19:23, who says that You don't have to eat the fruit of a fruit tree for the first three years since it was planted.

If we seek the rules concerning trees in the rest of the Bible, we do not find other references to this three -year history: it is an example of a topic of the Bible that appears only once.

The second example comes from Levitico 19: 9, which says:"When you reap the messee of your land, you will not hire to the margins of your field and you will not collect the ears left behind your harvest". The next verse applies the same rules to the grapes of the vineyards, and explains that these parts of the field must be left to poor and immigrant people.

By examining the rest of the Bible, we see that this rule returns a couple of times; The most memorable examples are that in Ruth's book, where Ruth meets her husband Boaz, a foreigner, while he collects ears in his field, and Matteo 12, when Jesus and his disciples take wheat to eat from the edge of a field during Saturday.

So it's clear that there is a recurring theme in the Bible about leaving food in the fields for those who need it, but in a sense it's a medium theme. It's relevant, but you probably wouldn't put it on a list of the ten core teachings of the Bible.

The third example is from Leviticus 19:4, which says “Do not turn to idols and do not make gods of molten metal. I am the LORD your God.". Now, we know this is very important, right? It's one of the Ten Commandments, for God's sake! Worshiping idols and other gods is one of the difficulties that the Israelites stumble upon most often throughout the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, and continues to be a relevant theme throughout the New Testament and even today, despite our idols have changed over time.

Surely we can fit in “do not worship other gods” in a list of the ten most important themes of the Bible.

I took all these examples from Leviticus for two reasons. First, because many of the verses used against LGBTQ+ people come from this book and the next, Deuteronomy, so I wanted to look at some of the arguments that have the same place.

Second, because aside from the verses on sexuality and gender, we Christians tend to overlook these books of the Law, as they are not relevant to us. We read those verses about the fruit trees and the edges of the fields and say: "Jesus has abolished all this stuff, so we must not worry about rules on mixed fibers or seafood".

But, as we have seen, there are topics in these first books that return during the scriptures and are relevant for us, so we must be careful not to throw the child with dirty water.

The fact is this: the passages used against LGBTQ+ people exist. The prohibitions on homosexual behavior that we find in Levitician 18:22 and 20:13, for example? They exist, even if we understand that they have been written in and for a completely different time and place, with a tremendously different conception of sexuality.

But the number of times in which these comments appear on people with different sexualities pale comparison with the number of times in which the people of God is said to travel the path of inclusion.

The half dozen texts on people with different sexuality clearly fall in the category "It occurs more than once, but it is definitely not one of the main themes". The inclusion of people who were previously excluded from society, on the contrary, is one of the most important issues of the whole Bible.

Let's take the example of Ruth, which we remembered when we talked about gleaning. Deuteronomy 23: 3 explicitly excludes two tribes of people by law when he says:"The warning and the Moabita will not enter the assembly of the Eternal, none of their descendants, not even to the tenth generation, will ever enter the assembly of the Eternal".

But at the beginning of Ruth's book we are told that Ruth herself is a Moabita, and despite this she is welcomed by her mother -in -law Noemi to be part of the Israelite community. Ruth is even granted the honor of being one of the four women mentioned in Jesus' genealogy in Matteo! Without the inclusion of this woman, to whom the entry into the community should not have been allowed, we would not have had the same Jesus of which we read in the Gospels.

We think of eunuchs, people of non -compliant gender of the ancient world who lived outside the boundaries of sex and genre as they were interpreted at the time. Deuteronomy 23: 1 says that nobody, whose external reproductive bodies have been modified, should be allowed to join the Israelite community.

Yet, in one of today's readings, you felt what God said through the mouth of the prophet Isaiah: that decades after the writing of the Deuteronomy God changed the rules and welcomed the eunuchs, giving them a special place in the house of God.

The history of the Eunuchi continues in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 8, where we meet an Ethiopian eunuch, one of the first converted to Christianity, to which full belonging to the Christian community is granted, without the need to change anything of its kind or sexuality.

Of course, the prize for welcoming the greatest number of marginalized goes to Jesus himself, who constantly raised the people who, wrongly or reason, were considered "against the rules". For most Christian people the words of Jesus have greater weight of the other parts of the Bible, some of you may have even found a Bible in which his words are printed in red to underline their importance. When Jesus reaffirms a theme that you have repeatedly found in the rest of the Bible, you are sure that it is an important theme.

It is therefore not a surprise that, in today's reading from the Gospel of John, Jesus speaks once again of inclusion. Here it is painted as the good shepherd, the one who knows every sheep by name and continues to add new sheep to his flock! Our reading today begins at Versetto 7, but going back a few verses we discover that Jesus is addressing this sermon on the sheep to the religious leaders of the community, the people in charge of deciding who could be part of the community and who did not.

In verse 16 he says:"I also have other sheep that are not of this ovile; even those I have to collect, and they will listen to my voice, and there will be only one flock and only one shepherd".

With these words Jesus reminds us that it is not us who decide if we want these other sheep in our flock. In the end, he tells us, we will be a single flock with a single shepherd. Jesus shows us the entire scope of this trajectory that focuses towards inclusion, with one end anchored at the beginning in the genesis and the other in the prayer house of Jesus for all people.

And this is the reason why it is so important for us to be here, on this Sunday of reconciliation with Christ [1], to reaffirm the movement for the inclusion of all people, including those with different gender identities or sexual guidelines. Because, even if we are not the ones who decide who is part of the flock of Jesus, as a community we have the power to decide how other people will live their experience in the flock, here and now.

LGBTQ+ people growing in Elk River in Minnesota will see a church that focuses on a single verse, or will they experience the love of a community that lives the wide embrace of God, of which we repeatedly read in the Scriptures? Visitors will see a group of people intent on marking borders, or will they see the body of Christ to work together to make sure that all people can live a prosperous life?

Remembering ourselves of our commitment to love, and how this love manifests itself in one full welcome of the other, is the purpose of this day in the life of the Church. May God allow me to live this mission every day, for the rest of this year.

Amen.

[1] An initiative of some Lutheran churches in the United States for "Creating a religious celebration for all people loved by God, regardless of sexual orientation, identity and gender expression".

* The biblical steps are taken from the new Diodati version.

** Austen Hartke is the author of Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians, a book of theology and personal stories published by Westminster John Knox Press in 2018. He is also founder and administrator of Transmission Ministry Collective, a community online dedicated to the care, spiritual formation and potential of leadership of transgender Christian people, not binary, genderqueer and non -compliant. As a religious transgender person, Austen's greatest passion is helping other trans people and gender not in accordance with finding themselves in the scriptures.

Original text: "The Bible is a Story About Inclusion"-A Sermon On John 10: 7-16