Potentially queer. . .

Apparently the Lutheran Church in Sweden (at least the Diocese of Västerås) has published a pamphlet to help those teens who are GLBTQ and who feel confused or oppressed because of it.  In the pamphlet, the teens are encouraged by Biblical examples of potentially queer people (they must be gay because they don't fit our stereotypes of straight).  It is a creative concept, for sure, but hardly anything more than the worst kind of novelty and unfaithfulness to the Bible.  It just might have been aided by the fact that the most recent Bishop elected identified as a gay man.

While one would have to give the effort a high grade for ingenuity, the whole thing offers teens legitimately wrestling with their desires nothing less than the worst kind of fake comfort and leaves them even more vulnerable than ever.  What kind of foolishness would presume to identify Biblical characters who just might be like me?  Instead of this, we have a Savior who was tempted in every way as we are tempted but without sin.  Should not this be the hook on which we hang our angst, our fears, our desires, our guilt, and our shame?  Is not the key here that we are not victims of our desires but in Christ are given strength for self-control?  Of course, this is not politically correct but it is Biblically true.  I am not sure when the decision to jettison Biblical for relevant and current was made but I am sure it was long before Bishop Mogren's consecration in 2015.

All of this, however, is less radical than Nadia Bolz-Weber's foray into sexual ethics called Shameless.  Her approach is not a tinkering with the Biblical morality and vision of sexuality but a wholesale rejection of it and of all the Christian morality that has come from it.  According to Bolz-Weber, it is always and only about sex and everything else must be submissive to sexual desire.  Hers is a shocking rejection of traditional Biblical, Christian, and Lutheran teaching of marriage, family, sex, and desire and the only thing more shocking is that she continues to be the diva of edgy and emergent ELCA style Lutheranism for youth as well as adults.  How long this can continue will depend less upon Biblical counterpoint than upon the stomach of ELCA people.  Apparently they can tolerate more than I thought possible.

I guess the Scriptures have been more true than we think since it is clear from Genesis that when sin entered the world it was first about sex and that remains one of the central issues where the sinful infection continues to cause us problems.