(Genesis 1:26-27, Jeremiah 2:9-13; Romans 1:16-32)
In addressing this passage from Romans, we should probably begin by clearing the decks: this passage is not about homosexual activity. It addresses homosexual activity, but that’s neither the focus of the passage nor its purpose. The focus is Paul’s explanation of how and why this world is broken; homosexual sex is just a symptom.
What we need to see, if indeed Romans is a theological retelling of salvation history, is that what we have beginning in verse 18 is the Creation and the Fall. That’s why Paul draws so intentionally on the language of Genesis. He’s laying out the universal disaster of human sin in order to make it clear that salvation comes through Christ alone. For him, the relationship between Jews and Gentiles in the church is a major concern, especially as it seems to have become a problem in Rome, and so his key point to this is that Jews and Gentiles stand on equal footing before God. Thus in verse 16 he declares that the gospel is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” There is a distinction, but no separation.
And thus Paul says in verse 18 that the wrath of God is revealed—it’s shown to be active, it’s seen in operation, unfolding in human history—against all human ungodliness and unrighteousness. This isn’t just Gentiles, or even uniquely true of the Gentiles, as he’ll make clear in chapters 2-3. No one is innocent; all are guilty.
Now, when we think about sin, we tend to think about sins—we focus on particular acts, and argue about how bad they are, and maybe try to get something taken off the list. Paul goes below the surface to the root of our sin: idolatry, the choice to worship something other than God. Even for those who don’t have the Scriptures, there is enough reason to acknowledge and worship God just in this world that he has made; we do not fail to worship God out of ignorance. When the sinful heart comes up against the truth of God’s existence and his character—and the idea that such a God would have the right to expect things of us and to make demands of us—it suppresses that truth. The root impulse of sin is the desire to be the sole rulers of our own lives, and thus to acknowledge no god that we haven’t chosen for ourselves, on our own terms. All the people and goals and desires that mean more to us than God are expressions of the central desire of our sinful nature: to be first in our own lives, to bow to no authority but our own.
There’s an old saying that the man who represents himself has a fool for a lawyer; it’s also said that he has a fool for a client, and both things are true. How much more, then, is he a fool who has himself for a god? As we’ve seen, if we turn away from the one who spoke the world into being, we become spiritually deaf; if we reject the one who said, “Let there be light,” and there was light, we are blinded by the darkness of our hearts; if we refuse to accept the one who is Truth and is the source of all wisdom, there is nothing left for us but lies and folly. And against the terrors of the world, there is left no defense, and no option but to worship them in hopes of somehow appeasing them.
If we alienate ourselves from the one who made us, we cannot know who we are; if we must be gods to ourselves, we cannot be truly human to ourselves, and thus we cannot truly know what it means to be human. In this, I think, is one of the subtlest forms of idolatry, and one which is increasingly coming out into the open and taking center stage in our culture: the idolatry of identity. We worship the right to decide for ourselves who we are, to determine for ourselves what defines us. Anything connected to that becomes an inalienable right, because it’s part of who we are; no question or challenge is allowed.
That, of course, is why Romans 1 is so controversial in Western culture. I lived five years in Canada; if I chose to preach on this passage there, I could be accused of a hate crime and put on trial by one of their Human Rights Commissions, so-called. Why? For being “anti-gay,” or whatever terminology they might use. For attacking people for their “sexual identity.” There’s the key word: identity. The desire is definitive.
This isn’t just about sex, though; we see it all over the place. Our culture likes to redefine sins as diseases—thus, for instance, a disobedient child who throws a temper tantrum anytime he’s told “no” isn’t a kid who needs to be disciplined so he learns to grow up, he has ODD (oppositional defiant disorder). He’s not a sinner, he’s just sick. This is a trick we use to avoid admitting that we’re sinful, but it does more than that—it gives us an identity in our sin. This approach teaches us to name ourselves by our besetting sins, and allow them to define us. Which, honestly, is pretty twisted.
Beyond that, think of how we tell people who we are. We identify ourselves by our work—I am a pastor—or by our relationships—I am Sara’s husband, I am Lydia’s father (and Rebekah’s, and Bronwyn’s, and Iain’s). We identify ourselves by our country—I am an American—and our political party. We identify ourselves by our gender, and many of us identify ourselves by our heritage, including that aspect which we wrongly call “race.” We identify ourselves by where we went to school—IU or Purdue? All these “I am” statements are statements of identity—they are all examples of us defining ourselves outside of who we are in Christ. That doesn’t mean all of them are therefore idolatrous, as if it were somehow morally different for me to say “I am a pastor” versus “I pastor a church”; but they often are.
I’ve certainly known men and women who found their primary identity in being married—or in being single, whether they considered that positive or negative. I’ve known more than a few people who truly defined themselves by their political party. I’ve seen folks who were so concerned about what it meant to be a man or a woman that they considered that to be the primary fact about themselves. And yes, there are those who think that who they want to sleep with is absolutely essential to their inmost being.
Now, obviously, some of these are more central to who we are than others. We are created male and female by God, and so this is a fundamental part of who we are, far more profound than whether you voted for Nixon in ’72 or Kerry in ’04. Regardless, if we belong to Christ, that is our primary identity; that is what defines us above all other things. Everything else—even that we are male and female, which is a reality God created before the Fall, when we were still perfect—everything else is secondary. If we find our identity first in any of these things rather than in Christ, that is idolatry.
Anything that we think is essential to who we are (and thus to our well-being) is something we will defend against anyone and anything that seems to threaten it—even God. If I find my identity in being a pastor, my ministry won’t be the ministry of Christ, it will be all about me. If your idea of what it means to be a man or a woman—because that’s really where the identity issue lies, in our interpretation of that fact—if that is most important to you, everything else will be distorted or denied to fit that. And, yes, to anyone who believes their sexual desires are who they are, any suggestion that those desires might not be in accordance with the will of God is going to feel like a rejection of them as people and a vicious attack on their very souls.
Even so, if we’re going to preach the gospel clearly to our culture, we have to begin where Paul begins, here and in Acts: by exposing, naming, and confronting its idols. We have to help people see that what they take for freedom is really slavery, and that they aren’t really who they think they are—they were created to be more, in Jesus Christ.