Available Light

This morning my reading included the most boring chapter in the Bible to date, Numbers 7. I know that when I reach 1 Chronicles there are even greater depths of tedium to be plumbed, in those interminable genealogies, but today it was 89 (!) verses listing what each of the 12 tribes gave as an offering when the altar of the tabernacle was consecrated. Each of the TWELVE gifts are described in excruciating detail, and each of the TWELVE tribes gave exactly the same thing! Aaaarrrggghhhh! For the last couple of days, in Leviticus and Numbers, it has all been laws: laws for priests and laws for people telling each group how to set up and then how to run a system in which to keep themselves pure. It has been about establishing the dichotomy between sacred and profane, and how to police the boundary between the two. There are two very brief references to homosexuality in this regard, and there are lengthy and repeated references to the avoidance of touching corpses, either of humans or...

This picture hasn't got anything to do with anything. I took it when we were camped recently in Surat Bay. This last weekend I was in Auckland for the last of the hermeneutical hui that the Anglican Church has been holding over the past 4 years to address issues of Biblical interpretation as they apply to matters of sexuality. I hadn't been to any of the others, so didn't know quite what to expect. We met in Auckland's Holy Trinity cathedral, a quite lovely building that is, oddly, designed so that the best view in the place is the one from behind the altar. In other words, it doesn't draw the eye in toward the altar so much as lead it out, through the stained glass to the city beyond,  which is an interesting theo-architectural statement, and perhaps for the hui, a profound one. The past hui had addressed themselves to the usual Biblical texts used by those seeking divine authority for their views on sexuality. The arguments over those passages have all bee...