#cherry pickers

Looking for Cherry Picker Hire In Essex? Get in touch with our local team now!

The Cherry Pickers: 1940

July 1940. Berrien County, Michigan. "Cherry-picking season. Family of migratory fruit workers from Texas." Medium format acetate negative by John Vachon.

Hey! Thank you for the ask. I couldn’t sleep so I’m glad I got thiss 💕💜✨☺️🙌🏽

Hibiscus 🌺: Where would you want to go on your next vacation? Iceland or Ireland or Bali

Hey there! I totally get where you’re coming from. Everyone does in many ways “cherry-pick” from the Bible -- it’s a huge text and while maybe ideally we’d sort of focus on all of it, it’s just not doable to do so; we’re going to have favorite passages, stories that resonate most with us. To me, that’s not a bad thing -- the Spirit of God is alive and at work in each of us in unique ways, and when that includes speaking to us through scripture it’s a beautiful thing that She leads different people to different passages. 

Then again, when those of us who affirm being LGBT+ and hold that the content of the Bible does not mean that God condemns us are accused of cherry-picking, it’s usually with a bit of a different connotation -- that we’re just “ignoring” verses like Leviticus 18:22 or Romans 1:26-27. I highly disagree with this accusation.

I do not ignore Romans 1:26-27, or 1 Timothy 1:10, or any of the others -- I engage with them. In fact, in the huge scope of all the Bible verses there are, I probably give the “clobber claim” passages too much of my time! I have researched them, I have read them in their original Hebrew and Greek, I have prayed and discussed and read books. And I have concluded that some of them -- like 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 -- have fallen victim to mistranslation, and others -- like Romans 1:26-27 -- are indeed speaking badly about mlm sexual relationships, but that context is key to understanding why they do so and what it means for us today. 

I think when we’re accused of cherry-picking, it’s because we choose to interpret the Bible in context rather than claiming something like it all being the direct word-for-word will of God for all people in all times and places. We’re “cherry-picking” to them because we look at Leviticus 20:13 and say that yes, maybe it is outlawing sex between men, but it’s addressing a specific group of people in a specific time and was never written to apply to me. 

But we could reverse it and claim that they’re “cherry-picking” for not behaving as though, say, Leviticus 11:9-12 applies to them because they eat shrimp. Or because Jesus says in Luke 18:22 to sell all that you have and give it to the poor, and they own stuff, they’ve “cherry-picked” around that verse. We could say that, but I wouldn’t. Because just like anyone else they’ve made interpretive decisions. They’re not “ignoring” those verses; they’re looking at them in context, looking at the bigger picture of scripture -- a work that was written over at least a thousand years by multiple people! -- and deciding how to apply it to their own lives.

We might also ask those who say you can’t affirm being LGBT+ because the Bible says being gay is a sin if they think that slaves should submit to their masters, since verses like 1 Timothy 6:1 (the same book as one of the clobber claims!) says so. Some might say yes, alas -- but most would say no, that was a different time and even a different “kind” of slavery than chattel slavery, and we see God’s larger picture of love and justice for the oppressed as meaning that God doesn’t will slaves. After all, Galatians 3:28 says there’s no longer slave or free! (as well as no longer male and female, would ya look at that -- it’s almost like different portions of the Bible “contradict” each other because it was written over a long span of time by human beings.) If they understand the context around those passages, why is it so hard for them to comprehend the context around the “clobber claims”? (And if you want to read my discussions on that context, check out the “But what does the Bible say?” section of our resources page and particularly this post.)

No one really takes the Bible “literally.” It would be preposterous. Jesus would literally be a gate, as well as being a slain lamb with seven horns and seven eyes, and God would literally be a rock. We all know how to read interpret metaphors, as well as how to read in context. 

There’s a big difference between taking the Bible “literally” and taking it seriously. We can interpret scripture -- in fact, God invites us to wrestle with Them and with scripture! It’s meant to be a living text, through which the living Spirit can communicate with us for our fullness of life -- not a lifeless thing where every single opinion of every one of its human authors has to be accepted as also being God’s opinion / will for everyone. 

You might also find some posts on our FAQ helpful, such as this one on how to respond when people say we’re using the Bible to “justify our sin.”