(Ir)religiosity

I wrote an article on homosexuality for the MoSAIC blog, a subsidy of Reconciling Ministries Network, the other day. Here is the full text of the article. You can also read it and the comments on the MoSAIC blog.

I am confident that 50, maybe 75 years from now we will have resolved the “gay issue” as some call it. We will have reached a consensus and moved on. It will be a non-issue, instead we as a church will likely be splintering over another hot button issue. In fact, I imagine my grandchildren and great-children will look back on my generation with the same sort of wide-eyed amazement and disbelief that I feel when I look back on my ancestors who participated in slavery, denied women the right to vote, and promoted white supremacy. They will wonder why in the world it took us so long to shake free from our oppressive self-imposed myopia of denying the reality that God uses all persons even those of different sexual orientations. They will wonder, like many have since Constantine officiated the wedding of the church and the nation-state, why the church, who should always be the first to decry injustice and oppression, once again remained silently and paralytically complacent with the diseased status quo.

But that does no good for us now as we are wrestling to guarantee the rights of all persons regardless of sexual orientation and we are fervently fighting to ensure that God’s grace is never, ever limited by human parameters. So, what to do?

When faced with these challenges, I think perhaps the best thing we can do is turn to the narrative of scripture, the ongoing, unfolding story of God in which we are graciously invited to participate. This is tricky because many have and will use scripture as a tool of exclusion, as a proof-text to deny persons God’s grace. We’ve all heard the quotations whether they be taken from some obscure collection legalisms found in Leviticus (and I find it quite interesting that persons are willing to deny homosexuals rights based on this rubric, but are unwilling to follow the rest of the purity laws) or from one line Paul wrote in Romans which when situated within it’s context is likely condemning sexual promiscuity rather than a particular orientation.

On the subject of sexual promiscuity, I find it fascinating that many of those who are so worried by what they call “the homosexual agenda” (I don’t even know what that means) rarely if ever point the same finger of judgment towards sexual promiscuity among heterosexuals. Furthermore, it is very hard for me to take evangelicals, who argue that homosexuals are “destroying the family,” very seriously when statistics show that the divorce rate among evangelicals is significantly higher than most other religious demographics in the US.

But I digress. Back to scripture.

Rather than pulling a few verses out of context as a means of proof-texting, I propose that we take a more holistic view of God’s story in and with God’s people. And on this issue I can think of no better example than that of the early church in its growing pains struggling to discern who was in and who was out. When read together, the entire New Testament following the life of Jesus is an account of early church leaders struggling to make sense of God’s universal grace, the in-discriminatory offer to participate in the life of the divine, and join God’s redemptive action within the narrative of history. And they wondered, who is right, the Jews, or these newish Jews that call themselves Christian? What about the Gentiles, do they need to be circumcised? Should they eat kosher? Should they keep all the purity law? Who’s in the “in” group and who is in the “out” group? How can we parse God’s grace?

And of course the truth is you can’t parse grace and we’re all quite grateful that ultimately Peter, James and others decided, as Paul wrote in Romans 8, that nothing can separate us from the love of God. Absolutely nothing. Yes, we are very grateful indeed because if they hadn’t come to this conclusion most of us wouldn’t be Christians and we would still be adhering to strict ancient laws. All were welcome into the fold of God’s family; Jew and Gentile, male and female, circumcised and uncircumcised. Grace is liberally offered to all.

So, given that history, I think it would behoove us as a church to take a serious look at how we are parsing God’s grace today and the “in groups” and the “out groups” we have and continue to construct. If we’ve learned anything from scripture it is that God is always jettisoning our finite groups and categories. If we’ve learned anything from our history as God’s people it is that we love to cast ourselves the part of being God’s gatekeeper, deciding who is in and who is out, who is worthy and who is unworthy. But of course, God needs no gatekeeper. In fact, God has done away with the gate completely. We don’t live under that model anymore. We live under grace. And all are invited to be a part of the story; all are invited to be a part of God’s creative process.

One of my favorite passages in the New Testament is Galatians 3:28 where Paul conveys this message most explicitly, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Because I believe that Christianity is inherently contextual–indeed, that is the very essence of the incarnation–and because I believe it is the task of the church and of the Christian to interpret and re-interpret the scriptures within their contemporary worlds, I can’t help but wonder how Paul might write that verse were he here today. Perhaps it might be something like this, “There is no longer graced or ungraced, there is no longer gay or straight, there is no long heterosexual or homosexual; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

I could go on and talk about Jesus’ life and his welcoming the unwelcomed, accepting the unaccepted, and loving the unloved, enabling the disenfranchised, but I won’t. We know the story. At least I think we do. Perhaps we know the story, we just don’t believe it. Perhaps we need to be converted to the true essence of the gospel, to our high and noble calling to re-imagine the world, acknowledging that all persons, regardless of sexual orientation, are invited to respond to grace and to participate in God’s work in/with/to the world nurturing this alternative reality called the kingdom of God.

Lord, help our unbelief.