I have two male friends, both middle-aged, both of whose friendship and personality I treasure. They are both committed Christians, they both live a life of service, and they are both gay. One is a leader in a local church, one leads a non-profit charitable ministry. Both love Jesus very much, serve him and people around them effectively, and have lived with God a long time. After each struggling for many years with the fact of their gender orientation, one has chosen to live celibately (though with a male flat-mate), and does not refer to himself as gay, though everything about him declares it. The other one (less outwardly effeminate) has chosen to "come out" and lives in a monogamous sexual relationship with his male housemate.
Each has made his personal decision after much honest heart-searching, questioning, counseling, and attempts at reorientation. Each has now reached a place of peace in his identity in Christ and accepts the limitations each one's choices has brought about: on the one hand, a life without fulfilling personal partnership and on the other hand, ostracism from most of mainstream church.
Who am I to say categorically which has chosen "rightly" and the other "wrongly"?
Here are links to two brief 3-minute videos which discuss some modern viewpoints on homosexuality and Christians' response to it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYl6hbBYvqo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyweHjwLrYM&feature=endscreen
I find myself somewhere in the middle of the two positions so baldly stated in the first one. Even had I the best will in the world to do so, I cannot honestly affirm homosexuality as normal, natural and designed by God as part of original creation. I don't think one even has to believe in God or the Biblical account of creation to see the fallacies in this attitude.
Quite aside from the fact that mankind would have died out long ago had a critical mass of humanity been homosexually oriented, plain and simple biology teaches us that, for example, the orifice primarily used for male homosexual gratification was clearly designed for waste matter going out, not for foreign objects going in. (Have a chat with any doctor serving in a largely homosexual neighborhood and let him inform you of the rate of hemorrhoids and other common health issues specifically caused by this practice.)
The animal world confirms that mammals are, with a few strange evolutionary aberrations, clearly designed for male + female = the race continues to exist. Female/female sexual relationships also mean no babies, without extraordinary and "unnatural" measures. Arguments I have heard trying to prove that "animals are gay, too" have been largely specious and, to me, laughably far-fetched. I'm sorry, but that's been my (admittedly limited) experience.
On the other hand, I know too much to blindly believe that the Bible, in the form in which we now have it, is perfect, without fault and error-free. (This is not even what the doctrine of biblical inerrancy teaches, by the way, which refers to the original documents -- none of which are extant, so who can know? -- but it is how the term "inerrancy of the Scriptures" is commonly defined and held to by fundamentalists.) I do not worship Father, Son and Holy Book but Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who leads us into all truth. Sometimes said truth he leads us into is not containable in a collection of documents written at best 2,000 years ago, in other languages and cultures.
Every denomination and church grouping values some Scripture over others, and will even clearly violate (what appear to be) certain direct commandments, because we have differingly discerned some of these as culturally irrelevant.* Why these and not others? is the question that haunts any serious seeker of truth. And often, the answer is to be found not in lofty bursts of eternally-binding revelation, but in such banal roots as having inadequate understanding of the original culture or audience or situation, of taking too literally a story, hyperbole, parable or even joke; the fact that we are all, to some degree, inadvertently bound to our own forms of cultural blindness.
So when the Bible in the OT and some of the NT letters condemns homosexual practice as sin (though Jesus never mentions it one way or the other), I have to agree. I agree it is sinful in the sense that it is a symptom of brokenness, and all brokenness we experience in the world we live in is in some degree connected to the fact that we live in a fallen creation, in a broken world.
What I have come to believe is that homosexuality is, like so many other brokennesses we daily deal with, a result of the Fall and one of many broken forms of identity and/or sexuality. There are countless forms of broken identity/sexuality in the heterosexual arena as well, most of which are not named specifically in the Bible. Why is this one glitch somehow more sinful than another glitch? (The NT does not specifically prohibit twisted heterosexual men from beating or sexually abusing their wives, so should we assume that's okay? Rhetorical question.)
The argument of whether or not homosexual orientation is inborn or learned behavior has been hotly debated for many years by people much more informed than I. I don't intend to enter it here. But what I do know is that we are all imperfect. Some of us are born with genetic glitches which affect our lives negatively, such as a tendency toward certain diseases or physical or mental weakness. Some of us are raised in environments which negatively affect our lives; I myself was raised by two chain-smokers and as a result, many years later, I still have what is known as a "weak chest": a tendency for colds to settle in my lungs and turn to bronchitis (though I myself have never smoked). My ex was raised by religious emotional and sexual abusers, which of course negatively affected both his personality and his sexuality.
We are personally responsible for none of these things. I know there are people who choose to experiment with various forms of sexuality and lead a promiscuous lifestyle, which the Bible also condemns as sinful. But these two friends of mine, neither promiscuous, do not know themselves ever to have been different in their sexual orientation. As far as they are aware, they never chose this wiring-- in fact, as "good Christians" trying to live a holy life and believing themselves to be sinful, they both fought living it out. It remains, however, an essential part of who they are and how they are, whatever they decide to do about lifestyle.
The question may remain: who is right and who is wrong, of the choices each of my friends have made?
And my reply has to be: actually, that's none of my business. They have each made their decision before God as honestly as they know how, and they are responsible to him, not to me. Did Jesus' death on the Cross, his resurrection and his ascension really take care of the sin question once and for all, or did it not? Am I still required to measure up to a standard of law, however admirable, which is impossible to attain (see Romans), even when doing so violates my conscience --or my very being? Maybe I'm wrong, but isn't there such a thing as being dead right, and isn't that what Jesus consistently condemned in the Pharisees?
Even if a practicing homosexual Christian is considered to be "in sin", is he therefore my enemy? And even if he were my enemy, I thought I was commanded to love my enemy and do good to him. Am I not also in sin, every day of my life, often inadvertently but sometimes knowingly, and doesn't Jesus' blood cover me-- why not him? I don't believe I was invited onto the committee to decide who is "in" and who is "out" of the bounds of God's love and forgiveness.
Bottom line: My assignment is to love, not to judge. I love God, and I love both my friends-- and we all love Jesus. We each stumble forward trusting in the grace that we believe the Cross purchased for us. I know it's messy, but you know what?
That's the way life is.
__________
* If you think this too strong a statement, consider that in John 13:14 Jesus, after washing the disciples' feet, says: "So if I, your Lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you must wash each other's feet." This is a pretty strong direct command of our Lord and Savior, even though it's often translated more weakly as "you ought to wash each others' feet". Yet we in today's church have universally written this off-- legitimately, I think-- as applying to the humility expressed by the act and not the act itself; just as most churches have also -- with some very conservative exceptions-- come to the awareness that women covering their heads was an ancient cultural expression of a desired quality. We do not live in 1st-century Palestine, wearing sandals on dusty roads; nor is a woman with her head shockingly uncovered automatically considered a prostitute! It is the desired quality that matters, not a particular cultural expression of it.
In a similar vein, we still use literal bread and wine as a sacrament of communion (some are very particular to use only unleavened bread, yet tolerate grape juice. ??!!)-- when actually the intention of the gesture at the Last Supper was probably more that we remember Jesus' presence with us any time we eat together, making every meal, in a sense, a sacramental experience. Bread and wine, being present at every meal in that culture, were therefore ideal for this symbolic purpose.
I'm not against the fact that we do these things, just pointing a couple of them out. Every church tradition interprets various verses according to their overriding and often unexamined cultural values, and most of us simply accept as unbreakable truth valid for all time much in Scripture which is actually culturally irrelevant, negotiable or limited in scope.
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