This week has been a busy one for the news. It’s hard to know what to
say about the Supreme Court case handed down this week which everyone
hastens to say is “not as bad as it seems” – the case of the baker who
wouldn’t bake for a gay wedding – so I’ll focus not on the actual case
but focus on how it seems. Though the legal factors may be so much more
complicated, “how it seems” is that the religious right has something to
celebrate and the LGBTQ+ community has something to worry about.
What worries me a lot in this case is the equation of homophobia with
Christian practice. Christianity should not be equated with homophobia,
because Christianity is diverse. Though the conservative churches may
get more news coverage, so many churches like ours have fought long and
hard to express our own religious practice: we ordain, marry, and affirm
the leadership of LGBTQ+ people as a core commitment of our faith. We
believe God calls us all, not in spite of our sexuality, but through it.
The call to love and to marry someone – of any gender or sex – is a
divine call, and a sacred obligation.
A more subtle problem, but a problem still is the equation of
Christian practice with a kind of purity practice. Seeing the world as
divisible into “lifestyles we condone” and “lifestyles we must loudly
condemn” creates a shame-based religion focused on sin and its
management, dividing the world into clean and unclean… and this is a
problem even if we disagree on a baseline definition of what is and is
not sinful. Refusing to associate with sinners is the behavior of
Pharisees. It is precisely not the behavior of Christ,
who was famous for hanging out with tax collectors and sex workers.
Jesus deliberately spent time with, and shared food with, people who
were known to be sinners, even people who were publicly considered evil.
So someone today who, while claiming to be Christian, refuses to be
“tainted” by association with a “sinner,” is practicing a religion
contrary to Christ and the good news of the gospel. I could go farther
into the book of Acts where the purity laws of food and drink are
overturned, or into the book of Romans where Paul basically says “it
doesn’t matter how correct you are if you’re a jerk about it” or any
number of stories that illustrate this, but hopefully you get the point:
we’re all human sinners, and trying to avoid contact with people you
believe to be sinners makes you less Christlike, not more.
Closer to home, and nothing to do with cake, the youth group at my church designed and painted some beautiful rainbow banners to show MPC’s commitment to
the rainbow. They include Bible verses chosen to highlight our
commitment to Love. We laid the banners out on Sunday at youth group and
blessed them. The youth prayed prayers including:
“I hope these banners will help LGBTQ people see the church could be
an ally and not an enemy”
“I
hope these banners will make sure everybody feels included and
welcomed”
“I hope these banners will help people feel our church is a
joyful and happy place”
“I hope our world will become a safer place for
people to be themselves”
May the youth lead us into the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment