I feel blessed to pastor a church that is recognized in the community as LGBTQI-friendly. (For those who, like me, don’t usually use initials other than when texting, that’s “lesbian/gay/bi-sexual/transgender/questioning/intersex.” If you don’t know what it all means, which is understandable, I recommend: the Internet.)
I believe I am fulfilling God’s calling by serving on a task force to address issues of gay teen suicide and acceptance in Fort Worth. If you are a non-Christian, you may look at this and think, “Of course. How can anyone who believes in a loving God do anything else?”
Me Then vs. Me Now in a Fight to the Finish!
But, ironically, if you are a Christian–if you were me in my teen and college years–you might look upon me with quite a bit more skepticism. “He’s given in to cultural bias and thrown the Bible to the side,” you might think.
I became a Christian as a teenager in the ’70s. Though I went to a Presbyterian (old PCUS) Church, evangelicals and Charismatics were my earliest influences. These were often very good folks, and their mentoring was important to me. It was taken for granted in those circles that the Bible was to be taken literally, and even though many of them attended my PCUS church, they tended to look askance at the “liberal” teachings the PCUS espoused about Biblical interpretation and social issues. I tended, even then, to be less “literal”-minded–after all, my dad was a college professor. I felt fairly confident, for instance, that evolution was right, even if it meant that the Bible wasn’t “literally” right. And because my mentors in faith tended more to Dr. King than Dr. Robeson, I was inclined to believe that social justice mattered.
But it was clear, no matter what, that your faith played out in your sex life–that a certain amount of propriety and restraint were expected of the Christian, and that certainly homosexuality was a sin that defied both propriety and restraint. It never occurred to me to think otherwise. Romans 1: 24-26, Paul’s condemnation of homosexuality as an expression of idolatry and licentiousness, was a text often preached or referred to in evangelical circles at that time. In retrospect, it seems to have been a regular topic far in excess of its importance even in Paul’s letter to the Romans, never mind to the total corpus of Scripture. One has to wonder why it was emphasized so much!
I Don’t Think I Know Anybody Gay… Oh Wait…
The first time I met a gay man (and knew it) was in college, when I met young man who’d been embarrassed when his roommate distributed an audiotape of him having sex with another man. (That, of course, has ramifications today, and in retrospect it’s a blessing that my friend had the ego strength not to crumble or take his own life.) I can’t remember why he came to me for “counseling,” if that’s what you would call it. I had the impression (probably rightly) that he was flirting with me, but also that he was troubled, and the only way I could think to help him was to pray over him and convert him to Jesus. I did that one night when we were walking a path on the woods and I felt he was getting a bit too familiar–I said we should pray right now that he comes to know Jesus. He left school at the end of that semester and I don’t know what happened to him since. I don’t even remember his name. I just remember being proud of myself for my evangelical fervor. I was a sophomore– a “wise fool.”
I was singularly naive in those years. Only in my senior year did I realize that my sometimes roommate and best friend was gay. I’d known it intuitively for some time, but it wasn’t an acceptable thing to know about him, so I’d never brought it to consciousness. And of course, those were the days when it would have been unimaginable for him, as an evangelical Christian himself, to admit his orientation. When he finally did, it resulted in his alienation from Christian faith altogether.
When I Was in Seminary School
It was only when I entered seminary, in 1981, that I began to entertain the notion that to be gay might be acceptable for a Christian. I suppose the fact that I was already oriented toward open-mindedness made it easier for me to consider this option. Presbyterian seminaries are by nature hotbeds of all sorts of radical ideas; at least that’s what The Presbyterian Layman says, so it must be true!
James Nelson’s book Embodiment was on everyone’s reading list. It espoused a theology of sexuality that was highly influenced by the Sexual Revolution and, while it built on Biblical understandings, often took them to extremes that made me uncomfortable. It seemed to me to make a backwards argument–that all sorts of sexual behavior was okay with God, so let’s go back to the Bible and prove it. And if we don’t like what the Bible says, let’s dismiss it.
That gets to the nub of the problem for the Christian. The problem is not so much whether homosexuality is acceptable in the eyes of God; rather, at issue is, what are we to do with the Bible if that’s true?
NEXT: The Challenge of Interpreting the Bible