The Priority of Ministry in the Debate about Homosexuality

There are some interesting, unexpected twists in the Bible. For example:

Jesus defies theological tradition and heals people on the Sabbath, claiming that the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.

Peter and the council in Jerusalem accept the idea that uncircumcised Gentiles are as favored by God as the Jews, after Peter shares his story of witnessing the Holy Spirit fall on his new, non-Jewish, God-fearing friends. (Acts 10-11)

Paul pushes against multiple religious sensibilities when he tells both Jewish and Gentile Christians to let their convictions guide them regarding eating meat that has been sacrificed to idols.

These are examples of how theology is impacted when preceded by ministry.

Jesus preferred people over theological tradition and scandalized his opponents. Peter engaged with the Gentiles in Antioch long before Paul developed a theological framework for what had happened there. Paul’s concern for how Jews and Gentiles were going to live as one people as followers of Jesus formed his thinking about religious dietary regulations.

I’ve been talking to some people (again) about the various controversies regarding same-sex marriage and the place (or even the possibility) of gay people in the life of the church. The polarizations that have resulted from the larger discussions out there have done little except to fragment churches, denominations, and people.

We in the west tend to sort things out by starting with the abstract (theories and theologies) and then moving toward some sort of ministry practice or standard of behavior. But what might happen if we began by engaging with real, live people instead? That isn’t to say that having theological convictions isn’t important; it’s that theological convictions should arise out of our engagement with Scripture and with what we believe that God is doing in the world.

Denominations have crafted two polarized responses to same-sex marriage, with any number of variations in between them. One pole is grounded in particular texts of Scripture and denies gay people membership in the church. The other operates out of a conviction of God’s love for all people and fully embraces gay people and affirms gay marriage. They both begin with a theological standard and follow with a standard of behavior.

I am curious about what would happen if some of the leaders in these various groups sat down with some gay people who claimed to be followers of Jesus, and asked them to talk about how they saw the spirit of Jesus at work in their lives? If there were couples at the table, they could be asked how they were experiencing and demonstrating the presence of Jesus in their relationships. Then others in the room could offer their own testimonies. I wonder if the people would be challenged in the way that Peter was challenged when he saw the Holy Spirit at work among the Gentiles? Or would the room just be silent?

I’ve had such an experience. I have spent quite a bit of time with some devout Christian friends who were also gay. I have heard their testimonies and stories, of encounter and faithfulness, of deep struggle and pain, of joy found in salvation and in the presence of Jesus. We have prayed together and prayed for others together.

At the same time, I was raised with some very traditional and negative views about homosexuality. A long time ago I had to start living between the tension of my received convictions and what I was seeing in the lives of my friends. This has not been abstract for me—the process began in earnest when I became a pastor and there were gay people who came to my church. These were not people with some kind of political agenda. They were, like me, people who wanted to orient their lives around Jesus.

I’m hoping that some folks will rise up—people like the apostle Paul—who will help us with a responsible, theological way forward. We need someone who is willing to revisit our Scriptures without simply editing out the parts that offend. We need someone who is willing to take on the risky task of exploring what God might be doing in some unexpected places (there’s a lot of that in the New Testament, as I recall) without simply declaring that all is okay, everyone is okay, and let’s all just get along (I’m pretty sure that none of us is okay. That’s why we trust in a lot of things about God’s grace, mercy, forgiveness, and the need for reconciliation).

There are precedents for this kind of thing throughout church history. It’s never been easy and it won’t be easy now. That is, if anyone is willing to do it.

Church Chicks and Bible Boys: Time to Play Nice

I’ve been seeing a number of blogs (particularly Rachel Held Evans) and articles (like one in Christianity Today) recently about women’s roles as teachers in the life of the church. It appears that the conversation has been stirred up by a podcast released by John Piper, who feels strongly about restricting or even forbidding women to teach if a man is present (but what if he’s present but dead? Can a woman preach at a man’s funeral? Maybe, if no living men are there).

I tend to not wrestle much with this issue, since I resolved it some time ago for myself. I believe that such restrictions come from a misinterpretation of certain texts of scripture, and I also work for a theological seminary that supports women and men equally in roles of ministry and leadership.

Some claim that Dr. Piper is revealing his own personal hang ups regarding the female body. I can’t really speak to that because I’ve never talked to him about the subject, but I have heard him declare his views about other things, and I suspect it’s more about him wanting to preserve the integrity of scripture—at least, his interpretation of it. While I take different views from his on many subjects related to Christian faith, I have to respect his desire to be true to scripture.

However, there is a problem with this. There is a long history in the church of crashing human lives against our theological interpretations, thinking that we are being faithful to God in the process. Jesus ran into this with the religious leaders of his day, who thought that the very work of God could be limited and restricted by their interpretation of Sabbath Law. Jesus scandalized them when he said, “The Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath.”

When Peter experienced his dramatic vision and then encountered the group of God-fearing gentiles in Antioch (Acts 10), the falling of the Holy Spirit on the people ran cross-grain to his understanding of scripture. After all, gentiles were unclean, and this new story, for Peter and his friends, was a distinctively Jewish story (after all, Jesus was Jewish). So it didn’t make theological and biblical sense to him that the gentiles would receive the Holy Spirit—just like Peter—without prior incorporation into the life of Israel (including circumcision, etc.).

Yet, Peter reported the story to his fellow Jewish leaders in Jerusalem (Acts 11) and they ended up affirming the inclusion of the gentiles in the emerging church (although they backslid a little later on). But their affirmation didn’t come about on exegetical grounds; it came phenomenologically. In other words, they didn’t base their decision by revisiting scripture. It came on the basis of Peter’s testimony of the experience he had in Antioch. It would be Paul who would come along later and provide the biblical basis for all of this (see Romans and Galatians).

So here we are now, still wondering how it can be that women are claiming to be filled with the Spirit, hungry for knowledge, sensing a call to be teachers, leaders, and even pastors, but are being crashed against a hermeneutic (interpretation) that is claimed to be immoveable.

I know of respected theological seminaries that do not support women in teaching or church leadership roles, but will allow them to enroll in their school and even pursue the Master of Divinity degree. Some women have reported to me that they were frequently reminded by their professors (sometimes in humiliating ways) that their role in the church had to remain limited or they would be immersed in sin and stand outside of God’s favor. I asked these women if their schools gave them a tuition discount since they couldn’t exactly use the degree that was awarded to them. They said no.

I find it difficult to believe that this exclusionary conversation is still going on. Perhaps I’ve been in the opposite world for so long that I forget how relevant the topic is for so many. I’m sad about the pain that this brings to women in the life of the church.

We really need to stop submitting ourselves unquestioningly to biblical interpretations that imprison human lives. Jesus did this quite frequently with his theological opponents. The apostle Paul had to revisit the biblical narrative on a number of topics, and we are all glad that he did. So is the door closed on that process? Yes, I suppose it is, if indeed the Holy Spirit no longer works in the world.

Maybe all that stopped in Antioch. But I don’t think so.

Homosexuality: On Being Human

A friend of mine once invited me to go with him to see a movie in Hollywood. It was an Indie film at one of those cool, small-venue theaters, and was about a Mormon family dealing with the news that one of the sons was gay.

Another man was planning to join us that day. I had met Tom (not his real name) once or twice before, and knew that he had recently made the determination that he was gay. He was about 40 years old, single, and had been struggling with a lot of identity issues in his life. He had come to the conclusion that the source of his problem had been the denial of his sexuality.

So off we went on a Saturday morning, stopping for breakfast at a tiny Hollywood deli, and then landing at the theater about 20 minutes early. The other two had decided against the original movie choice, and instead opted for a dark mystery. That was fine with me. I like mysteries, especially dark ones.

As we were waiting, Tom and I started talking. He knew that I was, at the time, a Christian and a pastor, and he launched into an unsolicited defense of his newfound sexuality. He observed how some people think that homosexuality is a result of some childhood trauma or neglect, but that wasn’t true. People are just born that way and there’s no disputing it, he said.

I hadn’t actually been disputing anything. I was just reading movie posters and thinking about popcorn. But I felt like I’d been baited, and I knew I didn’t want to go down some no-win street with him. So, I dipped into my few remaining memory banks and remembered something from a systematic theology class I’d taken, and said this:

“Tom, I’m not smart enough to know who’s born with what and who gets things forced on them along the way. But I really can’t start my conversation with anyone in that place. I want to start as co-humans, made in the image of God. That’s something we share in common.”

Tom didn’t even respond to me, but at least, I thought, we’d gotten off that track.

We watched the movie, went to lunch, and even saw a movie star or two while we ate. Then we took off for home, but the freeway was jammed because there had been an accident somewhere off in the distance. What should have been a 40 minute drive ended up taking two hours.

But it was a very interesting two hours. Tom opened up his life (again, unsolicited) and poured out stories of abuse, neglect, and pain that he had suffered as a child. He described the sense of isolation and alienation that he had been experiencing as an adult. We talked together now as friends, hearing stories and entering into shared human realities.

I don’t know if Tom was really gay or not. I don’t know if he was just looking for some kind, any kind, of label to give his life a framework. But I do know that, on that day, homosexuality wore a real human face, not a caricature.

About a year or so later, I was doing a series of surveys for my doctoral project, asking all kinds of people about their perceptions of their own spirituality. I asked Tom to participate, and he agreed. When I asked him some of the questions on my survey, he didn’t tell me about his spirituality being based in friendships, family, mountain climbing, or a vague intuition about something “out there.” He told me about his trust in Jesus, and offered up a pretty clear Christian testimony.

Didn’t see that one coming. Go figure.

Gay Marriage: Convictions and Ministry

The tension between religious convictions and ministry is nothing new. For centuries followers of Jesus have visited people in prison, even though the ones imprisoned may have broken laws to get there. They have cared for people ravaged by plagues, putting themselves at risk of infection, even as the general populace assumed that the sickness was some sort of divine act of judgment. Jesus’ call for his disciples to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them is a relational tension that most of us find difficult but necessary to our Christian witness.

Roy Hattersley, a UK journalist and atheist, marvels that a Christian leader he knows holds views toward homosexuality that Hattersley finds ridiculous, yet he marvels that the man also goes to the margins of society and cares for those very people whose lifestyles have landed them in the dark and degraded shadows of civilization. Hattersley notes that he and his like-minded friends do not do that sort of thing. Faith, he observes, does breed charity.

I read a journal article once that speculated about first and second-century slaves finding a place in the early church. Some of those slaves—both male and female—might have been forced into prostitution. That would have been a challenge for those early faith communities that would have found prostitution to be an abominable practice. Speculation or not, it is not a big leap to imagine those small churches bringing ministry to the lives of ones that unfortunate, living in the tension between conviction and ministry.

In the early days of the emergence of AIDS, a number of Christians visited gay people languishing in the horror of that yet-undefined disease, and cared for them in the midst of the suffering patients’ fear and anguish. In an LA Times story that I read at the time, the caregivers refused to answer questions about judgment on the suffering. They came only to care for the ones in pain.

I predict that, once same-sex marriage becomes commonplace, that some Christian communities will bar the doors and make their stand. That’s their prerogative. Others, however, are likely to respond with an intuition birthed of the Spirit of God, and bring ministry in places that require a collision with their convictions.

There are serious implications to this kind of response. If churches reach out in care to gay people—including those who are married to each other and have children—are they participating in the ministry of Christ? Has Jesus gone before them to those places? In doing such ministry, are people of faith finding that Jesus is present in the most unlikely of circumstances, this friend of sinners?

Followers of Jesus have, since the unleashing of the church 2,000 years ago, put themselves in places that are risky, scandalous, and dangerous. We shouldn’t expect that we, in the perceived safety of the western world, should be sheltered from that call to ministry.

Following Jesus may not be for the faint of heart. But it clearly is for those who have a heart.

Same-Sex Marriage and Ministry

According to a recent TIME cover story, the fight for same-sex marriage is close to being over. A CNN Religion Blog article reveals changing attitudes toward homosexuality on the campuses of Christian colleges. With an increasing number of Americans—especially younger Americans—declaring their support, it’s probably all over except the final state and federal blessings.

The debates, however, are certainly not over, especially in the Christian community. And the debates are challenging. Do we stand firm in our traditional convictions, or do we, as some have argued, wake up and join the movement of a culture that may have already left us behind? The questions are difficult and are fracturing Christian communities and denominations.

If, indeed, the marriage ship has sailed, maybe some other questions need to be entertained, regardless of the position that is held regarding same-sex marriage: What will ministry look like in this new landscape?

There are a number of possible future scenarios to consider as well.

A married, gay couple walks through the doors of your church. Is there room on the cross for them to put their hands next to yours and mine?

A child comes to our Sunday School with a neighborhood friend. When his two mothers show up to visit, will that child be able to share his church with them?

When your state approves same-sex marriage, will a gay couple be able to find spiritual counsel at our churches when their relationship hits the rocks?

When a gay couple moves into the house next door to mine, will I be able to answer the question: Who is my neighbor?

The church has had to deal with difficult questions before. In the early days, the first Jewish Christians had to come to grips with Gentiles who were being encountered by the Holy Spirit, but lacking a Jewish identity. It took them a while to learn how to be one family of faith. Not too long ago, divorced people had a tough time finding a place in the church, and the church didn’t know (in general) what to do with them. Now we do ministry. Many churches have divorce recovery groups, and have learned to explore the depths of God’s love, forgiveness, and grace when it comes to remarriage. Some—but not all—have even worked through the issue theologically.

We will inevitably, regardless of our position on same-sex marriage, have to deal with the ministry implications of this sea change in our culture. That the culture is rapidly changing is indisputable. And while culture influences our perspectives on our faith, it cannot be the sole criteria for interpreting our faith. Culture is, however, our context for ministry.

How will we do this?

A Writer's Confession

Here’s the deal: I love to write about God, Christian faith, theology, ministry. I love exploring ideas that have caused people like me to question and wrestle and struggle with God. I hope that my own reflections and investigations will help others along the journey of faith in Jesus.

But I also like to write scary, thrillerish, fictional stuff. I write about ghosts and vampires and zombies, and I do that for two reasons:

Reason One: Supernatural monsters offer a great context for exploring theological themes related to good and evil, heaven and hell, life and death (for example, one of my novels is actually asking about the nature of evil and hell; its sequel deals with human trafficking). The monsters always symbolize something and the characters in the story are given the space to navigate the drama while engaging with deeper issues.

Reason Two: I just like scary stuff. Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve loved spooky stories and, especially, scary movies. There was an L.A. based series in the 1950s and 60s called “The Million Dollar Movie.” It would run for a week at 7:00 in the evening, showing the same movie each night, Monday through Friday. When our TV guide would arrive, I’d scour it to see what was playing. When I spotted Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, The Wolfman, or Invaders from Mars (I didn’t care that the Martians all had zippers down their backs), I’d plan to watch every single night until my eyeballs exploded.

But if you write about monsters (and even the human, serial-killer type monsters), then you have to write some gory stuff or people won’t stay in the story. Let’s face it: Vampires bite necks and drink blood, and then get impaled through the heart with a wooden stake. Werewolves stalk people, tear them apart, and then get killed by a silver bullet before they have time to turn back into an accountant or a hedge fund manager. You get the idea.

I recently read a couple of fresh chapters from one of my novels-in-process to two women I know, each at a separate reading. When I was finished, each gave me the same startled look that suggested they were thinking, in the imaginary bubbles over their heads, “What in the world is wrong with you?” It’s probably a legitimate question, which I hope will go unanswered.

There is an important precedent for this kind of thing, however. Here are some hideous, gory examples:

A woman gives shelter to a high-profile refugee, and then pounds a tent stake through his head and into the ground while he sleeps.

A woman is gang-raped, and then her body is dismembered and the butchered pieces sent around to leaders in the community.

A national leader’s duplicity is revealed, and he is impaled alive on a tall, wooden beam and left to die a slow, painful death while the people of the community watch.

These rather graphic, bloody examples, are found in the Bible (in order: Jael and Sisera, Judges chapter 4; the Levite’s Concubine, Judges chapter 19; the execution of Haman, Esther chapter 7).

I fear that Christian fiction can be overly sanitized because publishers worry that graphic scenes or language will cause Christian consumers to close their pocketbooks. Maybe Christian novelists even fear that they are crossing a moral line by engaging in such writing. One thing is for sure: Religious editors for centuries have certainly overlooked the graphic nature of the Bible. And yet I hear it’s a pretty big seller.

This is not an argument for gratuitous violence and rough language. But if we who love stories don’t allow the characters to act true to their character—even if that character is dark and dangerous—then we’re not telling our stories well.

Having said all that, the second book in my vampire trilogy—A Body Given—is now in publication (Kindle and Nook to follow soon). If you like that sort of thing, see for yourself if the creep factor serves the story well. It’s too late for me to change it anyway.