The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor's Journey into Christian Faith

by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

The following Sunday, I started to go to the RP church—and not for research. That morning—February 14, 1999—I emerged from the bed of my lesbian lover and an hour later was sitting in a pew at the Syracuse RP Church. I share this detail with you not to be lurid but merely to make the point that you never know the terrain someone else has walked to come worship the Lord. Even though I felt like a freak in that church, I was drawn to keep going back.

My transgendered friend’s words were still weighing heavily upon my heart. Who is this Jesus that he heals some but not others? Is it right to pray for healing when, from the Bible’s perspective, I was to repent from my sin? Does God hear prayers that are not construed in the terms he lays out in the Bible?

And if he was real and if I was his, I prayed that he would give me the strength of mind to follow him and the character to become a godly woman. I prayed for the strength of character to repent for a sin that at that time didn’t feel like sin at all—it felt like life, plain and simple. I prayed that if my life was actually his life, that he would take it back and make it what he wanted it to be. I asked him to take it all: my sexuality, my profession, my community, my tastes, my books, and my tomorrows.

The Bible told me to repent, but I didn’t feel like repenting. Do you have to feel like repenting in order to repent? Was I a sinner, or was I, in my drag queen friend’s words, sick? How do you repent for a sin that doesn’t feel like a sin? How could the thing that I had studied and become be sinful? How could I be tenured in a field that is sin? How could I and everyone that I knew and loved be in sin? In this crucible of confusion, I learned something important. I learned the first rule of repentance: that repentance requires greater intimacy with God than with our sin. How much greater? About the size of a mustard seed. Repentance requires that we draw near to Jesus, no matter what. And sometimes we all have to crawl there on our hands and knees. Repentance is an intimate affair. And for many of us, intimacy with anything is a terrifying prospect.

When Christ gave me the strength to follow him, I didn’t stop feeling like a lesbian. I’ve discovered that the Lord doesn’t change my feelings until I obey him. During one sermon, Ken pointed to John 7:17, and called this “the hermeneutics of obedience.” Jesus is speaking in this passage, and he says: “If anyone is willing to do God’s will, he will know of the teaching, whether it is of God or whether I speak from myself.” Ah ha! Here it was! Obedience comes before understanding. I wanted to understand. But did I actually will to do his will? God promised to reveal this understanding to me if I “willed to do his will.” The Bible doesn’t just say do his will, but “will to do his will.” Wanting to understand is a theoretical statement; willing to do his will takes action.

In my case, my feelings of lesbianism were familiar, comfortable, and recognizable, and I was reluctant to give them up. I clung to Matthew 16:24, remembering that every believer had to at some point in life take the step that I was taking: giving up the right to myself, taking up his Cross (i.e., the historicity of the resurrection, not masochism endured to please others), and following Jesus. The Lord made it clear to me that I had to make some serious life changes.

At this time, I was just starting to pray that God would show me my sins and help me to repent of them. I didn’t understand why homosexuality was a sin, why something in the particular manifestation of same-gender love was wrong in itself. But I did know that pride was a sin, and so I decided to start there. As I began to pray and repent, I wondered: could pride be the root of all my sins?

In it, God is comparing Jerusalem to Sodom and saying that Sodom’s sin is less offensive to God than Jerusalem’s. Next, God tells us what is at the root of homosexuality and what the progression of sin is. We read here that the root of homosexuality is also the root of a myriad of other sins. First, we find pride

Second, we find wealth (“fullness of food”) and an entertainment-driven worldview (“abundance of idleness”).

Living according to God’s standards is an acquired taste. We develop a taste for godly living only by intentionally putting into place practices that equip us to live below our means. We develop a taste for God’s standards only by disciplining our minds, hands, money, and time. In God’s economy, what we love we will discipline.

Third, we find lack of mercy

Fourth, we find lack of discretion and modesty (“they were haughty and committed abomination before Me”).

Pride combined with wealth leads to idleness because you falsely feel that God just wants you to have fun; if unchecked, this sin will grow into entertainment-driven lust; if unchecked, this sin will grow into hardness of heart that declares other people’s problems no responsibility or care of your own;

Importantly, we don’t see God making fun of homosexuality or regarding it as a different, unusual, or exotic sin. What we see instead is God’s warning: If you indulge the sins of pride, wealth, entertainment-lust, lack of mercy, and lack of discretion, you will find yourself deep in sin—and the type of sin may surprise you. That sin may attach itself to a pattern of life closely or loosely linked to this list. While sin is not contained by logical categories of progression, nonetheless, sin is progressive.