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January 19 - February 6, 2019
John called himself the Beloved Disciple in his gospel. What a way to describe yourself! And yet it dawned on me that John took that title because he really understood how much Jesus loved him and how unique their friendship was. Calling himself the Beloved Disciple had nothing to do with pride but everything to do with the kind of relationship John experienced with Jesus.
As I consider it now, I think I was trying to alleviate my sense of rejection by using sexual feelings. Lust was my attempt to define and control intimacy on my own terms and to put it back in familiar territory. It had very little to do with Mark himself.
As C. S. Lewis says, “It would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. . . . We are far too easily pleased.” I had to learn to find acceptance in God.
This is an incredible perspective
Henri Nouwen observed something similar in his own life: “I kept running around it in large or small circles, always looking for someone or something able to convince me of my Belovedness. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the ‘Beloved.’ Being the Beloved expresses the core truth of our existence.”29
It often seems, from my vantage point, that the gay rights movement isn’t always interested in the rights of all gay people but rather is interested in the rights of the majority who believe in same-sex marriage. If there were real diversity and concern for everyone within the gay community, there would be acceptance of those like me and the churches that agree with my choice to embrace celibacy.
No Christian should carry a cross alone, and if someone is, the church is not fulfilling the law of Christ, as Paul talks about in Galatians 6:2.
The church in the West has been involved in a long and complex conversation about sexuality, which has not been very public, open, or positive for many.
The church needs a new apologetic, a way of thought and life that neither demonizes nor elevates the same-sex desires facing many faithful Christians. For this to happen, our minority living in the tension of grace and truth needs to speak up. Our experiences and stories are valuable and ought to be stewarded for our brothers and sisters to understand us.
This new apologetic must further permit us to form a deeper Christian response to homosexuality, one that honors both Scripture, the wisdom of tradition, and people’s real experience. At the same time, such a response needs to recognize that we are waiting, that one day our final redemption will come and a great horizon of heavenly intimacy will be opened to us in Christ and his church, but that day has not yet fully dawned.
Let me sketch seven reasons why I hold to this position. The first is scriptural authority.
But who's interpretation of it?
The Holy Spirit’s moral empowerment
Ive never heard this phrase before
My second reason is theological accuracy.
The word gay does not necessarily refer to sexual behavior; it can just as easily refer to one’s sexual preference or orientation and say nothing, one way or the other, about how one is choosing to express that orientation. So, whereas “stealing Christian” describes a believer who actively steals as an acted behavior, “gay Christian” may simply refer to one’s orientation and nothing more.
My third reason is to be prophetic.
The opposite of homosexuality is not heterosexuality. It is holiness.
The fourth reason is related to identity.
My fifth reason is reconciliatory.
Christians have built a prejudiced stereotype and generalization of the gay community. Promiscuity and sexual orientation must be separated in our thinking.
My seventh and final reason is invitational
I had so many questions raised by these relationships. Was a broken heterosexual marriage not centered on Christ superior to a transgender couple seeking Christ for their new lives? Was a Christian view of masculinity that excluded people who didn’t fit the stereotype really any better than a view that exalted gay sexual identity above Jesus’ call to discipleship?
Appeals to our human experience were not enough to convince me. God’s vision for marriage was profound and beautiful. I could not dismiss it.
Unless we learn how to accept others without affirming everything, we have lost the art of conversation, because we’re suppressing our honest opinions. We can accept and affirm people without agreeing with and affirming all of their desires or beliefs or accepting their actions.
Compared with eternity, homosexuality is a momentary desire.
you are not ultimately celibate, gay, or any of these titles or labels. While they are part of your reality now, the ultimate reality is that you are betrothed to me. My love is your true identity.
I am often asked by Christians, “What can we do to better love our LGBTQI neighbors?” While there are many issues that need serious attention, most of them stem from a Christian failure to really listen and love. Instead of creating a safe place for people like LGBTQI Christians to share, we tend to react from fear, not from the security of the gospel.
When we can move beyond seeing homosexuality and same-sex desire as part of a culture war we must (or can) win, we may finally see the people behind the smokescreen of identity politics, truly loving them with the kind of love God has shown us.
Being gay is not about having gay sex. That is a moral choice separate from gay identity.
Jesus said, “Whoever lives by believing in me will never die” (John 11:26). He offers this gift of eternal life to every person, even to an atheistic young activist in a pub in the gay quarter of Sydney. That is my story. I could die to my identity and my desires only when I knew God had given everything for me to know him.
Jesus bought my body on the cross, and my body is not mine to do with it what I will. My ethical stance on gay sex doesn’t define me, nor does it disqualify me from being part of the gay or Christian community. Even if you disagree with my conclusions—what I sincerely hold out as hard fought truth to you—the fact remains that God loves you and desires relationship with you. It’s only in this love that we know who we are, and have true moral knowledge.
Whether you agree or disagree with my conclusions, I recommend you keep searching with God, while prioritizing the importance of Jesus Christ through the Scriptures, reason, and Christian tradition.
Jesus is clarifying that for a male and a female to become husband and wife—by leaving their families behind and becoming sexually one, forming a new kinship unit—that is not just “how things normally go” but how God has made them and wishes them to be understood: what scholar Bernd Wannenwetsch has called “the norm as ought.”39
God does not discriminate, but he calls believers of all kinds to a standard. While Jesus’ death and resurrection is the only source of right standing with God, the early church ruled that all sexual immorality was still forbidden.
We are all broken worshipers, regardless of our orientation or identity.
None of us have the right to judge, but this does not change the righteous standard we all fall short of. Jesus alone met that standard for
N. T. Wright states, “There are no surprises on this in the Bible. For Jews, homosexual behavior wasn’t an issue [because it was assumedly out of bounds], except as part of a larger whole to which Jesus refers in traditional biblical terms. For non-Jews, such as those addressed by Paul, it was an obvious issue, since every possible kind of sexual expression was well known in cities like Corinth and Rome (there is a popular belief just now that the ancients didn’t know about lifelong same-sex relationships, but this is easily refuted by the evidence both literary and archaeological).”40
our behavior either does or doesn’t align with our original role to give proper worship to God according to the image in which he made us.
N. T. Wright states, “People often suggest that since Paul believed in grace, not law, all the old rules were swept away in a new era of ‘tolerance,’ but this is a shallow and trivial view. Paul (and most early Christians known to us, right through the centuries) stuck with the bare essentials of Jewish morality: no worship of idols, no sex outside marriage.”47
Reading these passages is very hard for anyone who is gay or same-sex attracted, but Wesley Hill reminds us, “One of the most striking things about the New Testament teaching on homosexuality is that, right on the heels of the passages that condemn homosexual activity, there are, without exception, resounding affirmations of God’s extravagant mercy and redemption. God condemns homosexual behavior and amazingly, profligately, at great cost to himself, lavishes his love on homosexual persons.”48
when I realized that God did not create humans as male and female as a statement to oppress LGBTQI people or because God is a homophobic projection of our culture (although, without our idols removed, God can and has easily become so). Rather, as the author of Genesis writes and then Jesus reiterates, God created us as male and female so we would reflect his image together.
The implication is that Adam needs Eve, and Eve needs Adam, in order to image God. They cannot socially or biologically work without each other. They are incomplete without God and without each other. They need each other’s diversity. Together they both make up the original humanity. Without each other, they are lost, incomplete, and unable to fulfill God’s commands.
Sam Allberry says, “If marriage [between a man and woman] shows us the shape of the Gospel, then celibacy shows us the sufficiency of it.”52 Marriage is at the heart of the kingdom that Jesus came to bring into this world.
The church itself became an alternative family structure that didn’t fit societal norms, by embracing the minorities the ancient world looked down on, including slaves, women, and sexual minorities like the eunuch from Ethiopia. For its entire history, the church has always created and fostered diverse community structures, whether monasteries, missional communities, or small cells of believers like the Celtic priories. They are an essential of church community, not just add-ons to “family” churches.
John was the only disciple of the Twelve who was at the cross when Jesus was abandoned by his other followers and friends. This is witnessed in John 19:26: “When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold, your son!’ ” (ESV). We see Jesus forming this first kingdom nonnuclear family through the spiritual bond he shared with John and Mary. The church is a family bound not by physical lineage but by the spiritual bond of knowing Jesus.
When we look at the covenant friendship of David and Jonathan, and of Jesus and John, we see that marriage is not ultimate or even the greatest form of intimacy that can be experienced, as is often wrongly communicated by the church and our society at large. Rather the love of friendship is the greatest of the loves. There is a long and rich Christian tradition that has prized this. Of course, marriage is profound and contains friendship itself, but the point here is that a life of celibacy as a gay man does not, as I thought originally, cut me off from the intimacy I was made for.
The lie I had believed was that I must have gay sex to be whole. Like many gay people, my outrage at the church for denying gay marriage came from the belief that sex is a requirement for human flourishing. I came to realize that gay marriage, for a Christian, is an oxymoron, as marriage is framed by God in the Scriptures as solely between a man and a woman. Claiming it can be anything else is to argue from scriptural silence. The practical realit...
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When we in the church elevate marriage or romance above God, we fail to see the prophetic paradox of Jesus’ own life.53 Jesus broke this sexual idol by living as “[a eunuch] for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:12). By adopting this marriageless existence, Jesus embodied a prophetic stance against the rejection of sexual minorities from the temple in Jerusalem, as well as in Greco-Roman society. Not only that, he lived a sexual life that was defined by the restored future, not the broken present. Side B Christians (and other singles) imitate Jesus in this way. We become eunuchs for
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My story has taught me that as Christians, we have the privilege of showing the world what it looks like to no longer live under the constant oppression of desire, especially sexual desire.
I contend that when God says in Leviticus 18:22, “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable,” he does so for a reason related to his image, not just for the sake of ritual purity.
Paul teaches that exchanging the image of God for another image in anything we do (as expressed in male-male and female-female pairing, as Paul outlined in Romans 1) represents a rejection of God himself. As the Center for Faith, Sexuality, and Gender states, “The Fall has corrupted God’s original intent for human sexuality in all persons; therefore, all people—straight or non-straight—experience corruption in their sexuality.”59 Any departure from God’s intention for sexual expression in marriage misses the mark.
The God-honoring parts of gay relationships can be enjoyed within God’s vision for friendship. Human beings can live without sex, but we cannot live without love. God calls us to repent of sinful sexual relationships. I have many friends who have left gay marriages or relationships to follow Jesus.
