How the Church has Failed the LGBTQ Community
Mark 12:31 – Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
I was talking with my friend at church and the LGBTQ issue came up. “I love them but I don’t accept them,” he said. “We shouldn’t accept sin in other people.” Is he right? Should we, or should we not, accept sin in other people?
Well, we accept sin in ourselves, don’t we? Every day I see sin and failure in my life, and yet I accept myself. Why? Because God accepts me. God has accepted me into his kingdom. God has accepted me into his family. At the cross, my sins were placed on Christ and his righteousness was imparted to me. God chose me, forgave me, loves me, and shares his glory with me. In God’s eyes I am just as righteous as Jesus (2 Corinthians 5:21). Doesn’t God know that I’m sinful? Isn’t he aware that I sin every day? Yes – but he chooses to forgive and forget and accept me “just as I am.” He didn’t wait for me to overcome all of my sins before accepting me. If God accepts me despite my sin, how can I refuse to accept anyone else, including anyone in the LGBTQ community?
But my friend continued: “It makes me angry when the schools push the LGBTQ agenda on my children. They’re damaging my children and that makes me angry.” But I wonder what’s more damaging – teaching children that the LGBTQ lifestyle is acceptable, or teaching them that it is not acceptable? When schools teach them that it’s acceptable, our children are in moral danger. But when we teach them that it’s not acceptable, our children are in danger of prioritizing morality above love; our children are in danger of becoming as proud as their parents; our children are in danger of becoming self-righteous Pharisees who look down their noses at others.
I wonder why the church considers the LGBTQ community more sinful than everyone else. When I grew up in the 1970s the LGBTQ movement was well-hidden but moral depravity still abounded – illegal drugs and premarital sex were encouraged and even glorified. The church opposed these sins, of course, but its opposition was not nearly as vehement as it is today against LGBTQs. If you turn on Christian radio it’s hard to listen for more than an hour without hearing someone blast LGBTQs. Why the violent opposition?
A couple of years ago I attended a baptism and the preacher spent most of his sermon haranguing the transgender movement. I couldn’t help but be struck by the incongruence of the occasion. Why did the preacher decide to rail against the transgender movement at a baptism service? Why would he waste such a beautiful opportunity with such an ugly sermon? He could have preached about new life in Christ – he could have preached about commitment – he could have preached about many suitable topics but he preached about … the transgender movement??? My main reaction was disappointment for the young man who was baptized that day; I felt like his day was almost spoiled.
This summer I was at a weekend missionary conference that included three teaching sessions: (1) how to be a godly example, (2) how to develop a personal relationship with God, and (3) “The Transgender Tsunami,” complete with explicit photographs that were shown, I suppose, to shock the audience into outrage. Which one of these topics doesn’t fit? There were no sessions on prayer – no sessions on Biblical interpretation – no sessions on reaching culturally diverse communities with the gospel – no sessions on worship – no sessions on living in the Spirit – no sessions on building community – but there was time for an hour-long blast at the transgender community. Whence the rabid opposition? The evangelical church has lost its perspective, lost its way, lost its priorities, and lost its witness because of its emotional reaction to one particular sin.
Why does the church consider same-sex marriage as worse than
other sins? There are exactly zero verses in the Bible about same-sex marriage.
There are six verses in the Bible about homosexuality. Meanwhile, there are
over 150 verses about pride, over 70 verses about greed, over 100 verses about
hypocrisy, and dozens more on sins like complaining, selfishness,
unforgiveness, lack of love, disobedience, judging, gossip, lying, … the list
goes on and on. Why does the church spend such a disproportionate amount of
time focusing on a sin that the Bible is relatively silent about? It’s almost
as if Christians are trying to detract from their own failures by focusing on others.
Interestingly, although Jesus didn’t say anything about LGBTQs, there is a parallel in his teaching. During his time there was a group of people who were despised by the religious establishment, just as LGBTQs are despised by today’s church; a group of people who were considered a moral danger to society, just as LGBTQs are viewed by today’s church. In Luke 18 Jesus told a parable about these moral outcasts to the religious leaders of his day, and if Jesus were speaking today I think he would tell a similar parable. It might sound like this.
Two people went to church to pray. One was an evangelical Christian and the other was a homosexual. The Christian prayed, “Thank you, God, that you have separated me from this morally corrupt world and that I am not like gays, homosexuals, transgenders, bisexuals. What a danger they are to society! I go to church, I read my Bible, I pray, I tithe.” But the homosexual, who did not feel welcome in the church, stood at a distance and wept, saying, “Oh God, be merciful to me, for I am a sinner.” I tell you that this “sinner,” not the “Christian,” returned home justified before God. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.
In his original telling of the parable Jesus did not say that the sinner repented, asked for forgiveness, or changed his ways. He was justified before God simply because he was humble and recognized his sin and unworthiness before God. Jesus didn’t tell any parables about “The Tax Collector Tsunami” – instead he told a parable warning the religiously respectable not to judge others as their moral inferiors.
Am I saying that the gay lifestyle is okay? I wouldn’t say that any sin is “okay,” whether it’s sexual sin or one of the more “respectable” sins that the church tolerates and even sometimes encourages, such as pride, greed, materialism, consumerism, overeating, prayerlessness, etc. On the other hand, I would say yes, I accept the gay lifestyle, just like I accept all of the lamentable sins in my life and in the lives of my loved ones. As Martin Luther said, “Sin boldly” – he wasn’t minimizing the seriousness of sin but rather emphasizing the abundance of the grace of God. Our sins are forgiven – all of them, whether sins of the flesh or sins of the mind.
God’s word to the LGBTQ community is love, forgiveness, acceptance, and invitation. The church has instead delivered a message of judgement, condemnation, and rejection, thus failing miserably and shamefully as God’s ambassadors. As such, gays and transgenders have a better chance of entering God’s kingdom than today’s evangelical church (Matthew 21:31).
I don’t want to be like the church – self-righteous and self-satisfied. I want to be like the sinner in Jesus’ parable – relying on God’s righteousness rather than on my own. As such, I don’t have any right to judge others, whether they be church members, homosexuals, transgenders, or anyone else. God didn’t send Jesus to the world to judge (John 3:17, 12:47), and neither has he commissioned me to judge. God has been so gracious in loving me and forgiving me that I am compelled by his love to accept everyone. I welcome everyone and I leave judgement to God. I’m sad when the church rejects those who do not measure up to their standards. LGBTQs, like all sinners, need to repent – but the church needs it more because our sin is greater, because with more knowledge comes greater accountability. I pray that we will learn to love, forgive, and accept others as God has loved, forgiven, and accepted us (Ephesians 4:32).
Wow. There is much to unpack in this one.
ReplyDelete1. It is not necessary to be self-righteous to recognize that sin has a range of intensity to it, that some sins are worse than other sins. A study of history and the cultural collapse of civilizations shows a clear correlation between downward trends toward darkness and the disappearance of the halcyon days when the civilization was at its peak and some sins were virtually unknown in the general populace. Within my lifetime, I have seen this happen in America. In the 1950s, LGBTQ-XYZ was so much in conflict with the culture that it was unpopular to discuss it, let alone find it to be a front-line social issue. Along with the decades-long collapse of America, sexual perversion joined related behaviors that now have come out of the closet and are vying for open acceptance. At the same time, Good American Christians (GACs) are being influenced by the post-rational, post-discerning mentality that is pervading the milieu to not apply the Law of God to what is going on around them, such as the LGBTQ. What a contrast this is to the biblical all-stars such as David, who in Psalm 15 describes the person who lives close to YHWH (God): "... in whose eyes a reprobate is despised but who honors those who fear the Lord." Are those in the LGBTQ category reprobates?
It depends on how much free will they have left to change their way of life. These habitual behaviors are powerful, like drugs, and few who become deeply entrenched in them ever come out of them and usually die well before old age. These people have sold their souls to evil and not a few are involved in witchcraft and Satanism. They are so spiritually repugnant that scripture in places tells us to not have anything to do with them. (Start with the book of Jude.) It is not that they come across as raving maniacs (though many do); they can be quite intelligent and rational, yet live lives disjointed from the truth - a schizophrenic existence among the non-LGBTQ populace. To put it more generally, some people are so evil that in the interest of preserving civilization and any form of godliness, the godly remove themselves from such people. They are indeed a specialized mission field, like the guys who bring the gospel to pornography conventions. Even there, few are converted and what few do convert, too many of them lapse back into their old way of life. The freedom of their will has been intentionally damaged to where they become reprobate.
3. Finally, it is popular in church circles to say: "Hate the sin, love the sinner." But a little thought about this reveals its triteness. It isn't even biblical. The assumption of this bit of advice is that a person who sins and his sinful behavior are independent. Yet any clinical psychologist worth his salt can point out that habitual behavior forms a person's character, and what we are is, in essence, our character. In God's judgement, it is our character that summs up our overall behavior in life. In view of this, it is biblically consistent with human nature that David should write that the godly despise reprobates because the godly despise sin. If we despise it in ourselves, to be consistent we would also despise it in others, and if it constitutes what they are, then there is no real distinction between the sin and the sinner. We might have spiritually romantic notions about how such dregs of society can be redeemed and sanctified, but to suppose that this is the norm rather than the exception is to live in Disneyland.
I might add that if we start thinking about human beings as subhuman, lacking any real free choice, then we do not honor the freedom of will that God has allowed us to exercise by denying it in even the most sinful person. That person chose to be as they are; free will was and is being exercised. Genetics is no excuse for labeling people as subhuman, as lacking in free will, because it is free choice that triggers genetic tendencies. Those people who are genetically disposed to be alcoholics, for instance, still have a choice in whether they stay away from booze or not. Consequently, any genetic argument that LGBTQers have genes that overpower their free
ReplyDeletewill is only true if they are indeed no longer human beings with any free will. Yet at some point in the past, they still chose what to do with their lives.