May you meet the Inclusive Church of Christ

In this article I am responding to an article that speaks eloquently about a struggle that more and more Christians are resonating with. However, it has been and is (emphasis, present tense) a very real struggle for many of us.

Still, none of us is beyond learning. And God is giving us a new grace in this age to fight with others who are also fighting.

Not many of us are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, or other sexually expressive affiliation. Not many of us that I know of, but the statistics tell me that my reality is not a true representation.

There are, therefore, many out there who are living a closed experience and, in the current context, I am not talking about those with secret addictions, the functional addicts in all strata of society. There are so many within the myriad forms of addiction that steal peace, kill joy, and destroy hope.

And I have to say this…it’s not just the addict who struggles. Almost all people have struggles. And when I talk about ‘struggle’ I mean a meaningful daily struggle, with nothing easy about it.

But an article by a gay man desperate for the church to stand up to help people like him, who, like all of us, need to find their way to God and inclusion within God’s people.

Would any of us stand in God’s way?

This young man could refer us to these words of Jesus from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 5:

30The Pharisees and their scribes complained to their disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with publicans and sinners?” 31Jesus replied, “The healthy have no need of a doctor, but the sick; 32I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

Verse 32, it’s all of us, anyone dressed in skins. Let us not call the LGBTI+ crowd particularly sinful and therefore call ourselves self-righteous. That’s what the Pharisees did: highlight everyone else’s sin while ignoring their own. Our task as Christians is to live real before God: our personal struggle (and each of us has one) is a cosmic challenge that only God can overcome. How defenseless are we? Jesus calls the sinner to repentance – a personal activity, for each of us, facilitated by an almighty and merciful God.

Verse 31, Jesus grants the Pharisees and scribes his truth (because it is not God’s truth) – ‘believe as you wish’ Jesus might say – because the sick are those who know they are sick – Jesus cannot help the ‘good’ person in his blind stubbornness; self-righteousness that threatens to reign in all of us. And this is not a comment on the vagaries of the disease, just that everyone is sick. Everyone! That is why everything should be included.

Blessed is the one who knows that he is sick, the one who knows he needs the Doctor, the one who looks for the hospital.

And our work, mine in my case, is simply to be a guide for a person who has not known God and who is looking to find him. They don’t need my unqualified opinions on the road. We can give them resources while we listen, but as we present ourselves before God, we will all be responsible. Our responsibility is not to inhibit anyone’s passage to the Christ.

Therefore, we listen. We feel in your anguish – a reality, so far and for the foreseeable future, of being alienated from God’s compassion for the vast grove of humanity.

Ours is the challenge of standing up, as the young man says. It will cause us conflict, of that there is no doubt. But our lives are no longer about us; they are about the Lord’s business.

And the Lord would never condemn them as our fears and preconceptions would.

I mean, as the quoted article suggests: “If you’re LGBTQI+ and need someone to talk to, I just want to offer you a listening ear.”