Throughout my life, I have struggled internally with reconciling the fact that I am a man who has sex with men, and that I enjoy a relationship with Jesus Christ in my walk of faith.
I was raised somewhat Baptist, in that this was pretty much our family tradition, though we did not attend church much. Our family was from the South, so being Baptist was almost redundant. I don't even remember the first time I heard that as a gay person I was the "abomination," that those responsible for creating my society insisted that the God of the Universe hated me. Knowing I could not help who I was inside, I was shocked and terrified that God had created me to be an object of loathing, that my mere existence was a bother to Him and His universe.
For the rest of my life, that was a bell that could never be unrung. No amount of reassurance or excusing could make better the fact that a "holy" person had been okay with sentencing me not pnly to a life after death of burning for being gay and hated by God, but to a life in THIS body of being hated not only by God, but also by all the other humans who I saw supporting each other and everyone who was not my kind.
The act effectively placed me outside of the human race.
All this was done in the sacred quiet space of church after church after church. And it was done, I think, even before I was fully aware of liking men. Inside, I simply knew somehow that they were talking about me. From then on, walking into church made me feel like I was walking into a place meant to heal others, but that was meant to violate me, my soul, essentially like a continuous and public rape and humiliation by those who felt entitled to point out how they believed God felt about something inside the soul of another. They were entitled to say things that hurt little children, and to make them afraid of the Living God. Is this clear? that was behavior. There are some very serious injunctions about this in the New Testament.
So, I got to worship in a violated state, and since that first thing was somehow okay, any further violation must be okay too. The God of Love loved everyone else except me and the rest of my brothers and sisters living in outer darkness at the whim of church leaders.
I know Leviticus and Romans, and many of the other passages that supposedly talk about being gay. I also know there has been much work to place those passages in a kind of context to offer an alternative interpretation so that those verses do not have to lead to condemnation of we who are in the LGBTQ community. But I would like to offer something else here, a Bible passage that gives me peace in my heart with both being gay and being Christian, and allows me not to engage ever again with those who elect to condemn me. I have no interest in the argument, and no longer entertain for even one second the possibility that God condemns me. I simply reject this out of hand, eternally, and intentionally. I absolutely refuse the fight altogether.
This is my peace. Acts 10 presents the story of Peter's vision on the roof when Cornelius, a respected centurion, was sent to find him. In the vision, God said to Peter three times, "Do not call anything impure that God has made clean." By saying and doing this, God created a way for Peter to be in relationship with Gentiles. Of course the Gentiles did not stop being Gentiles and suddenly become Jews simply because Peter came among them. Yet, God elected to NAME them clean, even though the law before had caused Jews to call them otherwise.
I took this in. From then on, I could care less if someone chooses to call me the "abomination" and claims to be speaking for God. I claim that God made me Clean. God joined me with this vision in the sense that He led me to it. I know this in my heart. I offer anyone else to consider taking this in and see if the Spirit in them affirms the message in themselves that God has made them clean, that God has seen fit to bless and affirm "all of the animals on the blanket."
What's more, I consider that it is entirely possible that had God not made a way for Peter to get past Old Testament Law in order to associate with Gentiles, the gospel message would never have even been conveyed to those very Christians who today see fit to condemn homosexuals. They would have been excluded from the beginning. God chose to do something else.
I belong to a certain fellowship that has a saying about this kind of thing. It amounts to, "I resign from the debating society."
Peace.
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