I just reread a series of posts I made over a year ago about gay rights in an attempt to plumb the depths of the Christian stance. It’s always interesting to read yourself from a long while back. Very insightful to read things I wouldn’t otherwise remember saying or thinking. (It also makes me think that I would have to clean this blog before I run for political office, heh.) I suppose I agree with much of what I said then: I still don’t believe gays should be allowed to marry, or that a gay lifestyle is okay. However, I do think that my perspective on how I should approach the issue of gay rights has changed significantly.
Essentially my feeling on the matter is that it’s not worth writing about anymore. Looking back at my posts, considering everything, I just don’t think it’s what I want to focus on. This doesn’t mean I’m changing my position; it just means that, as a believer, I need to play defense on this issue, or deal with it on a need-to-talk basis. This fascinating interview with Rosaria Champagne Butterfield drove home how much overlooking the issue is really the key to dealing with it. If someone brings up the topic, looking for a fight, I’ve got to be like Jesus and hold them off with evasive answers that point to the deeper issues. Often Jesus refused to fall into the traps of the Pharisees and Sadducees when they laid out a controversial catch-22 and held a mic eagerly in his face. He transcended the issues. Taxes to Caesar. Marriage in the afterlife. What authority he did his ministry under. He was a master at bypassing nonessential issues to get to essential ones, and I should have the same approach.
The essential issue that I should focus on as a Christian isn’t homosexuality vs. heterosexuality–in fact it’s not sexuality at all.
Reading St. Augustine’s confessions this year reminded me that sexuality is something to be entirely submitted to the Lord. His conversion experience brought a commitment to total continence and lifelong celibacy. Wow. That’s not something you hardly ever see, at least with express intention, in the evangelical church. Yet it was widely practiced and regarded as superior in the 395 AD church. Is the heart of the married believer any different? No. Being married this past year (since June 2012), I have learned that even in marriage God calls us to lay sexuality on the altar. Whether one partner thinks sex is god or the other thinks it’s gross, or worse if they both err in the same direction, it takes the grace of God to realize that sex is a gift from him, and to have the willpower to stamp it “GOD’S” and let go of our “rights” in the matter.
Reading Out of a Far Country by Christopher Yuan made the final connection between this and the gay issue. He came out as gay and lived that way for several years, getting involved in drugs and drug dealing too. When he did come to faith, it was through brokenness, in prison, through the prayers of his mother. It wasn’t an intellectual decision: he reports his conversion as happening first, then it sort of occurred to him that he should give up drugs, and lastly, his heart already awash with the holy spirit, it dawned on him that his lifestyle was also under God’s say. Yuan never says that he doesn’t feel gay impulses anymore or that he has heterosexual feelings. He isn’t “happily married now with five kids.” Although I haven’t read him further to check, it seems his natural sexual orientation hasn’t changed much. But the most powerful thing that he said in the final chapter was, “I realized God doesn’t call us to heterosexuality. He calls us to holy sexuality.”
Augustine and Yuan brought me to a new understanding of Jesus’ words in Matthew 19:10-12:
The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”
Before I had eschewed the application of this passage to sexual orientation because I had heard it very poorly done by alleged Christians who used it as license for homosexual lifestyle. But that’s not the spirit. Eunuchs don’t have sex. The point is that people abstain from a sexually active lifestyle for various reasons. Perhaps Augustine is one who “made himself a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.” Perhaps Yuan is one who has “been so from birth.” (Here I think it unnecessary to split hairs between nature and nurture. My doctor friend Paul assured me that there is no “gay gene” and actually laughed at me for asking. The point being that the feelings or orientation is not expressly willed. And we must agree that this is often the case with those who encounter sexual impulses.)
This passage, together with that confounding one in 1 Corinthians 7 in which Paul recommends celibacy to marriage, seem to make it clear that sexual activity should not control the Christian, or even be assumed as a right or taken for granted. It is granted only to those “to whom it is given”. Christianity doesn’t elevate those who are married (in fact, perhaps the opposite). God ordains marriage as a holy institution between a man and a woman, but there is nothing about marriage or even the orientation capacity to enter it that is of substance in the eternal kingdom. You are not less or more based on your marriage status or sexual orientation, as long as that sexuality is submitted to him and sanctified by him.
The issue with gay rights is the gay agenda, not the people, because the agenda is an ideology that elevates the right to a lifestyle over the message of Christ, that we must lose our life to find it again in him. Sexuality is a smokescreen. It just happens to be a huge part of how humans are wired, and thus a litmus to the heart, but like every single fiber of our heart and every synapse of our mind, it must be buried with Christ in death, until it is raised with him. What part of us will we withhold from God? We will always withhold when his spirit has not overcome us, and we will never withhold when it has.
Thus the essential issue worth chasing, the issue to which all issues return, is an issue of the heart, the love struggle between man and God, the Gospel. In short, I have decided to make my life’s voice more about the gospel and less about issues like gay rights. Of course there is a place for engagement with culture and for articulating the Christian response to things. Yet I am encouraged by the memory that we and our kingdom are not of this world, and that the way to make social change is to champion this one simple message, Christ crucified, and let it wreak havoc on every other sphere.
Ben Taylor 