Dear friends,
This week has been a busy one for the news. It’s hard to know what to say about the Supreme Court case handed down this week which everyone hastens to say is “not as bad as it seems” – the case of the baker who wouldn’t bake for a gay wedding – so I’ll focus not on the actual case but focus on how it seems. Though the legal factors may be so much more complicated, “how it seems” is that the religious right has something to celebrate and the LGBTQ+ community has something to worry about.
What worries me a lot in this case is the equation of homophobia with Christian practice. Christianity should not be equated with homophobia, because Christianity is diverse. Though the conservative churches may get more news coverage, so many churches like ours have fought long and hard to express our own religious practice: we ordain, marry, and affirm the leadership of LGBTQ+ people as a core commitment of our faith. We believe God calls us all, not in spite of our sexuality, but through it. The call to love and to marry someone – of any gender or sex – is a divine call, and a sacred obligation.
A more subtle problem, but a problem still is the equation of Christian practice with a kind of purity practice. Seeing the world as divisible into “lifestyles we condone” and “lifestyles we must loudly condemn” creates a shame-based religion focused on sin and its management, dividing the world into clean and unclean… and this is a problem even if we disagree on a baseline definition of what is and is not sinful. Refusing to associate with sinners is the behavior of Pharisees. It is precisely not the behavior of Christ, who was famous for hanging out with tax collectors and sex workers. Jesus deliberately spent time with, and shared food with, people who were known to be sinners, even people who were publicly considered evil. So someone today who, while claiming to be Christian, refuses to be “tainted” by association with a “sinner,” is practicing a religion contrary to Christ and the good news of the gospel. I could go farther into the book of Acts where the purity laws of food and drink are overturned, or into the book of Romans where Paul basically says “it doesn’t matter how correct you are if you’re a jerk about it” or any number of stories that illustrate this, but hopefully you get the point: we’re all human sinners, and trying to avoid contact with people you believe to be sinners makes you less Christlike, not more.
On the bright side, and close to home, I hope you’ll come to church in the next few weeks and admire the new set of banners created by the Youth Group which will be hung up this week. With HUGE thanks to Jim Allardice, Sloan White, and Cheryl Neely, this fantastic set of banners has been designed and painted by the youth to show MPC’s commitment to the rainbow. They include Bible verses chosen to highlight our commitment to Love. We laid the banners out on Sunday at youth group and blessed them. The youth prayed prayers including:
“I hope these banners will help LGBTQ people see the church could be an ally and not an enemy” “I hope these banners will make sure everybody feels included and welcomed” “I hope these banners will help people feel our church is a joyful and happy place” “I hope our world will become a safer place for people to be themselves”
May the youth lead us into the future. Every Blessing,
Talitha