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February 08, 2006
Matt has asked us all not to sit on the fence as regards gay people. He happily quotes from an op ed in Yes Weekly, which has picked up on the Graffiti controversy and is now exhorting all us Greensboro folk to see the light.
People in Greensboro purport, according to Matt, not to be fence sitters (after all we were one of the first cities in NC to screen Brokeback Mountain says the Yes op ed), so discrimination like what happened with the Graffiti ads should never have happened (even though he admits that Graffiti is from WS after all). And I suppose we as a community would be rising up to support gay marriage too if we weren’t “really” the fence sitters the Yes op ed purports we're not.
And here is the big question posed to us by Yes magazine: “What’s it gonna be, Greensboro? Are people capable of falling in love with the same sex welcome in our neighborhoods, our stores and sidewalks? Or will we resort to the provincialist position of fearing what we don’t understand, condemning what’s different?”
Putting aside for a moment the feeling that that paragraph was written by a thirteen year old on LiveJournal, we’re left after reading the Yes article, of which Matt approves, with the obvious fact that the agenda here is the total mainstreaming and concomitant cultural acceptance of the gay and lesbian and transgender lifestyles, both personally and institutionally, and that anything less than that is discrimination.
Well, I write to say that that is both not fair but shallow. Once again, for example, the “in your face” controversial aspect of the ad rejected by graffiti ads, a private company, is made to equal discrimination against gay people, tantamount to not welcoming people on our sidewalks, an obvious reference to the days of racially segregated sidewalks or deference black people had to pay to white people when passing them on sidewalks.
There we go again: people who stand in the way of the gay and lesbian agenda are bigots.
And once again the word “homophobia” shows up, even if from the mouth of the gay Graffiti ad employee. The charge is still there implicitly: the public is full of homophobes, so we can’t run the ad. And we know that how?
And yet again, this charge of “discrimination” once again glosses over the profound and significant and well thought out and deep moral problem posed not only by gay marriage, but by the mainstreaming of the gay lifestyle, for people of many beliefs and faiths. It is a shallow and disrespectful dismissal of these people to treat them as being tantamount to racial bigots. It is just not fair or right.
There is no escaping that this issue amounts to a major battle in a “culture war.” But one wonders if it is possible, given that we do in fact live in a community together, to have discussions with some measure of mutual respect and less demagoguery. It may be that there is no way to debate this in a civil fashion, and that in the end this will be a nasty knock down drag out battle with unkindness and demagoguery and stereotypes and false accusations thrown out on all sides. I hope a way can be found to debate this in a civil and constrained and mature matter. Right now today, I am not hopeful. I have personally come to think that the Graffiti ad deal was a set up. I could be wrong. That is my suspicion. No I cannot prove it. It just feels like a pawn in their game.
Comments:
Beth. I suppose I know the answer, but how has your congregation dealt with these issues?
Me: I am not sure what you mean. There is a difference in how I or we as Christian citizens interact with certain political/cultural/moral issues and how we as a church interacts with those same issues. Give me an example and I'll try to answer you more precisely.
Beth: I guess what I'm asking, is based on the question Ask is posing. Not knowing if your church has dealt with it or not, I feel compelled to ask. I may be a little hypocritical here, but I would expect your congregation to leave overwelmingly to the conservative side. That being said...Say someone came to your church this Sunday driving their 93 Volvo with a rainbow bumper sticker, and walked into church holding hands with someone of the same sex. They sit down and attend church. They go to Adult sunday school, where they openly admit to living in a same sex relationship. At this point, do you sit them down and kindly escort them out.
Does the congregation steal the candles from the Alter boys and charge after them versing the rites of Exorcism? Or do you ignore it and let it go...
And they join the softball team, and become a integral part of the church? Has your congregation or church setup rules to deal with this when it happens? What are they? What if a long time member of the church becomes gay?
Do Sermons at your church ever concentrate directly on the message your religion wishes to convey on homosexuality? Or is it a subject, that as long as it doesn't affect us, lets not bring it up kind?
Me: Dear Beth,
OK, here I go. I’m going to hit the highlights. I would ask you to follow up as you would, gently please, and I will try to clarify as best as I can.
It is important to keep separate what or how we may deal with situations within the context of church and how we encourage one another to interact with and treat people they know and come across in their everyday lives. What I speak to below is NOT about how I or we as Christian individuals are to be with regard to homosexuals who are our neighbors, people with whom we do business, share fences, and have friendships. Plus, I am perfectly aware of the difference between the civic or civil order and the church order, between the government of the people and the government of the church. So I am NOT talking or inferring anything about the standing or the rights which homosexual people should have or not have in society in general. I believe in the separation of the church and the state properly construed, so it is not necessarily appropriate to extrapolate out from a church approach to a personal or civil or governmental approach to something. The church is not a secular institution but its people are part of a secular nation.
And even within the context of the church there are different levels of relationship. There may be a homosexual individual who comes off and on, or a couple who shows up as you wrote about. There are many levels of involvement and relationship. We invite everyone to visit and get to know us and we them. We seek to love all who come our way and to treat them with dignity that behooves them as human beings made in God’s image. We encourage all comers to ask of us hard questions and we try as best as can to answer them as best as we can.
At the same time we do look to the Bible as our authority, the Bible as traditionally understood, and the canon as accepted by the ProtestantChurch. I really don’t want to get into a lengthy argument about Jesus and Paul, the canonicity of the Gospels, the dating of the Gospel of Thomas, the Da Vinci Code, etc. I am working on a very lengthy address related to that.
OK, first, no, we have never escorted anyone out! Nor have my sermons ever concentrated on the issue of homosexuality. We have talked about marriage of course, and I have tried to lay out what Scripture as we understand it defines as a legitimate marriage, but, no, I have not ever gone after this issue in a sermon. I don’t preach that way. I preach exposition messages mostly, and justdeal with whatever is next in the Bible book being covered.
But we would consider homosexual sexual expression to be incompatible with God’s will and outside of what God intends for human relationships. But so are a lot of things, so we don’t pick on homosexuals.
People of all kinds visit our church, in all kinds of situations. They are not interviewed, given a sticker of approval, or whatever. They are greeted, welcomed, and treated nicely.
If in our sharing time a homosexual couple stood up and said “Hi, my name is Bill and this is Frank and we are a gay couple and we’re seeking God’s will for our lives,” we would say, “good to meet you Bill and Frank” and we would keep the dialogue and relationship open and free and get to know them. If they stood up and said “Hi, my name is Bill and this is Frank and we are a gay couple and we’re here to find out what your position is on homosexuality” then that might create a different ambience. But we’d still be nice.
A homosexual couple would be free to keep visiting as long as they wanted to but they would eventually figure out that the church would not bless their homosexual union. Then they would leave. That’s how it would work in reality.
But the church would also not bless a heterosexual couple living together not married, or a man seeing another woman than his wife on the side, or lots of things.
When it came to “joining the church,” despite the fact that every member is a sinner, if there were known public issues like those above, or many others that one could think of, the profession of faith in Christ would likely not be considered credible, and membership would not likely be extended. That may answer the “integral part of the church” question. But then, there are people who hang out as non members for a long time while they sort out this or that. Would they be allowed on the softball team? Probably. But shoot, that just reminds me that we don’t have a softball team.
Now if a member of the church started exploring relationships of the same gender, eventually as that came out that would need to be addressed, in love, in a spirit of restoration, with hope that those urgings and feelings could for the sake of what is right be resisted and God’s strength be sought to live in a manner consistent with His Word. Many have such urgings time and again. Many resist them as they resist other urgings. If a person rejected such counsel and insisted on pursuing a gay lifestyle, and yet remained amongst us, that would then create a process of church discipline with the goal of repentance and restoration, without which ultimately there could be excommunication, sad to say. But again, that would rarely happen, as folks would just leave or wander off.
Reading that I wrote above I’m thinking of so many follow questions that I could just keep typing all day and this could be like the longest comment in the history of MSN Spaces. So I’m going to stop.
Beth, feel free to ask follow ups. I’ll do my best to answer them.
Beth: Thanks, that was really insightful and was truly a good read. The only question I really have is on the excommunication part. Not necessarily with just the gay aspect, but for any reason have you had to perform an excommunication? If so who is the person or persons that make that final decision? I assume they are still welcome to attend church following the excommunication, but just not as a member?
Me: Beth,
No, we have not ever formally excommunicated anyone. In this day and time things rarely come to that because people just leave for a different church. Most of our processes of what is called "church discipline" whether more formal or less formal have ended up in restoration, which is always the goal. In some cases, like say unrepentant adultery, the person usually takes off, and pursuing something as extreme as excommunication could actually hinder the ability of the separated couple to deal with the own legal process in the civil courts. In other words it may not be in the interest of the offended party and his or her children to further piss of the offending party while they are seeking mediation or going through court proceedings. We approach all of these situations pastorally with the real life human people before us and in our prayers, not just following a "procedure," trying to balance the purity of the church with the on-the-ground real-life reality people face. So, for example, a person who may come out as gay is not just a theoretical construct, but someone's son or father or husband or brother, and there are thus many considerations. We have had a situation much as you have described and the person drops by off and on, and is warmly received. Because of our view of things we "hope" for change in that area of his life. He remains a friend. He left us. But he could not re-enter into the full communion of the church without that issue being addressed. My heart is so heavy as I write. I wish some things were not so hard.
Joel Gillespie
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