The Wilderness of Sin

Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?

-Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew7:3 (NRSV)

I have read several responses to the Nashville Statement over the past 24 hours and I don't imagine that I could do any better than the Denver Statement by Lutheran Nadia Bolz Weber, or Jonathan Merritt, in responding to the content of the statement.  But here goes anyway.

In his biography Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis reflects on the various homosexual relationships that occurred at his boarding school when he was young.  He talks quite frankly and openly about the dynamics of those relationships, and then sort of answers the begged question: "is there something wrong with that?"  To which his answer is essentially that he was never tempted or otherwise drawn into any such relationship and so he cannot, in good conscience, condemn those boys for what they did.  Lewis, being a man of his time, was probably no where near what we would consider LGBT affirming, nor was he entirely removing all doubt from those relationships, which often involved a significant age and power inequity (older boys taking advantage of younger).  He saw the messiness of human relationships and he decided that he was not in a place to judge.

I have never personally been troubled by homosexual urges, but I have not always been entirely virtuous with my heterosexual urges, that is one log that I need to take out of my eye, but for me personally there is an even bigger blindness.  In order to gain some perspective on the issue, I'm going to steer away from the emotionally charged issues of sexuality and talk about the sin that most troubles me personally: gluttony.  I am a glutton in the most traditional sense, with regard to food, but also in other ways: I can binge watch with the best of them, I can get obsessed with an idea and devote all or most of my time to it until that itch has been scratched.  But food is still the big SIN in my life.

At some point, I recognize that my various gluttonous tendencies have been getting in the way of my personal health.  With food it is when the scale starts moving in the wrong direction and my clothes start to fit a little too tightly. I have come to recognize this as a broken relationship and a form of idolatry.  I am using something to fill the space where God's love is supposed to be.  I have been this way for basically as long as I can remember.  My broken relationship with eating started when I was seven or eight years old and despite a lot of self knowledge and suffering the consequences (high blood pressure, diabetes, just generally being too fat), it is always a struggle to keep that relationship in balance.  Over all, as an adult, I have made some progress towards health, but it is not easy and the work is constant.  It has been a long road filled with steps up and steps back, but one thing I can tell you is that hearing from thin, fit people about what I ought to do makes me want to punch noses.

What I have had to come to terms with is that I cannot ever avoid the relationship (because I would actually die), but I do have to try to keep it on a healthy track.  Which is why I think the evolution of our attitudes towards homosexual people is crucial.  Is homosexuality a sin? Well, pederast forms of it certainly are, the highly promiscuous culture of the 1970's which came to a screeching halt with the advent of AIDS, pretty surely was.  Is two people of the same gender living together in a committed, loving relationship sinful? I have to say the answer to that is no.  Until now, no culture has really given homosexual people the opportunity to live healthy, well adjusted out lives.  They have always been here and darkness and secrecy never really does good things for repressed urges.

I will tell you a dirty secret: my worst eating habits happen when no one is looking.  If I'm at dinner with a bunch of people, I can very easily pass on the desert menu, but leave me alone at home with a package of Oreos and gluttony explodes.  I can have a nice healthy salad for lunch and then justify scarfing down a bunch of Doritos at 3:00.  Sin with regard to sexual relationships, and indeed sin in general, has to do more with relational fidelity than it does with mechanics.  We learn to be faithful to each other and we learn to be faithful to God. If we are promiscuous with our faith we are idolaters, which is definitely on the list of sins that gets the Big Guy all riled up.

For instance the reason why Leviticus says people shouldn't get tattoos is because pagans got tattoos as part of their devotion to their false gods.  None of my tattoos are to false gods, so I fully believe that I'm in the clear on that front (well that and Jesus forgiving me).

The problem I have with things like the Nashville Statement is that it actually commits a form of idolatry, the idolatry of self-righteousness, and furthers that sin into behavior that is harmful to others by marginalizing and condemning vulnerable people (suicide rates among homosexual/transgender youth are higher than average, and many homosexual youth experience homelessness as a result of coming out to families who do not accept them). In a more general sense, it denies people who struggle with sin a path to find the healthy, balanced and faithful expression of their sexual identities.  The same goes for transgender people.  Look at it this way, I know that it is a struggle to eat the right way and to keep my weight under control, but I do have a healthy recourse that doesn't require starving myself. I can enjoy a good salad and fresh summer veggies, I can cook healthy meals and learn about new types of food from all over the world, because I have a healthy way to pursue my relationship with food if I so choose. If the only way I could indulge my love of food was by scarfing as many Twinkies as I could when nobody was looking, I don't think I would live very much longer.

I think a vision for a community of faith should provide the same thing for people of all sorts.  This of course does preclude certain behaviors that are harmful to others, but it is difficult to make a case based on anything but hysteria that homosexuality or transgender identity are actually harmful to others in the community if they are given a place, not marginalized and forced into denial. What is harmful to the community is telling a certain group of people that they are excluded from your tribe because of who they are and who they love.  We are seeing that across the country.  LGBTQ people are not some sort of toxic, degrading force on our society, but capable of being faithful and constructive components of it, if and when we allow them to be. It's kind of a shame that so many parts of the church are lagging behind on this crucial realization.