Hopefully, that will make a lot more sense by the time we walk out of here today. Before we get to that good to see you and welcome to this place that we call DCC. If you are new here we want you to know that you are safe here regardless of how your story reads and that you really have walked into a place of people today who are exactly like you. We are a community of people chasing after a better way to live that happen to believe Jesus offers that better way to live but perhaps the best news for you is this, you don’t even have to believe that to belong right here with us every single week. We are pumped that you are here, and we hope that you want to come back and do this again with us real soon.
So we are wrapping up a series today called Distortion. We have spent the last 6 weeks talking about lots of ways that we all tend to have a distorted image of God and all of the problems and challenges associated with that. While it’s all been really important stuff, I don’t know that any of what we have talked through has the power to revolutionize this thing we do called church and to change what people think when they hear the word Christian, more than you and me clearing up the distortion that we have on where God really is in all of this stuff that we are going to talk about and talk through together today. I want us to wrap up this series by talking about the fact that God is not homophobic. Homophobia is defined as an unreasonable fear of, opposition to, or dislike of homosexual people and homosexuality. Let me first say this, I am not clear on a lot of things but I am clear about this. God is not like that. We shouldn’t be either.
You need to know that I am not an expert on this subject, still have a lot to learn, and still could do a better job loving like Jesus and living more like Jesus amongst everyone in the world around me especially my friends in the LGBT community. I continue to work hard to understand in my own life and story. In fact, I have read two books in just the past week. If you want to do some additional study I would highly recommend them. One is Redeeming Sex but Deb Hirsch and the other is called Us v. Us by Andrew Marin. Let’s start with a quote from Us v. Us…
ILLUST> Sherry says “I live in a religiously conservative city, and I’m under no assumption the people here will think it’s great if I marry a woman one day. But for how religious everyone is, a gesture of telling me I’m loved every once in a while would go a long way to how I view them and their version of God.” That quote comes from Sherry, a 36-year-old bisexual woman living in Colorado Springs, Colorado
That’s our context, and that hits close to home doesn’t it. Andrew Marin says that unless you have been sexually attracted to someone of the same sex you can never fully grasp, as heterosexual people what that actually means. The truth is that we don’t really have a clue. While I believe that, I also believe that we can continue to get some more clarity on God’s heart for our friends, family members, people in the world around us who identify as a part of the LGBT community and how that plays out in our lives and stories too. We really don’t have a choice. We have been off course for too long and it is time for that to change. See, God is not the real challenge, the people that claim to follow him are the challenge and God continues to get a bad wrap. Let’s see if we can change that. Let’s do this.
If you brought a Bible we are going to be in John chapter 4 today. If you would like a Bible to follow along in but don’t have one, they are on the back tables. Or you can just hit our app, the YouVersion app, or you can just read along with me off of the screens. Let me give you just a bit of the back story so this all makes sense. Jesus has been down in Judea around Jerusalem and is heading back north toward the region of Galilee where he is from. The only way to get there is to go around or go through Samaria. Jesus decides to go through and stops in a town called Sychar which is here around noon. He is tired and thirsty. Okay, so here we go, John chapter 4 beginning with verse 7…
7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” 8 (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)
Excuse me sir but there are lots of reasons why you and I shouldn’t be talking right now. I am a Samaritan and I am a woman. Samaritans were considered half-breeds and looked down on by Jewish people in that day, and women were not generally talked to in public by Jewish men. Guys like you don’t talk to, look at, interact with, and certainly don’t have conversations with someone like me. Jesus doesn’t flinch or hesitate. If you keep reading the next few verses this is not just about him being thirsty, he is interested in her heart, in her story, and he wants to have a conversation with her. She’s confused because Jesus is a Jew, and Jews in that day categorized people like her. There are two categories that suggest that Jesus would nothing to do with her, she’s a Samaritan and she’s a woman. So what do we takeaway from this moment? How about we start with this…
GOD DOESN’T CATEGORIZE PEOPLE. Unfortunately, we in the church, have and often still do. My friend Yemi talked about it a few weeks back, there was a day when even in the church if you were of the wrong race you were in a different category. Unfortunately, in church world we are known for creating categories for hippies, people who dance, people who drink, people who smoke, people who are divorced, teenagers who get pregnant and aren’t married, people who use medical marijuana. The list goes on and on. If you look back through church history it’s actually a pretty sad, extensive, and exhaustive list. If we look around the church today, we still see it. This pastor’s comment sounds more familiar to us than most of us would like to admit. Listen to this…
ILLUST> I don’t want to be closed-minded or judgmental, but in good conscience I simply can’t approve of the lifestyle. I personally believe it’s a choice, not something predestined or forced by anyone. When people choose this lifestyle, some of them go as far as to claim that God made them the way they are, pushing onto God their responsibility for their own choices and behaviors. Activists may use the word love to justify their behavior, but those who disagree with them are seldom treated with love. They send out hate mail peppered with a wide range of threats and abusive speech, with many calling for our damnation. But even so, we have learned that we must not respond to hate with hate; we must love these people…those people…and seek to help them, even though we do not approve of their behavior. (SOUND FAMILIAR? ARE YOU READY?) Just so we are clear…I am not talking about the gay community. I am talking about the church community.
Well that didn’t go exactly where we were expecting it to. We need to be honest with ourselves church, God doesn’t categorize people but we often do. We categorize sin and the people that struggle with that naturally fall into categories too. I know because I have been the victim of that. When I crashed and burned as a pastor 14 years ago and had an affair I got dropped into a certain category by certain pastors and church people. I remain in that category with some still today. It sucks. If you are experiencing that as you sit here today, I am sorry. Unfortunately, it happens a lot with what we are talking about today. We read passages like Leviticus 18 and 20, Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6, 1 Timothy 1, come to quick and certain conclusions about people and drop them into specific categories and all of a sudden church is no longer a safe place at all for them. Maybe it would help us if we were to experience this through just a moment or two of one man’s experience. Watch this…
*************ROLL VIDEO OF SAM ALLBERRY*********
We hear one thing about Sam Allberry and drop him into a category that is absolutely and completely untrue. His orientation does not put him into a different category. He is first and foremost a follower of Jesus. He is a Christian who is same sex attracted and yet joyfully affirms the traditional understanding of marriage being between and man and a woman and the only Godly context for sex. The Bible addresses Sam’s temptation, it talks about racism, greed, gluttony, gossip, idolatry, adultery, and fornication more. In Leviticus this hot button topic in the church that we are talking about today is mentioned in the midst of twelve other ways that our sexuality can go off the tracks including sex with animals. I mean, I love my dog, but come on. Despite the fact that it is one of 13 or 14 things, we still have a tendency to highlight it, spotlight it, and put it in a category of it’s own.
ILLUST> Listen to how one man describes experiencing that in Us. v. Us. To this day I tithe 10% to charity, it’s a conviction I learned growing up Baptist. I’d never admit this to some of my friends but I miss it a lot. It’s a part of me that will never die. I feel sometimes I have more in common with my Baptist brethren than my own gay community. But that’s a part of me that probably won’t be known further because I can’t find one of my Baptist brethren to get to know me enough to find that out. If they did, you couldn’t pull me out of that church!
If they did, if they were to see me differently, it they refused to allow themselves to put me in a separate, a different, a distinct category you could not pull me out of that church. It’s sad and unfortunate. When people do things or struggle with things that we don’t struggle with or don’t understand we place them in categories, categories that suggest to them that God somehow, someway, sees them differently when nothing could be further than the truth. As Sam Allberry said, despite the categories his fellow bishops try to drop him in the gospel, the message of Jesus is still good news. Let’s keep reading…
15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” 16 He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.” 17 “I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. 18 The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”
Wow Jesus! That feels familiar. What does it feel like? It feels a lot like what I just did a few minutes ago when I threw down some passages from Leviticus doesn’t it? Come here and let me truth slap you a little bit. As Christians we are so good at truth slapping. It’s like we have a class in it or something. Oh, wait a minute, we do. We call it evangelism. Here’s a question. Would this be any different if Jesus said you have had 5 lesbian wives and the woman you are currently living with is not your wife? Answer, no, God doesn’t categorize people. It still feels like a hard truth slap right in the face. Before we jump there let’s remind ourselves that we are 17 verses into a conversation here, a conversation that began with love and acceptance. This should help us see this…
GOD IS ALL ABOUT COMPASSIONATE CONVERSATIONS. According to the research conducted by the Marin Foundation, people in the LGBT community are much less concerned about our theology on homosexuality than they are with how they have been and continue to be treated by Christians in the church. If you think about it , it makes sense. When are we most compassionate? When we can relate directly to what another person is going through. We have said that we struggle because we don’t really understand. How hard are we trying to? It is so important that we see this. The real issue here is not homosexuality. It is sexual orientation. When it comes to sexual orientation issues every single one of us in one way or the other can say me too. Why? Because God has given us the gift of this incredible mind-blowing thing, this thing that feels unlike any other human experience called sex. I was reading this past week that we should feel sorry for our atheist friends, why, they don’t have anyone’s name to call out in the moment of truth. So, God gives us this incredible thing called sex and then what, he puts severe limits around our ability to experience it.
ILLUST>One man, one woman, in marriage, how many of us have never messed that up? How many of us feel like our default position, desire, our make up, our orientation is something other than that, or would prefer something other than that? Jesus says if we have looked at a woman, or let’s be fair at a man, with lust in our eyes, we have crossed the line. It’s out of bounds. I wonder how many of us could say that it didn’t happen in one way or another in the last month, week, maybe even last few hours or days. Never lusted, never watched your favorite movie or tv show and thought what if, never sat on the computer after the wife and kids are in bed, never stepped outside of marriage before during or after marriage.
I love this quote by Deb Hirsch. “Acknowledging our own broken sexuality enables us to identify with a sexually broken humanity”. “We must see heterosexuals as no less broken (and in need of salvation) than homosexuals. We are all together in the human experience of life and trying to live out the reality of the kingdom. Every human being on the planet is sexually broken. Everybody’s orientation is disoriented. All of us are on a journey toward wholeness; not one of us is excluded” So, me too but it is actually bigger than that. I would argue that the path that God asks our friends who identify as LGBT to walk is much harder.
ILLUST> So many of these beautiful people didn’t choose to be this way. Were they born this way? I don’t know, no one knows, science doesn’t know. We could debate that all day long. I do know this, two different friends of mine, a bi-sexual woman in her thirties and a transgender male to female friend in his sixties now have both told me this. They would change that about themselves if they could. In fact they have both prayed that God would take it away. He hasn’t. Not saying that that is the desire or prayer of every person in the community. Research suggests it is the desire of a lot of them. When we are willing to have conversations we hear stories of sexual abuse at a young age, guys who beat and rape to help prove to them that they are not lesbian, and depression and suicide rates that are off the charts. Suicide rates among teenagers are crazy high, they are four times higher among teenagers in the LGBT community, 8 times higher when their families reject them. Suicide rates in the transgender community are at 41% and the success rates are at 33%. The next highest category is schizophrenic which is at 5.6%.
Have you ever thought about what we the church are asking our friends in the LGBT community to do? We are asking them to be celibate or to force themselves to work through a heterosexual marriage. We are asking them not to act on the deep desires of their heart for love. Have we ever really paused to think about how much that must hurt? Yes, we ask our singles to wait until marriage too but do you see the difference? With them it’s usually just a matter of someday. The only real answer we have for our friends in the LGBT community is never, but hey, heaven is for real and it will be great someday. That doesn’t help much in the pain of today. I’m not suggesting that we should change the answer, I am asking how in the world can we not have compassion when we think through all of that?
ILLUST> Billy Graham once attended a rally in support of President Bill Clinton after the big sex scandal had become public. He was asked by a reporter why he was there supporting the President after all that he had done to his family and this country. Billy Graham said “it’s the Holy Spirit’s job to convict, God’s job to judge, and my job to love”. Are we focused on our job? Let’s finish this…
40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. 41 And because of his words many more became believers. 42 They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”
How did the lives of these people change for the better forever? It wasn’t the argument of the Samaritan woman. It was as a result of their own experience with Jesus. We can argue with people all day long about their life choices and the lifestyle that they choose to live, or we can point you to something that is better like the Samaritan woman is doing here. We feel pressure from the inside to condemn and pressure from the outside to condone. We feel the need to convince and convert and yet once again here it is, compassion wins. Everything would change if we would just get this…
IT’S MORE ABOUT OUR POSTURE THAN OUR POSITION. Greg Koukl says it this way, “we shouldn’t add any offense to the gospel, but we certainly shouldn’t take any away. It’s already offensive enough. If people hate us, just be sure that it’s for genuinely following the teachings of Jesus rather than for an unbiblical attitude’. Our attitude and approach will always be so much more powerful than the best of arguments that we could ever make.
We must lead with our embrace not our theology. When we lead with our theology we tend to get all caught up in the “wrongness” of some people’s behavior, and the humanness of the person is easily lost. It’s all about engaging with people wherever they find themselves or we find them, loving them, and slowly and intentionally pointing them to Jesus. Why, redemption, sanctification, healing, and restoration is his job, not ours. But we definitely have a role to play in this. In 2 Corinthians 5 we are told that we are ambassadors and have been handed a ministry of reconciliation. What does that mean? It means that responsibility for reconciliation belongs first with us, the church. The first move is ours. We have to stop reacting to and start reaching out. How are we doing with that?
Let’s be honest, our unloving attempts to argue others into believing something we believe have not served us well in the past. Our theological convictions and priorities are meaningless if they are disconnected from what we see Jesus live out here with this woman at the well, the command to love our neighbor as ourselves. In the end a commitment above all else to love, irrespective of theological convictions on sexuality, is far more productive than this endless debate we seem to be in over whose definition of sin wins.
ILLUST> Tasha, a 21-year-old lesbian living in Miami, Florida: All I wanted was to feel loved by those in the church I grew up with. To me, love is not being demanded to turn straight or loving me “in Truth.” The only truth I ever got wasn’t in love. It was done by those who thought they had the right to tell me how wrong I am and how disappointing I am to God. That’s not love. Love is giving me time to be with you to figure this out together. If you let any church people read this, tell them that I don’t have to be right to feel loved but I have to be dignified in our disagreement.
The latest studies suggest that 92% of our friends who identify as LGBT would not require or ask us to change our theology for them to come to church. They are not even asking us to. They are asking us to do what we are commanded to do, love. Our friends in the LGBT community should be flocking to us and packing this place out because of the way that we love. DCC we have to be that place. We are not the Holy Spirit, it is not our job to condemn, convince, or convert. Our only agenda is that every person that walks into this place gay, lesbian, bi, trans, or straight bump into and experience the radical and reckless love of Jesus. Every single day in the place we are committed to walk into the mess, ambiguity and tension of all that is going on in our lives and into the reality of Jesus’s love for all of us in the midst of that. Yes, there is mystery, confusion, and misunderstanding but if all of us are willing to fill the gaps with love, grace, truth, and compassion with God’s help we can sort it all out. Jesus was all love, all grace, all truth, all the time. If we are trying to see God as he really is we can’t miss this, God has always been and will always be about together, even when we are not the same. Let me pray for us.
