Still, a lot of people are talking about the North Carolina ban on gay marriage and President Obama's support for it, and about homosexuality in general, and about how that interacts with people's faith and peoples of faith. (Just FYI, gay marriage is illegal here in Texas. Last year a judge ruled that a woman and her husband were not legally married, because the woman was not born a woman, although in every other legal situation she was allowed to identify as one.)
Googling stuff about the Biola Queer Underground group, where according to their website queers and their sympathisers seem to live in a lot of fear, led me to explore other tangential issues and I came across this: "Christians are an army that shoots their own wounded". I am brought to tears.
I feel like I've swung to the middle about the church. I'm definitely not in love with it anymore, but I think I've moved past the rejection phase. So please in reading the following remember that although I like everyone have biases, I don't think I feel compelled to either defend the church or condemn it. I also recognise that "Christian" can mean a wide variety of people, including people who don't identify with a/the church.
Back to that powerful statement. I'm not going to deny that people have felt that way. I can even think of a member of my family who might use those words to describe part of their experience with a church. I have also known and loved a few Christians whose dedication to trying to eradicate sin has caused them to prioritise judgment over compassion, and to call that love. I have been one of those Christians - particularly towards myself, when I have so often crippled myself with judgment. So I can totally see how that statement could be true, at least in part, at least sometimes.
I can also see that rejection of and reaction to the church can be hurtful as well. Christians also feel misunderstood. Everyone's got those teachers in their life who shape them big time, often without even trying, right? Well one of mine was the Head of the Classics department at Monash Uni. She was a lesbian first-wave feminist, who'd experienced her own epiphanies in walking away from the church, and I often left her classes feeling ostracised for being straight, white, and religious. I think I probably hurt some people at Murrumbeena when later, under that same teacher's influence, I was in the throes of trying to figure out what the hell was going on in my faith. But I'm pretty sure that's nothing compared to the hurt and abuse people have suffered from others "wiping out sin" in the name of Christ.
My hunch is that judgment, i.e., determining whether what's going on is right or wrong, is helpful sometimes but not nearly as much as many Christians I've met seem to think it is. I think of the story of Jesus avoiding the issue when asked to stone a woman caught in flagrante delicto. My recent cleanse-induced foray into the bible was about Romans 3:22-23: "There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." And having read that verse dozens of times over the years, a new realisation jumped out at me. I think, taking that passage in context, that the most important part of the sentence is "there is no difference", not the "all have sinned" bit. Grammatically it's the main clause, at least in English. The point is everyone's equality and salvation and righteousness, not everyone's sinfulness. I'd love a radical shift in focus in faith communities. "How important, really, is it to judge in this particular situation? What would happen if we bypassed the right-or-wrong issue?"
So I renew the challenge to myself: Respond with compassion. Respond with humility. And I'm sorry to those I've hurt in my judgment as a Christian, or of Christians.
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