I find it very interesting that the couple of posts I’ve put up on social media recently regarding loving LGBTQ people better and more inclusively have attracted some of the most upsetting and angry spirited comments from people in the name of holding to truth. The most revealing aspect of these comments is the intolerance and prejudice that doesn’t take very long to reveal itself as the comments quickly descend into less and less curtesy and more and more rudeness. The qualities of the fruit of the Holy Spirit like gentleness, kindness and self control are soon abandoned as the fight to by right emerges in a spirit crushing avalanche of hate.
The good outcome though has been to make me buy books about and study deeper into the scriptures cited by my opponents. Truthfully the deeper I go the more convinced I am that what drives many of the more bitter commentators is fear, homophobia and intolerance. Backed by basic over simplification of scripture, ignoring of context and linking of unrelated texts, I find the arguments put forward for the exclusion and discrimination against LGBTQ people to be shallow and ignorant of the heart of Gods love and the basic subversiveness of the gospel. It’s always Gods heart to subvert hatred with radical love, to replace division with outrageous acceptance, to welcome the alien, make the last first and exult the heart of humility and servitude over selfishness, greed and exploitation.
The gospel is so utterly counter intuitive that it is truly an upside down kingdom where the most loving, most selfless and most Christlike are the most ridiculed, reviled and ultimately crucified like the champion they follow.
The people who say Jesus loves the sinner but hated the sin (not actually in the Bible sorry) seem to skip over Love and emphasize hate and only reveal their fear and intolerance more profoundly.
It was anger, fear, jealousy, self righteousness and hard heartedness that banged the nails into our beloveds wrists and ankles.
It’s a very short journey from excluding a person based on their sexual orientation to nailing a young man to a fence in Wyoming and torturing him to death. It’s an even shorter journey from referring to behavior as abomination to referring to a person as an abomination. If you find yourself there then you’ve landed in a place very far from Christ’s passion for His children.
When the door to your heart closes and hardens, it shuts out the light as well as the darkness.
For evil to triumph it simply requires that good men say nothing. Here’s a great book that I discovered via these threads.
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