LOVE, AND DO WHAT YOU
LIKE
November 12, 2006
prep talk for youth group discussion on sexual orientation, St. Thomas Episcopal
Church, Medina, WA
So I was 12 years old, and I was watching MTV with my older cousin Stan. Stan was 16, and he was so cool! He knew everything.
A video came on featuring George Michael. Stan pointed out that George Michael was wearing an earring in both his left and right ears. “See, here’s how it is,” Stan said. “If a guy wears an earring in his right ear, he’s straight. Left ear, he’s gay. Both ears: he’s a waver.” I took this to mean “bisexual.”
Not only did Stan really believe this to be true, but I believed him as well … because Stan was older, and he knew everything.
My family moved across the country when I was in the 8th grade. I was trying to make a good first impression, so I tried to emulate the older guys who had girlfriends. I even remember noting that when they sat on the floor in the school hallway, most of them crossed their right leg over their left. Stan’s talk about earrings came back to me. Should I be careful not to cross my left leg over my right?
Later, I started to learn that becoming a man might not require quite so much paranoia. I heard a pop song at the time with lyrics that struck home. The song was called “To Be a Man,” and one verse went:
The will to give and not receive/
The strength to say what you believe/
The heart to feel what others feel inside and see what they can see/
I know that’s what a man can be.
I would later realize that this was not about becoming a man; it was about becoming an adult in general.
One day when I was 16, I was sitting in the school library. My friend Holly was sitting with me, working on a research project. She came across a magazine article about gay Christians. This shocked her. “Those people aren’t Christians!” she exclaimed.
I asked, “Why not?”
“Well,” she said, “because being a Christian means being like Jesus. And Jesus wasn’t gay!”
I refrained from pointing out to her that Jesus wasn’t a woman, either.
By this time, we all knew which kids were suspected to be gay. There was Marty; he was so scrawny and wimpy that he must be gay. And Billy did that thing with his hands. And Travis had a weird, undefined relationship with an older woman; we didn’t know what it meant, but we thought there must be something wrong going on there. “Gay” was a word you used to describe something you didn’t approve of: “Oh, that’s so gay!” I never understood this usage of the word.
Around this time, I found out that two priests in our diocese were actually a gay couple who lived together. Most people knew it, but nobody talked about it. Phil ran the diocesan church camp. It was kind of assumed that if certain parents found out he was gay, they wouldn’t send their kids to camp. But Phil and Gary are two of the finest priests I’ve ever known, and 20 years later, they’re still together.
It was also around this time that somebody first said to me: “The Bible is very clear in condemning homosexuality.” I didn’t believe him; I had to look it up for myself, and when I saw the passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans, I didn’t know what to do. I was certain that the truth about homosexuality was more complicated than the Bible’s straightforward condemnation of it. I was questioning what authority the Bible had, and I wondered if disagreeing with part of it made me less of a Christian.
Since then, I’ve learned about many other things in the Bible that I disagree with. The reality is that it’s impossible to follow all the Bible’s rules to the letter.
You can try all your life to treat the Bible as a rulebook, but I don’t believe this is what it’s intended to be. The Bible is a history of people’s ideas about God, and it was written over a thousand-year span. The reason not everything in the Bible is consistent or applies to us today is that the Bible didn’t drop from the sky all bound and ready for us. Human beings wrote it, and human beings change. Even if God never changes, our ideas about God do change. This doesn’t mean we should take the Bible less seriously; it just means we should take it seriously in other ways.
What is the most important thing the Bible says? You’ll never get everybody to agree on this. But since we’re Christians, it’s a good idea to go to the Gospels, which are the story of Jesus, our savior, the person in history who we believe most resembled God and who told us what God wants from us. Most Christians believe that everything else in the Bible either leads up to Jesus or is a commentary on him.
So let me take some time to quote for you everything in the Bible that Jesus said about homosexuality:
(15-second silence)
You know what Jesus did say? Someone actually asked him at one point, “What’s the most important rule of all?”
And he replied, “Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.” These rules were already part of the Jewish law, and Jesus singled them out, saying that every other rule depends on these two things.
Later, early Christian theologian Augustine wrote, “Love, and do what you like.”
Does this sound easy? No – believe it or not, this is even harder than trying to follow all the Bible’s rules at once. Why? Because it requires us to think before we act! If we are first going to love, then we need to base everything else we do on that love. Love is the filter Christians use to view the world.
Living in love is very difficult! It means loving people we don’t really like. No matter what you think of homosexuality or any other issue, Jesus shows us how to live in love. Sometimes this means thinking before we speak, because that would be the loving thing to do. And sometimes it means speaking when we’d rather stay quiet, because that would be the loving thing to do.
We can’t make a simple list of behaviors that are OK and behaviors that aren’t, because most behaviors are OK in some situations and not in others. This is true for dating and sex, too. Do you know your standards for a romantic relationship?
Let’s get something straight here (no pun intended). In order to become a man or a woman, you just have to keep having birthdays. It will happen. And whether you’re gay or straight or celibate, whether or not you have kids, whether or not you play sports, whether or not you wear dresses, whatever you do, as long as you don’t die, you will become a man or a woman. Manhood or womanhood is a gift from God.
Adulthood, on the other hand, is something you choose to do. God doesn’t bestow it on you; you have to earn it. We could all give examples of people, famous or otherwise, who may be men and women but who have been known to act like children. You don’t have to earn God’s love, but you do have to earn adulthood.
Jesus showed us what it means to become an adult. Our baptismal covenant is a Christian understanding of adulthood:
- Will you continue in the apostles’
teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?
- Will you persevere in resisting evil, and whenever you fall into sin, repent
and return to the Lord?
- Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?
- Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as
yourself?
- Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the
dignity of every human being?
If you are baptized, these are the promises you’ve been asked to work on for the rest of your life.
Let’s split into smaller groups now. I’d like us to discuss these questions:
- What are some messages you’ve heard,
positive or negative, about homosexuality and about what it means to be gay?
Think about things you’ve heard from parents, friends, in movies, in music, on
TV … everywhere.
- Have you heard the name Ted Haggard? He’s the evangelical leader who allegedly
paid a man for sex and bought drugs from him. What was the most wrong thing he
did? (Hint: How do you suppose his wife feels?)
- Do you know anyone who is gay? What has your experience of this person been?
- What are the qualities of a healthy sexual relationship? (Some possibilities:
no exploitation, no domination … it should be responsible, mutual, caring,
loving, growing over time, not overly terrified of change.)
- Recently, have you gone out of your way to respect the dignity of another
human being? Tell the story.
- What are your standards for a dating relationship? (Senior high will be able
to discuss this in more detail next week.)