Last Sunday morning I spoke briefly in my sermon about some things we must keep in mind concerning the Gay Pride Parade scheduled for Father’s Day.  The parade has provoked significant discussion in Augusta and seems to have been harnessed as an issue by which to attack the Mayor.  That is, before the Mayor knew that the paperwork was awaiting his signature news of it apparently was leaked to a ministerial association, which created a bevy of critical emails.  Those emails were prominently quoted in the Chronicle last Sunday.

Given that my comments from the pulpit were extemporaneous I thought it might be helpful to write the gist of them here.  I gave three suggestions for our response to this issue of the parade and others like it.

1.  Lead with the Gospel:  The most important point to make is that we must always view our fallen world and fellow sinners in it through the lens of the Cross.  Doing so will make it impossible to see anybody else’s sin without first remembering your own.  That is the point that Paul was making with the Corinthians who had become so proud and judgmental:  “Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God?”  You can hear some Corinthians saying, “Now Paul is preaching.  Let them have it!”  But Paul presses on:  “Do not be deceived:  Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters not adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders. . .”  At this point, perhaps a number—though certainly not all—were  shouting, “Amen!  Call ‘em out, Paul!”  But he didn’t stop:  “Nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”  Now you can imagine the church is more quiet because these are the sins Paul has already confronted among the leaders at Corinth.  To a hushed congregation, the reader of the epistle then speaks these words, “And that is what some of you were.”  In that congregation—as there are in ours—there were representatives of each class of sin named.  Then comes the good news, “But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Co. 6:9-11).  Before singling out any category of sin for unusual and self-righteous condemnation, remember that the unrepentant homosexual will not experience any greater heat in hell than the one unrepentant of his greed.  When you meet or interact with or read about a homosexual, do not think first of his sexuality—think first, “Here is a fellow sinner who needs my same Savior.  If Jesus could save me, he could save anyone!”

2.  Leave it Alone:  Leave the Gay Pride Parade event alone.  Don’t attend it, don’t bring it up as a topic for debate and don’t write the paper about it.  Those who organize such events tend to like negative publicity as much as positive, so if it is ignored the event accomplishes less.  However, we do not ignore such events out of animus but rather out of love.  As one who has pastorally cared for a number of homosexuals through the years (both those who struggle with it as a sin and those who were offended to have their preferences called “sin”), I can say that my experience has confirmed what I have read: that someone with same-sex attraction is one who has experienced profound rejection of some kind in the past.  That rejection may be imagined but it is usually real and heartbreaking.  The result is that one can be locked into a kind of perpetual state of adolescent self-pity.[1]  Such self-pity does not always result in same-sex attraction; it can result in any number of indulgences or pursuits of acceptance.  That is not a revolutionary insight, but rather a recollection of Adam and Eve’s disposition.  It was their self-pitiful delusion that God was denying them something good that propelled them to rebel against him.  Therefore, the “Gay-Homosexual” is one who flaunts his sexuality and provokes public reaction as a self-fulfilling prophecy of his rejection.[2]  Out of love for the homosexual or any other person who is a provocateur with his sin, we refuse to get pulled into his or her unhealthy cycle of rejection/indulgence because it is destructive to him or her as an image bearer of God.

3.  Leave Room for Relationships:  That leads naturally to the third point which is that we do not want to take action or speak in a way that communicates that our Christ is not available to every sinner weary of his or her burden.  We must be careful never to speak of any category of sin as if we can imagine no grace for it.  Nor must we speak of any kind of sinner as if such is nowhere near where we live and work.  I have listened with a broken heart to a number of homosexuals who have said, “I never thought I could go to anyone in my faith community with my struggles because of the way they told gay jokes or spoke about ‘those homos out there.’”  Broadcast with your language and action that you are a representative of Christ who says, “The one who comes to me I will never cast out” and “Come to me . . . and you will find rest for your souls.”  While we must never tell the homosexual that his or her attractions are good and normal, neither must we ever give the impression that they are unforgivable.  It would be as unloving to condone a homosexual’s sin as it would to condone the greedy or rebellious or adulterer or drug addict.  Sin wars against the image God has beautifully endowed us with.  While his grace may never in this life fully liberate us from the struggle with a besetting sin, it declares that we are free from its condemnation and guarantees a future in heaven without it.  The Christ who befriended Mary Magdalene is the Christ we desire to share with everyone and anyone who will allow us to befriend them.

[1] The clearest presentation of this theory is by Gerard J. M. van den Aardweg’s The Battle for Normality:  A Guide for (Self-) Therapy for Homosexuality (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 1997).

[2] I get this distinction between the “gay” and the “non-gay homosexual” from Dr. Joseph Nicolossi who works with recovering homosexuals.  Dr. Nicolosi’s contention is that the gay homosexual is one who publicly flaunts and provokes with his lifestyle while the non-gay homosexual is one who has heterosexual values and yet struggles with his sexual identity or has finally conceded to it.  This latter group, he says, represents the largest percentage of the homosexual population in America.  Allen Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, was such a person.  While he was a strong proponent of heterosexual marriage and Judeo-Christian ethics, he was privately one who had finally wearied of his homosexual struggles and conceded that he had no choice but to live in that identity.