something a friend wrote

a woman i greatly admire wrote this on a note on facebook and it's something that i had actually been having a conversation with another person about just yesterday. here's what she said:

So I just finished reading a chapter in a book called 'unchristian' by a guy who spent three years researching the thoughts and perceptions of 18-29 year-old "outsiders" toward Christianity. The particular chapter I read was on homosexuality, and how Christians are perceived to be anti-homosexual and holding gays and lesbians in contempt. Coincidentally, a friend here on FB posted a poll on gay marriage, and it got me thinking about this very charged issue.

I am often torn because on the one hand I see God's design for sexuality within the context of a male-female union, and yet also feel great compassion on the gay people I know and have known throughout my years. One of the great hurts of my and my husband's life was when his best friend, who was dying of AIDS, refused any contact with us because he had been rejected and hated by the Christians whom he considered to be brothers. Guilt by association robbed us of the opportunity to extend our love to him.

A young man just left my office, and he said, "Yeah, but if a person is gay, he can not be saved." My response is, we all are sinners and each deserving of the separation from God that sin creates. If my Christian friend John (not his real name) who seriously struggles with pornography got hit by a bus, at his funeral would we say, "Too bad John was not saved?" Or what about our friends who daydream sexually explicit thoughts on a regular basis? Are they less saved than ourselves? How about the countless number of Christians in our churches who are divorced from their Christian spouses and remarried? Are they not saved because they are living in adultery? Do not misunderstand what I am saying. I am not condoning a homosexual lifestyle, any more than I condone pornography or divorce. But we must stop singling out a group of people and calling them greater sinners than the rest of us.

This is not even the point of my note. As I mentioned, I was thinking about gay marriage. It seems that the crux of the issue lies in the concept of rights. i.e. just like a straight couple, a gay couple should have the same right to love whomever they choose, and be married to whomever they choose. They have the right to the same happiness. This I believe is a misconception, and for this reason: No one has the right to love and marry whomever they choose. This may sound crazy to our Western ears, but not to someone in a culture who as a matter of fact arranges the marriages of their children.

If we, as Christians, are truly to embrace the lordship of Jesus Christ as sovereign Lord of Creation, then we must submit to him any perceived right to choose the person with whom we share our most intimate bond. We must shed the notion that we have the right to marry and homosexuals do not, based strictly on our sexuality. The only reason we can be married and have sexual intimacy is because God chooses that for our life.

Maybe you will say to me, "Works for you, Yvonne, because you married the man you wanted to marry." That argument may have worked against me in my younger days, but believe me, the only reason I am still married, 27 years into this relationship, is because of obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ and the vow I spoke before him almost 25 years ago. If I was to think I had the right to always be happy, the right to love only the one I wanted to love, then this marriage would have dissolved long ago. Tom and I are both so different from those 20-somethings who said, "I do," yet because we are committed first to the Lordship of Christ, God has granted us the grace to stick it out; for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God's holy law.

When Prop 8 was on the ballot and I saw all those people with YES ON 8 signs, I wondered if those same people would march for an anti-divorce measure. Until the church grabs hold of this, that even our marriages are bound to Jesus' Lordship, and stops the hemorrhage of divorce that is bleeding in the pews, then we need to be quiet about our opinions of others' lives and go about loving them. It was Jesus' love for the sinner that drew them to the Father, by contrast he reserved his choicest rebukes for the religious people who sat in judgment of others.

The only picture the world has of Christ is presented by those who call themselves by his name. For too long the church has painted a picture of a Jesus that in many ways is repulsive to a sick and hurting world: a Jesus who is hateful and judgmental and holds the sinner in contempt. I hope that we can be God's image-bearers in a way that is better representative of the one who laid down his life for us while we were still sinners. We need to change the perception of being anti-anything, and present a Christ who gives his love and compassion to all.