A Canterbury Tale
By the end of my sophomore year at Hampden-Sydney College, Inter-Varsity, our official campus fellowship group, was becoming more exclusionary and judgmental. There were standards that brooked no room for questions or disagreement. I was increasingly frustrated for my friends in IV who had questions, or were troubled in their souls, or who didn’t toe the fundamentalist line, or who weren’t quite pretty enough, cool enough, or secure enough in their faith to fit the IV model. Don’t get me wrong, there were many good, faithful people in IV–but the tenor of the group had become increasingly “Us against Them”–us against the “liberal religion professors,” us against the fratty boys, us against the Creeping Religion of Secular Humanism. Us against the world.
But some of us liked the world. Some of us found the world kind of interesting. Some of us felt intellectually challenged by the “liberal” religion professors and enjoyed a beer with the fratty boys now and then. Some of us thought humanists had something to teach us.
Those of us who weren’t so comfortable with the ironclad certainty of IV found ourselves gravitating to Canterbury, the Episcopal fellowship group at Longwood College across town. Their campus minister, John, would come to Hampden-Sydney every Thursday to perform the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Several of us were regulars. We loved the rhythm of the liturgy and John’s gentle voice and self-effacing, lopsided smile.
John’s unconditional hospitality made Canterbury a welcoming, warm, and non-judgmental place. Every Sunday night we’d go for a meal and program. We’d often follow up by putting on some records and dancing– what we called “Episco-Disco”–we had a big fellowship hall all to ourselves, after all!
Canterbury was a place that seemed to welcome those who were lost, struggling, unsure about faith and life, insecure, and lonely. It was almost a condition of being in the group to acknowledge that you were one of the walking wounded.
Not all of us were refugees from Inter-Varsity. Some were highly committed to it. Others would never even necessarily claim to be Christian. But the thing we shared in common was a willingness to be honest and vulnerable and a clear commitment to one another. At times my Canterbury friends were my biggest support, but at other times they were my strongest critics–because they knew me so well and loved me enough to tell me when I was headed down the wrong path.
It seemed like a bit of heaven on earth. My Canterbury friends remain my friends to this day.
That perceived contrast between IV and Canterbury has been defining for me. It was the contrast between faith defined by rules and regulations and faith defined by love and welcome. I always think of the First Letter of John, that teaches, “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” (I John 4: 7-8).
John also says, “There is no fear in love, for perfect love casts out fear” (I John 4: 18).
It seemed to me then, and now, that far too much religion is based on fear and condemnation, and far too little on love–and yet “God is love!”
Save Yourselves!
There are plenty of places in Scripture that condemn many people for many reasons, either to hell or to various other unhappy fates. What irks me is that there are as many, if not more, that contradict those dark passages. Why do so many Christians read Scripture in a fearful way?
If you have a whole view of the Bible, then the only way that you can view God as being as oppressive, punitive, and neurotic as we are, is to view Scripture legalistically. Then every word of it has the authority of Law and very little of it is counteracted by “later” Law. And certainly none of it is conditioned to time or circumstance, but is meant to be set-in-stone rules of behavior for all of time.
To live by such a legalistic standard is to live by a mistaken assumption, too common among Christians, about the nature of the world in this “interim” time, the time between the life of Jesus and His return in Glory to rule.
It’s the assumption that we live in a world so fallen and unredeemed that there’s nothing to be done except to save ourselves.
Oh, that’s not the theological language that’s used, but that’s what is meant. It’s a lifeboat mentality. The Fallen world is condemned, and it’s every man (woman, and child) for himself (herself).
New Age Thinking
But that’s not what Jesus taught.
Jesus taught that He was inaugurating the New Age, the invasion of the Kingdom of God into the Fallen world. He taught that the Kingdom is now planted as a seed in the world as it is, bearing the fruit, right now, of the world as it is meant to be. The earliest Christians believed that the resurrection of Jesus was the dawn of the New Age, the Age the prophets had predicted, when the faithful dead (specifically Jesus) would be raised, and good news would be preached to the poor, release proclaimed to the captives, sight recovered by the blind, and the oppressed liberated (cf Luke 4: 18, Is. 61: 1-2).
The New Age, in other words, begins NOW.
And key to that New Age was that the Law’s authority as our “custodian” (Galatians 3: 24, where the word can also be translated as “prison guard”!) is negated. The New Age, Paul says, returns us to the pre-Mosaic promise to Abraham, to be “a blessing… and by you all the families of the world will be blessed” (Gen. 12: 1-3).
This is the Age of Blessing, not of cursing.
Furthermore, this is the Age when God’s Law is to be written on our hearts, not something imposed from the outside.
It is the Age, in other words, not of ourselves, but The Other.
We know that salvation, at least for us, is assured. We don’t need to worry about ourselves anymore. Our concern is for The Other. God wants us to make sure the whole world is saved, NOT CONDEMNED, in accordance with John 3:17: “For the Son of Man came into the world not to condemn the world, but that through Him the world might be saved.”
Forgiveness–The Power of God at Our Fingertips
If the world is to be saved, how is that to be done? Not through condemnation, that much is clear from the verse above. No, as Jesus’ teachings indicate, the world is to be saved through forgiveness–humility–peacemaking–justice–reconciliation–love. The Gospel of John, again, shows the way, in a fashion dramatically relevant to the issue of Christians accepting LGBT persons.
After Jesus is raised from the dead, He appears to the fearful disciples in the Upper Room. He breathes on them—a symbolic sharing of the Holy Spirit—and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20: 23).
This is an incredible power given to a community that is charged, not with judging the world, but with blessing it. Jesus is saying that He has given His people a power previously attributable only to God: The power of forgiveness. Or, on the other hand, not forgiving. But if we consider the entire direction of Jesus’ ministry, and of history, it’s easy to see Jesus’ preference is that we forgive.
Forgiveness is a complicated matter. Quite often we have to forgive people for something they didn’t really do wrong, but we felt personally wronged by it. We are arrogantly, selfishly, holding a grudge that festers in us. We have to forgive them, not so much for their sakes, but for our own.
The time has come for straight Christians to forgive gays and lesbians. Not because gays and lesbians have done something wrong, but because our unwillingness to forgive is the greatest barrier to God’s grace that they—and we—have to overcome.
In fact, if we examine it carefully, what is it we’re holding against them? Their sexual orientation? But how has that wronged us, or wronged anyone, ever?
That’s often the way it is with the grudges we hold. They don’t stand up well under careful scrutiny. The wrong we imagine is not real. It’s pointless and unfair to wait for an apology. We simply have no choice but to forgive, for the sake of our own souls.
Jesus gave us the ability to forgive with the authority of God in Person. We have this incredible power, a power to heal and reconcile–but what we’ve chosen to do with it is to retain their perceived sin. Note that while Jesus says that if we forgive others, their sins are forgiven them; but on the other hand, if we don’t, they are retained… by whom?
Most likely by us—by those who refuse to forgive, but allow unforgiveness to eat at our souls like a cancer.
Forgiveness means we let it go. It frees those we forgive, and by extension, it frees us.
And this forgiveness has the power of God. If we forgive them, it’s official: God has forgiven them. Homosexuality is no longer a sin. It has never been, at least in the eyes of God. Its so-called sinfulness has always been a construct of flawed humanity, trying the best we can in our limited way to interpret God’s work in the world.
Instead, we hold onto it, tying a millstone of unacceptability around their necks and rotting out our own souls like sugar rotting out teeth.
Forgiveness is the ethic of the Kingdom of God. Forgiveness is the open door that welcomes people to God’s kingdom, where, as Paul said, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, but you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3: 28). This incredible (and, in the ancient world, unique) egalitarian vision had to begin with forgiveness, because Jew and Greek had to forgive each other for being Jew or Greek, and so on.
There’s a closed door between us and so many seekers–whether they are LGBT persons, or people struggling with other issues in their lives. Only when that door is open can people respond, yes or no, to the Kingdom’s invitation. But right now, we are barring the door. It is our own unwillingness to forgive that is barring them from God’s grace. And we will certainly be held accountable for it.
Forgiveness is the key ethic of God’s intention for the world, an intention laid out in the Old Testament and at the core of Jesus’ ministry: The tikkun olam, the healing of the world, God’s shalom, the peace and wholeness of our broken state.
And by God’s grace, we hold the key to the tikkun olam, the shalom of God, in our hand: forgiveness.
If we use it.
But here’s the best part, the great, ironic, God-part: once we forgive our LGBT brothers and sisters, then, in the name of Christ, we can receive their forgiveness for all the wrong we’ve done them for centuries, in the name of Christ.
And if they forgive us, then it’s official:
God has forgiven us.