Our Gay Neighbors (Part 2)

This is a multi-part series. Read the other parts here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

(Note: This is the second post in a series on engaging our friends in the gay community. You will feel some dissonance. More to come)

I vividly remember a wave of anxiety washing over me the first time our friends came over to our home. Having grown up in the Bible belt, where years later I migrated north to embark on a very conservative theological education where few remarks were made concerning our friends in the gay community, and if they were I could expect a reference to Sodom and Gomorrah, left me ill equipped in how to engage them winsomely.  I began to suffocate under a pervasive sense, “What am I supposed to do?”.    

When my theology texts failed me, there was always the Bible.  John notes that when he saw Jesus he saw a man full of grace and truth (John 1:14).  This would be the paradigm for engagement I would need to lean into if I sought to love my friends in a way which honored Jesus. 

I have a friend of mine named Caleb, who when he was young his parents had an epiphany in which they came to accept they were both gay.  So they promptly divorce, entered into same sex relationships and took Caleb to pride day celebrations where one of his earliest memories were Christians shouting Bible verses and hurling jars of urine on the marchers.  Truth without love ain’t love, it’s assault.

Years later, Caleb too would turn to John 1:14 and would use these cohabitating virtues of Jesus to plot a path forward into winsome engagement with our friends in the gay community.  Truth, as we all know, without grace is condemnation; while grace without truth is compromise.  Taking a rubber band, Caleb shows how we followers of Jesus must hold these two in tension.  If, for example, we were to only hold the rubber band by one end its power is lost…it’s limp and lifeless.  But the real power of the rubber band is when we hold it by either end in tension at the same time.  So it is with grace and truth.  Grace by itself is limp.  In fact, there can be no such thing as grace without truth.  If grace means to give someone something they don’t deserve, then the assumption is they’ve violated a truth-filled standard.  But if we dangle truth by itself without grace we get an army of Christians who hurl Romans 1 grenades at our friends in the gay community, and let’s just say that’s not a recipe for revival.  We need both.  At the same time. In tension.

But there’s more.  When John remarks of Jesus that he saw a man full of grace and truth, the order is telling.  I don’t think people will really hear truth from us until they first feel grace.  Our friends in the gay community are not theological projects, or position papers to be written.  They are people with a lived humanity, often filled with extensive chapters of loneliness and hurt in the narrative that is their lives, like most of us.  I’ve yet to hear a conversion story from a person in the gay community where someone shouted a Leviticus passage, and they stopped and came to Jesus.  As Rosaria Butterfield remarks of her own conversion to Jesus, the way to the hearts of our gay friends is through the portal of hospitality.  And it is in the sharing of laughs and bread and drink where the possibilities of Jesus and grace and truth are opened.