A Love Song

I feel the need to compose an elegy for my home church. They are considering severing their ties with our denomination. Sadly, if they do so, I will no longer be able to call them my home. How can one be at home in a place that rejects who I am?

Church fights are tragic affairs because they are always human matters elevated to ultimate concerns. They reveal the inherent truth of John Calvin's doctrine of Total Depravity, for they reveal our inability to keep from falling to both of Karl Barth's poles of human disobedience to God--pride and sloth. In a church fight, pride drives the engine. Sides are chosen as we human beings declare ourselves to be right, morally superior, and, without necessarily meaning to, to be within the mind of God. In a church fight, sloth manifests itself in our unwillingness to consider that we might be wrong despite our certainty that we are right.

My denomination has been pulled to and fro over what is essentially a battle over sexuality. One part argues that God cares about our orientation because that orientation is something we choose as we grow up. Therefore, that which breaks from the norm--male-female sexual communion--is wrong as a willful rejection of God's order. The other part argues that sexuality is part of the created order which is far from a clearly delineated, this-or-that construct, but a spectrum with a wide range of possibilities for being human. Ergo, sexuality is not a willful choice but a discovery of whom God made us to be. Of course, we argue that the issue is not really this singular topic but rather a fight over theology, biblical soundness, and orthodoxy (whatever that is). Each part declares themselves right, more in tune with God, and, therefore, justified in denouncing the other side. They cannot coexist, so they divorce, and as with any divorce, it gets messy, hurtful, and irreconcilable.

And the church that formed me is on the brink of leaving the fold. sure they will be more holy, more righteous, and more sanctified if they do so.

That saddens me.

As they formed me, they instilled in me a vision of God that is huge. They taught me the power of compassion to overcome all human depravity. They taught me welcome as an embodiment of Christ in the world. In short, they loved me, helping me to learn to love myself so I might love others as I grew into being a pastor.

I do not understand their need to be right. I do not understand their willingness to consider a stance that rejects other human beings on a human relations issue. I do not understand a need to reject those who disagree. God loves us all, why can't we find room beneath that umbrella for everybody without making everybody look the same, speak the same, think the same, and spout the same?

I pray for humility--my own and everyone's. Humility tells me that ALL theology is speculative. We can never know the mind of God--that is the whole point of the last chapters of Job. What we know, we know only through God's self-revelation in Christ. What we know from that is that Christ welcomed one and all into his presence, even the most inner circle--Thomas the skeptic sat with Peter the know-it-all, James and John, egotists, sat with Bartholomew, so meek no one recalls anything but his name; Simon the Zealot (a frightening terrorist not afraid to attempt murder) could sit with John, the beloved disciple; and so on. Jesus asked only that they practice love--for one another, for the world, and for God. No one could claim to be right because only God was right, and God never threw anyone aside for bad theology.

I pray for compassion. God made every single human being that lives or lived. God is love. That means God loves every single human being that lives or lived. That is all that matters. No one need be "right" to be loved. I honestly believe that all God wants from us is love--not obedience to a code, a set of rules, or a rule of behavior other than we love one another self-sacrificially, walking with one another wherever the road leads. I worked with a couple in which one partner died a horrible death to wasting disease. The other tended them selflessly, endlessly, and tirelessly, washing their wounds, cleaning their mess, and feeding them with a spoon when the other was too weak to lift their head. That they were two men made no difference in light of their astounding practice of compassion--they would literally empty themselves to fill the other. Would that all the husbands and wives whose marriages I performed live so well! Would that I would live so well with my own wife and children! I believe God welcomed them as folks who got it.

I realize that the above paragraph will be enough for some to label me, turn away, and never read nor listen to me again.

I am sorry.

But I cannot turn aside from love that embodies Christ's compassion--self-sacrificing, other-centered love that redeems all touched by it. That is our call. To love. Not to judgment. To love. Not to casting stones. To love.

To love.

The people who taught me that seem on the brink of turning away.

Don't go.

Love.

God help us.

Love.