Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality (5 page)

So much of my life as a homosexual Christian, as I will try to describe in the following chapters, has simply been learning how to
wait,
to be patient, to endure, to bear up under an unwelcome burden for the long haul. Taped onto my desk where I write is a small sheet of paper with a quote from the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart.”
⁵
Having patience with your own weaknesses is, I think, something of what Paul was commending when he described the tension of living on this side of wholeness. When God acts cli-mactically to reclaim the world and raise our dead bodies from the grave, there will be no more homosexuality. But until then, we hope for what we do not see.

Washed and waiting. That is my life—my
identity
as one who is forgiven and spiritually cleansed and my
struggle
as one who perseveres with a frustrating thorn in the flesh, looking forward to what God has promised to do. That is what this book is all about.

W
HEN
I
WAS GROWING UP
in a Christian home and later attending a Christian college, it didn’t take long for me to discover that the Christian church has a rather unpopular position on homosexuality. Throughout the centuries, I found, the church has believed and taught that homosexual behavior is contrary to God’s desire for human life. And in recent years, while considering what we now know of some persons having a virtually unchangeable “homosexual orientation,” most of the church—Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant—has continued to claim that homosexual practice is out of step with God’s will. Acting on homosexual feelings and desires is contrary to God’s design for human flourishing.
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Christians initially arrived at this position through reading the Bible, and the same holds true of the church today. The Old Testament book of Genesis (chapters 1–3), together with Jesus’ teaching on divorce (Matthew 19:3-9; Mark 10:6-8), presents marriage between one man and one woman as the God-given context for human sexual expression and thus, in principle, rules out homosexual practice.

When Israel’s law comes to explicitly discuss the issue of sexual intercourse between two males, it pronounces it beyond the pale: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” (Leviticus 18:22).

In the one place where Genesis mentions same-sex eroticism, it presents it as an egregious example of the moral corruption into which the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah descended. When a pair of angels come to visit Abraham’s nephew Lot at his home in Sodom, a rowdy gang of men mistakenly assume the visitors are human males, and they demand that Lot permit them to have sex with the angels (Genesis 19:1-11).

The founding documents of Christianity, the New Testament, do not deviate from the negative evaluation of homosexual behavior found in the Old Testament. The Gospels record Jesus’ teaching that marriage consists of a covenant union between one man and one woman, in fulfillment of God’s original creative design. The early church in Jerusalem taught the same thing, and their apostles and elders wrote a letter to the church in Antioch urging them to live according to the dictates of Leviticus 18—“Abstain…from sexual immorality,” they said (Acts 15:20, 29)—implying that the Old Testament’s rule against homosexual intercourse was still in force even after the coming of Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

Paul, following the lead of his Jewish upbringing and of the nascent Christian communities through which he traveled, depicted homosexual unions as outside the bounds of God’s desires for his new humanity, the church. Men who practice homosexuality will not inherit the kingdom of God, he warned the Corinthians starkly (1 Corinthians 6:9, 10; see 1 Timothy 1:8-11). And in one of his greatest letters, the epistle to the
Romans, he chose homosexual activity as a graphic illustration of Gentile idolatry and unbelief (1:18-32).

On the basis of texts such as these, the Christian church has consistently and repeatedly said no to homosexual practice. For example, in the 1986 Vatican Letter on Homosexuality, the Roman Catholic Church expressed it this way:

It is only in the marital relationship [between a man and a woman] that the use of the sexual faculty can be morally good. A person engaging in homosexual behavior therefore acts immorally.

To choose someone of the same sex for one’s sexual activity is to annul the rich symbolism and meaning, not to mention the goals, of the Creator’s sexual design…When [homosexual persons] engage in homosexual activity they confirm within themselves a disordered sexual inclination…

As in every moral disorder, homosexual activity prevents one’s own fulfillment and happiness by acting contrary to the creative wisdom of God.
²

One evangelical church I attended for several years expressed a similar point of view in a position paper:

We believe that heterosexuality is God’s revealed will for humankind and that, since God is loving, a chaste and faithful expression of this orientation (whether in singleness or in marriage) is the ideal to which God calls all people.

We believe that a homosexual orientation is a result of the fall of humanity into a sinful condition that pervades every person. Whatever biological or familial roots of homosexuality may be discovered, we do not believe that these would sanction or excuse homosexual behavior, though they would deepen our compassion and patience for those who are struggling to be free from sexual temptations.

We believe there is hope for the person with a homosexual orientation and that Jesus Christ offers a healing alternative in which the power of sin is broken and the person is freed to know and experience his or her true identity in Christ and in the fellowship of his church.

We believe that this freedom is attained through a process which includes recognizing homosexual behavior as sin [and] renouncing the practice of homosexual behavior.
³

In other words, to those of us who know ourselves to be gay or lesbian persons and yet want to follow Christ and be a part of the community of faith and live out the gospel’s demand for holiness—to those of us who are Christians, members of Christ’s church, and are attracted to members of our own sex—the church says, “You must not act on your attractions.”

I do not wish to offend you gentlemen, but the church too is like the chief. You must do so and so. You are not free to have an experience. A man must be faithful and meek and obedient, and he must obey the laws, whatever the laws may be.

Alan Paton,
Cry, the Beloved Country

At times, though, for me and many others, the weight of the biblical witness and the church’s traditional teaching against homosexual practice can seem rather unpersuasive. The list of Bible passages and the statements from the Vatican and other church leaders just don’t seem compelling enough to keep gay and lesbian people from looking for sexual fulfillment in homosexual relationships. In fact, not only are they not compelling; these biblical texts and Christian pronouncements appear out-dated,
perhaps slightly cruel, and, in any case, not really workable or attainable.

Consider one reason for this. If it is really true that God is opposed to homosexual activity, then thousands of people who want to please God must be doomed to failure from the outset, since it can seem virtually impossible for anyone—let alone homosexual Christians who have no legitimate outlet for their sexual energies—to abstain completely all the time. Isn’t God setting gay and lesbian Christians up for a fall from the get-go?

On a recent trip to visit some friends from college, I spent a Sunday in Center City, Philadelphia. After attending a morning worship service, I drove through “the Gayberhood,” an area of town known, as its name suggests, for its gay-friendly establishments, barely three or four blocks from the traditional, conservative church I had just attended with my friends. The summer morning was turning into a bright, warm afternoon, and leaning my head out the window of the car, I could see rainbow flags fluttering from a red brick bookstore and hear music blaring from the open doors of several bars. What would need to happen, I wondered silently, for the people hanging out on this block to feel welcome in the church I just worshiped in? Would they have the impression that their lifestyle has compounded their guilt so much that God’s grace and forgiveness are now out of reach? Would some of them feel hope sinking into the pits of their stomachs if they heard that being a Christian means they should give up expressing their homosexual feelings?

Suppose a gay or lesbian person
did
want to come to church, to try to practice some kind of spirituality, to attempt to find God—what then? I heard one struggling lesbian woman say once, “It’s just too hard to try to be a lesbian and a Christian. There is no
way I can keep from surrendering to temptation, which means that I’ll never be able to live the life God wants me to live. I’ll fall into lesbian behavior, and that will be the end of my attempt at practicing Christian spirituality.” It seems to many lesbian and gay people that God could not or would not forgive all homosexual acts. For this reason, the demands for purity seem impracticable.

There are other reasons the church’s traditional no to homosexual practice doesn’t seem compelling. One is that it simply seems out of character with the Christian message of love, grace, and abundant life. Occasionally it strikes me again how strange it is to talk about the gospel—Christianity’s “good news”—
demanding
anything that would squelch my happiness, much less demanding abstinence from homosexual partnerships and homo-erotic passions and activities. If the gospel really is full of hope and promise, surely it must endorse—or at least not oppose—people entering into loving, erotically expressive same-sex relationships. How could the gospel be opposed to
love
?

Sometimes it seems that we gay and lesbian Christians are unfairly singled out by the church for especially harsh demands. After all, what other group in contemporary society does the church confront as directly and sharply as it does homosexual people? Heterosexuals are at least given the option of marriage and thus the possibility of having their sexual urges satisfied. For homosexual Christians, there is no such possibility. Unless our orientation is reversed—unless, in other words, we become heterosexual—gay and lesbian Christians are offered no hope that we will ever be able to fulfill our deepest sexual longings.

I once read the testimony of a gay Christian from the UK who said that he tried abstinence for a while and found it unworkable.
He would have “good runs,” successfully resisting temptation for weeks at a time, his hopes soaring, until the proverbial dam would break and he would find himself on the street looking for a one-night stand. Every time afterward he would feel miserable with guilt. His solution for this cycle of sin-guilt-repentance was to come out as a homosexual Christian and enter into a monogamous homosexual union.

Admittedly, I sympathize with this solution. On many late, lonely nights when my desires for gay sex seem overwhelming, I remember, “There’s an easy way out of this frustration. I could find a gay partner and the long struggle of resisting temptation could be over.” To say no over and over again to some of my deepest, strongest, most recurrent longings often seems, by turns, impossible and completely undesirable. If a gay Christian’s sexual orientation is so fixed and ingrained that there seems to be little hope of changing it, should he or she really be expected to resist it for a lifetime?

Everything in our culture tells us that the scriptural witness and the church’s no to homosexual practice are onerous, oppressive, stifling, perhaps even mildly sadistic. Being sexually active is the way to be most
alive
—to be fully, truly, beautifully human, a chorus of influential voices says. And if this is the case for heterosexual persons, surely it also holds true for those who are homosexual. If gay and lesbian persons deny themselves the pleasure of being sexually active, won’t they end up living shriveled, shrunken lives? If the church requires gay and lesbian Christians to refrain from homosexual sex, won’t that somehow dehumanize them?

I hear and read similar statements, transposed into a theological key, from Christians too. According to Genesis, “It is not good
that the man should be alone” (2:18), these Christians remind us. What’s more, Jesus castigated religious people who “tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders” (Matthew 23:4) and said that his own “yoke is easy, and [his] burden is light” (Matthew 11:30). Surely this means that no gay or lesbian believer should have to go through life without a partner who can satisfy his or her sexual desires. As a Christian friend once wrote to me, “If healing prayer and counseling don’t ‘work’ and a heterosexual relationship is not viable, then well-intentioned, monogamous homosexual relationships ought to be respected by the church.”

In short, for a variety of reasons, deciding to accept the Bible and the church’s teaching against homosexual practice sometimes doesn’t seem very easy.

Biblical commands are not arbitrary decrees but correspond to the way the world is and will be.

Richard Bauckham,
God and the Crisis of Freedom

In the first several years after Jesus’ resurrection, the earliest Christians became known for their countercultural lifestyle. Where the surrounding culture trumpeted materialistic values of accumulating wealth and comforts, the Christians sold their possessions and belongings and distributed the proceeds to the needy who were part of their fellowship (Acts 2:45). Where society scuttled prisoners and other undesirables off to murky dungeons, the Christians visited those who were so mistreated, often bringing food and warm clothing for these helpless outcasts (Hebrews 13:3). Where raucous revelry marked pagan social life—“orgies,
drinking parties, and lawless idolatry,” as one observer put it (1 Peter 4:3)—the early Christians were known for a weekly gathering they called a “love feast,” in which they shared bread and wine that symbolized the body and blood of Jesus, whom they worshiped with hymns and prayers.

What was it that motivated a lifestyle so radically out of step with the prevailing norms and customs of the surrounding Greco-Roman culture? What gave rise to this early Christian ethic? As I go back through the New Testament, I sense that for the early Christians it was the story of the gospel—which they told and retold to each other through their preaching, through their breaking of bread and sharing of wine together—that functioned as their motivation. Becoming a Christian in those days meant “learning the story of Israel and of Jesus well enough to interpret and experience oneself and one’s world in its terms.”
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The gospel was “a comprehensive scheme or story [the Christians] used to structure all dimensions of existence.”
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And this story fueled a radical, upside-down pattern of life.