We finally addressed the issue of the day.
It's been nearly a month since the U.
S. Supreme Court handed down a decision legalizing same sex marriage in all fifty states. And, though it has been hard to escape discussion of the issue, until today, we had.
As I repeat ad nauseam here, our gatherings are not focused on the worship of God in the way Christendomites worship. For us, worship happens when an individual disciple offers his/her body as a living sacrifice. We meet to spur each other on to love and good works, the love and good works being the worship.
When the same sex weddings thing did come up today, it was a part of what for us is a more important conversation about how each of us stands up for truth without being ashamed of the gospel or our Lord.
The issue, as most conservative Christendomites have to deal with it, that is, how do we avoid having to ritualize gay marriage? is one we won't ever have to deal with because we don't have a sanctuary, or believe in them, and we don't do weddings for anyone. Period.
Knowing what the typical evangelical response to the Supreme Court has been, it struck me how different our mindset is. Our people's question is, "How can I be salt and light and a testimony for Jesus?" not, "How can we preserve the purity of our sanctuary? And, how can we protect our pastor from being forced to officiate at a same sex wedding?"
In the New Testament, clergy didn't officiate over weddings and the word church wasn't used to describe the part of a building where rituals were performed.
So, we are free to struggle to spur each other on to lives that rebuke sin, stand for truth and offer love and mercy to people who need to believe that Jesus is Lord.
In the conversation today, that ran longer than any reasonable sermon, there was some discussion of "the religion of pleasure," which is hedonism, the idea that what brings pleasure or happiness is truth. It seems to me that in our group, we are opposed to it. I'm not sure everyone in even the theologically conservative church is. Perhaps more on that later.
I believe that I need to say much more about what follows here and have been struggling in prayer and meditation to know how to do it for quite some time:
ReplyDeleteThe teaching of Jesus that we discussed in our last gathering which convicted us most deeply is, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me."
Too many people today think they can follow Jesus without first denying self.
The question we struggled, and I mean struggled--no, STRUGGLE--with is the reality that to have a positive ministry to LGBT people, we have to start with this demand of Jesus, which we see as Jesus 101.
The problem that I see with shepherd -dominated religion is that it doesn't speak this truth.
As some know, I spent many years on my Region's Commission which is tasked with assisting struggling churches with what we still call "renewal."
Every church we worked with during my tenure was struggling because, as one of friends sometimes said, there was sin in the camp.
We never once called for confession of sin. For that matter, we never even pointed out sin.
So much of shepherd dominated evangelicalism has stopped proclaiming, as the first step in following Jesus, the act of self-denial.
If we don't demand it among ourselves, we have no message to address the moral decline of the culture.
I was excited, that, in our gathering this past Sunday, this conviction about self-denial was spoken by someone other than me.
AND, that the conviction that self-denial must begin with the self is known among us to be step one.