I want to make a frank confession.
Homosexuality, while something I have gradually come to understand intellectually and theologically, is still something I struggle with existentially. It is a struggle that manifests when I struggle not to express discomfort when I receive my coffee from an effeminate man with long painted fingernails at the drive-thru window of the fast-food restaurant on some mornings. It is a discomfort that rises when I see “flamboyant” homosexuals parading down the street in a Gay Pride parade as opposed to the more scrupulous homosexual who tries not to make identity his window of access to the world. In the past, it has been a discomfort when I deflected a sexual advance after a girl friend of mine told me another man was attracted to me. I would like to wax intellectual here and say that what bugs me at times about the whole politicized homosexual movement is the celebration of difference as a form of direct antagonism against the status quo that stirs up these feelings, but it is something far deeper. I have come to realize that it may be a part of who I am.
And what I realize is that this “issue” that I have spent time trying to intellectualize and overcome seems at times a worthless mental exercise. In this same way though, it reminds me of the often worthless profession of faith I claim as a Christian. It reminds me clearly of how at times I’ll leave church, having been inspired in the peace and communion of Christ, only to enter a car with three screaming children and let off a curse word, meeting their screaming with my own. Or how I promise to volunteer more in charitable activities and no sooner have I said it that I forget this pledge of compassion and move on with my insular life, attending to my own needs, spending my own money on me. Or how I bad mouth someone or gossip and feel convicted even as the words are coming over my lips, but continue because the catharsis that comes with it is too satisfying not to indulge.
There is no other image to me perhaps more striking than the events that immediately follow Christ’s resurrection. Resurrection life, that promise which we believe opens us up so entirely to the Other, seems on an applied level like so many moralities that we fail and which fail us by expecting of us a person who simply cannot follow step-by-step along the same path. And yet if we are to believe the reports of the gospel writers, then at some point, Jesus does things that are completely unexpected. He enters the home of a sinner to share a meal. On another occasion, he allows an unclean person to clean his feet with her hair, as these motifs increase, we are constantly confronted by Jesus doing things that many Jews of his time would find unclean and abominable. And in doing such things, we are led to believe that what was unclean, what was abominable, he makes clean. What makes clean is not the transformation that occurs in the Other, if any, but rather that Jesus comes alongside the Other in humanity and compassion, and by doing so challenges the status quo.
The reality of the gospel cannot simply be summarized as the actions of a holy man doing holy things that we get to emulate every now and then when we pass a poor person on the island of an intersection we decide to give him a 5.00 dollar bill, even while against our better judgment because we can’t account for our act of charity once it leaves our possession. And as Americans, it’s our duty to know where our money goes. The reality of the gospel is the lived experience of the Other. The pre-Passion cross sayings that the gospel writers put on Jesus’ lips in the living world seem like a call to live among the despised, the damned, and the outcasts. It is self-death.
Paul talks about being dead to the law and alive to Christ. What does this look like? The law is the law of sin and separation, not just from God, but to ourselves and others. When I see myself only as a functionary of God’s law, I have failed to relate to what it means to be alive in Christ. There is something profound to be understood that even after the experience of resurrection life, we find that the Apostles continue in their progressive understanding of Christ to live as those whose lives are continually making room for new understandings. Having been in his presence was not enough. Continuing to live in his presence is necessary.
Two particular issues of post-resurrection importance that required the Apostles to examine their interpretative filter were among these, and they were far from trivial. These included the eating of unclean meats and the problem of circumcision. Paul’s answer to circumcision was one of ecumenicity. Peter’s answer to the eating of meats was one of inclusion. In both, the customs of the outsiders, despicable, abominable, and unclean, were met in the spirit of love and grace. If you are not Jewish, if you do not understand the meaning behind ritual laws of purity, you most likely will not capture how problematic this was. As a lay Christian far removed from this world, my response used to be “get over it.” And then I quickly realized that I may as well have said “get over it” to the post-slavery generations of my time who still strongly identify with slavery, despite myself, who has virtually no bond that could bring me to any such ethnic identification, primarily because I have always existed at the top of the ethnic power structure and have no need to remind myself who I am.
I mentioned earlier that the existential discomfort I feel for homosexuality is perhaps a part of who I am. This however is not without qualification. What I’ve learned in my Christianity is that who I am and who Christ says I am are not the same person. Outside of Christ, I am isolated from God, a sinner, and to add to this rather abstract notion and ineffective motif, I am also a liar, jealous, envious, in the past, a brawler, a thief, a fornicator, in essence I have never had a problem understanding what Paul says of me before Christ: I am guilty of it all. And while my life has been shot through with the resurrection life of Christ, this other law working in me expresses the expectation for the fullness of resurrection life I have yet to experience, even while I continue to grow. While many Christians intellectualize the importance of sanctification as a life-long process, it is often understood as a conformance to something they think they’ve already got a handle on intellectually. For as soon as their transformation is complete, their interpretative window closed, and their Bibles bound cover to cover, and there is no longer a living Word but a codified Word that they knock the cobwebs off each Sunday to re-read the same static passages, and in doing so prove sanctification is not a conformance to the character of Christ but a conformance to ethical duty. Despite talk then of a living confrontation with the living God, it is always a confrontation with the past that fails to find itself as a genuine experience in the present. It is the “dead men’s bones” Jesus inveighs. There is no room for new wine, for the skins are already full. These Christians live the faith of their fathers, but it is not their own. Is the problem deeper? Is there a fear that we will go off track? Is there a presumption that God inspires the men who went before us in a way that is unattainable to us? It is an unspoken presumption, unvoiced, but present and deeply attached to our own restrictive interpretations of ourselves as spiritual persons.
The discomfort that at times catches my spiritual life off-guard is precisely the impetus I need to understand the universal gift of salvation through the dying and rising Christ. Discomfort indicates that I am still struggling with my former self, the sin that has always been the reflex of my instinctual physical life. I think if Christians are real with themselves, they would not mistakenly translate a discomfort for homosexuality they have felt all their life now as a spiritual discomfort that they justify as emanating from their spiritual life. They would recognize that the “man of sin” remains, and we are at war with surrendering to fear, distance, and simply the discomfort of difference. Christians should see these as opportunities. Those who fear the house of the publican should enter boldly into it, for “perfect love casts out fear.” Those making difficult spiritual transitions are often the ones who are existing in the fullness of relationship with God, eating meat among those who drink milk - they understand that relationships are dynamic. Cornelius learned this. Paul learned this. Peter also learned this. The afterglow of the resurrection story is not the conclusion but the beginning. Beginnings make new possibilities not codify old ones. And the thing that you are uncomfortable with may very well be the thing that God is calling you to enter into and understand in love.
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