Good News – Progress Continues
April 12, 2018
My moment of awe this week was a photo pasted on Facebook. No, it wasn’t a photo or meme of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress on the debacle that led to possibly billions of people worldwide having their privacy compromised by Cambridge Analytica. It was a photo posted by my friend, Nancy, of her 3 year-old granddaughter. While Nancy is an exceptional photographer, this was not an exceptional photo, other than it just made me smile. It made me smile because Nancy’s granddaughter bears a striking resemblance to, not her mother (sorry Laine), but to her uncle, Nate (Laine’s brother). Nate was an exceptional young man that had the misfortune to be diagnosed with a genetically rare form of right frontal lobe brain cancer in December 2011; he passed away in November 2017. I loved Nate because his mother is one of my closest friends. I watched Nate grow up. I watched him play with my toddler daughter. Through his parents, I followed his collegiate career, and had the opportunity to visit with intelligent, articulate “adult” Nate. I wept when I learned of Nate’s diagnosis. I wept many other times in conversations with Nate’s mom during the time he was ill. I wept on the day I read Nancy’s text that informed me that Nate had passed.
But today, I smiled. I smiled, not just because Tulah looks like Nate, but because her parents, Laine and Sarah, still have the same rights that I do. That is something that I worried about when I awoke on November 9, 2016. In June 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Constitution guarantees a right to anyone, including persons of the same sex, to marry. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said, “No longer may this liberty be denied.” While the Supreme Court decision was significant, public opinion polls for many years prior indicated that most Americans approved of same-sex unions. But, on November 9, 2016, I feared that could change.
Instead, the acceptance of our country to extend “rights” to all persons in society is continuing. On March 25, 2018, my church, a reconciling congregation that “welcomes people of all ages, races, backgrounds, abilities, economic circumstances, sexual orientations, and gender identities into the life and leadership of our church,” came to a consensus agreement that our “church property, including our sanctuary, should be available for all ceremonies of legal marriage.” In June 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Constitution guarantees a right to anyone, including persons of the same sex, to marry. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said, “No longer may this liberty be denied.” While the Supreme Court decision was significant, public opinion polls for many years prior indicated that most Americans approved of same-sex unions.
Make no mistake though. Things are not perfect yet, or even close. There are still many people who believe that being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender is a “sin.” A quick Google search on this issue will bring up websites from both sides that interpret the same Bible verses very differently. Following the SCOTUS decision, there was no shortage of Christians criticizing the decision. However, a blog post by Adam Hamilton, senior pastor of The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, on June 27, 2015, resonated with me. Hamilton said that more than 37 years of studying the Bible taught him that the Bible is at times complicated. He said that within the pages of the Bible, we learn of the heart, character, and will of God, but we also find things that we might question. Some of these things seem to reflect the culture and times the biblical authors lived in more than the timeless will of God. I agree with Hamilton that the Bible, “is wonderfully complex and we do not do it justice, nor are we always able to discern God’s will, simply by quoting a handful of verses.”
Hamilton admitted that his views on homosexuality changed over the years due to two factors. The first was his daily study of scripture and weekly preaching that helped him appreciate the complexity of the Bible and why it needs to be carefully interpreted. Second, he has gotten to know and care for an increasing number of gay and lesbian people, and hearing their stories helped him to see them as human beings.
Last year, I had the opportunity to hear Jen Hatmaker speak at an event in Dallas. Jen is a best-selling Christian author and speaker. She and her husband, Brandon, left a comfortable lifestyle as pastors at a suburban mega church to establish Austin New Church in south Austin, Texas. Austin New Church is focused on serving the under-resourced. In 2016, Jen suffered the wrath of evangelical Christians when she said in an interview that she supported LGBTQ relationships. LifeWay, a large Christian retailer, pulled her books from their stores. She received death threats. Her children were harassed. Yes, you read that correctly – “Christians” were harassing her children and sending her family death threats because she chose to be loving and accepting of people who were different than her. She has said, “Being on the wrong side of the evangelical machine is terrifying and punitive.”
In a November 2016 post on Facebook, Brandon Hatmaker tried to explain the journey that he and Jen had been on that led them to believe that ‘same-sex marriage, as a life-long monogamous commitment, can be holy before God.” Some of that post is reprinted below.
We started with scripture (Again, please assume a ton of prayer). For more than a year we studied every version of every verse in the Bible that appeared to discuss “homosexuality”. We studied the Greek. We studied the Hebrew. We read every commentary we could find related specifically to the related passages. As we would for any topic seeking truth, we did our best to look at each verse with fresh eyes. We applied all the rules to faithfully and ethically interpret scripture: We considered the type of literature, the context in which each was written, what other scriptures say about it giving clues to God’s intent, and viewed each through the lens of the Gospel. The historical view is that scripture is clear on homosexuality. What we found is that it’s not as simple as traditionally taught.
Every verse in the Bible that is used to condemn a “homosexual” act is written in the context of rape, prostitution, idolatry, pederasty, military dominance, an affair, or adultery. It was always a destructive act. It was always a sin committed against a person. And each type of sexual interaction listed was an abuse of God’s gift of sex and completely against His dream for marriage to be a lifelong commitment of two individuals increasingly and completely giving themselves to one another as Christ did for the church.
But not one of these scriptures was written in the context of marriage or civil union (which simply did not exist at this time). Each act mentioned in the Bible was sin, no doubt. In context, we believe the same today. Just like heterosexual sex outside of marriage is sin for obvious reasons, whether consensual or not, we still believe homosexual sex outside of marriage is a sin.
In the same way, we then studied what the Bible says about marriage. Every verse. We studied what scripture describes as God’s original design, God’s gift of sex and procreation, and God’s intent for the relationship. We considered it through the lens of God’s redemptive plan from Genesis to Revelation. We viewed it as the most disciple-making relationship ever dreamed where two individuals learn to increasingly give themselves wholly to each other as Christ did the church. We dug deep into considering which of the Bible’s teaching on marriage was a description of whatever the current state of marriage was at the time each book was written and which of the Bible’s teaching was a prescription for how marriage should be.
Bottom line, we don’t believe a committed life-long monogamous same-sex marriage violates anything seen in scripture about God’s hopes for the marriage relationship.
This week, my sister sent me a photo of an article that her company sent to employees. It said that her company had been ranked by Forbes magazine as 22nd out of 250 companies for diversity. It said her company had achieved a perfect 100% score for the third year in a row on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s 2018 Corporate Equality Index, a national benchmarking tool on corporate policies and practices pertinent to LBGTQ employees. Not surprising (to me anyway), is that Parkland Memorial Hospital also received a perfect score for its health care options for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Texans, according to the annual survey by the Human Rights Campaign. The 11th annual Healthcare Equality ranked 1,600 health care facilities across the nation for factors such as patient nondiscrimination and staff training. Parkland was the only Dallas-area medical center to receive a score of 100 percent.
I wish I could share this news with someone in my family who would have rejoiced at this news, but sadly, I cannot. Like Nate, he no longer walks on this Earth.
Things aren’t where they should be yet. But today, I’m awed by the understanding and compassion of the members of my church and others. I’m awed by the resiliency of my friends to continue in the face of immeasurable loss. A precious 3 year-old, and her parents and grandparents awe me. Today, I weep tears of happiness. Thank you Nancy, Steve, Tulah, Nate, Laine, and Sarah. Thank you Parkland Health & Hospital System, Hallmark, Oak Lawn United Methodist Church, and everyone working for all humans to have the same rights!
