I presume this to be a mystery, falling short of a paradox, that God condemns homosexuality while, at the same time, creating homosexuals. To suggest someone can be born into an inescapable sin is to deny the power of the cross. To suggest that a person must war against their own nature and embrace shame and scorn just to make it into heaven and be embraced by a loving God is paralyzingly stupid. In that context, making criminals of homosexuals seems wrongheaded. This is our fog of war, our stumbling blindly around in ignorance and fear rather than prayerfully studying and engaging. This is an issue the church must come to terms with, but for which Christ left no specific model. What should our response be?
Guitar Cases & The Communist Threat
I used to have very long hair. Long, flowing hair like my mentor, Larry Hama or the other Larry in my life, the musician/minister I modeled myself after, Larry Norman. Most people reading this will have never heard of Larry Hama (who created the current incarnation of G.I. Joe) or Larry Norman (who created contemporary Gospel music), and thus have not a lot of chance of understanding me or my motives or, for that matter, my hair. But it came to pass that Adam and I were having lunch down at the South Street Seaport, and the waiter—a young man of late teens to early twenties—all but refused to wait on us. He seemed angry and hostile towards us, annoyed. I couldn't figure it out until I looked over at Adam, a close friend for some years. Adam also had long hair. A Jewish guy with amazing hair who described his hair-care regime thusly: "I wash it, and let it dry." Presto, amazing hair. Long, flowing, rock star hair. And this kid was giving us the worst service ever.
Then it finally hit me: the waiter thought we were gay. Which upset him or angered him for some reason. I leaned over to Adam, whispering, "Hey—I think that kid thinks we're gay." And I wondered if he'd just fallen off the chicken truck. New York City is literally jammed with all manner of ethnic, racial, religious, and political types. On any given day, in any given part of the city, literally, the entire cultural world can and will pass you by. Judging a book by its cover (or, in our case, its hair) was an utter waste of time. My wife was Adam's wife's best friend, but this idiot kid was going to spit in our food. I couldn't imagine why this kid would even care what we were or why it upset or angered him. But that's what gay people do: upset and anger people simply by walking around breathing. And, rather than investigate why we react the way we do, we lash out at them. As if our hang-ups and insecurities are somehow their doing.
So, I finally called him out, standing at my table and shouting over at the waiter,
"HEY, you IDIOT— I'M NOT GAY." I
pointed at my chest, "I'm a MUSICIAN." Then I pointed at Adam.
"HE's
gay!" There was laughter throughout the plaza, but I was
pissed. Adam and I went somewhere less homophobic to eat and, as
we walked across the plaza, I said, "Y'know, if we were carrying
guitar cases, we'd have our lunch by now." Long-haired guys
carrying guitar cases are a universal, everyday sight in every
city in America. Nobody thinks Lenny Kravitz or Steven Tyler or
Willie Nelson are gay. Why? Because they're carrying guitar
cases. And maybe that's the
answer: if we issued every gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgendered person a guitar case, maybe the country and the
church would stop beating these people up.
This week, somebody's going to accuse me of being gay. It's
okay, I'm used to it. It's what ignorant people do. It is,
frankly, easier to presume an ulterior motive or guilt by
association than it is to wrap our narrow little minds around
the concept of Christ's perfect love overcoming ignorance and
fear. This is why I get angry for being so presumed: it lets
ignorant Church Folk off the hook. It enables them to dismiss
the whole idea of engaging the issue because it presumes an
ulterior motive on my part. During the
1950's, if you talked about Communism you could end up
blacklisted and unable to work, or worse. When he refused to
invade Cuba (and potentially trigger World War III). President
John F. Kennedy was labeled "soft on Communism," a label that
stuck. He was assassinated a year later. Many of our pastors
fear political assassination and blacklisting simply for showing
any kindness at all to LGBT persons. Thus,. the black church's
response to the community is typically a non-response motivated
by fear rather than faith: a disorganized hash of Stuff We Done
Heard Someplace.
Many of our pastors simply have no idea how to respond. They haven't done their homework. Haven't had even one honest and informed dialogue with gay clergy or civil rights groups. The entire subject is simply radioactive, with most of our pastors choosing to ignore it and hope it goes away. But it's not going away. And, lacking a cogent, reasonable response that stands both biblical and anthropological tests, the church seems that much farther removed from reality simply because of its fear of actually dealing with reality. The anger and bombast and denunciations and all that sending people to hell reads as what it is: fear. Love has no need to employ hate as a medium for its message. Love does not inspire hateful acts.
The notion of Communism being "evil" was part of a PR campaign invented by Dean Atchison, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's undersecretary of state. Atchison felt the postwar Soviet threat was too complex a concept to explain to the American public, so he fitted the Soviets with a black hat, painting them in simplistic, child-like tones of black and white, and literally invented this notion of the evil being not merely the Soviet Union but the political ideology of Communism itself which, in turn, led to Korea and Vietnam. Atchison literally invented the Cold War, which at times threatened to destroy the entire planet, as America naively waged war against an idea; not even specific persons, but a political concept. This thinking is now deeply embedded within our cultural DNA as we still consider Communism "evil," as opposed to more properly understanding some Communists have done evil things. Right-wing conservatives have successfully translated this concept to Islam. Rather than our focus being on specific people who commit evil acts, we ascribe the quality of evil to an ideology and fight the air. People can be hunted down and killed. Ideas cannot.
The church is, in much the same way, entrenched in a cold war of hate. Not against specific persons and not even in response to a specific action or wrong. We are fighting the very idea of homosexuality without understanding it, without understanding what the bible actually says about it or what those words actually mean Much like postwar America bamboozled by Atchison's twisted rhetoric, we are uninformed about our reasons for loathing these people. We walk in ignorance and lash out in hate while calling ourselves Christian. Thus, not only are we not having the discussion, we're afraid to have it, afraid of the finger which will inevitably be pointed. This is how the enemy deceives us: gets us all warped and believing we are somehow doing God's will by hating people. Well, accuse away. I'm used to it. I've been called much worse.
In this Special Edition we are making a suicide run
into the issue of homosexuality and the Black church. This is one of those issues that incites disgust, anger, fear and loathing, a topic no one wants to deal with and yet everyone flocks to virtually any reasonable dialogue on it. Why? because, whether we admit it or not, we're looking for answers. Many of us, within the Christian church if not specifically the Black Church, want peace. We want a truce. We want to find a way to come together as a family without the hiding, the whispering, the suspicion, the expulsion from our group of same-gender loving persons. Publicly, we get our back up. The simple fact I am not writing in all caps, sending gays to hell, makes me a marked man. My many pastor-friends start scurrying for the exits when we use anything short of a judgmental tone towards these persons. Call it what you like, but this behavior is fear. Pastors are terrified of the subject because, for most of us, keeping our job is our highest ministerial priority. As pastors, God's truth should be our highest ministerial priority, but it's not. Most pastors will throw LGBT persons under the wheels of the bus at the slightest provocation because they know, if they do not, their pastoral days are numbered. Many pastors, white and black, pander to the ignorance of their congregations instead of educating and leading. Most of our churches operate under rules of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, wherein persons we know, for a fact, are gay are accepted just so long as they never actually publicly admit it. We just go on pretending to see what we want to see while encouraging these persons to live a lie. The minute our suspicions are confirmed, we feel compelled by our biblical ignorance to turn on them, to shun them and show them hate. A black pastor, presented with evidence of a ministry leader's homosexuality, must take immediate steps to discipline and rebuke that leader. Many of our pastors secretly arrange for sexual reorientation therapy to try and rehabilitate gay leaders.
This is our fog of war, our stumbling around blindly in ignorance and fear rather than prayerfully studying and engaging. In this non-discussion, pastors simply cannot risk seeming reasonable. They've got to be harsh judges in order to maintain their credibility. Even arranging a fair and balanced forum to exchange views and pray together, would seem by their uneducated and ignorant congregants as a capitulation to sin. And rather than challenge that mindset, many if not most pastors simply perpetuate it. Homosexuality is, to many black Church Folk, the greatest sin, worse even than murder. Most Church Folk I've ever known have no sense of the fact that their pettiness, gossip and failure to love are every bit the sin that homosexuality is. Pastors who fail to educate, who fail to lead, deserve the crippled, ignorant, half-baked ministries they create. CONTINUED
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