My wife asks me from time to time why I blog.  Sometimes it is inconvenient when I know I should be doing other things, sometimes I wonder if I have any “real”* readers, sometimes I am not in the mood…but I do it anyway.  I told her this morning the real reason why I blog.  I like to learn.  Blogging allows me to learn and then I get a chance to comment on what I learn.

As I begin Chapter One of Preston Sprinkle’s book People To Be Loved: Why Homosexuality is not Just an Issue I am once again in a position of getting to learn new things.  For example, I have learned that I have used the words homosexual or gay lifestyle in my writings recently and LGBTQ people would prefer that the word “lifestyle” not be used to describe “their life”.  LGBTQ people have jobs, friends, favorite foods etc., all the things that everyone has but when lifestyle is used to describe how they live, it conjures up “gay sex”. Sexual intimacy is just one small part of a person’s life, not an overriding factor.  

The word “homosexual” is not the preferred word for a person who is gay.  Gay people prefer the word “gay” or “lesbian” rather than being referred to as a “homosexual”.   Another reason that Sprinkle does not like the word homosexual is that it “is a broad term that has the potential of erasing the faces of real people with different stories.”   The best way to refer to gay or lesbian people (when in doubt or when one needs a broad term) is LGBTQ people.

This is just a taste of the lessons that can be learned by reading PTBL.  Although some may say it is too much trouble to be concerned about labels for people, I think about the labels that kids in my school applied to gay people in the sixties.  The good Christian kids I ran around with used words like “faggot” and “homo” and had little concern for how those words hurt real human beings.  Sprinkle references James 3: 6 when he relates that words like this are dehumanizing; they “stoke the fires of hell.” 

As I think about my past and the cruelty of the words we used, Sprinkle tells real stories about real people.  He tells about Eric Borges, the young man who grew up hearing the word “faggot” a lot.  He wrote “I was physically, mentally, verbally and emotionally assaulted on a daily basis….I was stalked, spat on and ostracized.”  Eric was assaulted in his classroom and no one intervened, not even the teacher who was in the room.  Tim Otto found that he was attracted to other boys at a young age.  Being the son of a Christian missionary, he tried not to act on his impulses.  One day (as an adult) he was propositioned by an adult gay man and they had sex.  Tim went into a tailspin, feeling like he had to kill himself for his sin.  I found his comment so telling:  ‘I wish that somehow rather than ending up in the arms of that anonymous man, I could have found myself in the arms of the church…I wish in the church I had found myself loved.’” 

What does the church offer gay people who want spiritual help?  Well obviously we don’t want to offer negative labels that just hurt people.  Surely we can do better than that.  Yet at times it is so easy to be negative about people who don’t have a heterosexual orientation [I just used a dehumanizing word for the rest of us].  Sprinkle writes “the Christian church has often played an unintended yet active role in pushing gay people away from Christ.  Sometimes away from Christ and into the grave.”  Here is a general truth about life; if anyone is different in any way, they just have trouble fitting in.  If anyone is gay or lesbian, they quickly get the idea that church is not where they belong.  Yet as we read the Bible, we see all kinds of people wanting to be close to Jesus: “broken people, sinful people, marginalized people, people who are clean and unclean, pure and impure.  Some are befriended.  Others are confronted.  All of them are loved” [Sprinkle, 15].  I don’t know, but I have venture a  guess that Jesus would not turn away a gay person who needed spiritual help, yet as Christians we do that very thing. 

Sprinkle tells of a gay friend who leads a Bible study.  I can imagine some Christians saying that gay people probably don’t feel like God’s word would be helpful, inspirational and valuable.  Yet some do have a hunger to know more about God. They actively seek spiritual help from The Bible.   The problem is that they report anxiety about attending Bible study in a church.  Sprinkle’s friend used the words “too scared” to attend Bible study at church.  They do not want to be harassed or humiliated by the treatment they feel they would receive from “regular” Christians.  In my study of Jesus, the only people He got upset with on a regular basis were hypocrites, the people who declared they are Christian but did not act like they were Christians, people who have a Bible study and exclude folks who don’t fit in?

Sprinkle cannot forget the names of Tim, Jeremy, Julie, Wes or Lesli, all people who just happen to be gay, people who were humiliated, people who were shunned, people who found no place in a church anywhere.  Sprinkle writes “I want to be ruthlessly Biblical in how we formulate our thoughts about homosexuality.  It’s not an either the Bible or people question; it is both the Bible and people.  Homosexuality is not about either truth or love; it’s about both truth and love, since truth is loving and love is truthful.  Our God is both.  There’s not room for false dichotomies here.  We need to be thoroughly biblical because we desire to thoroughly love people” [21].  There’s a “broad term”—people.  Aren’t we all people, created by God, seeking a relationship with Him?

Why do I blog?

I don’t want to be a Christian who dislikes a “group” of people.  I don’t want to be a Christian who uses bad language to refer to a group of people.  I don’t want to be a Christian who excludes people from my group because they are different from me. 

I guess I am trying to learn, how not to be a hypocrite.

*apologies to my “real” readers but I am well aware of bots…