A friend and I have an ongoing conversation on our beliefs on how homosexuality fits in with Christianity. When I talk about this issue, I often talk about love being at the center of Christian belief, and a lack of love being at the center of most opposition to the pursuit of homosexual rights in the Church and in the world. “Love” is a loaded word, and here’s my attempt to explain it.

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Perfect love comes from God. We are created in God’s image. We have the capability of acting with that perfect love. That perfect love is patient, kind; not envious, boastful, arrogant, rude, insistent on its way, irritable, resentful. “It does not rejoice in wrong-doing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” 1

We are to love unconditionally without being ‘mean’ or rude; we are to be full of unending kindness. In terms of the issue of homosexuality, I can’t understand how it is kind to tell someone that the love s/he feels for someone of his/her same sex is incorrect and unnatural is kind–let alone voting against their ability to have hospital visitation rights or the ability to bring a parent-less child into a home.

To not be arrogant, we need to be humble, accepting that we aren’t God, and we have no right to speak with God’s authority. We can’t live on believing that we have privileged knowledge; that we arrived at our ideas of morality through a more righteous path than another person. We can’t be so insistent on our beliefs that we restrict people from living according to theirs (when it doesn’t affect/harm other people). Many against homosexual rights say that those rights impede their own. How is that so? It is not a right to control other people according to what you believe. It is a right, in the U.S.A., to pursue happiness. 2  If being part of a loving homosexual relationship brings happiness, than let it be. 3  If being part of a sexual relationship with a minor brings happiness, do not let it be because it clearly harms the emotionally/mentally inferior minor. I have to get that out there even though I know no one would ever go there.

Love endures all things and never ends. What are these “things”? Perhaps these things are like disagreements over issues like homosexuality. Certainly this love I write of is the love that never ends. It is eternal in God; it should be in us as well. If we want our love to endure, we need to give up some control. We need to give away that imagined power of moral superiority. We have to submit to each other out of reverence for Christ. 4

This unending, unrelenting love that comes from God is summed-up by the Greek word agape. It is the love that Jesus told us to have when he told us about the two most important commandments. It is the love that God had when God gave us Jesus. 5  When we practice ‘tough love,’ or try to fix people who act in what we deem a sinful manner, we are not loving them with agape love. We might feel a desire to help, to bring them to Jesus and a higher life, but that is not our job. That is not the love we are supposed to have. The love is not meant to be internal. Love is meant to be shown in our actions and spoken in our words. When we withhold those actions and words, we are loving with a phileo, or conditional love.

Our love is not meant to be internal. It is meant to be shown. If it is only internal, it is not love.

“Now for this very reason, applying all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence, and in your moral excellence, knowledge, and in your knowledge, self-control, and in your self-control, perseverance, and in your perseverance, godliness, and in your godliness, brotherly kindness [phileo], and in your brotherly kindness, love [agape].” 6

We need to also remember that always showing this love is not just for our neighbor and not just for God. It does something very special in us. If we can do this; if we keep trying to do this when it is most difficult, we start to live into the image of God—of which we were created. 7  Our soul grows and binds with God when we are able to live and love in the midst of tension. 8

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All of this creates problems because it is quite impossible to continually act in this perfect love; however, it is not impossible to keep trying. We all know the struggle in different ways over different issues. For some it is hard to love and show love to the homosexual. For many, well most homosexuals it is nearly impossible to show love to the other side. It isn’t surprising that so many homosexuals who want to believe in God and Jesus Christ end up leaving the church. So often they are shown little or no love. When I hear about another hate crime against a homosexual, or about a homosexual denouncing Christianity…when I hear someone use the words gay, queer, or faggot with the intention to insult, I think of Genesis 6:6, which says “And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” Genesis says this about the wickedness on the earth.

To me, this lack of love is what is wicked and causes moral downfall in our world—not gay sex. A lack of true love is the sign of a separation from God and God’s greatest commandment for us.

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Footnotes

1) 1 Corinthians 13: 4-7. “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrong-doing, but rejoices in the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

2) The Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

3) Mother Mary. “And when the broken hearted people living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be. For though they may be parted there is still a chance that they will see, there will be an answer. Let it be.”

4) Sex God. Rob Bell. 113.

5) John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

6) 2 Peter 1: 5-7

7) Matthew 22:39. “And the second (greatest commandment) is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ “ Derived from Leviticus 19:18. “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”

Sex God. Rob Bell. 61.