Challenges from a Queer Gaze

"The important thing to remember about Christianity is that it says you can't judge," said a homosexual young man sitting in front of me.  This came in the midst of a class-long discussion about creating a safe classroom environment for youths of all different sexualities.  The issue of the role of faith came up particularly during the second half of class for a little while, and this young man identified himself as a Christian and told us what Christianity was basically about - loving others by not judging them.

This short discussion of faith was prefaced by the following video, one that our teacher particularly suggested should be watched by the Christians in the class.



As you maybe can tell, Christians of the variety who would read the Bible and believe homosexuality is sinful were put immediately on the defensive, and the mood for it was set to about the creepiest version of "Jesus Loves Me" that I have ever heard.  There were so many things within even that two minute trailer that I wanted to argue or defend.  Out of my teacher's worldview, she believes in a broad tolerance.  That tolerance will include Christianity, so she doesn't want to tell us not to be Christian.  My problem is that she is implicitly telling us what kind of Christians to be by wading into the difficult question of how to read the Bible.  And many, though certainly not all, of the other Christians in the room are convinced by examples like the exhortation not to eat shrimp in Leviticus.  Well, we obviously don't follow that, so we basically can pick and choose which parts we want to believe, so I'll go with the judging not part that I like.  My head was spinning, and I was wanting to plead with my fellow Christians to take a closer look at the whole Bible and to move beyond a "fifth grade understanding" of it by taking it more seriously, not less so... by placing ourselves under it, instead of chopping it up and sitting in judgment of the pieces we don't like. 

I was not able to really respond to the video within class, and I am not sure that if I had said everything I wanted to that it would have been productive in that context.  The teacher had brought in six queer young people from Youth Pride to talk about their experiences.  Queer is an umbrella term used for sexual minorities - those who are not heterosexual or who identify themselves outside what is considered the norm for gender as well.  Our teacher is queer and has expressed her desire to "queer the gaze" of others, especially future teachers, to be more sensitive to the diversity in the world and to get outside of the normal gaze of the white male Protestant viewpoint.  Which is where I am.

As the youths talked about their experiences, some of them talked about Christians in their past insistently telling them they were going to hell.  I honestly am quite saddened and challenged by some of their experiences with Christians.  I did not want to fight those young people sitting right in front of me, nor did I want to fight the other Christians in the room over the way to read the Bible, so I listened, and I prayed for them.  I have much more directly shared my views within the class through my online reflections, and you can read my entry from this week here.

The battle for my teacher and fellow students' hearts is to be fought, I believe, not on whether homosexuality is a sin.  The real battle is to help them see the glory of Christ in the cross, and I commend Christ's supremacy and beauty whenever I get a chance.  But I believe they will not really get it until they see it as true.  I don't know what it means to believe something if it isn't to believe it as true.  My fellow students see well enough that Christianity satisfies the deep longings of my heart - that it works for me - but they do not all believe that it is true.  Jesus satisfies me, and he satisfies me only because he is true!  And the battle, I have seen, lies in simultaneously commending Christ and also fighting for the concept of truth, which has been tragically lost.  Without believing in truth, it is as if they do not have ears to hear.  They do not feel conviction of sin because they don't believe in the truth of sin itself.  Father, grant them ears to hear, and may you be pleased to do so by awakening in them a passion for the truth!  I need continual help from God on the best way to represent him in this context, and I pray that those times of restraint in the classroom come from the Spirit and not from my fear and cowardice.  Please do continue to pray for me. 

That all is actually a long preface to what I actually want to do with this entry, which is to show how I was personally challenged by God as I was sitting there in the classroom.  And my hope is that it will also challenge you.  Fallen human nature leads us to hear rebuke and do a thousand things to get out from under it.  But I believe that I am a redeemed sinner, and my heart, mind, and soul were entangled in sin in a million ways that I did not even understand - the more I know Jesus, the more I know how lost I was.  I have been justified and saved, and now I am being made into the likeness of Christ for my own good and for his glory.  Just as the good news of the Gospel comes first as bad news - that in order to live I must die - so it is with sanctification.  Every day is a dying to myself, and my heart's desire, as I get closer to Jesus, is to be more like him, though I am continually made more aware of how wide the gap still is.  If my heart is really to be like Christ, I should hate the parts of me that pull me from that, and I should hunger for rebuke from the Word of God toward the end of killing those parts.  Christ, bring the Sword of your Word to bear upon my sin, and slay me for the sake Christ!  Oh, that this might be our prayer!  Father, forgive me where it is not.  And so, my first instinct when told by the young man that Christianity is mainly about not judging was to discount the messenger.  My instinct was to say, "He doesn't interpret the Bible honestly, and he is a sinner.  I wish I could help him see more clearly."  But I was and am pressed by God to attend to the challenge of his Word, no matter the messenger.  The following is the passage that the young man was shortening:

Judge not, that you be not judged.  For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.  Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?  Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye', when there is the log in your own eye?  You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.  (Matthew 7:1-5)

I was sitting there, certainly judging the people in the class.  I was judging some of them in regards to their sexuality, but I was also judging the Christians concerning their relationship with Scripture.  This passage teaches that I will be judged in the way I was judging them.  I am pressed:  have I attended to the grand redwoods poking out of my own eyeballs?  The following are some meditations and convictions that flow from thinking about what it would mean for my judgments to be turned back on myself within this particular context.

1)  The first and most obvious way is in regards to sexual purity.  In the Sermon on the Mount our Lord drives the issue of adultery back to an issue of the heart.  Any lust is wrong.  I would be hard-pressed to believe someone who said they were completely free from it.  I need to take my lust seriously.  By lusting, I am saying that there is someone or something more attractive than the love of God.  Lust is a sin against my (future) wife, but it is ultimately a sin against our future Husband.  By my sexual purity, I get to display for the world the surpassing value of Christ.  How seriously do we take all sexual sins, especially within our own lives, and not just the sexual sin of homosexuality?

2)  I also believe that within our classroom conservative Christianity was caricatured and attacked, though certainly the attack could have been even worse.  If people insist on rejecting Jesus and the claims he makes in the Bible, I at least want them to be rejecting the Jesus who is really there in Scripture and life, instead of some flimsy caricature.  Likewise, if I expect people to take the time to understand Christianity beyond a flimsy caricature, then love prompts me to do the same for others, and I should be willing to listen.  I should make an effort to understand and meet people where they are.  The incarnation of Christ humbles me about how far I should be willing to go to meet people at their point of need.  Our figurative stance toward the world should not be standing on a hilltop, shouting at people, with our fingers plugged in our ears.  Rather, it should be on our knees, down in the valleys, weeping with those who weep, gently and patiently speaking words of life.  Our confidence in Jesus should be strong enough that we do not fear unplugging our ears to give a hug.

3)  Regarding the young man's initial proclamation about judgment, I must admit that I believe he has made some severe simplifications of the meaning of Scripture.  He has, I believe, picked out a favorite verse and made it ultimate over all other verses in Scripture.  Do I do this?  Do I have a canon within a canon?  Is my understanding of Scripture imbalanced in some ways that need correcting?  Do I assume that my current understanding is full enough?  Am I passionate about seeking the whole truth?  I wrote recently about being convicted that I almost exclusively quote Paul's letters, and I have an anemic understanding of the Old Testament.  I need to study and meditate on and know the whole counsel of God, not just my favorite parts.  Indeed, if God wrote it, he means for us to know it.  And God is looking for those who tremble before his Word. 

4)  Similar to #3 is our idea of God himself.  I believe that many people outside Christianity, but also inside it, entertain notions of God that are woefully inadequate and not true.  I believe AW Tozer has pointed out that entertaining false ideas of God amounts to idolatry.  To say that God is loving but not just does great violence to who he really is.  And our view of love in that case is severely inadequate.  Of course, we cannot know God exhaustively because he is an infinite God, but we can know him truly!  We can know him truly only because he has chosen to reveal parts of himself to us.  And if we willingly ignore parts of his character that he has revealed, we will be worshipping an imbalanced version of the God who is really there and not God himself.  Though I easily recognize this tendency to worship an imbalanced God unconstrained by truth within those who stress only God's love, I wonder... in what ways does my own view of God do him injustice?  And even if I have a factually, intellectually accurate picture of God in my head, what good is that if my life itself does not bear witness to the total truth of God as he has revealed himself?  Does my life tell the truth about the God who is there?

5)  The young man wanted to escape being judged by others.  I do, too.  I know that I am a sinner still in need of grace, but oh, how I hate it when my sin is pointed out!  I have been very conscious of this, so I don't really pull this verse out in my defense very much, but I very much believe this verse has been abused in Christian circles to avoid accountability.  How often do you quote this verse to avoid hearing rebuke, just as this young man did?

6)  I have saved what was the most profound realization to me for last.  What would I say to someone who is homosexual and says he sees no conflict with that and the Bible?  How would I commend Christ to him, knowing that it would require a very radical change?  What I have noticed with my teacher and with others is that they place a great deal of emphasis on each person's ability to form their own identity.  Each person does that differently, and they are unique, and there is nothing wrong with that.  For most queer people, that queer-ness has become central to their self-understanding and the way they identify themselves.  For me to say, "Follow Jesus and give that up," is to say, "Die to the thing that has become central to your identity."  They will feel, if they understand it, the totality of that call more than many other people would.

It is inconceivable to them that we would call homosexuality a sin because to them, it is just who they are.  Perhaps they feel conviction that it is wrong, but also possibly not.  How could God tell them that their very identity is rooted in sin?  I imagine that they might reason this way:  If there is a God and he is good, he would want me to be happy.  I found happiness in this, so he shouldn't tell me it is wrong.   I, of course, disagree, but I was convicted in thinking this out...

We don't just sin.  We are sinners.  Too often we think of sin as individual acts of sin that we do, but we are really born as sinners when we are born into Adam.  Romans 14:23 says, For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.  When we do not have faith, which means also when we are not in Christ, our whole lives are sin.  Our righteousness is as filthy rags.  Anything I do that does not flow from faith is sin.  When we try to create our own identities apart from Christ, it does not matter if it is around homosexuality or academic success or the American Dream or motherhood, it is sinful.  All other identities are subordinate to our ultimate and central identities as adopted children of the true King, and so there is a radical transforming of who we are.  Coming to Christ means undergoing a deep identity change.  Those who come to Christianity just to pick up a cultural habit have not experienced the rebirthing, identity-transforming power of meeting Jesus.

For self-identifying homosexuals, they probably have the gift of seeing more clearly how hard is the call of Jesus.  For many other people, myself included, we are blind to the ways we just append Jesus to our fallen identities.  Practically, we often muddy things up ourselves when we equate our actions with our identities.  For instance, if Jesus were to say, as he might do, You need to stop reading so many books and blogging to go out and make a difference in the world, I am sure it would hurt a bit.  And if Jesus were to say this through someone close to me, I would feel like my lifestyle was being attacked by that person... like my very identity was under attack.  We might say, as the homosexual would, Isn't it my right to live this way, to do this?  And sinners like myself, who deserve only hell and judgment and death, are in no position to demand our rights.  We have no rights.  We have no rights.  We have no rights!  If God were to make his presence powerfully known to us, the last thing we should do is demand our rights!  We should throw ourselves, instead, upon his mercy and grace.  What things do I defend as my right, even perhaps wrongly thinking that God is on my side in that defense?  Am I willing to unleash the Bible as a lion on my selfish notions of how I think my life should be lived?  That, after all, is essentially what I am asking the homosexual to do.  Am I willing to do this to myself?

Finally, God does want us to be happy.  But we are to be happy on his terms and not our own.  His designs for our happiness put our designs for our own happiness to shame.  And in that, he is glorified!  He wants for us a holy and enduring happiness in him.  How much heartache and disappointment could be avoided because we pursue happiness first, when we should instead pursue the Kingdom of Heaven, through which we get a superior happiness thrown in?  This is a happiness that comes in a way that is not intuitive, by placing ourselves underneath the demands and promises of Scripture, instead of over them as judge.  The way to be truly happy is not to pursue happiness but to pursue Jesus!  How gloriously counter-intuitive is the Kingdom of God!

Well, as you can see, I had quite a few pent up thoughts, and I am thankful for this forum to express them.  I sincerely do hope that God grants these words and thoughts to be a means of grace to you.  If you are interested in a more straightforward examination of homosexuality by a pastor that I trust, here is a link to seminars given at the Village Church.  Matt Chandler gave about a two hour talk on May 21, 2010.  It is good.  May God's grace be with you.