Struggling with Homosexuality Like a Christian

Note from blogger: don't get to the phrase "homosexual Christians" and stop reading. Rather, keep reading and let the author Wesley Hill tell what he means that by that odd phrase. The excerpt comes from a book in which Hill reflects on the biblical teaching on homosexuality out of his own personal struggles. And at 160 short pages, it's well worth your time.

"When we homosexual Christians bring our sexuality before God, we begin or continue a long, costly process of having it transformed. From God’s perspective, our homoerotic inclinations are like “the craving for salt of a person who is dying of thirst” (to borrow Frederick Buechner’s fine phrase). Yet when God begins to try to change the craving and give us the living water that will ultimately quench our thirst, we scream in pain, protesting that we were made for salt. The change hurts.

“Are homosexuals to be excluded from the community of faith?” asked one gay Christian in a letter to a friend. “Certainly not,” he concluded. “But anyone who joins such a community should know that it is a place of transformation, of discipline, of learning, and not merely a place to be comforted or indulged.” Engaging with God and entering the transformative life of the church does not mean we get a kind of “free pass,” an unconditional love that leaves us where we are. Instead, we get a fiercely demanding love, a divine love that will never let us escape from its purifying, renovating, and ultimately healing grip.

And this means that our pain—the pain of having our deeply ingrained inclinations and desires blocked and confronted by God’s demand for purity in the gospel—far from being a sign of our failure to live the life God wants, may actually be the mark of our faithfulness. We groan in frustration because of our fidelity to the gospel’s call. And though we may miss out in the short run on lives of personal fulfillment and sexual satisfaction, in the long run the cruelest thing that God could do would be to leave us alone with our desires, to spare us the affliction of his refining care.

“Not only does God in Christ take people as they are: He takes them in order to transform them into what He wants them to be,” writes historian Andrew Walls. In light of this, is it any surprise that we homosexual Christians must experience such a transformation along with the rest of the community of faith?

The Christian story proclaims that our bodies belong to God and have become members of the corporate, communal body of Christ. This is yet a third reason Scripture and the church’s no to homosexual practice make sense to me."

-Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality (2011 A.D.) http://www.amazon.com/Washed-Waiting-Reflections-Faithfulness-Homosexuality/dp/0310330033/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330522662&sr=1-1

C.S. Lewis: Children Are Never Deceived by Fairy-Tales

"Those who wish to be deceived always demand in what they read at least a superficial or apparent realism of content...[Without] at least some degree of realism in content...no deception will occur at all. No one can deceive you unless he makes you believe he is telling the truth. The unblushingly romantic has far less power to deceive than the apparently realistic. Admitted fantasy is precisely the kind of literature that never deceives at all. Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction; they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines. None of is deceived by The Odyssey, the Kalevala, Beowulf, or Malory. The real danger lurks in sober-faced novels where all appears to be very probable but all is in fact contrived to put across some social or ethical or religious 'comment on life.'" 

--C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961 A.D.)

Did Jesus Ever Get a Stomach Virus?

This piece by Russell Moore is now the foreword for Patrick Henry Reardon's new book The Jesus We Missed: The Surprising Truth about the Humanity of Christ.

http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-We-Missed-Surprising-Humanity/dp/1595553711/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330290712&sr=1-1

"Several years ago, a brutal stomach virus crept through the seminary community where I serve as dean. One day, knowing that most of the students in my classroom were on the upswing from this sickness, I posed the question, “Did Jesus ever have a stomach virus?”

On a more typical day-a day in which the question of such illness would have been a more abstract reality-I doubt there would have been anything less than consensus. Of course, these future pastors would have asserted, Jesus assumed everything about human nature, except for sin.

But this wasn’t an abstract question. These students were still reeling not just from the discomfort of the stomach flu, but also from its indignity. They had been wracked with vomiting, diarrhea, fever, and chills. They still smarted from the sense of having no control over the most disgusting of bodily functions.

So when I asked this question, these ministers of the gospel hesitated. The stomach virus wasn’t just awful; it was undignified. And thinking of Jesus in relation to the most foul and embarrassing aspects of bodily existence seemed to them to be just on the verge of disrespectful, if not blasphemous.

Why is it so hard for us to imagine Jesus vomiting?

The answer to this question has to do, first of all, with the one-dimensional picture of Jesus so many of us have been taught, or have assumed. Many of us see Jesus either as the ghostly friend in the corner of our hearts, promising us heaven and guiding us through difficulty, or we see him simply in terms of his sovereignty and power, in terms of his distance from us. No matter how orthodox our doctrine, we all tend to think of Jesus as a strange and ghostly figure.

But the bridging of this distance is precisely at the heart of the scandal of the gospel itself. It just doesn’t seem right to us to imagine Jesus feverish or vomiting or crying in a feeding trough or studying to learn his Hebrew. From the very beginning of the Christian era, those who sought to redefine the gospel argued that it doesn’t seem right to think of Jesus as really flesh and bone, filled with blood and intestines and urine. It doesn’t seem right to think of Jesus as growing in wisdom and knowledge, as Luke tells us he did. Somehow such things seem to us to detract from his deity, from his dignity.

But that’s just the point.

The very beginning of the Christ story itself tells us that part of the sign of the Messiah is that he is wrapped in cloths (Lk. 2:12). Why do you wrap cloths around a baby? For the same reason you might diaper your infant, or wrap her up in a blanket. The point is to keep the baby warm, and to keep him dry from waste. From the very beginning Jesus is one of us, sharing with us a human nervous system, a human digestive system, and as we’ll see every aspect of human nature.

It didn’t seem right to the world to imagine the only begotten of the Father twisting in pain on a crucifixion stake, screaming as he drowned in his own blood. This was humiliating, undignified. That’s just the point. Jesus joined us in our humiliation, our indignity.  In this Jesus is, the Scripture tells us, not ashamed to call us brothers (Heb. 2:11).

I thought intensely about this as I was asked to read, and write a foreword, for my friend Patrick Henry Reardon’s new book on the humanity of the Lord Christ, The Jesus We Missed: The Surprising Truth About the Humanity of Christ (Thomas Nelson). This is the best contemporary treatment of this subject I’ve ever seen.

This book prompted me to think and to ponder. But, more than that, this book prompted me to pray and to worship, to see the Jesus it is so easy for me to forget: the Jesus who was really and truly one of us, so that we might be, with him, the heirs of the Father and the children of God. The one who took on every aspect of our flesh and blood in order to redeem us from the power of the devil (Heb. 2:14-15).

Reflecting on the humanity of Jesus always drives me to see what I’ve missed in my own humanity. Too often, we’re tempted to excuse our own bitterness, our rage, our lust, our envy, our factiousness as “only human.” The mystery of Christ shows us that such things aren’t human at all, but satanic. We define humanity in light of our brother, in light of the alpha and omega point of humanity-Jesus of Nazareth.

Reflecting on our Lord’s humanity can drive you to the Jesus you might have forgotten or, might never have seen. It can also propel you with longing-for the day spike-scabbed hands wipe away your tears as you hear a northern Galilean accent introduce himself as your Lord, as your King, but also as your brother."

Protecting Ourselves To Death

"Sometimes we want to want to protect our children or our flock from too many things. For instance, we sometimes try to protect them from the caustic scorn of peers who have little time for Christian values. After all, we console ourselves, the Bible says much about earning a good reputation with outsiders. But that reputation is for integrity, kindness, love; it is never to be won at the expense of silence. I look at my children, and I wish for them enough opposition to make them strong, enough insults to make them choose, enough hard decisions to make them see that following  Jesus brings with it a cost. A church that is merely comfortable, that never evangelizes, never encourages its people to stand on the front line, will never be a strong, never be a grateful, never be able to sort out profoundly Christian priorities."

--D.A. Carson, How Long, O Lord? Reflections on Suffering and Evil (2006 A.D.) 

Narnia: National Security, Small Government, with a Little Environmental Regulation

"These two Kings and two Queens governed Narnia well, and long and happy was their reign. At first much of their time was spent seeking out the remnants of the White Witch's army and destroying them, and indeed for a long time there would be news of evil things lurking in the wilder parts of the forest--a haunting here and a killing there, a glimpse of a werewolf one month and a rumor of a hag the next. But in the end all that foul brood was stamped out. And they made good laws and kept the peace and saved good trees from being unnecessarily cut down, and liberated young dwarves and young satyrs from being sent to school, and generally stopped busybodies and interferers and encouraged ordinary people who wanted to live and let live."

-C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

 

We're a Bunch of Phonies

"One of our greatest problems today is that we have gotten caught up in our culture-wide quest for authenticity. We want our jeans authentic (pre-ripped at the factory), we want our apples authentic (grown locally instead of somewhere else), we want our music authentic (underground bands nobody ever heard of), we want our lettuce authentic (organically manured), we want our literature authentic (full of angst), we want our movies authentic (subtitles), and we want our coffee tables authentic (purchased from a genuine peasant while we were on some eco-tour). In short, we are a bunch of phonies. We are superficial all the way down.

We are not going to get out of this snare until we see the quest for authenticity for what it is--a hypocrisy factory cranking out tight-weave superficiality by the yard."

-Douglas Wilson, Wordsmithy (2011 A.D.)

The Social Importance of Motherhood

"No matter what the outcome being examined–the quality of the mother-infant relationship, externalizing behavior in childhood (aggression, delinquency, and hyperactivity), delinquency in adolescence, criminality as adults, illness and injury in childhood, early mortality, sexual decision making in adolescence, school problems and dropping out, emotional health, or any other measure of how well or poorly children do in life–the family structure that produces the best outcomes for children, on average, are two biological parents who remain married. 

Divorced parents produce the next-best outcomes. Whether the parents remarry or remain single while the children are growing up makes little difference. Never-married women produce the worst outcomes. All of these statements apply after controlling for the family’s socioeconomic status. I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for the major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties."

 -Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 (2012 A.D.)