Friday, March 30, 2012

The greatest of these...

Can I be honest with you today?  I’ve never struggled with same-sex attraction.  Like Tim said Wednesday in chapel, I too thought girls in second grade had cooties, and didn’t want to have anything to do with them. But when puberty kicked in, my attraction was always for the girls.

That being said, let me be confessional as well, because I haven’t always treated the gay community as I should have.  I’ve made off color comments at their expense.  I’ve used language to describe a gay person that was inappropriate.  I’m glad things like Twitter and Facebook weren’t around when I was growing up because of some of the comments I might have posted. 


I grew up in an era when the church honestly didn’t know how to respond to the issue of homosexuality, so at times, we didn’t respond well.  I’m not apologizing for the church.  I am apologizing for the part I played in hurting people not like me.  I am also saying that the church isn’t perfect, and doesn’t always respond well to the situations it faces, just like me. 


I’m grateful that isn’t the end of the story.  There is hope in this journey we’re all on.  It begins with the fact that I can be more like Jesus today than I was “back then.”  And as I become more like Jesus, so does the church, because I am the church.                                                                                                                                           


And so are you.  We are the church.  Hearing and responding properly is something we all want to do — and do well, because the way we live matters.  So, we need to keep listening to each other.  We need to keep talking to each other.  We need to keep asking the Spirit of the One who created us to help us know what to do, so we can respond like Jesus would.  We also need the same Spirit to give us the courage to be loving, truthful, and charitable.  It is who Jesus was.  I want it to be who I am, too. So…


If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.


But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.  For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 


When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.  For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.


And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13:1-4, 8-13

I’m in, how about you?

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