To Stone or To Love
For a number of years I have observed the growing conversation around the LGBTq community while trying to find my own ground in the discourse. I do not agree with those arguing for the normalization of it and neither do I agree with those opposed to the LGBTq. Often I have asked, where Gods heart is in the matter. It is Jesus who says, ‘come to me all you who are heavy laden’… and I have seen the weight that those that have come out to me carry. The self-hate, the self-erasure the insecurity… they have been fighting so hard just to exist within themselves, I have no heart to add the weight of shallow prejudice on their backs. Truth be told, I want to hug and hide you in places where nothing can come at you anymore, where maybe, Jesus can do what he intended to do when he invited us who carry heavy burdens to come to him. Yes I include myself in this story because I also carry the kind of identity shattering brokenness, it’s just that these things show up in different ways and we really aren’t that different. I believe strongly that God will move in big ways within this and many other marginalized communities because, that’s who He is.
Many years ago I came across a report from several countries from both the global North and south that drew a correlation in the 90th percentile between non normative sexual attractions and trauma experienced within the 1st 5 years of life. I have deliberately used the words I have used because I know the sensitivity around what I am saying. The long and the short of it is that when a critical population is identifying itself based on sexual preferences, perhaps they are not the problem but the larger mass that blame children for being victims of aggressive abuse in their formative years is the problem. In my own person, I will not hate or minimize the agency of any human being to live free from oppression and abuse. I think it’s very foolish to engage in any conversation regarding identity politics without an understanding of the contributing factors.When God gave Israel the law before they came into their promised land, he made it clear that they should not take up the practices of the people He was routing off of the land and among the most abhorrent to god was child sacrifice in all its forms…. The actual murder and offering of their children to other gods or even practices that symbolically offered these living children to these gods (one name is molech… there are many). Before Israel was broken into 2 and eventually taken into captivity, a key charge over them was that they had made it a thing to offer their children to gods and idols as sacrifices. We are not different from them. Generation after generation we have been quiet as our children and siblings were being preyed on by fathers, brothers, cousins, uncles and even people of the ‘cloth’. Some children were chased away from home when the abuse bore them pregnancies, other children were blamed for being abused, and others have nowhere to go as we turn our eyes away from the commercial use of church funded orphanages. So when we start blustering on about how we cannot allow alphabet minorities…. It holds no water, because we were complicit in seeding into the identity crisis. So what do we do as western nations start to incentivize inclusion and gay rights?If the church should hear the sound of the father’s heart, she would humble herself before him and repent, turning her eyes into herself and exorcizing everything that allowed such abuses of the children. She would rise up and protect the children with everything she has and she would seek the Holy Spirit on how to love the broken back to a semblance of wholeness. Church, hate and violence is not the way to engage with this one. The love of Christ Jesus is… and HE set a precedent in John 8:1-11.
I have copied from v. 3The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
“No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
Now replace adulterous woman with whatever alphabet situation. The principle remains the same.
If we cannot deal with the root of sin, we will spend our days beating leaves that only multiply as they grow again, very much like the hands of a hydra. The root of the alphabet situation is the abuse of children in their formative years, usually by family members, let’s have the courage to start dealing with the issue there, where it all begins
