Amos was an Old Testament prophet. One day, the Lord showed him that God was holding a plumb line, a vertical line with a piece of lead on the end beside a wall. It was the line to which the straight, vertical wall was being measured – a perfectly vertical line which God held, showing the people that God sets the standard and the people should build to that standard. For you see, if a wall is not built perfectly vertical, following a plumb line, the only good thing to do is to knock it down and rebuild before greater damage is done when the wall falls down of its own weight. And Amos was given the great honor and joy of serving God that day by telling the people of what the Lord had shown him. For this great service to God, the king’s messenger told Amos to leave the country and go work somewhere else. Amos simply replied that he had been minding his own business, but God had told him what to say. Amos was not well liked by the powers of his country, but Amos was on a first-hand speaking arrangement with the Creator of the Universe. Such is the joy of being a prophet when prophets help people reconnect with the Creator of the Universe.
In everything we do, this key mission of helping people reconnect with the Holy Creator of the Universe and have eternal life with God should be our motivation, our reason for everything we do in this church. As Jesus said, “ Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. “(Matthew 18:19-20) This is why we do what we do in this church.
Yet once in a while, things outside the church distract us from our mission.
Today, I speak of the recent Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage. This is fair warning – This sermon is most definitely PG-13 rated.
I also want to point out at the beginning that while most people in this audience disagree with the decision, there are many people who are very happy with the decision and believe it was proper and just. Before we start, I want to remind you of this, and the related fact that this is not the most important thing that ever happened. Jesus Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection were the four most important things that ever happened.…and the law of one particular nation on an issue of sexuality pales in comparison.
To many people, this decision came as a surprise. It did not to me. To many people, it signaled a significant change in the world around us. It did not to me. To many people, this was an announcement that our nation was no longer Christian. It did not to me, for I had realized that in some ways this country had left Christianity many decades ago, and in other ways our Christianity had become a deep bedrock upon which the nation increasingly stands. The difference, you see, is how you define Christianity and what you consider a Christian nation to be like.
Furthermore, I am not angry about the decision – and I am not glad about the decision. I just expected it. I do not blame the men and women of the Supreme Court, for they are doing just what is to be expected in a democracy which is based upon a Constitution instead of religious laws. In a way, the people to blame for this decision are mostly Christians, for we are supposed to be the wise people in our society, as Christ said, we are to be the salt of the earth, giving it flavoring and seasoning, an intensely valuable yet rare group of people who ensure a good turn to society. The ordinary people in society are not expected to know better – and those who are truly evil can be expected to do evil. Yet we are the people who were expected to share God’s wisdom with the people around us, and we did not share God’s wisdom in a wise manner. And so the decision was made.
A brief look at the background, looking at both sides of the issue, as wise people should, so that we can prepare ourselves and understand those with whom we disagree, for understanding them is the key to persuading them.
When we go back in history and begin looking in the pages of the Old and New Testament, there is little direct teaching about who should get married. The Old Testament law of Moses has some definite rules, which are mainly the rules which we would take to be rules against incest, which are very practical rules for a culture with no birth control and where the absolute authority of father and grandfather were unchallenged.
The Old Testament does not even indicate how many wives a man can have – in fact, in the oldest times it is clear that multiple wives were common. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob each had several wives and concubines. David and Solomon each had many wives and concubines. You will notice that in the Old Testament times, though, there was a distinct difference between a legal wife who had a certain amount of prestige and legal claim to property, and a concubine who had little if no legal rights. Also, adultery - a violation of marriage - was one of the evils prohibited in the Ten Commandments.
The question of whether two men or two women can or should get married never even came up. It was assumed that marriage was between men and women. But that is not to say that homosexual practice did not exist in ancient times. It did and the Law of Moses condemned the practice in no uncertain terms, calling it, as you have undoubtedly heard, “an abomination” as the King James Version puts it, the harshest condemnation possible in the language. More recent translations use the word “detestable”. Around ancient Israel, in ancient Greece, homosexuality was widely practiced. Even the term “Lesbian”, which is commonly used to describe women who are sexually attracted to each other, comes from the Isle of Lesbos, a Greek island, on which the women were alleged to be unusually attracted to other women in ancient times. But in Jewish regions, the practice was looked at in the worse possible light because God’s Word condemned the practice.
Yet we do see a slightly different view of marriage and even homosexuality in the New Testament. In Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus, Paul indicates that a leader in the church should be the husband of only one wife, and we generally see a movement toward having just one wife. We see various prohibitions to Christians against “fornication”, which was a catch-all term and meant “sexual impropriety” of many types, ranging from pre-marital sex, to sex with a woman you were engaged to, to sex with prostitutes, and many other situations. In Paul’s opinion, marriage is the second-best solution to life, with the preferred state being celibacy – or living completely single without sex of any kind. And it is from this mention that the Roman Catholic church requires that its priests remain unmarried and celibate.
It should also be noted that Biblically speaking, there is no discussion made of the orientation of a person toward having sex with a male or a female. In the Bible, the issue is always the practice of homosexuality. Celibacy, Paul’s preferred state, is simply refraining from all sexual relationships and does not concern itself with orientation. Thus, biblically speaking, there is no modern concept of being gay – only the activity of gay sex, which is condemned, just as sleeping with another man’s wife is condemned.
In the first chapter of Romans, Paul puts forth his great analysis of sin and the present fall of humankind. Paul says that humans first turn their back on God, ignoring or denying God even though God is clearly present in the world. Because of this, people’s thinking turned from wise to foolish, and they began to worship gods and idols they had created and even people rather than the One God who Created all things. Paul says, “24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. 26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.”
Paul says, in essence, that the natural consequence of turning your back on God is homosexual practice. It is not exactly a punishment from God, but more a situation where God lets a person do what they wish to do – to worship the created person rather than worship the Creator. Our God is a polite God, allowing you to get what you want.
And so this is why we see most traditional Christians pointing out that homosexuality is considered a sin in the Bible, declared by the Word of God to be abomination in Leviticus 18:22, (Speaking to men, the verse says: “You shall not have sexual relations with a man as a woman. It is detestable” (or abomination depending upon the translation).
Yet we see that there is great debate among many Christians, and many Christians also wish to accept homosexuals into the church. In fact, several denominations have even allowed homosexuals to be local priests and some even allow bishops to be homosexual. Where are these people coming from? We expect lost people to not care what the Bible says, but why do Christian believers believe in this way?
As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, real moral problems never occur when the debate is between good and evil. The problems always occur when there are two good principles at stake, or two evil outcomes at stake. In this case, the dilemma comes between the clear condemnation of homosexual practice in the Bible and the concept that all people are equally sinful in the sight of God and are valuable images of God. In this case, many of the more theologically liberal Christians argue in the following manner:
At one time, men used the Bible as a justification for slavery since directions are given which explain how slaves should be treated and act. Also, the Bible was used as a justification for treating women as second-class citizens because of some statements made in the Bible. The argument goes… we eventually saw the light about slavery and about women, therefore we should also see the light about homosexual marriage.
Even deeper, though, is a basic disagreement about the nature of God which underlies this debate. Traditionalists have argued that at the root, God is the great “I am”, the ultimate Creator of the Universe and everything else. Thus, it is vitally important to learn about the personality of this great, complex Creator-Being and take seriously everything written about God in the Bible. The Bible is seen as the Word of God, inspired by the Holy Spirit’s influence upon the writers over the centuries, who were guided by that Spirit in their writing. Thus, everything said in the Bible was what God wanted said and we ignore or disparage those words to our great danger.
Theological liberals, as I mentioned last week, have a hard time with that view of inspiration. They are often hung up on the fact that men wrote down the Bible, and therefore will argue that a reading of the Bible, just like any other book, is mostly influenced by who you are, what your background is, where you come from, and by the influences upon the writer of the book. In other words, because the Bible is a document written by men, it should be treated as and analyzed as any other document written by men. Because of some theories in the mid-twentieth century by some French philosophers, many liberals have decided that these influences upon the writer and the reader are far more important than the precise words actually written on the paper. And so liberals don’t take the writings of the Bible nearly as seriously as traditionalists do. They attribute most anything that they do not like about the Bible to the negative personal power agendas of the men who wrote the Bible. Rather than letting the Bible mold the reader’s life – they would rather mold the Bible to the reader. In essence: Whatever you decide the Bible says, no matter how convoluted, is right for you.
But what about the idea that God inspired the writing of the Bible? This is ignored in practice, for the field of biblical studies, which assumes that prophecy cannot exist, a field which is essentially a literary field and not a theological field, has confused many people through claims of late authorship for many books of the Bible. If you follow the conclusions of biblical studies, then men wrote the Bible without help. And that isn't a critical problem to a theological liberal because of their views of God.
Chief among their view about God is this view: God is love. I’m sure you’ve heard this before: God is love. We even have songs that reinforce this concept. Unfortunately, about a hundred years ago some people began taking this as the complete truth about God: God is love. Now I agree that God wishes us to love one another, and God loves us, but despite a single sentence in I John 4, “God is love” is not the complete total expression of the most complex personality in existence, the God who Created the Universe. God may love more deeply than anyone else, but the Bible also states that there are things and people who God hates. God is very, very complex and any attempt to reduce this wonderfully complex Being down to a simple three-word statement is heresy – a false teaching. Yet “God is love” is easy to remember, and leads to simple, easy ideas which have a certain appeal.
You see, if “God is love” and that is all there is to God, then anything we do which can be portrayed as loving another person must be good. And clearly, supporting the rights of homosexuals to marry can be seen as loving other people, so it must be good. In fact, helping people to do and achieve anything they wish promotes freedom, which is an American virtue, and must be good, right? And stopping people from doing something reduces freedom, which must be evil, right? And those parts of the Bible which are "difficult" (meaning in conflict with this "God is love" point of view) are simply the product of men caught up in their own need to dominate other people.
Add the very real legal benefits of marriage in regard to healthcare, and we end up with the debate which went to the Supreme Court.
As you can probably see by now, the deep, root cause of this moral debate – which is the cause of most moral debates in our country over the last thirty years – is both a fundamental disagreement over the nature of God, and a conflict between the perceived moral standards of the Bible and the moral standards actually found in our society as a whole. Biblical standards are written down and you will find them written mostly in the books of Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Exodus, as well as in the books of the New Testament. Society’s standards are not written down – they mostly involve the primary principle of personal freedom to do anything desired, an acceptance of the goodness of what anyone desires, and the concept of fairness - which at its root is the concept that there is no one who has a preferred point-of-view. These are derived from the US Constitution. Since the US Supreme Court follows the evolution of law as developed from the Constitution – it must look toward previous decisions and laws rather than biblical standards. But why did this whole issue come up in the first place?
Unfortunately, in any group of people, there exist certain people who feel an obligation to instruct other people how to live and act. While we have that duty toward our children, in an ideal world our goal is to help other people learn how to listen to the Holy Spirit, and to let the Holy Spirit of God instruct other people in their behavior. Jesus was very angry at the group of Jews known as Pharisees because they were constantly telling other people how to act and live. Then – as now – the behavior of Pharisees keeps people away from God, because people tend to mistake the behavior of these busybodies with the behavior of most of the people of God, people who are willing to live and let live, people who walk in peace, people who are happy dealing with their own problems and pleasant to all others.
Our most outspoken Christians who defend “Christian morals” do not help the cause of Christ, but instead have set up a dynamic where many people in society at large have identified Christian belief with the belief in a strict, joyless, strait-jacketed, controlled life among unpleasant people who tell each other what not to do. When we or our parents said negative things about the behavior of a man or woman, we and our parents reduced the public perception of Christianity to "just another" controlling system of moral behavior. We have forgotten to tell people what Christianity really is: An explanation for why we each exist, an understanding of how the Universe exists, a relationship with the greatest Being in the Universe and a view of the world which allows us to live in total freedom, secure that our Heavenly Father loves us completely and will eventually provide us with a life free of tears.
And so we end up with people in the society at large who have been hurt by Christians and now truly hate Christians because of the actions and words of a few of us. And those people who hate Christians will eventually die a real death and be separated from God throughout eternity. And that is very sad.
Unfortunately, these Christian-hating people also often have the built-in desire to instruct other people in what is correct behavior and incorrect behavior and have also become modern Pharisees, insisting upon behavior as their moral code demands, including especially their need to instruct traditional Christians in the “proper” way of behavior, according to their code of total tolerance for all behavior – except for Christian behavior.
Theology – your understanding of God - you see, has consequences. It leads to decisions – sometimes very good decisions, sometimes very poor decisions. It is important to have a reasonably good understanding of the personalities of God the Creator, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit so that we make good decisions.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of the Supreme Court decision is that it has finally led many people to realize that our legal code no longer follows the Law of Moses and Christian common law as it did for centuries. This is why this decision did not surprise me – I never bought into the idea that America is a Christian country based upon Christian law. Instead, I understood that America is a country in which many Christians happen to live, and in which for a period of a couple hundred years it gave a person a tremendous social advantage to be or pretend to be a Christian, as many, many people have over the years and many still pretend to this day. We were founded principally by Christians - but we were not founded as a theocracy, but instead a republic, designed to follow laws and the evolution of laws developed from a basic rulebook known as The Constitution. Where that Constitution references the Christian Bible, it is just as a starting point - in no place in the Constitution was there placed a guarantee that Christian concepts should be followed.
For you see, this decision forces us to face the greatest distortion of what Christianity is. This decision forces us to look at ourselves and decide what it means to be a Christian. This decision forces us to understand deeply that Christianity is NOT a moral code, a code of behavior, a rulebook of do’s and don’ts.
No, Christianity is about a choice made deep in your heart that you will attempt to your very best to truly follow the leadership and example of Jesus Christ – not because Jesus was a wise man – although He was – not because Jesus was the greatest moral teacher the world has ever known – although He was – but because Jesus told us that He was God Himself, sacrificed Himself for each of us, and then proved that He was God Himself by His Resurrection which was seen by over 500 witnesses in at least eleven different situations and recorded by eyewitnesses on documents which are still being reprinted to this day. We follow Jesus because He was and is God!
Jesus had certain things to say, He answered the greatest questions, Jesus endorsed the Old Testament writings, and the followers of Jesus reported upon certain events and teachings of Jesus in what we call the New Testament. And so we follow those teachings first because of Who taught them, and only secondarily because they happen to work better than any other set of moral teachings the world has ever known. But if you follow Christianity because of our moral teachings, you are missing the core of the religion, which is that Jesus was and is God, and from this everything else follows.
And when we put them together, here is what the wisest people I know have arrived at in consensus, as written in the United Methodist Book of Disciple – our law book - and certain resolutions that have been adopted by our United Methodist pastors and laity in assembled conference.
First, we consider the Holy Scriptures to contain everything that is necessary for our salvation, and we consider the Holy Scriptures to be the foremost authority on social matters and our relationship to other people.
Second, we consider every person to be of great worth, a special and unique image of God created by God, and thus every person is entitled to love and dignity and respect.
Third, we consider the practice of homosexuality to be at odds with Christian teaching and the practice of a holy Christian life. Thus, those who are self-avowed and practicing homosexuals are prohibited from being pastors in the United Methodist Church at this time. Changing this position has been voted upon several times by our international “General Conference”, and each time the proposal has been soundly defeated. And as the percentage of conservative delegates from Africa and the Phillipines and South Korea grows, the chances of liberalization occurring grow less possible every four years.
Fourth, because of this Bible-based understanding, it is the official policy of the United Methodist Church that no pastor may conduct a same-sex wedding, and an official statement from the legal Counsel of the Council of Bishops has been sent to all pastors in West Virginia affirming that the Supreme Court decision does not change this policy. In fact, Justice Kennedy’s decision expressly stated that the First Amendment gives us the right to continue teaching our traditional religious-based views against same-sex marriage. Of course, those in favor of same-sex marriage may also teach their views.
In this church, there are a couple of ways that I would suggest to you we react.
First, we should recognize that there is no sin worse in the sight of God than any other. Gossip is a sin; homosexual practice is a sin; being inhospitable is a sin. Everyone who walks into this assembly for the first time brings with them a whole host of sins, all of which are, theologically speaking, none of our business, and any one of which God hates. Our business is to connect people – particularly people who are hurting, who are realizing that their ideas about life aren’t working, who are stridently anti-God – and connect them with the love that Christ brings and the healing that happens when a person decides to follow Jesus Christ, be baptized, and listen to the Holy Spirit. It is the business of the Holy Spirit and Holy Scripture to convict people of the sins in their own life and lead them to repent and live another way, in this new way learning how to grow closer to God rather than farther away.
No matter what the sin of the person, I can think of no place better for anyone than to be in church most Sunday mornings.
Secondly, we hold people in leadership to a higher standard of holiness, while recognizing that only Jesus Christ lived a perfect life. If you wish to lead or are called to lead, begin getting your life in order today by listening to the Holy Spirit – whatever your sins.
And so, for your friends and relatives who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual – or straight – I say, we will love you regardless of your sins – all of them, singling out no particular sin for special hatred, but being hospitable to all so that all may be saved by Christ. Judging you is above our pay grade – it is for the King of glory, Jesus Christ to decide.
The only wise action and approach to sin is to accept all who sin – which is every person on this planet – and trust in the power of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit to lead us all to a holy life.
Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment and He said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart…” “And the second is to love your neighbor as yourself.”
Our mission given by Christ, my friends, is to go to all groups of people, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them all that Jesus has commanded, and He will be with us always until the end of the age.
Be wise – help us to convert this nation to the love of God and then we will once again be a Christian nation. We need to return to the straight vertical plumb line of God. Tell people this – and know the joy of Amos. You will be beloved of God - but may not be the most popular person with the government or the populace. But the joy that a close relationship with God brings will be worth it.
Chief among their view about God is this view: God is love. I’m sure you’ve heard this before: God is love. We even have songs that reinforce this concept. Unfortunately, about a hundred years ago some people began taking this as the complete truth about God: God is love. Now I agree that God wishes us to love one another, and God loves us, but despite a single sentence in I John 4, “God is love” is not the complete total expression of the most complex personality in existence, the God who Created the Universe. God may love more deeply than anyone else, but the Bible also states that there are things and people who God hates. God is very, very complex and any attempt to reduce this wonderfully complex Being down to a simple three-word statement is heresy – a false teaching. Yet “God is love” is easy to remember, and leads to simple, easy ideas which have a certain appeal.
You see, if “God is love” and that is all there is to God, then anything we do which can be portrayed as loving another person must be good. And clearly, supporting the rights of homosexuals to marry can be seen as loving other people, so it must be good. In fact, helping people to do and achieve anything they wish promotes freedom, which is an American virtue, and must be good, right? And stopping people from doing something reduces freedom, which must be evil, right? And those parts of the Bible which are "difficult" (meaning in conflict with this "God is love" point of view) are simply the product of men caught up in their own need to dominate other people.
Add the very real legal benefits of marriage in regard to healthcare, and we end up with the debate which went to the Supreme Court.
As you can probably see by now, the deep, root cause of this moral debate – which is the cause of most moral debates in our country over the last thirty years – is both a fundamental disagreement over the nature of God, and a conflict between the perceived moral standards of the Bible and the moral standards actually found in our society as a whole. Biblical standards are written down and you will find them written mostly in the books of Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Exodus, as well as in the books of the New Testament. Society’s standards are not written down – they mostly involve the primary principle of personal freedom to do anything desired, an acceptance of the goodness of what anyone desires, and the concept of fairness - which at its root is the concept that there is no one who has a preferred point-of-view. These are derived from the US Constitution. Since the US Supreme Court follows the evolution of law as developed from the Constitution – it must look toward previous decisions and laws rather than biblical standards. But why did this whole issue come up in the first place?
Unfortunately, in any group of people, there exist certain people who feel an obligation to instruct other people how to live and act. While we have that duty toward our children, in an ideal world our goal is to help other people learn how to listen to the Holy Spirit, and to let the Holy Spirit of God instruct other people in their behavior. Jesus was very angry at the group of Jews known as Pharisees because they were constantly telling other people how to act and live. Then – as now – the behavior of Pharisees keeps people away from God, because people tend to mistake the behavior of these busybodies with the behavior of most of the people of God, people who are willing to live and let live, people who walk in peace, people who are happy dealing with their own problems and pleasant to all others.
Our most outspoken Christians who defend “Christian morals” do not help the cause of Christ, but instead have set up a dynamic where many people in society at large have identified Christian belief with the belief in a strict, joyless, strait-jacketed, controlled life among unpleasant people who tell each other what not to do. When we or our parents said negative things about the behavior of a man or woman, we and our parents reduced the public perception of Christianity to "just another" controlling system of moral behavior. We have forgotten to tell people what Christianity really is: An explanation for why we each exist, an understanding of how the Universe exists, a relationship with the greatest Being in the Universe and a view of the world which allows us to live in total freedom, secure that our Heavenly Father loves us completely and will eventually provide us with a life free of tears.
And so we end up with people in the society at large who have been hurt by Christians and now truly hate Christians because of the actions and words of a few of us. And those people who hate Christians will eventually die a real death and be separated from God throughout eternity. And that is very sad.
Unfortunately, these Christian-hating people also often have the built-in desire to instruct other people in what is correct behavior and incorrect behavior and have also become modern Pharisees, insisting upon behavior as their moral code demands, including especially their need to instruct traditional Christians in the “proper” way of behavior, according to their code of total tolerance for all behavior – except for Christian behavior.
Theology – your understanding of God - you see, has consequences. It leads to decisions – sometimes very good decisions, sometimes very poor decisions. It is important to have a reasonably good understanding of the personalities of God the Creator, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit so that we make good decisions.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of the Supreme Court decision is that it has finally led many people to realize that our legal code no longer follows the Law of Moses and Christian common law as it did for centuries. This is why this decision did not surprise me – I never bought into the idea that America is a Christian country based upon Christian law. Instead, I understood that America is a country in which many Christians happen to live, and in which for a period of a couple hundred years it gave a person a tremendous social advantage to be or pretend to be a Christian, as many, many people have over the years and many still pretend to this day. We were founded principally by Christians - but we were not founded as a theocracy, but instead a republic, designed to follow laws and the evolution of laws developed from a basic rulebook known as The Constitution. Where that Constitution references the Christian Bible, it is just as a starting point - in no place in the Constitution was there placed a guarantee that Christian concepts should be followed.
For you see, this decision forces us to face the greatest distortion of what Christianity is. This decision forces us to look at ourselves and decide what it means to be a Christian. This decision forces us to understand deeply that Christianity is NOT a moral code, a code of behavior, a rulebook of do’s and don’ts.
No, Christianity is about a choice made deep in your heart that you will attempt to your very best to truly follow the leadership and example of Jesus Christ – not because Jesus was a wise man – although He was – not because Jesus was the greatest moral teacher the world has ever known – although He was – but because Jesus told us that He was God Himself, sacrificed Himself for each of us, and then proved that He was God Himself by His Resurrection which was seen by over 500 witnesses in at least eleven different situations and recorded by eyewitnesses on documents which are still being reprinted to this day. We follow Jesus because He was and is God!
Jesus had certain things to say, He answered the greatest questions, Jesus endorsed the Old Testament writings, and the followers of Jesus reported upon certain events and teachings of Jesus in what we call the New Testament. And so we follow those teachings first because of Who taught them, and only secondarily because they happen to work better than any other set of moral teachings the world has ever known. But if you follow Christianity because of our moral teachings, you are missing the core of the religion, which is that Jesus was and is God, and from this everything else follows.
And when we put them together, here is what the wisest people I know have arrived at in consensus, as written in the United Methodist Book of Disciple – our law book - and certain resolutions that have been adopted by our United Methodist pastors and laity in assembled conference.
First, we consider the Holy Scriptures to contain everything that is necessary for our salvation, and we consider the Holy Scriptures to be the foremost authority on social matters and our relationship to other people.
Second, we consider every person to be of great worth, a special and unique image of God created by God, and thus every person is entitled to love and dignity and respect.
Third, we consider the practice of homosexuality to be at odds with Christian teaching and the practice of a holy Christian life. Thus, those who are self-avowed and practicing homosexuals are prohibited from being pastors in the United Methodist Church at this time. Changing this position has been voted upon several times by our international “General Conference”, and each time the proposal has been soundly defeated. And as the percentage of conservative delegates from Africa and the Phillipines and South Korea grows, the chances of liberalization occurring grow less possible every four years.
Fourth, because of this Bible-based understanding, it is the official policy of the United Methodist Church that no pastor may conduct a same-sex wedding, and an official statement from the legal Counsel of the Council of Bishops has been sent to all pastors in West Virginia affirming that the Supreme Court decision does not change this policy. In fact, Justice Kennedy’s decision expressly stated that the First Amendment gives us the right to continue teaching our traditional religious-based views against same-sex marriage. Of course, those in favor of same-sex marriage may also teach their views.
In this church, there are a couple of ways that I would suggest to you we react.
First, we should recognize that there is no sin worse in the sight of God than any other. Gossip is a sin; homosexual practice is a sin; being inhospitable is a sin. Everyone who walks into this assembly for the first time brings with them a whole host of sins, all of which are, theologically speaking, none of our business, and any one of which God hates. Our business is to connect people – particularly people who are hurting, who are realizing that their ideas about life aren’t working, who are stridently anti-God – and connect them with the love that Christ brings and the healing that happens when a person decides to follow Jesus Christ, be baptized, and listen to the Holy Spirit. It is the business of the Holy Spirit and Holy Scripture to convict people of the sins in their own life and lead them to repent and live another way, in this new way learning how to grow closer to God rather than farther away.
No matter what the sin of the person, I can think of no place better for anyone than to be in church most Sunday mornings.
Secondly, we hold people in leadership to a higher standard of holiness, while recognizing that only Jesus Christ lived a perfect life. If you wish to lead or are called to lead, begin getting your life in order today by listening to the Holy Spirit – whatever your sins.
And so, for your friends and relatives who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual – or straight – I say, we will love you regardless of your sins – all of them, singling out no particular sin for special hatred, but being hospitable to all so that all may be saved by Christ. Judging you is above our pay grade – it is for the King of glory, Jesus Christ to decide.
The only wise action and approach to sin is to accept all who sin – which is every person on this planet – and trust in the power of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit to lead us all to a holy life.
Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment and He said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart…” “And the second is to love your neighbor as yourself.”
Our mission given by Christ, my friends, is to go to all groups of people, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them all that Jesus has commanded, and He will be with us always until the end of the age.
Be wise – help us to convert this nation to the love of God and then we will once again be a Christian nation. We need to return to the straight vertical plumb line of God. Tell people this – and know the joy of Amos. You will be beloved of God - but may not be the most popular person with the government or the populace. But the joy that a close relationship with God brings will be worth it.
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