Jesus Loves Gays

Jesus loves gays. He does. Some gays don’t believe it. Some homophobes don’t believe it. But it’s true.

He loves gays more than gays love gays. He loves gays more than gays love being gay. And he loves gays more than homophobes love hating gays. Simply, Jesus loves gays. (John 3:16)

Parents, friends, family, governments, businesses, schools and churches have at times failed to love gays. Jesus never has. And Jesus never will.

There is old folk song we sing at Vine Church called ‘Here is Love’, which is about the limitless love of Jesus.

Here is love vast as the ocean
Loving kindness as the flood.
When the prince of life, our ransom
shed for us His precious blood.

Grace and love, like mighty rivers,
Poured incessant from above,
And Heav’n’s peace and perfect justice
Kissed a guilty world in love.

The beauty of the love of Jesus is that it is unlimited, unmerited, and unconditional. He loves us the way a good father loves their children, for we are all children of our Father in heaven. This is the good news which the story of Jesus speaks about.

God’s unconditional love for me doesn’t mean He approves of everything I think, do, or say. Every parent knows the difference. The problem with gays and straights is the way we look to our romances, or our work, or family, or possessions or something else, to give our lives meaning, to justify and save us, to give us what we should be looking for from God. It is not that we desire good things, but that we make good things into ultimate things. This idolatry leads to anxiety, obsessiveness, envy, and resentment. But the love of Christ, which we see in the story of his death for us, invites us to become part of a new story. This story is not one we write in order to give our lives meaning, or to justify or save us. This story is one which God is telling, and which justifies, saves and gives meaning to our lives because that is what our God gives his children. God accepts his children and provides a future full of hope. This story of love is not only our only chance for forgiveness, but our only hope for freedom. For what you love ends up owning you. And so we become slaves to our relationships, or slaves to our work, or slaves to our possessions. But there is a love, which when it ends up owning you, bestows liberating freedom, true meaning, and genuine salvation. (Matthew 11:29)

A friend of mine recently tweeted a photo of this T-Shirt with a guy bending his arm to try and steal love from a vending machine. Another friend replied, ‘u can’t buy or earn love! U also can’t steal it. It’s a gift!!!!’

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

(Eph 2:8–9)

Why not talk to a Christian friend and ask them what the love of Jesus means to them. Also you could read: Tim Keller, How Can I Know God.

The Multi-Layered Story of Our Salvation (John Calvin)

John Calvin says that being a Christian is all about Jesus: ‘our whole salvation and all its parts are comprehended in Christ.’ In other words, when we become part of the story of Jesus we enter into the multi-layered story of our salvation:

• our salvation— in his very name
• our untroubled expectation of judgment—in the power given to him to judge
• our protection, security, abundant supply of all blessings—in his Kingdom;
• our gifts of the Spirit—in his anointing
• our strength—in his dominion
• our purity—in his conception
• our gentleness—in his birth
• our redemption—in his passion
• our acquittal—in his condemnation
• our remission from the curse—in his cross
• our satisfaction—in his sacrifice
• our purification—in his blood
• our reconciliation—in his descent into hell;
• our mortification of flesh—in his tomb
• our newness of life—in his resurrection
• our immortality—in the same
• our inheritance of the Heavenly Kingdom—in his entrance into heaven

Calvin concludes, ‘In short, since rich store of every kind of good abounds in him, let us drink our fill from this fountain, and from no other.’[1]

Living in Christ’s Story (sermon, essay, prayer)

I have posted a new sermon, essay and prayer on my Resources page.

Living in Christ’s Story (Faith & Hope) (1 Corinthians)
MP3 | Read | Summerfest Team Training | 4 January 2010

Cruciformity (The Theology of the Cross and the Christian Life in 1 Corinthians)
Read | Moore Theological College New Testament 3 | 2009

Prayer for Haiti
Read | St Phillips, York Street | 17 January 2010

Loneliness and God’s Story

Loneliness and God’s Story (Psalm 139) is a sermon I wrote a number of years ago and preached again recently at St Phillips, York Street. You can find it on my Resources page along with a number of other stuff I have shared in the past.

The Cross and the Christian Story

The ‘theology of the cross’ provides the Christian with a story to live in and die for. ‘The Christian story’, Stanley Hauerwas notes, ‘will not remove the challenges [of living in the world], but it holds the possibility of helping us to understand, accept, and imaginatively transform the unmanageable, ambiguous aspects of our existence’[i] as they live by cruciform faith, hope and love.

This story contains the power of God to save the world, and the power of God to change the church. Paul applies this story to the dysfunctional congregation in Corinth. They had begun to construct their own narratives, which according to Thistleton, ‘imbibed secular Corinthian culture’.[ii] These narratives became irreconcilable, and so divisions arose. The loss of the Christ narrative led not only to disunity but also sexual immorality and idolatry. With the marginalisation of Christ’s story the foundation of Christian love was demolished resulting in selfishness. In reaction Paul reminds them of the gospel he preached to them. This story should narrate their lives and produce: faith in Christ—not local narratives of power and glory; hope in the resurrection enabling them to live according to the wisdom of the cross—not the wisdom of this age; and love that builds up the church—not insistent on its own way.

Paul’s application of this story to the problems at Corinth is vastly relevant to our postmodern age which rejects the possibility of a universal story. Far from being a tool to legitimize power, Tomlin argues, the story of Christ ‘presents a vision of community life which resists claims to power by modelling itself on the self-giving and powerlessness of Christ.’[iii] Tomlin continues,

The cross operates as a counter-ideology to the uses of power current within the church, fostering a regard for love rather than knowledge, the poor rather than the wealthy, their trembling apostle rather than the rhetorical ability of any ‘rival’, mutual up-building rather than spiritual showing-off. Theology that begins at the cross is for Paul the radical antidote to any religion that is a thinly veiled copy of a power- seeking culture.[iv]

The story of the cross is The Story our church needs to live in and The Story our world needs to hear. This story ‘does not offer a resolution of life’s difficulties but it offers us something better—an adventure and struggle as together we live faithful to the reality that he is Lord of this world.’[v] In this story, ‘even death can be faced, if it is seen as an event in God’s story, rather than as the end of one’s own.’[vi] The Christian who follows Paul’s as he follows Christ’s story (11:1), will die every day. In this way the ‘theology of the cross’ stands as the image of the Christian life, or as Luther put it, ‘the Christianus must be crucianus.’^[vii]

[ii] Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: a Commentary on the Greek Text (NIGTC; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000), 33.

[iii] Graham Tomlin, The Power of the Cross: Theology and the Death of Christ in Paul, Luther and Pascal (Carlisle, Cumbria, U.K.: Paternoster, 1999), 99.

[iv] Ibid., 101.

[v] Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame, 1981), 149.

[vi] Samuel Wells and Mark Nation, Faithfulness and Fortitude: Conversations with the Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000), 128.

[vii] Cited in Alister E. McGrath, ‘Theology of the Cross’, DPL, 197. Christianus est crucianus: a Christian is a cross bearer.

The eucatastrophe of Man’s history

The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation — This story begins and ends in joy. (J. R. R. Tolkien)

Story

The importance of stories is undisputed. Alasdair MacIntyre writes, ‘Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words.’[i] Aristotle said, ‘When the storytelling goes bad in society, the result is decadence.’ Yet one of the essences of postmodernism is that there is no overarching story that rules over all times, cultures, histories, and people. Everything is contingent on culture and perspective. Lyotard defines postmodernism simply as ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’.[ii]

In the novel, Fight Club, writer Chuck Palahniuk, through the character Tyler Durden, gives voice to a generation without a Metanarrative:

We are the middle children of history—no purpose or place. We have no great war, no great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won’t. We’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very ****** off.

In a world without a great war or great depression is left to create its own futile story. What the world needs is a story which is not only worth living for, but worth dying for. In 1 Corinthians, there is such a story. A story which has been foretold and revealed by a divine storyteller (2:10), which Paul reminds the young and troubled church in Corinth, to lead them out of decadence. Such a story, if McIntyre is correct, is eminently practical for, ‘I can only answer the question “What am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”’[iii]

[ii] Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savior (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979), 7.

[iii] MacIntyre, Virtue, 217.