Click the button below if you haven’t read the first part of my coming out story.
Before we get started, part 1 of my coming out story discussed pivotal moments in friendships and Christian history that have influenced my spiritual journey. What about my sexuality? I clearly implied I am gay and asexual. What’s the story behind that?
I have a published article with the AZE Journal (an asexual and aromantic online journal) that describes how I have processed and define my experiences of attraction and love as a homoromantic asexual — “gay ace” for short. I also published a feature article with Sojourners magazine that describes asexuality and its relationship to purity culture and Christian sexual ethics. Both are essential readings before you move on because those stories precede and intersect with what I’m about to get into.
Now, let’s continue.
How do queer Christians relate to the Reformers? Let me paint you a picture.
Josh Sawyer has written for and directed video games like Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity. His most recent title, Pentiment, is a point-and-click adventure game set during the early sixteenth century. You play as a medieval manuscript illustrator thrust into the role of detective when murder breaks out in the abbey he’s working for. Along the way, Catholic priests and villagers tell you of a heretical movement sweeping across Europe. Some bold individuals furtively study and nervously discuss the implications of this, shall we say, theological contraband. “Once their pernicious seeds take root, they can choke the faith right out of you!” one Catholic father remarks. As the story nears its end over a span of several decades, more people succumb to the message of this movement’s false prophets — even your own character, if you so choose to embrace the lie. I’m talking about what the likes of Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli were behind. The Reformation.
You could say it’s a thematic parallel to the murderer’s motives, who — once discovered — confesses he killed a few people to save his entire parish by preventing ancient, buried history and artifacts from being uncovered. Why? The saints his town venerated were never real figures; it was folklore rooted in ancient Greek mythology that original settlers derived from ancient statues and murals. “If the people have reason to doubt the validity of the saints, can they doubt the church?” the murderer says. “Can they doubt the gospel, the word of God?”
The protagonists insist that even the greatest saints dealt with doubt, so the townsfolk have the right to know the truth. The criminal rejoins that this is the problem: the common folk are not saints. The deaths he orchestrated pale in contrast to the spiritual death he foresaw if he didn’t keep the folklore intact. This is what happens “[w]hen people believe that all just authority is false, that their own education and reason are superior to divine truth. [...] I preserved a lie to illuminate a greater truth!” he yells. “I know this is hard to believe, but I was trying to save lives, to prevent death.” But not so for himself. He commits suicide by bringing down the subterranean chamber onto himself that contains all the pagan evidence. Another senseless death attempting to divert the course of fate. Or God’s plans, as I imagine he’d say.
Christians often say that faith is the only force that gives authority and substance to discerning right from wrong. While there’s truth in that, what they often don’t realize is just how many believers weaponize religion toward unjust ends where what is wrong is right, and what is right is wrong. The church is always self-correcting in some way, either leading or following the rest of the world into a more just future. Right now, this manifests for the church in its response to LGBT people, provoking the most controversial and heated debates Christians have faced since the Civil War and Civil Rights Movement. As different as slavery and sexuality are, both involve lives on the line and justice. How are believers called to interrogate their theology and history to discern where life and righteousness preside?
Just like the villain from Pentiment, history is filled with Christians murdering in the name of God. Where we once had the Crusades, the Seven Years’ War, and the English Civil War, we now find interdenominational relationships and interfaith coalitions. Hatred abounds amid ideological divides, but I’d argue the norm of disagreement consists of toleration. Whether enthusiastic, passive, or disgruntled, the plurality of today once drew the swift, uncompromising battle lines of yesterday where nothing less than the entire integrity and witness of a worldview was at stake. For evangelical Christianity, attempts to keep denominations in harmony over the last several decades (namely in the United States) have failed as tribalism and fundamentalism grow. I’d argue that disagreement over sexuality in culture and the church is a big part of this ancestral rage and violence boiling more prominently to the surface. We’re seeing it in more disturbing hate speech and seismic schisms across mainline Protestantism.
Recalling the gay man I mentioned first in my prior post, I remember a question he posed: “Is your God really threatened by discoveries of a sexual spectrum instead of a binary?” I replied that “believing that sex (not even gender) existing on a spectrum forces me to re-evaluate a good amount of long-held and ongoing beliefs among Protestant believers within the frames of interpretation I’ve held to with my faith and the nature of sexuality.” In other words, my answer was yes — my God was threatened by any alternative views on sexuality, even faithfully different interpretations. Why? Because there was no such thing as “faithfully different interpretations” on sexuality in my tradition, let alone in the history of the church!
However, I was unaware of worse conflicts over orthodoxy and sacraments that many denominations can “agree to disagree on” now without getting into a holy war. But fundamentalism presumes no such turbulence. Whatever denomination claims it has always been faithful (or, at the very least, reclaims faithfulness) to the unbroken line of the true church of Christ. This means that no beliefs can or should change, just as Jesus himself cannot change. In my reformed Baptist background, this is why I’ve had to bend over backwards with blatant historical contradictions and disagreements between authors within the Bible yet affirm literal inerrancy (i.e. the Bible is free of any and every kind of error); I’ve had to ignore nearly unanimous paleontological and astronomical data to believe in a young Earth; I’ve had to make sense of a righteous God who commanded genocide and oversees eternal conscious torture because of narrow views on election and hell; I’ve had to believe women are incapable of church leadership because they’re divinely subordinate to men, thereby leading themselves and congregants to hell if they teach from the pulpit. The list goes on.
God couldn’t be any different than how I was told to think about him and his book, or I might as well throw it all out and become a drug addict or ax murderer. Really, I’ve heard these hypothetical life paths invoked to illustrate how faith skewed in the slightest way signified apostasy and blasphemy; God would abandon me and give my reason, morality, and sanity over to unchecked corruption if I got out of line. To disagree with fundamentalism is to disagree with God, which is why I nearly gave up on faith at multiple points throughout my early 20s. I was holding onto something that grew increasingly impossible to manage in light of what I learned, felt, and experienced. I could trust none of my faculties because my heart was deceitful, my body twisted, and my reasoning faulty. Utterly. Nothing that was contrary to what I was raised in could come from the Holy Spirit.
It’s a rite of passage for humans to have a darkest night of the soul, which can be literal or figurative in terms of time. I experienced this for years with my faith. Where I had already struggled to connect with God in prayer and church and reading became worse as I dissociated from my fundamentalist upbringing from 2016 to 2021. After all, I’d never felt the Holy Spirit really work in my life. I loved studying theology, but I’d never had a “religious experience.” It was all just intellectually stimulating and, sometimes, emotionally moving. So, whenever I’ve heard people say they heard God or the Spirit moving, I’ve often viewed that as human forgery of a divine stamp lending unverifiable credibility to whatever one says or does. It’s why I always urge everyone to take those appeals to a divine experience or authority with a grain of salt, but I can say that — after years of spiraling into discontent with and distance from God — I finally felt something in the spring of 2022. And it’s been there ever since.
I get back on my feet amid the ruins of my tower. It’s freezing and dark. I have only fleeting intervals of guidance from the moonlight as it’s repeatedly swallowed by the overcast. I can only manage to meander, kicking at pieces of stone, or kneeling to finger shards of wood. There’s nothing I can think to do.
I curse and cross my arms, hunching and shivering as I contemplate wandering off to see if anyone will help me from one of those nearby buildings. Surely someone heard all that commotion.
However, something keeps me here — a gut instinct to sit it out. It’s ridiculous, and I shake my head at the thought. But I close my eyes and center myself. Somehow, I know this is what I must do.
I start piling chunks of stone into three short walls, forming an incomplete square near the edge of ground zero. I scour the detritus and happen upon a few planks, heaving them onto my shoulder one by one until I’ve formed a roof atop the walls. Upon shedding my shirt and stretching out my limbs, I hunker down inside this ramshackle shelter and bring my knees to my chest. I hug my legs and lower my head into them, allowing myself to become lost in the pitter-patter of rain as it entrances me into a state of respite and rue. I wait …. and wait ….
I’ve had a peripheral interest in Christian sexual ethics since my late teens. Once I read books written by dudes about the unending, powerful temptations of pornography and extramarital sex, I honestly pitied them as an asexual man who didn’t relate to their struggles. I eventually broached the LGBT “issue” when I got to know more people in the furry community. I read Peter Hubbard’s Love Into Light, Jackie Hill Perry’s Gay Girl, Good God, and Andrew T. Walker’s God and the Transgender Debate. Compassionate straight theologians (like Preston Sprinkle) and celibate gay Christians (like Wesley Hill) were a breath of fresh air amid believers who dehumanized and misrepresented LGBT people, despite being told to love their so-called enemies. Right-wing media and conservative Christians have never made that easy in their rhetoric toward LGBT people.
I was all about “love the sinner, hate the sin,” you know? This was the “firm yet loving” response that captured the masterful balance of grace and integrity of Jesus, who straddled the tightrope of calling for love and repentance. Secular people and false teachers who shouted “love is love” and “God loves you as you are” didn’t sell the full vision for God’s people. After all, you wouldn’t approve of someone you love lying or stealing just because they want to and say it’s part of their identity. All of these “progressive Christians” were downplaying biblical authority and morality by caving to the corruption of the flesh and world’s demands to be popular. Well, Christians are supposed to be in the world, not of it.
Then, I came across Justin Lee’s Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Christians vs. Gays Debate. It caught my eye because he called himself … a gay Christian. Not a gay Christian who acknowledged his sexual orientation but didn’t act on it. No, a gay Christian who embraced the gay lifestyle.
Impossible! An affirming evangelical? No sound Christian can have their cake and eat it too by abusing God’s grace. You could say that’s even worse! At least the progressives were being honest about rejecting the Bible and core doctrines; this just came part and parcel with letting homosexuality slide. This Lee guy sounded like he was setting himself up for disappointment when he’d stand before God. But his story went against everything I heard about what happens to gay people when they embrace their sinful disposition. He tried to “pray away the gay” and it didn’t happen, but instead of retreating from the scriptures, he searched them deeply. His book dispels many myths about what same-sex attraction is like and where it comes from. He also exposes how common interpretations of passages associated with homosexuality like Genesis 19 (Sodom and Gomorrah) and Paul’s epistles lack nuance he couldn’t have accounted for in light of modern discoveries and understandings of sexual orientation.
However, what struck me most is his takeaway of Jesus talking about his and mankind’s relationship to the Sabbath. Jesus broke it in order to help people in need, just as his ancient forebear had done with another law. Lee calls this following “the spirit of the law” rather than “the letter of the law,” basing much of this on the purpose of biblical law according to Jesus and Paul. This made more sense of regulations changing and being broken throughout biblical history, with Jesus incisively voicing the eternal precedent behind everything God wants humans to do.
I actually spoke with Lee for several hours over some phone calls to commend his book, but I also conveyed my concerns over his interpretation of some “clobber passages.” He gave me so much of his time with a thoughtful, gracious attitude. Even still, he didn’t convince me that his view was hermeneutically sounder than traditional views. I lightly engaged with some of his quirky YouTube content in the following months, but I needed time to process the broad strokes of his views. I would need more to seriously consider this affirming theology.
Stumbling across Lee is where I’d dipped my toes into affirming theology for the first time, but here’s where I tell people the journey truly began.
It was the middle of April 2022. The minutes turned into hours as I lay in bed. It was a couple months after confronting my reformed friend over being in a “celibate partnership,” and his uncharacteristic silence still kept me up on occasion. I was also dealing with general loneliness and sorrow, as well as anger over another friend I had crushed on who also ghosted me — but for no explicable reason.
Through this mire of grief, a compulsion surfaced in the dead of night to specifically read Matthew Vines’ book. It’s that book. The one regarded as the most culturally influential and beginner-friendly book on affirming theology. It caused such a fuss that SBC president Albert Mohler Jr. and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary authored a multi-pronged polemic against it. Vines’ God and the Gay Christian also garnered attention from news outlets like TIME and The New York Times.
Anyways, the urge wouldn’t go away, so I shot up from my mattress, marched to my bookshelf, and sat on the couch reading the first third of the book until I fell asleep. I picked up right where I left off the following afternoon. My mind was ablaze.
Vines wouldn’t ultimately sway me either, as he had his own arguments that left me with more questions about the interpretation of Greek words like arsenokoitai and malakoi. Nevertheless, his challenges to the church had to be taken seriously, such as traditional theology necessitating enforced celibacy only for LGBT people when it’s supposed to be a gift; that is, a voluntary calling, which has been seen that way in the church for millennia — until now. Being a single straight person with the option for dating is not the same as LGBT people totally barred from the pursuit of companionship. I’d also highlight Vines’ understanding of “good and bad fruit” (as defined by the gospels) as not solely relating to sound or false doctrine, but a more holistic view that includes evidence of one’s heart by their works and seeing life or death in what one reaps spiritually — and emotionally, morally, or physically.
As much as I was convicted to hold on to traditional sexual ethics, it didn’t make sense that celibacy was a universal burden for a whole class of people; it didn’t make sense how this and conversion therapy efforts led to more death and despair than flourishing. I understood the frustrations as well, and they propelled me forward into nearly three months of intense studying, even surpassing the two weeks I wrote my entire master’s thesis draft.
I slowed my roll by touching base with traditional views because I don’t like rushing into something just because it sounds nice. If the state of my soul was at stake, you’d better believe I checked out other folks like Sam Allberry, Kevin DeYoung, and more who had written on LGBT stuff. If the Holy Spirit was calling some pastors to remain firm in traditional sexual ethics and convicting some LGBT Christians out of LGBT relationships, then what did that say about embracing any sexual orientation or gender identity outside of straight and cisgender? Was it all sin down the line if I not only considered dating a man, but even just respected a trans person’s pronouns or self-identified as a “non-practicing homosexual ” or “same-sex attracted”? Sub-categories within traditional and affirming camps didn’t make things easier to parse out either.
I listened to plenty of debates and podcasts where people went over their talking points and life stories. Of course, there were always people on both sides who used shallow and biased reasoning to get to their conclusions; I saw it with affirming and traditional folks alike. Whichever conclusion was right or wrong, I needed to hear from astute scholars who really knew why they believe what they believe. Then, I’d have my best shot at determining which view carried the most weight.
Whereas Lee and Vines made dents in my defense, Karen Keen plowed right through it.
I’m dozing in and out of an uneasy nap. My exhaustion and injuries play tug of war with me enduring a purgatory of consciousness. I just want sleep to pull me out of the middle, but right before that happens, I’m jolted awake as I watch a lower leg come into view from the edge of my shelter’s opening. The figure pauses momentarily just long enough for their thick black cape to rest at the heels of their black boots, but the fabric billows up once more as they resume their stride.
“H-hey!” I yell with a cracking voice. I scramble forward to poke my head out and peer in the direction the stranger went. To my surprise, they’re looking back from afar, clad in dark clothing all over with their face obscured by an impressively deep hood. I stand up and take a step forward, but the person abruptly holds out a gloved hand, palm facing flat toward me while shaking their head. Before I can ask for clarification, they turn around and walk past a line of bushes.
I think about pursuing, but I sigh and crawl back into my shelter instead, trusting the stranger knows what they’re doing. Returning to my rest, I lean my head back against the stone where sparse streaks of water run through caked dust.
Keen is a biblical scholar with an abiding love for scripture. She grew up in a conservative “Bible-believing” church context similar to my own. While not the intended focus of her studies, she wound up delving into sexual ethics and committing to celibacy for most of her life as a lesbian. That is, until she came to the scriptures with fresh eyes, became affirming, and married CenterPeace founder Sally Gary in 2021. Keen knows the traditional position inside and out, just as she has known the Bible inside and out her whole life. I read her book Scripture, Ethics, & the Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships in a matter of days, enamored by how she broke down and interpreted the Hebrew in the creation account, as well as what to make of the evolution of laws from the Israelites to the early church. She doesn’t settle for anything less than the divine authority and relevance of scripture, yet she provides fresh, exciting angles on these beliefs by revealing the humble construction and “moral trajectory” of the Bible as God collaborating with its authors and editors. Rather than standardize the application of scripture for all time, Keen asserts that each generation of Christians plays an active part in carrying forward and advancing what the early church started.
Most importantly, I had never felt more seen in her definition of biblical marriage. For me, sex and biological children haven’t been part of why I want to marry. As I describe in my piece for AZE, I love marriage as a calling to commit to someone and live life with them in selfless, sacrificial, and unconditional love. I mean, it’s the sole point of the stereotypical marriage vows. Yet Christians always talk about how theologically important it is that “the parts fit together” and that sex is, at the very least, postured in action toward procreation. Still, we know a lot of straight people don’t have procreative sex or children, and that’s … well, absolutely fine. As important and beautiful as those things are, they are optional in marriage. They do not make a marriage. Keen made me realize my theological priorities were out of place in how I valued the symbolic nature of God and Israel or Jesus and the Church with husband/wife imagery above all else. It’s similar to Justin Lee pointing out how the Pharisees saw honoring the Sabbath all wrong. Keen says this:
To slavishly uphold the symbol without regard for circumstances is wrong. Paul, following Jesus, teaches that attention to need is more important than practicing a symbol that witnesses to heaven.” (p. 66)
Most traditional Christians already downplay what Paul says about how to do your hair and treat women in the church, despite backing up his claims with clear appeals to creational intent, nature, and theology. But just because (in my opinion) Paul addressed particular audiences in particular contexts with particular intent, doesn’t then mean that everything is to be interpreted or applied the same way today. That doesn’t mean Paul was wrong (which actually isn’t an impossibility in places since he gives his own advice apart from God), but that aspects of his work — to use his words — were shadows of things to come and prods at great mysteries meant to be built upon and moved beyond, ever onward and upward toward bringing God’s kingdom to Earth. Indeed, I currently believe Paul had little to no frame of reference or context for sexual orientation or gay coupling, and I think some traditional scholars cherry-picking and reaching to prove otherwise falls flat, especially in the face of what we see in the lives of LGBT people right in front of us. We can look to the scriptures and see how LGBT people can live out the heart of biblical marriage in the same way straight couples can. Keen succinctly outlines this in her book The Bible and Sexuality:
“Scripture defines marriage as covenantal kinship of mutual support that typically includes the goods of procreation, sexual stewardship, and sanctification. [...] Same-sex attraction is the same as heterosexual attraction — the familial drive that makes us want to couple with another person and build a home.” (p. 63, 97)
Her approach to the traditional view isn’t antagonistic. She intimately knows (as do I) the good intentions to obey and honor God in advocating for marriage between men and women only. After all, that kind of union is how I got here! But the Bible calls Christians to expand their imagination of what it means for Jesus to draw all people to himself, and that includes LGBT folks being able to live fully as they exist and are called. Keen writes, “My response to traditionalists is not ‘No, you are wrong’ or even ‘Yes, but.’ My reply is ‘Yes, and.’” (p. 112)
I came into Keen’s work wondering if she’d provide solid hermeneutical backing to the affirming position, and I got more than I could handle. What I didn’t anticipate was how she also helped me reconnect to what I see as the truth at the heart of the universe: God is love, as hokey as it sounds. God cares about who we are and our well-being alongside our salvation and righteousness. God is a being who enacts retribution and justice — a being who becomes furious in the face of evil. Nevertheless, redemptive love is the root of it all, and he will accomplish the most unexpected and strange things to see that done. This has informed how I look at “fallen” or abnormal conditions, whether they be mental or physical. Are they expressions of a person’s sin? No. Are they dispositions Satan can use to tempt us toward certain sins? Perhaps, but this goes for anything that God has made that can be twisted toward manipulative ends. Atypical sexuality is no different. Augustine ruminates on this with intersex people in The City of God:
“For God is the Creator of all things: He Himself knows where and when anything should be, or should have been, created; and He knows how to weave the beauty of the whole out of the similarity and diversity of its parts. The man who cannot view the whole is offended by what he takes to be the deformity of a part; but this is because he does not know how it is to be adapted or related to the whole.... God forbid, however, that someone who does not know why the Creator has done what He has done should be foolish enough to suppose that God has in such cases erred.” (from Scripture, Ethics, and the Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships, p. 99)
This passage has moved me to tears, reminding me of what Jesus said about a blind man’s condition. Whether healed or not, God’s glory is shown through people the world sees as broken or foolish. If atypical sexual orientation and gender identity aren’t expressions of a sinful heart, do they become sin by way of what embracing them entails? Studies of LGBT people tell us that affirmation of one’s sexual orientation or gender identity leads to flourishing. When that is paired with the church allowing them to pursue the sanctifying vocation of marriage, this can lead to even more good fruit of the Holy Spirit for community well-being, mutual support, and even adopting kids or helping raise relatives’ children. Whether one views this posture as sympathetic concession toward a naturally fallen condition or an embrace of God’s plan unfolding into an even more diverse kingdom, the results are drastically more life giving than those of repression.
Lastly, I’d be remiss to not mention Bridget Eileen Rivera’s profoundly insightful, convicting, and gospel-centered book Heavy Burdens. She takes no side in the debate, instead focusing on surprising church history, theological developments on sexuality, and LGBT people’s experiences for readers to come to their own conclusions. In so doing, she demonstrates how Christians must actively advocate for the humanity and rights of LGBT people, whether affirming or not. Where her observations struck me most is how — in light of all this messy context — everyone cannot be right on every single article of faith. And that’s okay.
With every denomination around us, Christians shouldn’t imagine a God who’s hidden his “one true church” in a particular tradition. I don’t think Jesus was just talking about right or wrong doctrine with the narrow gate, but also right or wrong deeds in the surrounding context. I think fundamentalists like the narrow gate because they attribute it to themselves to feel superior and special. But just as there is grace in sin, Rivera says there is grace in error. As long as believers are humble and earnest in their search for the ways of God with Jesus as their proclaimed savior, salvation is at hand. Of course, there are core tenets of the faith that warrant measures of exclusivity, but we have the bar set for Christians, and it’s a lot more straightforward than creeds and confessions often suggest, which can cause more trouble when more essentials (rather than secondary issues) are tacked on to faith. According to Rivera:
“When Christians attach the possibility of hell to conversation about sexual ethics and gender identity, they negate the power of the gospel. It effectively reduces the Christian faith to whether a person believes the right thing about sex. [...] Christianity doesn't rise and fall over our beliefs about sexual ethics and gender identity any more than it does over believer's baptism versus infant baptism. Or the Lord's Supper. Or spiritual gifts. Or numerous other disputes.” (pp. 165-166, 187).
While I was poring over all these approaches to biblical interpretation, moral reasoning, and history, I’d never felt the Holy Spirit more in my life. I wasn’t just on fire for the Bible and God, but also how this framework galvanized me toward an expression of faith that wasn’t content to remain in church or at home. My theology often felt cold and inadequate in the face of injustice and suffering outside and inside the church. Through discernment and prayer, I now believe my feelings have been compunctions of the Spirit that not only come through scripture, but through me because Jesus is alive, having ascended so the Advocate could inhabit God’s people.
That’s why I continued to read and watch dialogues. I attended Revoice, CenterPeace, and the Queer Christian Conference in the span of a few months in late 2022 and early 2023. I intently watched and spoke with people in these spaces to see if they were truly devoted to the things of God. I reached out to an “ambassador” who represents The Reformation Project. I have gotten in touch with people like Karen Keen, Matthew Vines, Justin Lee, and others. I reexamined my traditional views along the way, over and over again. Where they were once so obvious and clear, now they no longer make sense. I couldn’t believe what my reasoning and heart told me was wrong.
I empathize with LGBT Christians who think and feel otherwise, especially in light of how biblical passages referring to same-sex activity come with some guesswork for all scholars regarding lost history and culture. I respect LGBT Christians who embrace celibacy since there can be great beauty in that — whether for a time or until death. This isn’t even mentioning Paul giving it his (personal) stamp of approval over marriage. Nevertheless, when I use something like the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, I find that while tradition supports the traditional view, reason and experience are where the affirming view prevails with the whole testimony of scripture and lives of LGBT believers. Interpretation has strong cases on both sides, but I personally believe affirming exegesis is more compelling and believable in its engagement with cultural and biblical history. This is why I see a new chapter unfolding in the church’s approach toward LGBT people, who are helping bring out what God intends for his people with sexual ethics.
The Reformers moved beyond tradition when it did not accurately or more deeply serve God and his people. My tradition of reformed ilk have lost the reformed spirit in favor of rewinding the clock for a perfectly certain and static church held captive by the law. Consider “ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda,” which means “the church reformed, always reforming.” To be true to scripture is to not only return to what is good, but also renounce what is bad — or even good no longer — when it fails to reach the heart and will of God for his people. The apostles modeled how the church is called to adapt to culture and look for God in people and places where his followers least expect to see him.
I cannot bear false witness. I have seen God alive and present in affirming spaces, which is why I cannot stick my head in the sand and be blind to LGBT people’s plights. The church should embrace LGBT people as they are in their sexual orientation or gender identity, inviting them to steward these parts of their being with the wisdom of sexual abstinence in singleness, relational fidelity in marriage, and Christlikeness in lifelong commitment to a spouse. This calling is not compromised on the basis of the sex or gender of partners. Gender essentialism, biological determinism, complementarianism — these views of binaries are only biblical by way of proof-texting the letter of the law. Christians are called to look deeper for the spirit of the law, and I believe affirming theology achieves this. I was not convinced by eisegesis that caters to selfish desires, but rather exegesis that frees people into selfless joys that exemplify Christlikeness.
I’m tired of being quiet and complacent about it. I cannot be, or my words mean nothing. Here I stand; I can do no other.
Chirping. A light breeze. I don’t bother opening my eyes — I know it’s morning.
I lean forward and groan, lazily rubbing at a newfound crick in my neck. A small sacrifice to pay for sleep, as well as for some of yesterday’s pain subsiding. As I arch my back, one of my eyebrows does the same at the sound of something I hadn’t caught before. Beneath the birdsong and rustling of nature, I hear hushed whispering.
I steel myself and crawl out, wincing from the bright and cloudless morning. From behind, the murmuring comes to a slow halt amid soft exclamations at my appearance.
I turn around to hundreds of people in garbs of every imaginable color. Scarfs, skirts, and shawls wave along to the wind. All eyes are on me, with some faces wearing concern. Others deeply curious. A few, to my surprise, are radiant with joy and pride.
My gaze drifts to someone parting the people. They’re clad in white from head to toe, even with a hood and white cloth over their lower face, obscuring all but the dark ocean of their eyes. I slowly walk past my shelter to meet them in the rubble. Mere feet apart, the stranger folds their hands in front of them. They are waiting.
Tears come unbidden, rushing down my cheeks before the emotion wells up in my chest.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, barely able to prevent my voice from shaking.
The corners of the stranger’s eyes crinkle. They gracefully come forward and lift their hands up in an invitation to my own. A sob escapes me as I take hold.
“I’m scared,” I say in shame. But I take a deep breath. “Will you help me?”
The stranger moves even closer, enveloping me in their arms.
“Always,” they answer warmly.
To be continued.
(Tracks 1 and 26, “Title Screen” and “Vis Major” in the voiceover come from the video game Pentiment. Sound effects pulled from freesound.org.)