On this second day of LGBTQ Pride Month and what would have been my macho father's 102nd birthday, I think I'll process a couple of things here (with too many words again, it has turned out):
My father was the hardest working human being I've ever met. He started to work in the Great Depression in Eastern Oklahoma in order to put food on the table of his abjectly poor rural family. My grandfather had died in 1926, when my dad was not quite 7-years-old. He had outlived his first two wives and had six children with my grandmother. That's in addition to the child she had from her first marriage and the many children he had from his previous marriages. It was a huge family and Dad worked from a very early age literally to keep them from starving. (My grandmother claimed that my dad was so bowlegged, because he went to work before his bones were fully hardened.)
Dad was very quiet. When he did speak, he was often angry. He was a gentle and kind man with an explosive temper. Mom made sure that his anger didn't result in harm being done to me and, though I never felt safe around him as a child, he seldom laid a hand on me. His language was sparse, but when it came, as is the case among people of oral cultures, it was often poetic and sometimes a little philosophical. He believed that we are here to work and to care for our clan, especially our household. And he believed that none of that is easy. In fact, he would sometimes say with his jaw and his eyes set, "Life is just hard!"
When I speak of the importance that the church learn to rehear the gospel in this era of undeniable gender and sexual ambiguity, I'm not at all out to loosen the church's obedience to the Reign of God. Indeed, what I am calling for is a revival of obedience to that Reign. What I'm calling for is a refinement of the church, a separation of the good news from ephemeral cultural dross.
There may be nothing that has more diluted the gospel in the West than its fairly recent confusion with modern notions of sexuality and marriage, the ideal of the "nuclear family." And so, when Paul admonishes other followers of the cross to live their lives as if they owned nothing and to avoid, whenever possible, getting married and having babies, we are confused and we usually dismiss his words as if they carried no weight (e.g., since he admits this is not directly found in the traditions passed on to him "from the Lord"). We have a hard time imagining a Christian life except within a church made up of nuclear families. We tolerate "singleness," but are saddened by it. And we respect the privacy of the home and gravitate to suburban neighborhoods, with their fenced yards and remote garage door openers.
The gospel is good news, because it will not settle down into a Norman Rockwell, a Walt Disney, world. It sets us free by the unspeakably open good favor of God. The God who raises the mutilated body of Jesus from the grave is a God of abundant grace. But this God insists that those thus embraced by love and mercy—this God insists that broken people, crucified people, mutilated people, people whose lives are hard—this God insists that they stand up, along with their hard lives, and move out into lived solidarity with other battered people. "Take up *your* cross and follow me to the hill where others are crucified!" Jesus says.
This strikes us (strikes *me!*) as unfair. Life is hard enough for broken people without moving out to work alongside of other broken people. But Jesus called poor people to do just that, not to be crucified alone, but to be crucified with him and with other people like like him, like them.
For the church to welcome LGBTQ+ people into "the temple" (as, if I may be so bold, Jesus called for on the day of overturned tables), is not to welcome them into siesta. Certainly, the body of Christ provides rest for those who carry heavy loads and nobody is to have a new oppressive set of laws heaped on them. However, the rest of the gospel, the peace of the gospel, "passeth understanding." It is not like the peace that the world gives, not the Pax Romana, not the Pax Americana.
To welcome LGBTQ+ people into the body of Christ is to welcome them into a hard life, but it is a hard life among others living hard lives. It is as serious as life and death. Indeed to welcome anyone into the body of Christ is to insist that they be baptized—and that means that they die with Christ and rise with him, an event celebrated and reenacted again and again as eucharist. Every member of the church is to die with Christ, to die out to self, to throw themselves into life with and for the outcasts of the world, the crucified people.
Life in Christ is just hard! It is also glorious. Let it be hard and glorious for everyone for whom Christ died!