Coming out for love

The thing that they tell you in law school is that their job isn’t to teach you the law, but to teach you to think like a lawyer.

I’m above all else a practical person, so I always heard that and thought it was a crock of shit, quite honestly.

The way that they teach you to “think like a lawyer” is to analyze Supreme Court cases.  And to evaluate and discuss, ad infinitum, why the Supreme Court came to the conclusion that it did.

I always thought that too was a crock of shit.

When the professor and the other students would say, the Court made that decision because of the precedent that was set in case blah, blah, blah, and because of the court’s view on yada, yada, and because this and that was going on in the country at that time, I would want to scream. I would want to stand up in class and say, you people are crazy. The reason that the Supreme Court came to that decision is because that’s the decision they wanted to come to, and they simply found old law and other justification that supported that decision, or figured out a way to justify why that old law didn’t actually fit with the conclusion they wanted to reach. They came to that decision because it was the one they thought best fit the fact scenario they were dealing with.

Y’all, I hated law school.

But I was also in my early 20’s and possibly a bit arrogant in thinking I was a whole lot smarter than what I actually was.

Looking back on it 25 years later, I still think there is some truth to what I thought then, that the justices come up with the answers that they believe fit the world that we live in today, and that in order to do that, they sometimes have to distinguish old laws that were once in place, and use reasoning and context to support the decisions they come up with now. They do that much the same way my current church does to interpret what the Bible says and means. Something called the Wesleyan quadrilateral. Where the things considered in determining appropriate theology are not just the black and white letter of the scripture but scripture, along with tradition, reason, and personal experience.

If we simply stick, as a society, with the laws that were put into place when this country was founded 200+ years ago, we would still have laws in place allowing slavery, child abuse, and domestic violence. 

But we don’t, because tradition, reason, and personal experience have led us to realize that those laws were morally wrong, damaging and hurtful to a large segment of the population.

Which is the reason that the vast majority of Christians today choose to ignore those passages in the Bible which allow for the same.

And yet, for some reason, many also choose to cling to those 6 passages in the Bible which they believe say that same gender attraction, and living out that attraction, is sinful and wrong.

And they argue, as I once did concerning the law, that those who say that the scripture must be looked at in the context of the time, and the society, and the original meaning of the words, and how those words are used in other contexts within scripture, and what the writer was attempting to make a point about, are just wrong. And that people are simply coming up with the result that they want based on what is going on in the world today.

And I believe those people are as arrogant and impatient as I was when 23 and 24. 

And I say that not with judgment, but with humility and shame of my own, because it is what once I believed as well. Because, for most of my life, I was told that what the Bible said was inerrant and was to be taken exactly as it was written. And yet nobody explained to me why those parts of the Bible which said that divorce was a sin, or it was wrong to eat shellfish or mix your fibers, were okay to ignore, but the ones concerning human sexuality and anything straying from God’s plan of one man and one woman were to be held up as the standard which was higher than all those other provisions in the Bible which said to love God and love our neighbor.

And for somebody who has spent most of her career questioning why things were the way they were, I never questioned those inconsistencies with Biblical interpretation and theology as I should have. Until I was finally given the permission by my current pastor to do so. I will never forget the first time that I told her, in Disciple class, that I didn’t like a scripture that I read. I expected her to scold me, quite frankly, albeit gently, and then move out of the strike zone so she wasn’t affected when the lightning came down to strike me. She didn’t do either of those things. She said, “Yeah, there are lots of things in the Bible I don’t like either. What was it you didn’t like about what you read?” Not the response I expected. She taught me that God was big enough to handle my questions. That God was big enough to handle my doubts. That God was big enough to handle my anger.

She taught me to question what I read and question what I thought, and instead of answering those questions, she answered with questions of her own, which frustrated me endlessly, but made me come to answers of my own. Answers which came from my own honest and real look at scripture, tradition, reason, and personal experience.

That lesson I learned has changed everything about how I see the world. About how I see my role as a Christian in this world. About how I see my obligation to be the love of God and the hands and feet of Jesus in this world. About how I value and cherish and experience the living word of God in my own life. 

I have spent my entire life reading the Bible. I had never experienced the Bible in its relevance and its message for my life until I truly began to be open about what I was reading and what it meant. I had never experienced the fullness of God’s message until I felt free to question what it meant, and to admit that there were things in it that just made me sick to my stomach, because of the stories they told about the objectification or devaluation of women or the victimization of the vulnerable young. Being able to recognize and admit that there are things in the Bible that do not bring me joy gives greater weight and joy to the scriptures that give me life and breath.

I sat in a class Saturday morning taught by the lead pastor at First United Methodist Church in McKinney. The class was on human sexuality and what the Bible says about it. And I cried. I cried, because for the first time in my life, I sat in a pew in the sanctuary of a church building, listening to a male pastor talk at length and in detail about this issue, speaking in love and affirmation, and calling bullshit to hate, judgment, and intolerance of the LGBTQ+ community.

He told the story of a young trans woman that he knew who described the journey of straight allies standing up for the rights of the LGBTQ+ community as “like coming out. Coming out for love.”

I believe that is exactly what this journey is for me. As my gay child and all of my LGBTQ+ friends must come out as gay to others, again, and again, and again, I must do the same. 

I must come out.  Come out for love. Again, and again, and again.

I listened to a portion of a podcast this past week. Much of the podcast I have theological differences with, and that’s okay. Because I try to be a little less arrogant than I was when I was in my early 20’s and to understand why people have the opinions that they do. But what the podcast did say which I agree with wholeheartedly was this: “Jesus didn’t come to take sides. He came to take over. Jesus told stories. We need to hear less debate and less doctrine and more stories. You will never experience yourself until you experience the love of God in you.”

Friends, we will not ever fully experience the love of God if all we do is hang on 6 verses in the Bible and what some people say that they mean. We experience the love of God by loving others. By listening to their stories. By seeing their hearts.

That’s what the Jesus I know did. 

Everything else is just religion.  

I choose my neighbor.

And I come out for love.

Again, and again, and again.