"I believe that unwavering certainty makes for bad religion. A faith tradition becomes dangerously brittle when it claims to know God completely or to hold the key to knowledge missing from all other faith traditions. How essential it is for all people of faith to remember that we know very little! We do not come to God because we know or understand God but because God knows us." (Page 49).
I find this statement from Moorehead's book to be quite profound. Christians for all too long have approached our Faith thinking that we know everything about God. Such attitudes come up every time a denomination wants to make a change of any kind. As many mainline churches decided to change their understanding of women being ordained many hard nosed people came out of the wood works opposing the ordination of women based on 1 Corinthians 14:34 which reads: "women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says." As time has moved on and Biblical history has been better studied, it was discovered that Paul was writing this in a time when women were still considered nothing more than property. Women were "subordinate" because they were suppose to be under the man no matter what. Christians realized that we now live in a time when women are not property, but created in the image and likeness of God just as men are. What happened? Religious traditions changed. We understood that we cannot exactly call ourselves Christians if we do not allow the Holy Spirit to move with her grace and beauty to change our understanding about God, one another and ourselves.
Over the past thirty years or so, the Church's understanding of homosexuality, bisexuality and people who are transgendered have also been changing. Yet, I would say that the change over LGBT people in the Church has been even more challenging than even the issue of woman's ordination because of people's perception of several Biblical accounts about homosexuality. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah, Leviticus, 1 Corinthians, Romans for a few examples. Many Biblical scholars have written books and papers about how our understandings of the "clobber passages" concerning homosexuality, actually do not condemn LGBT people. Author Daniel A. Helminiak, Ph.D. who authored the book: "What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality" has suggested that Jesus' encounter with the Roman Centurion, healing his servant was an account at which Jesus was blessing and condoning a love relationship between two people of the same-sex. You can read the accounts in the Gospel of Matthew 8:5-13 or Luke 7:1-10.
The bottom line in all of this, is that God is in no way stagnant. God can and does change. What does not change about God is God's unconditional and all-inclusive love. What does not change is that God became one with us in Christ Jesus to save us all from our sins and to call us to a change of understanding about ourselves, God and one another. God's call to us through Christ to always be open to conversion of heart, manners and life, is a constant call. It is a call to remember that no matter how difficult change seems to be, God is with us as we struggle to understand, adapt and sometimes even reject the call to alter an old way of thinking or behaving. When we find it difficult to reach out to someone who makes us uncomfortable, God is there with us to help us with those lousy emotions and to help us bring ourselves back into a Gospel like perspective. In those moments God helps us to learn more about God and ourselves, so that we may deepen our knowledge and devotion and may reach out and try again.
How are we being challenged to change our understanding of God, ourselves and others today? How is God drawing us to the Cross so that we may understand something new about our sufferings and the sufferings of others? How are we responding to God's call to change? Where are we resisting God?
God waits not to shame us for not wanting to change, but to come and just love us through it all. God is not the angry mean judge that the "ole' Time Religion" taught us over the years. God is the loving and embracing Savior in Jesus Christ, who longs to comfort us, and love us through the hard times. God comes to help us see ourselves in a different light, not the darkness of the anti-gay rhetoric of the religious right. God comes to us to let us know that even though change is hard, God still loves us whether we chose to cooperate with God's grace to change or not. God is that great someone who has been just waiting for us to ask God to come on in and help. God will come like a loving sweet mother who really wants to help us, but does not intervene until we ask her to. God waits like a father who just wants to be our best buddy, and when we finally acknowledge that we cannot do it all on our own, God will come and show us how to do it right. Are we willing to let God come in and help?
O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Collect for the Second Sunday of Lent, BCP, Page 218).
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