Light and Darkness

John 8:12-20 (NRSV)

Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life." Then the Pharisees said to him, "You are testifying on your own behalf; your testimony is not valid." Jesus answered, "Even if I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is valid because I know where I have come from and where I am going, but you do not know where I come from or where I am going. You judge by human standards; I judge no one. Yet even if I do judge, my judgment is valid; for it is not I alone who judge, but I and the Father who sent me. In your law it is written that the testimony of two witnesses is valid. I testify on my own behalf, and the Father who sent me testifies on my behalf." Then they said to him, "Where is your Father?" Jesus answered, "You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also." He spoke these words while he was teaching in the treasury of the temple, but no one arrested him, because his hour had not yet come.

In the past few days I have been receiving some wise counsel about seeing myself as God sees me. After my experience with the Roman churches ex-gay ministry Courage, I still have a lot of healing to do. Much of that healing needs to be how I have been taught to view myself as a gay man.

Courage along with other ex-gay groups casts this huge shadow of darkness over people who are gay. They do not want us to think of ourselves as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered because that is much too much of a "political label." And so their contradiction to that is to get us to see ourselves as men or women with same-sex attraction and to treat that as a "disease" or "disorder." They do not see what they do as darkness or damaging, because the spread of homosexuality as an alternative life to being heterosexual is the error of darkness they are seeking to shed the light of God on.

My experience is very much the same as what many LGBT people experience in our conversations with religious and political conservatives. There is something about homosexuality, bisexuality and transgendered behavior that is just not right. Not only does anti-gay rhetoric seek to destroy our work for civil and human rights, but also our dignity as human beings. They want us to see our sexual orientation and/or gender identity/expression as "intrinsically disordered."

The problem with much of this and other anti-gay rhetoric is that it really does go against the heart of what Scripture teaches about God's relationship with every single one of us, gay or straight. The talk that seeks to change people who are LGBT is also in it's own way a slap in the face of who God is. If we learn to see God in that "light" that is beyond our comprehension, that God is so much greater than labels and useless rhetoric we will see that God's view of all of God's children cannot possibly be confined to the world view that God has one group of people that God wishes were different than the way we were "fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139:14).

This Gospel has a lot to say about darkness and light. Jesus is the "Light of the World, Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life." (John 8:12). As I have said many religious conservatives accuse LGBT people of following darkness when we accept our sexual orientations and/or gender identities/expressions. As if, the only way for us to go back into the "light" is to renounce our sexuality and gender identities/expressions and try to be something we are not. Yet, they are forgetting something very important. God knew us, consecrated us and commissioned us as we are and loved us before we were even in the womb. Read all of Psalm 139 and Jeremiah 1:5 and we will see how much God loved us into being. In addition, we read in Psalm 139: 11 and 12: "If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night", even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as day, for darkness is as light to you." There is nothing about any of us that God does not know, or love. All of us LGBT and straight are a delight to God.

In Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh the beauty with which God created us has been restored. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, our sins have been washed away and we share in the newness of God's life and love. We have been redeemed to carry on in our life and to love ourselves and our significant other helping them to know that God cares about and loves them, and has sent us to love them as God's reminder. When we fall in love with someone and when someone falls in love with us, it is God's way of telling us how much God cherishes us. When we learn to fall in love with ourselves as LGBT people, God is reminding us how much we are cherished and loved. That Light that is Jesus permeates all of the darkness of anti-gay rhetoric and shows how none of that is any where near true. If we could only learn to see ourselves through God's Light and not the darkness of the religious right's anti-gay comments. If only we could help other gay people who have turned away from Christianity due to the darkness of ex-gay groups, what a different world it would be. The best thing we can do is see ourselves in that Light that is Jesus, so that others will want to know what we are doing. God's Light will shine through us.

Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins, and give us the liberty of that abundant life which you have made known o us in your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (Collect for the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, BCP, Page 216).