Is There Room At the Table?

Last night Bunny and I shared a meal with some friends from New Hope. We talked about a lot of things. Some trivial and some not so. One of the questions I was asked was "What is the church going to do about the "gay marriage" issue"

When we got home, I received a blog post from Chuck Warnock about a related issue. Go over there and read his post, and put his blog in your reader. He's doing some amazingly good stuff up there in a Kingdom sort of way. Chuck is writing about the effort by Soul Force, a pro-gay group, to have some mega church pastors sit down to a meal with them and talk.

My comments on Chuck's blog were basically, if it's a sincere desire to fellowship and learn more about another human being created in God's image, then why in the world would you not want to break bread with them?

We've had gay people here at New Hope on occasion, and have had repeated visits a while back from one half of a lesbian couple and I think one visit from them together. So when I think about this issue, I think about real people, not some made for TV stereotype.

And I think about the real Jesus as He demonstrated what God's love looked like while He was here in bodily form. The way that the religious people thought they were slandering Him by calling Him a "friend of sinners."

Used to, we wrote songs about how great that was.

Jesus, What a Friend for Sinners

1. Jesus! What a friend for sinners!

Jesus! Lover of my soul;

Friends may fail me, foes assail me,

He, my Savior, makes me whole.

Chorus: Hallelujah! What a Savior!

Hallelujah! What a friend!

Saving, helping, keeping, loving,

He is with me to the end.

2. Jesus! What a strength in weakness!

Let me hide myself in Him.

Tempted, tried, and sometimes failing,

He, my strength, my victory wins.

(Repeat chorus)

3. Jesus! What a help in sorrow!

While the billows o’er me roll,

Even when my heart is breaking,

He, my comfort, helps my soul.

(Repeat chorus)

4. Jesus! I do now receive Him,

More than all in Him I find.

He hath granted me forgiveness,

I am His, and He is mine.

(Repeat chorus)

Friends, by almost any measure, I am a conservative. My conviction from Scripture is that homosexual practice is a sin. That marriage between homosexuals may be recognized as legal by the state, but it isn't marriage as God created it.

All that stated and firmly held, backed by Scripture - I have a lot in common with the members of Soul Force. I am a sinner who needed a savior. I was created in God's image - the Bible uses the word "poema" which could be translated "masterpiece" to refer to those created by God's hands. So were they.

So yes, let's go get some fried chicken and green beans (Baptist inside joke).We'll disagree over sexuality, the meaning and interpetation of verses related to it - no doubt.

But do we have to agree on everything to share a meal together?

Poisoning the well

Poisoning the well was an act done since biblical days where a person would poison the water source for someone else. It was always seen as a desperate act because water was so precious that to deny someone that was in a sense to deny yourself future opportunity.

I'm sitting here wrapping up the powerpoint for tomorrow morning's message which comes from Matthew 7. Jesus commands His followers "Do not judge." Then He goes on to explain what the consequences for judging are, and how ridiculous it is to set yourself up as a moral authority when you yourself are so massively flawed.

In the last two months, I have read two books that speak to the current condition of the church in culture. unChristian by David Kinnaman and They Like Jesus But Not the Church by Dan Kimball both report that one of the primary words emerging generations use when speaking of Christians and the church is "judgmental".

We've poisoned the well. And it is going to take a real change in the hearts of those who follow Jesus to make that well fit for use again. We're really going to have to focus on loving our neighbor as ourselves. This means dropping the stones we've carried for so long.

Can we?