So there's a thread going on my church's forum about what seem to be recent developments in the PCUSA. I think PCUSA has finally agreed to accept gay and lesbian clergy (which is sort of anticlimactic, since I graduated with a guy who got ordained in PCUSA and during his ordination said yes, he would obey everything except the rule about gays and lesbians. This was back in '03 or '04, and it was news for a minute, but his congregation was cool with him, and that was the end of it.)

Someone brought the issue to our church forum. This opened up an old wound in our church. The Church, while it doesn't really have any stated policy on homosexuality, does recognize marriage as existing between a man and a woman. There's no room in current church policy for out gay behavior. Which highlights a certain disconnect when a sitting member of our College of Bishops has, when being sued for sexual harassment of a male, offered an affirmative defense. That, it appears to me, is what's wounding the church. Not so much the affirmative defense, but the apparent disconnect between beliefs and behavior.

I am not homophobic. On the contrary, I differ from my church in that I am gay-affirming. I understand the Levitical prohibition against homosexuality, but also understand the Levitical prohibitions against eating pork, against cutting one's hair, and against wearing clothes made of more than one fabric, the same Levitical codes that call for death for adultery and banishment of a woman for having sex during her menstrual cycle. Those are the same Levitical codes that prohibit blind or lame people from going to the altar of God, and call for burning a priest's daughter at the stake if she has sex outside marriage. All those are part of the Holiness Codes, which were designed to help preserve the identity of the Israelites when they lived among other people. I happen to believe that no human is capable of living under and keeping every law (613 contained in the Torah, 300+ of them possible without a temple, and NONE of them were intended for people who were not Jews). We Christians are not Jews, but have been grafted onto the tree of Judaic lineage through the Miracle of Jesus Christ. This is a spiritual inheritance, not a physical one. That is why we live not under the Law, but Through the power of Amazing Grace and can avail ourselves of the Grace that was so freely offered by Jesus' sacrificial death on the cross.

It never ceases to amaze me that we can explain away those parts of the Holiness codes that affect behaviors we want to engage in (like shaving or eating pork or blind or lame people coming to the altar), but we hang on to the prohibition against homosexuality. In my mind, the Word is the Word. Either you take it all literally or you dig in and try to understand it. I do the latter, and just don't think homosexuality is that big a deal. I know this is contrary to the teaching of my church, but this is where I am in my faith walk.

What I do think is a big deal is not holding a church official accountable for engaging in behaviors contrary to church doctrine. I think that hurts the congregation and I think it demeans the validity of the church (though not of the Sacraments. There is no power in Sacraments; they are merely outward signs of a Relationship with Our Creator). But the Church has specific rules on who is allowed to administer those sacraments. And I'm in a church where preachers with expired licenses freely administer Sacraments, mostly because the majority of people in the church don't understand the structure or all the rules. It's as if we as a church either don't know or don't care about being accountable to the structures we've created. Maybe that's why people feel so strongly that this sitting Bishop should, through public actions, make some sort of show of repentance or confession. Maybe they don't understand that he can only confess to and be forgiven by God. Maybe they don't understand that they should be looking to God for direction and guidance and not to another human being.

And maybe that's a sign that our complex and antiquated church structures no longer have any meaning. Maybe that's a sign it's time for a change in this church.

To start the change, I would ask the following: WHY, people? Why do so many folks care so passionately about this issue of sexuality? I mean, as an unmarried preacher in God's church, I ain't gettin' none. And I don't really care about what someone else is getting, and I CERTAINLY don't care about the details of HOW they're getting it. I don't understand why this issue of homosexuality elicits such passion in people. Why do grown men spend so much time having feelings about where another grown man puts their dingaling? What's up with that?

...unless....

Nah. But the anti-gay people ARE awfully loud and awfully passionate. I remember when an ancestor who will remain unnamed used to talk to me about sex, she asked what I thought about "those men that get down there and mess with each other." I told her I didn't think anything about it. Because I didn't. I didn't have an opinion on it one way or the other. It wasn't something that impacted me, my understanding of sex or the sexual experience, so it wasn't really something I cared about. It's sorta like my opinion on how turtles have sex. Don't know, don't care. Not a factor in my world; no reason to give it real estate in my head.

And it's why I just don't understand (supposedly straight) people getting so fired up over homosexuality. I understand gay people getting fired up over it -- it directly affects them. But straights? Why do you care? I'm not talking about the obvious civil rights violations of gay people. We all should care about that and labor tirelessly to see that ALL Americans are treated equally under the law.

But I'm still left wondering why straight people have such an issue with what they perceive to be gay people's living in violation of God's law. If that is the case, if you really believe they're committing an abomination against God, don't you trust and believe God enough to think that God will take care of it? Doesn't the Lord say Vengeance belongs to Him? Doesn't the Lord tell us to obey the law of the land by giving Caesar what belongs to Caesar? If Caesar demands equality for gay people, why aren't straight Christian people treating gays equally and without malice? Wouldn't this be an opportunity to exercise the love of Jesus in your behavior towards this, your fellow human being?

I just don't understand why people get so bent out of shape over gay people. The New Testament spends more time talking about social and economic inequality, yet we can distort the Gospel teachings into having a "prosperity Gospel" based on accumulating wealth. And we want to pick on gays?

Sorry, it's not clicking for me.