“The Pharisees had their eyes on Jesus to see if He would heal him, hoping to catch him in a Sabbath infraction. . . . . . . . . . . He looked them in the eye, one after another, angry now, furious at their hard-nosed religion.”
~ Mark 3: 2, 5 (The Message)
The rules that some Christians follow in an attempt to please God are really not God-pleasing. If we could just live by the two rules that Christ gave while He was on earth, to love God first, and to love your neighbour as yourself, then it really isn’t necessary to have any other rules, especially rules of exclusion for people who want only to love and serve the Lord but are forced to hide their true identity for fear of persecution and rejection.
As children, we need rules to keep us safe and to understand the way society works. As we grow older, we need fewer rules because we have experiences to direct us.
I think that baby Christians need rules too, and I also think that that’s where fundamentalism short-changes us. It relegates us to the position of the Pharisees who were more concerned with rules than they were with relationships, and over and over again, Jesus not only breaks those rules but He also chastises the religious leaders at the same time, which gives us an idea of His position on the subject.
Our great God is a God of the underdog, a God of the downcast and the outcast. In Jesus’ day, the outcast was the leper. Today it is gays. Did Jesus treat the lepers the way that the Pharisee’s did? No, he freely mingled with them and loved them equally.
God freely mingles with us gays today in spite of what “The Church” would try to tell us. He is alive and in the hearts of all who love Him – and He blesses us abundantly as His proof!