“The thing that has sustained me through all this is God has seemed so very close that prayer has seemed almost redundant. … Sometimes God calms the storm and sometimes God lets the storm rage, and calms the child.”
Personally, “I couldn’t be happier. I think that’s the best revenge,” he said.
He said his 15,000-member diocese was healthy, but the news he seemed most eager to relay was that immediately after the luncheon he was leaving for the Sundance Film Festival, where a documentary film, featuring his story and those of four other gay families, has been nominated for a grand jury prize.
Titled “For the Bible Tells Me So,” it is about families split by their beliefs about homosexuality and Scripture. He said his own parents talked more openly to the filmmaker than they had to him after his own announcement at age 39 that he was gay and getting divorced.
Well, it’s happened again. This time it comes via the Sundance Film Festival. A new movie is released about the lives of a number of families who have had their children come out of the closet. The same tired, thirty-four year old arguments have yet again been trotted out by the left (E.g., Paul was only talking about homosexual prostitution) to try and make the Bible say God thinks homosexual sex is a wonderful idea and the same well worn rebuttal (Original design) issued by the right. The media is all over it with CNN devoting almost 20min to it.
Honestly, I wonder what’s next? “Gays can sneeze; details on channel four news at 11:00pm,” perhaps?
Frankly, it isn’t news and it hasn’t shifted anyone’s mind. It’s more of a tactic — a tactic to, yet again, pit two sides of evangelicals against each other. On the one side is the fundamentalist right ranting about how Gays are breaking the law of God. On the other is the liberal left trying to show how the law of God is actually not being broken. Strangely, neither side seems to see that they are both on the same side — and it’s the wrong one — and it’s making them both look like idiots.
Even more strangely, neither side has figured out that making them look like idiots was the whole point. As long as they are debating their respective standing as to the rules, they are essentially neutralized and the message of the Gospel is going nowhere.
A message that would clearly say:
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God loves you regardless of what you have ever done or failed to do, He just loves you for no good reason and so do we.
He has set you free from the law — and that freedom is total — so that you would no longer have to run from relationship with Him based on your obvious inability to be good as measured by such.
He knows what it means to be fully human and fully alive and longs for you to move closer to such and thus closer to the fulfillment you were created for.
The gay life is so much less then what you can have — can we walk with you and love you towards all that God has for you?
But, of course, it’s just so much more fun to measure ourselves with the wrong measuring stick that the, “Healing of the nations,” can wait…
