Is It Worth the Risk?

“Is It Worth the Risk?”

Faith, LGBTQ Christians, and the Grace That Is Larger Than Our Certainty

One of the questions I often hear when I talk about LGBTQ people, faith, Scripture, and the Church is some version of this:

“Is it really worth the risk?”

Usually, what the person means is: What if affirming LGBTQ people is wrong? What if same-sex marriage really is sinful? What if your interpretation of Scripture is mistaken? What if you stand before God at Judgement Day and discover that you were wrong?

 It’s a serious question, and I don’t dismiss it. But I do think Christians need to understand that the question cuts both ways. The risk is not only on the side of those of us who are LGBTQ, affirming, inclusive, or willing to read Scripture differently than the tradition we inherited. There is also a risk on the other side.

What if Christians have been judging LGBTQ people wrongly for a very long time? What if the Church has placed burdens on us that God never demanded? What if generations of Christians have called unclean what God has called clean? What if people have been driven from the Church, from their families, from their faith, and sometimes even from life itself, not because God rejected them, but because of the rejection of Christians?

That is not a small risk. Indeed, at least from my perspective, it’s much a much larger risk that the one we’re facing.

Scripture has plenty to say about sin, repentance, holiness, and faithful living, and I believe those things. But Scripture also has something to say about judgment. Jesus warns us about judging others. Paul warns us about passing judgment on another servant of God. James warns us that teachers will be judged with greater strictness. The prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures repeatedly condemned religious people who dared to speak for God while crushing the vulnerable and marginalizing the outcast.

So when someone asks me, “Is it worth the risk?” I want to ask in return: is it worth the risk that you might be wrong in your judgment? Is it worth the risk that your certainty might have contributed to shame, rejection, despair, spiritual abuse, broken families, and death? Is it worth the risk that the people you have called sinful, rebellious, or deceived, may actually be beloved children of God bearing the fruit of the Spirit right in front of you?

These aren’t rhetorical questions for me. I was sent to conversion therapy as a teenager, where questions about my identity and salvation were tightly tied together. I spent years begging God to change me. I prayed. I repented. I pleaded. I begged. I tried to surrender harder, believe more, and hate the part of myself I’d been told God hated. I lived for years with the belief that if I were faithful enough, repentant enough, or broken enough, God would make me straight.

Only, God never did that. No matter how much I tried, how much I begged, God remained silent. God didn’t respond to my prayers by changing me. Christ didn’t come to me and heal me of my homosexuality. It was almost as if my being gay wasn’t a problem for God. I had been told by other Christians that it was a problem, and that I would roast for all eternity if I didn’t change, but that wasn’t the response I was getting from Jesus.

 Eventually, after years of pain, prayer, study, ministry, therapy, and wrestling with Scripture, I had to consider a different possibility: maybe the problem wasn’t that God had refused to heal me. Maybe the problem was that I had been taught to see something as sickness or brokenness or sin that God didn’t see in those ways.

Maybe I wasn’t waiting for God to change me. Maybe God was waiting for me to stop hating myself. That realization struck like a lighting bolt, and when it did I could feel the chains that had been binding me with terror over my salvation begin to crumble. If my sexual orientation wasn’t enough of a problem for Jesus to change me, then perhaps it wasn’t a problem at all? That revelation didn’t come all at once, but over time it moved through my life and, in successive stages, freed me from the fear and self-loathing that had governed me for so logn.

When people ask, “What if your interpretation is wrong?” my answer is: I have considered that. Deeply. Painfully. For decades. This has never been an abstract debate for me. It’s not been a culture-war talking point. It’s not been an intellectual exercise. It’s become my life, my body, my prayers, my ministry, my marriage, my calling, and my very relationship with Jesus Christ. I’ve sat with the question. I’ve wept under the question. I’ve carried the question into prayer, into Scripture, into the Church, into silence, into shame, into hope, and finally into grace. So yes, I have considered that I might be wrong.

Have those who condemn us done the same? Have they studied these texts carefully in their historical, linguistic, cultural, and theological contexts? Have they listened to LGBTQ Christians who love Jesus? Have they sat with people who begged God to change them and nearly died when that change never came? Have they examined the rotten fruit produced by the interpretations they defend? Have they considered that their inherited reading of a handful of scriptural references might not be the same thing as the voice of God? Or is this issue, for many people, disconnected from their own lived experience?

 For LGBTQ Christians, it’s not disconnected. It’s not theoretical. We don’t get to walk away from it when the comment thread ends. We carry it every day we life. We carry it in our families,in our churches, in our memories, in our nightmares. We carry it in the ways people look at us, speak about us, to us, and at us. We carry it in how they pray over us, exclude us, pity us, or condemn us. And still, many of us keep loving Jesus, keep serving the Church, keep praying, worshiping, preaching, teaching, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, caring for the lonely, welcoming the stranger, and trying to be faithful.

 Jesus said we would know a tree by its fruit. Paul names the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I see that fruit in the lives of LGBTQ Christians all the time. I see it in queer people who have every reason to walk away from the Church and yet still show up with love. I see it in trans Christians who have been mocked by religious people and yet still radiate the presence of God. I see it in same-sex marriages marked by covenant, sacrifice, patience, forgiveness, and fidelity. I see it in LGBTQ youth who have survived spiritual trauma and still dare to believe that God loves them.

 And I see it in my own marriage. My marriage has not drawn me away from Christ, it’s helped heal the wounds that shame created. It’s called me deeper into honesty, tenderness, stability, accountability, and grace. It’s borne those marks of the Spirit that Paul wrote about in Galatians: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And lately, especially self-control.

 Over the past few weeks, I have had thousands of vicious, cruel, hateful, condescending, demeaning, and slanderous things said to me and about me online. I’ve been accused, mocked, condemned, misrepresented, and treated as though I am some kind of spiritual contaminant rather than a brother in Christ. The provocation to lash out has been enormous. The temptation to respond in anger, to say the same kinds of hideous things back, to meet cruelty with cruelty, and to answer self-righteous spiritual superiority with my own sharp tongue has been very real.

 But I have tried not to respond in kind. Not perfectly. I’m human. I get tired and angry and feel the weight of their viciousness. But again and again, I have found myself trying to respond to the audacity of their cruelty with patience, clarity, honesty, and grace. And I certainly don’t believe that restraint comes simply from me, it’s the fruit of the Spirit alive in me by the grace of Jesus Christ.

 So when people look at my life, my marriage, my ministry, and my responses to hostility, and still insist that no good fruit is present, I have to ask: are they actually looking for the fruit of the Spirit, or are they committed to denying it because it appears in the life of a gay Christian?

 That’s one of the central questions in this conversation. Too often, the standard seems to be this: if LGBTQ people suffer, that’s “conviction.” If we despair, that’s “the cost of sin.” If we leave the Church, that’s “rebellion.” If we stay and bear good fruit, the fruit is dismissed. If we love Jesus, our faith is questioned. If we marry, our covenant is denied. If we serve, our calling is doubted. If we thrive, our joy is treated as deception. This is what happens nearly every time.

 At some point, conservative Christians have to ask whether they’re discerning fruit or simply defending a conclusion they have already decided must be true.

 I believe in repentance. I believe Christians are called to turn from sin, selfishness, idolatry, exploitation, hatred, cruelty, greed, arrogance, and all that distorts the image of God in us. But repentance isn’t hating ourselves. Repentance isn’t surrendering to shame. Repentance isn’t denying the presence of God’s grace in our lives because someone else’s theology has no room for it. For me, repentance has meant turning away from fear, from dishonesty, from the shame that told me I was uniquely broken, from the lie that God’s love was available to everyone except people like me. It’s meant turning toward Christ. Toward truth, grace, wholeness, love, and the life God actually gave me, rather than the life others demanded I pretend to have.

 So when someone says, “What if my interpretation is right and yours is wrong?” I understand the question. But I also ask: what makes you so certain your interpretation is right? What makes you so certain that the way you were taught to read these passages is the only correct way to read them? What makes you so certain that your judgment of our lives, our marriages, our ministries, and our faith is more trustworthy than the visible fruit of God’s Spirit in our lives? What makes you so certain that God’s grace is smaller than your theology?

 After all my study, prayer, suffering, and years of wrestling with Scripture and with God, I don’t believe I am wrong. The presence of the fruit of the Spirit in my life, my marriage, and my ministry confirms that for me. I have a strong sense of God’s love in my life, and that sense gives me all the assurance I need.

 However, all of that being said, even if I stand before Christ one day and discover that I misunderstood something, I trust Jesus more than I trust my own ability to get everyinterpretation perfect. I trust his love, mercy, and grace. I trust the One who knows my heart, my wounds, my prayers, my repentance, my longing to be faithful, and my love for him.

 My faith isn’t in my sexuality. My faith isn’t even in my own interpretation. My faith is in Jesus Christ. And I believe his grace is larger than our certainty.