Where does the difference lie?

Recently our family had an opportunity to do some emergency hospitality. A teenage girl needed a place to stay for about a week. She was pregnant and homeless and living on the streets. I found out about the need from my pastor, who found out from another pastor out of state, who found out from one of his congregation members.

For a long time we had been prepared to take someone into our home in an emergency. There were a couple of years when I was regularly corresponding with a gay friend whom I felt certain was going to end up on the street because of a volatile home situation. I always imagined the living room couch and extra bathroom stood ready for the day of his phone call. But this situation of a pregnant teenager was not at all what I had in mind.

To protect the privacy of everyone involved, I'm reluctant to say much more about it except that it turned out to be a tremendous blessing for two reasons. One, our young guest felt like a part of our family and became like a daughter to me. Two, I saw Christians come together to help her in ways that I didn't know was possible. Nobody judged, everyone lent a hand and gave a word of encouragement. The out-of-state congregation member kept in touch with us every day. Someone else was securing a job for the girl and a more permanent living arrangement somewhere across the country. Another person was buying the plane tickets to get her there.

I was on the phone with two doctors' offices and three crisis pregnancy centers, trying to secure an ultrasound appointment. Some of these places, I could tell, were Christian-run organizations. I didn't want the girl to be subjected to high-pressure tactics about what decision she should be making. She was a professing Christian, and I felt she had a better chance of making the right decision if she were given safety, space and the right encouragement. These pregnancy counselors understood that. There were no threats or condemning pronouncements, only helpful medical information, a chance to see the tiny beating heart on the ultrasound screen, and some free gifts like a baby blanket and tiny knit hat that she could take home with her. Nobody told her they were loving her in spite of her sin. Nobody told her that if she made the wrong decision she wasn't a Christian. Nobody told her that if she had an abortion she would be going to hell.

Apparently the Spirit of Jesus Christ still lives in the church. I was--I freely admit--shocked by the graciousness, the generosity, the compassion and the hospitality I saw in the random Christian strangers I came into contact with during those seven days. After years of being immersed in stories of the cruel, heartless, inhumane treatment of gay and lesbian people by their churches, I guess I'd been starving to see the gospel in action. For one week of my life I felt like I was a part of something great, the church of Jesus Christ working together as the hands and feet of a vast spiritual body to serve someone in need.

Now, in the aftermath, I am left wondering when can we transfer that generous, open-hearted love to the gay and lesbian people in our churches? I wonder when can I stop crying myself to sleep over another gay friend who tells me he would rather be dead than face a Christian father's hatred? I wonder when I won't have to go through weeks of torture because I hadn't heard back from a depressed gay friend who has been all but spit upon by his church, and can only imagine that he's lying alone in his apartment with a bullet through his brain?

Would it help Christians to imagine that a lesbian daughter who is contemplating a same-sex relationship is not much different than a pregnant teenage daughter who is contemplating an abortion? As a Christian parent, if your teenage daughter got pregnant, would you kick her out of the house? If you found out she had an abortion, would you tell her she is an abomination and is going to hell? The angry part of you might want to, but the sane part of you knows that she is a sinner, and desperate sinners commit desperate sins and this is why Jesus had to die for us. This is the situation where you most need to preach gospel hope, not drive a stake through her heart and walk away. And as tempting as it may be to point out the differences between the two situations ("My lesbian daughter defends her relationship! She wouldn't defend an abortion!"), isn't the real difference in our own heart attitude? Why is there such a difference? Why does there have to be?

A fence around the cross

The only way I know how to be a Christian without getting caught up in some of the disturbing trends of evangelicalism today is by not listening to Christian radio or watching Christian television, not becoming too avid a follower of any one Christian blog, and being careful about any book I read from an evangelical publisher. It's sad to say, but I find it's hard enough to hear the voice of God in the Scriptures and discern the leading of his Holy Spirit without also receiving a lot of noise and interference from these other outside sources.

Having been on that fast for so long, maybe I was unprepared to hear what I did when I tuned into Dr. Albert Mohler's spiel about the recent Rush Limbaugh controversy. After claiming that Limbaugh has made some points that many people can support and agree with, Mohler admonishes Christians to "think very carefully" about this matter, especially regarding the words we use. "Words represent character," he says, and "we are judged not only by our arguments, but by the very words and phrases . . . we deploy in making those arguments."

Seriously? Why should Christians have to "think very carefully" about Mr. Limbaugh's rant at all? So that we can pick nicer, more godly words by which to villainize Sandra Fluke? And after we've lovingly condemned her for her presumably immoral sexual lifestyle--which we really know nothing about--we can now feel much better about making the argument that people like her deserve not a dime of our hard-earned taxpayer money. Amen.

The marriage of Christian morality and right-wing politics has been all about defining the Us vs. Them dividing line. Politics already demands that you side with one social issue over against another, which puts you in some tension with your fellow citizens who are on the opposing side. Add religious conviction to it and you've boosted your political argument to the level of divine absolutes--why you should absolutely disagree with and even self-righteously condemn those who are on the liberal, God-hating opposing side.

Which means that the greatest damage done by this unholy union between religion and politics is to the gospel itself. The gospel calls all sinners to come to Jesus for forgiveness and hope. But in the minds of many Christians that unconsciously translates into, "Jesus calls all of us who have been raised in godly, Christian, Republican homes to realize that we, too, are sinners in need of forgiveness." In today's conservative political environment, few realize that it also means Jesus calls the college student who is sleeping around, the woman who has had ten abortions, and the gay rights activist who spews bitterness against the church, to come to him for salvation.

Well, now that I've put it that way, no Christian who reads what I just wrote would deny that this is true. Of course we want sinners to come to Jesus--even those sinners! But our appetite for politics reveals the truth of how thoroughly we have abandoned the gospel. Because if you tolerate a preacher using your church's pulpit to condemn Roe v. Wade, for example, how can you expect the woman sitting in the pew, who is weighed down with guilt about her recent abortion, to hear Christ calling her to a heavenly hope? That preacher can go on to talk about the forgiveness and grace of Christ until the sun goes down, but because he brought politics to the pulpit all that woman will ever hear is that everyone, except those who have had abortions, may be forgiven.

And don't even get me started on preachers who use the pulpit to rail against gay rights.

But back to abortion, it recently occurred to me that in all the years I've spent talking to the many, many Christian women who have opened up and confided their secrets to me, not one person has ever confided to me that they have had an abortion. No one. As much as I would like to believe that I've simply never known anyone who has had that in her past, I know it can't be true. Given our intense political vitriol against all things Planned Parenthood, why would a Christian woman in the church ever confide such a thing, or even more frightening, dare to believe that she could be forgiven for it? If that's the case, how much more thoroughly are we driving away non-Christian women who have had abortions from ever setting foot in our sanctuaries?

It makes you wonder about the many other groups we are driving away from Calvary's cross by our all-consuming investment in worldly things that will soon pass away. My guess is that these groups might possibly be defined as the modern-day equivalent to the lepers, tax-collectors, harlots, adulterers and Samaritans of Jesus' day. Whose lifestyles, we are reminded, shouldn't be supported by our tax dollars. And if we won't give them our money, then why should they believe we would give them our love?