What will happen if I love?

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." - G.K. Chesterton

There must be a reason Jesus told us that loving our neighbor is the greatest commandment next to loving God. He not only commanded us to love but he went out and did it himself without regard for his own reputation, safety, popularity. . . and ultimately his life. The rabbi who defended adulteresses and prostitutes. The holy man who touched lepers and other unclean types. The king who was abandoned to torture, mockery and a humiliating public death.

We speak of his suffering in reverent tones because that's how he atoned for our sins. That's the theological side of the story. But the human side of the story is that his sufferings came about as a direct result of loving all those despised, unwanted people. The hatred, the persecution and the outrage that led to his crucifixion came about because he healed a withered man's hand on the Sabbath and stood up for a prostitute who dumped a fortune in perfume on his feet and other such scandals. So when Jesus commands us to love as he loved--and also commands us to suffer as he suffered--he is speaking of two sides of the same coin. You cannot love the way he loved and not suffer the kinds of consequences he did.

Many Christians will fight you tooth and nail if you dare to bring up loving gay and lesbian people. The way they talk, you'd almost think there was a verse in the New Testament where Jesus answered and said to his disciples, "Know that you should love one another, as long as the conditions are right. Amen." That must be it, because all I ever hear is: I know we should love people, but I oppose the gay agenda. I know we should love people, but I'm not going to approve of their sin. I know we should love people, but they're indoctrinating my child at school. I know we should love people, but I'm not going to be manipulated by a bunch of sob stories.

What I'm actually hearing is this: Love sounds like a great idea, but I'm afraid if I love I something bad will happen. Yes, something bad will happen, but not what you think. Loving gay people probably won't lead you to approve of sexual sin, but it will most likely get you accused by fellow Christians of approving of it. It won't mean you'll support schools indoctrinating your children about homosexuality, but you will have to face the more real worry that the church is indoctrinating them to despise gay people. And you will definitely listen to people's sob stories, but instead of feeling manipulated you will never stop aching over the needless pain and injustice so many gays and lesbians suffer on a daily basis.

Simply put, loving gays and lesbians will mean many of your friends will forsake you, you will never be a part of the "in" crowd at church, your reputation will be tarnished, and you will carry the sorrows of others around in your heart until you feel like you're going to break. Downside: you will suffer. Upside: you will know the blessing of following in the path of a certain Someone who walked in those sufferings before you.

Discomfort level

I just heard recently that a gay Christian friend of mine is going to be leaving his conservative church. Even though he is not in a gay relationship and never has been, he is being shunned by a core group of people in the congregation. The only excuse they have given for the way they treat him is, "We're not at a place where we feel comfortable interacting with gay people."

Sure, I get it. That's my favorite Bible verse too. The one that says, "They will know that we are Christians by the way we love only those brothers and sisters with whom we have come to a place where we feel comfortable interacting."

Which also brings to mind some of my favorite passages out of the Gospels where Jesus goes around touching, healing, befriending and sharing meals only with the people with whom he had gotten to a place where he felt comfortable interacting. Because if you want to change the world, that's the winning formula right there.

Speaking of changing the world, I can't recall any time in church history where the gospel caught fire and spread because Christians were interacting only with those respectable people with whom they felt comfortable. Saint Patrick, who is credited with bringing Christianity to Ireland, largely ministered to slave girls who suffered being raped regularly by their masters. John Wycliffe was the first to translate the Bible in English for the benefit of lay people, whom the church of his day regarded as "swine." John and Charles Wesley were condemned by the clergy of their day for preaching the gospel in open fields to the uneducated masses.

If there's any spiritual lesson to be learned from the past, it is run, don't walk, from any temptation to center your Christian life around being comfortable, respectable and insulated. No great spiritual advancement has ever happened in the kingdom of God because Christians were afraid to love the really tough-to-love people.

Which is why there's hope for my gay Christian friends, because I see so many of them struggling to love their straight brothers and sisters in Christ in spite of our perverse ignorance and obnoxious self-righteousness. From a certain perspective we are the really tough-to-love people, not them. We need to understand the true nature of our spiritual situation. If we don't get our act together and learn how to love, the kingdom will surely march forward without us. And gay Christians will be leading the way.

Am I being sentimental or hyperbolic when I say that? Let me put it this way. If you want to know how God is working to advance his kingdom, observe what he is doing among the people on the margins. The poor, the homeless, the persecuted, the forsaken, the ill, the feeble, and the despised. God calls his people from within those situations and uses suffering to train them in love, forgiveness, patience and meekness. They may never get to be senior pastor at the newest megachurch everyone is flocking to. They may never even be allowed to lead a Bible study. They may struggle just to be accepted in their churches. But they are the ones whom Christ will lift up, they are the ones he will strengthen, and they are the ones he will reveal himself to. If you despise them, you do so at your own spiritual peril.

Giving your best anyway

"People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.
If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway.
If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway.
The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway.

For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."

— Mother Teresa


I wish more people would talk about death openly so that I wouldn't feel like the only freak who has no problem bringing up the apparently morbid subject. I think about my death a lot because 1) it's one of the few things in life that I can be absolutely certain I will have to face; 2) it helps me to clarify what my priorities should be and whether, today, I am living according to those priorities.

This past March marked my 25th year of knowing Jesus Christ and this coming August I will turn 43. Even if I live to an optimistic 86 years old, I am already halfway done with my life. And as I look forward to the next half of my life, possibly another 43 years, or possibly less, I figure I'd better spend it focusing on the right things and learning from some of the wrong things I've pursued in the past. After a lot of misguided idealism, running down blind alleys, crashing and burning, and meditating on the scars left from hard knocks, I've come to the brilliant conclusion that life--in particular my life as a Christian--is about loving God and loving people.

Any five-year-old Sunday School child could have told me that. What's both profound and mysterious is why on earth it eludes me so easily, and eludes most Christians I know. It sounds deceptively simple. Just love. Love will keep us together. All you need is love. At church even our praise songs about love fill you with such a wonderful, sentimental feeling you start thinking that love must be like floating blissfully along on a soft cloud, eating chocolates. You forget that the last time you tried to truly deny yourself in order to love someone who didn't return the favor, the effort took so much out of you you wanted to take the rest of the year off from humanity. If you haven't experienced what's it's like to be hurt, disillusioned, embittered, humiliated or ill-used, you probably haven't stepped out far enough in faith to obey Jesus' command to love. And unless you are able to rise from your wounds and know that Christ sacrificed so much more because of his love for you, you won't make it very far as his disciple.

Despite of all our glib talk about love, deep down we are aware of these hard truths, so we try to make following Jesus about everything but putting his love into practice. I've been down the road of trying to make the Christian life into a cause, a self-improvement program, a path to the American dream, an area of academic study, and an occupation. Anything but about loving people and loving the God who asks me to love people, because every day I wake up and encounter new reasons not to love people.

I don't know a great deal about Mother Teresa, but from her insightful words above I can tell that she understood the secret of loving others. You have to believe that giving the best of yourself to other people isn't the equivalent of flushing your life down the toilet. Because ultimately you are offering your life to God, believing that none of it is in vain, and that he is the rewarder of those who seek him.

Rethinking Christian love

People complain that Christians do a poor job of loving their neighbors, that for a bunch of self-professed followers of Jesus we rarely come off as very Jesus-like. But from an insider's perspective that's not such a big surprise considering all the hurdles you have to clear as a Christian just to obey what Jesus referred to as the second greatest commandment. The stumbling blocks come from the teaching you get at the average evangelical church. Honestly, the advice that I've come away with over the years on how to love people is probably the exact opposite of what Jesus actually meant and practiced. And after you've invested huge chunks time and energy believing this misguided advice, the process of figuring out how to deprogram from all the bad habits and how to adopt a more common sense approach while fighting the guilt that past sermons have instilled in you can take the rest of your living life.

You're told that your main approach in loving people should be confronting them with the gospel message, and you must put that front and center of every personal contact you have because, after all, if you don't care about someone's eternal destiny how can you say you care about them at all? How loving would it be if you just sat in the safety of your lifeboat and watched someone drown, huh? And so you file out of church service with the crowd, feeling determined to love the world by sounding an alarm. Your love takes on a shrill tone.

But after awhile you realize that your emergency broadcast is being ignored, which is when you take the next step of looking for ways to convince people that the crisis really does exist. They don't know they're drowning, so you gotta convince them. Now your love becomes argumentative and sales-pitchy. It's like talking to the Amway guy. "Hey, let me enlighten you. Let me show you what Jesus can offer. Don't run away, you haven't heard the whole story. I promise, it gets better!" Your concern for people's souls morphs easily into a concern for the sins in people's lives. Pointing out sin is a way of pointing out their need of salvation. It's all part of the argument: "See, I told you you were a sinner and this proves it." It gets to where you can hardly restrain yourself from delighting that you have an example of solid sin in this person's life that you can use to press home your very important point of how much they need Jesus.

Strangely, in pursuing a certain definition of "love," one coldly logical step leads to the next and pretty you never notice just how far you've strayed from the Bible's teaching on how to relate to others: "Do not judge, lest you be judged." "Love is patient and kind, . . . it is not rude." "However you want to be treated, so treat others." "As far as it is possible, be at peace with all men." Where did you go wrong? At which fork in the road did you take the spiraling path downward until you became--in the name of love--the preachy, self-righteous person that no one in the lunchroom wants to sit with?

The problem is you've been blind. The example of Jesus has been right there in front of you the whole time. And even though Jesus ought to know how to lead people to salvation, because he is salvation after all, for whatever reason you've chosen to listen to voices which you have judged to be wiser than his. "It's okay to love people, as long as you let them know where you stand . . . as long as you don't compromise on 'the truth' . . . as long as you don't give the impression you approve of their sin." As long as, as long as, as long as. Did Jesus cripple his love for others with so much fearfulness and petty concern for himself? Love was once a living, breathing thing, but now that we have surrounded it like a dangerous animal and poked and prodded it to death with our long sticks, it's become pale and limp, drained of all its blood. Love cannot be love when it is self-protective, self-serving, and pursuing an agenda for someone else's life.

Love always puts the other person first, their feelings, their comfort, their needs. Love meets them where they're at, understands things from their perspective, relates to their weaknesses, sits quietly with them in their sorrows, listens when spoken to, helps when asked, and sees the real human being beneath the bluster and folly. To do this you have to be unselfish, and tough. There is nothing wimpy or mushy or compromising about it. Jesus embodied this kind of love without people mistaking his compassion for compromise. He didn't become a "liberal" who thought sin didn't matter anymore. Quite the opposite, people became vulnerable before him. They felt their sinfulness in his presence. It is not judgment but kindness that leads people to repentance.

Love is supreme because it is the closest people come to having a direct encounter with God. When you love people the way they should be loved, they feel God's touch upon their souls. That does not happen by arguing or condemning. People don't come to know God by assenting to your prescribed list of theological tenets. They come to know him through your love. Brace every nerve in your body to have patience with their faults. Stretch every creative brain cell to imagine life from their perspective, to have sympathy and understanding. Let down the self-protective guard. Don't have all the answers. Get stepped on. Find yourself frequently ill-used. And be a blessing in someone else's life.

Competing agendas

Here's a conversation I've had many times over. A fellow straight Christian who takes a conservative position on same-sex relationships wants to know whether celibacy is "the answer" for gay Christians. I respond that it might be a solution for some people who think they can handle it. But there's always the problem of what to do about the people who don't think they can handle it. I bring up depression. I point out how the depression caused by the strain of trying to avoid this one sin can lead to worse problems. It might lead to acting out, for instance. It might lead to abandoning faith. It might even lead to contemplating suicide.

And the fellow Christian I'm talking to says, "Uh-huh . . . uh-huh . . . okay, but--"

Okay, but?

At this point I'm wondering, "What's so 'okay but' about suicide?" We're talking suicide. SOO-IH-SIDE. Why do alarm bells not go off in this person's head when they hear that word?

But now I've come to realize something. To me this conversation is about real people, friends I care about. It's about hearing someone on the other end of the phone going off about how they feel like God hates them and they can't do this and there are no answers and nowhere to turn and what hope can I give them that would make their life worth living, huh??

But to this straight Christian I'm talking to, this conversation is largely a theological exercise. Nothing real is at stake. It's about coming to the right answer while staying within the bounds of orthodoxy.

In other words, when one person is talking about love and the other is talking about protecting certain doctrines, how can the two sides be having the same conversation?

I see this problem on a larger scale too. We evangelicals tend to get starry eyed when it comes to rubbing shoulders with our favorite evangelical celebs. Someone tells of shaking the hand of Pastor of a Certain Megachurch, or studying under Professor at a Respected Theological Seminary or having their Facebook friend request accepted by Author of a Popular Christian Book. But when it comes to, say, a mother seeking out advice for her gay son or daughter, can she entrust her loved one into the hands of these "experts"? Is that megachurch pastor going to advise her out of love for her gay son, or is he going to be thinking about what the board of elders would say if they found out "a homosexual" was in their midst? Is that popular author going to love her gay daughter as much as she does, or will he be thinking about protecting the book deal he's trying to close with IVP?

It's a problem, isn't it?

When people ask me what respected Christian leaders or theologians I've consulted to guide me on my views, I have to admit that I haven't done that much consulting. I have no idea what other people's agendas are. Can these strangers love my friends the way I do? Can they feel the weight of the responsibility of it? Or are they just concerned about what a publisher or a committee or the powers-that-be want them to say?

I think the responsibility of love falls on the individual alone. You can't fully entrust it to others. The path love carves out is too uncertain, with too many twists and turns to be able to write it up in a brochure and submit to a board for approval. It's not something you vote on, it's a journey you take alone. I don't scoff at love like I used to, as something that's liberal and mushy and unprincipled. Loving others the way Jesus commanded is by far the most frightening thing I've ever had to do.