This week I found out I’m in a book I would have fought to be in had I known it was being written. The book is Jeff Chu’s Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian’s Pilgrimage In Search of God in America. It is a collection of stories about the diversity of Christian responses to homosexuality in the US. The stories range from the Episcopal Church’s first lesbian bishop Mary Glasspool to Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church. Chu writes so as to humanize each perspective, making it probably the most Christian book on homosexuality around. On page 123 he writes:
When he was in college, he became close with another Christian guy who was wrestling with these issues of theology and sexuality. “We really enjoyed hanging out with each other. It felt good to be desired,” he says. “But I just couldn’t reconcile it with what I believed, and I told him I wasn’t ready to decide anything.” He looks a little wistful, a little sad.“We met sophomore year. He’s an Episcopalian. It still is hard for me. Now that he has decided it’s okay, we fundamentally disagree on something that’s so core to our beings.”
I’m the Episcopalian and honestly my part is nothing more than a cameo in someone else’s story. But it’s a cameo that’s worth the retelling for both of us all these years later.
He’s theologically conservative, Calvinist, semi-closeted, celibate, and attends one of the most high profile conservative evangelical churches in America, Mars Hill Church pastored by professional potty mouth Mark Driscoll.
We went together to the reading, this friend and I. We’ve only seen each other a handful of times since his sophomore year 11 years ago. As I sat beside him in that small dark parish hall full of older mainline liberal Christians though, I couldn’t help but listen to the stories of the Phelps family, of a gay pastor committedly and openly living with his well-knowing wife, of a closeted cake-decorator trying to make a life in small town America, with a little more compassion, a little more openness. I found myself held accountable by his very presence.
There are unfortunately many people who I write off for their conservative views and beliefs. I’ve done that in a way that our culture condones and even supports, but I’ve done it to the lessening of my own soul. The truth is, my heart breaks a little every time I see this friend. Not out of pity: he wouldn’t want mine nor does he need it. It breaks for the brokenness of our relationship.
Perhaps this is the reason I take so such interest in an ecumenism that spans the theological spectrum. It breaks my heart that my beliefs have kept me from this man that I love, from many people that I love. And how ironic when these beliefs on both our parts are rooted in a person that came to earth to tear down walls, to bring in our outcast, to gather in the lost, and yet because of them we cannot even find each other.
I’m thankful for Jeff Chu’s book, thankful for spaces where we can be in relationship with those we’ve othered and tell stories. I’m thankful for friends who are so different they make me reconsider how I tell my own story. I’m thankful for beliefs that call me to love more broadly than I dream possible and pursue love in places I am disinclined to look.
