![]() ![]() Though I’m sure I’m about to hear how calling that out is victimizing this “true” Christian (as opposed to all of us fake ones), even though all any of us are going on is the manmade Scriptural interpretations we all are relying upon. Nothing like a little hostility steaming out of the love from someone who calls him/herself “a true Christian”. ![]() I’ll remember that Jesus turned water into wine. And if it happens that in the course of either of my friends’ weddings or receptions I find myself wondering if I’m doing the morally correct thing, I’ll be sure to remember the first miracle of Jesus’ recorded in the Bible. So you bet I’ll attend my gay friends’ weddings, in the exact same spirit my gay friends once attended my wedding. How in the world am I supposed to argue with that? Talk about having God eliminate your options. While it’s certainly true that in many of his parables it’s unclear what exactly Jesus was saying or meant, he didn’t even almost waffle about his “Love your neighbor as yourself.” In conjunction with “Love the Lord your God with ,” he very explicitly declared that to be the greatest commandment, the one upon which hangs “all the law and the prophets.” I think I better go to the weddings of my gay friends. And the only people who rile him are those who, in his own name (what with him being God and all), set themselves up as sanctimonious judges of others. (Not that there’s anything wrong with being namby-pamby! I have an uncle who’s namby-pamby!) But it’s hard to believe that it came from the accounts of Jesus that we have in the Gospels. ![]() I’m not sure how exactly we came to so often consider Jesus the soft and dreamy, namby-pamby type. Then you’ve got yourself a problem no one in this world wants. ![]() And you don’t have to spend a lot of time in the New Testament before you understand that the only kind of people who seem to ever truly anger Jesus are those who put religious dogma above what he most clearly stood for, which was God’s love.Īround Jesus you can whine, lie, shift your loyalties, be late, be greedy, be too ambitious, be stupid, be a coward, be a hypochondriac, constantly complain, fall asleep at every wrong moment-you can do nothing right, and it won’t in the slightest way seem to offend him.īut you put dogma ahead of love? You transmogrify God’s law into a justification for denying God’s love? One thing that often gets lost in our ideas about Jesus is the degree to which he is exactly the wrong person to piss off. Throughout the New Testament, the only kind of people with whom Jesus consistently takes frightful exception are the very “teachers of the law and Pharisees” whom we see him dressing down in the passages above. Jesus sure did love him some everyday people. Which I think is kind of the whole point. If you’ve spent any time at all reading the New Testament, you know that Jesus’ disciples weren’t exactly Johnnies-on-the-spot. Of course, it’s entirely possible that Jesus did say many crucially informative things about homosexuality, but that when he did no one around him happened to have handy an ostrich feather, sappy stick, or whatever it was they used for pens back then. When I next went looking for anywhere in the Bible where Jesus says anything-and I mean anything-about homosexuality, I found virtually nothing. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |