Is there a higher standard?

May 11, 2009 by Pastor Dan.

I talked about Christian Baptism recently—and I’m yet undecided whether we still need to divide ourselves on whether we baptize infants or only “believers”– after the age of accountability or decision. Plenty of teens make a decision for Jesus just before their gonads begin to fire, and suddenly the Christian life seems so much less interesting than everything else. I don’t think that is the dividing issue among Christians.

What bothers me (and I will come back to Baptism either here or on the Gay Catechism site), is that Baptism, with its rich symbolism (cleansing, freedom, repentance, turning, light, fire and Spirit, death and life) raises questions about getting in to the Realm of God. Baptism is the gate to the Christian life.

If Baptism is an “entrance exam”, and all Christians pass through it at some point, it is not a filter to keep out Lesbian/gay, bisexual and transgender applicants, largely because we are not always aware of our psycho-sexual selves when we are teenagers or before. (It would be an interesting study of Baptist denominations if they are having more trouble over making the decision to be baptized because teens and pre-teens are now more aware of homosexuality than they were a generation ago.)

But it’s obvious that many Christian groups would like to keep LGBT people out, like an insurance company wanting to know if we have a pre-existing condition so they can deny coverage.

Conservative Christians have an answer for everything, so they tell us that we are backsliding, that we have fallen from grace, that we can lose or have lost our salvation, … whatever, as if there is another, higher standard —a sexual standard— or a qualifying exam that LGBT people categorically fail even if we or our parents made a baptismal decision for Christ. “You can’t be gay and be Christian!!” they insist. But we are gay/lesbian/transgender/bisexual and we are Christian. Because the only qualification anyone can have to “be a Christian” is to put our faith and trust in Jesus Christ as our Savior. Everybody who believes in Jesus and is baptized will be saved (Mark 16:16; Acts 16:31).

(Of course, narrow/strict Christians like to point also to Matthew 3:7–8: ” But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance.”

But “bearing fruit” is not an entrance requirement. Living the Christian life is the result of God’s grace and the believer’s faith through the help of the Holy Spirit. I can’t help wondering if the reason this kind of harsh attitude is used on LGBT people is grounded in the idea that we literally don’t bear fruit (ignoring the pun)– we don’t have kids.

If propagating the Christian faith through biology is “bearing fruit” for the kingdom of God, bringing up one’s own kids in the Christian faith is “low-hanging fruit,” if you ask me. It’s the easy way out to assume that raising a family is a measure of merit.)

But why do some Christians set up another standard, beyond simple faith, to filter out others? Because some folks don’t like Everybody and they can’t stand the idea that Everybody who believes in Jesus could possibly be acceptable to God. If they can set a higher standard than God sets, or than Jesus sets, and make people believe there is such a standard, they can keep out the undesirables, the riff-raff, the minorities (and in our times, that means the sexual minorities).

The Gospel’s standards are not impossibly high. Most important, they are not based on achievement or merit but on faith — especially the faith of those who would have no other merit.

And the shoddy thing, which fundagelicals and ex-gay ministry people seem to practice, is to create a secondary standard, an entrance exam designed for them to pass that others cannot. Let me explain:

Some modern scholars have suggested that today’s homosexual is the Bible’s eunuch, and have drawn connections with Matthew19:12 and sexual orientation. In the Law of Moses, the eunuch is categorically excluded from Israel (Deuteronomy 23:1); i.e., “You can’t be a eunuch and be an Israelite!!” By definition a eunuch cannot sire children, cannot “bear fruit.” Yet Isaiah 56:3–5 argues against the Law of Moses: “For thus says the LORD: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.” (Again, ignoring Isaiah’s pun.)

So it is convenient to insist that to really be a Christian you also have to do something which is impossible, that “precludes” a whole category of people from the Christian Club and keeps it pure.

If heterosexuality were really the most important sign of righteousness which God demands of all people, as the Right insists, they are creating a standard which demands virtually nothing from those to whom heterosexuality comes naturally, and categorically lock out sexual minorities. (Sounds a lot like Matthew 23:4 and 13, “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. . . . woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them.”)

In effect, they ignore the demand of all disciples to practice self-denial but expect complete self-negation from us. It would be bad enough if the Right pushed these views as mere opinions, but they attempt to give them the authority of God. When I think of all the people who have suffered spiritually, deeply, because of such stuff, it is beyond mere hypocrisy. It is evil.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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