• The first prominent congregation in the Southern Baptist denomination has decided, following the pastor’s lead, to affirm same-sex relationships. What is important and interesting about this particular trend in conservative Evangelical churches is that it requires a thorough reinterpretation of several clear biblical passages, and overturns two millennia of virtually uncontested teaching. Fascinating. What I find compelling is not so much the sin of homosexuality, but that this one sin is driving a significant re-reading of Scripture in my lifetime (at least here in the global west).
• I noticed in this particular case that the pastor’s son was gay, and that raises an issue Scripture deals with extensively, namely the incredible power of relationships over our hearts. If the love of Christ does not compel us, the love of someone else almost certainly will. Think of the description of Solomon’s apostasy in his old age: “King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women…. They were from nations about which the Lord had told the Israelites, ‘You must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods.’ Nevertheless, Solomon held fast to them in love”(1 Ki 11). God knew it was inevitable that his worship would follow his heart.
• Jesus is something like the opposite, defining even his family as those who love God: “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it”(Luke 8:21). Because his heart belongs to the Father, the most powerful relationships in his life are structured by his one ultimate love. This is what he is saying when he declares at Matt 10:34, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth…. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law…. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”
• Don’t think I’m not sympathetic with a man who is moved by his son’s circumstance. Far from it. I’ve been overpowered by my love for my son since, literally, the moment he was born. The Bible never counsels us to diminish our love for our children. It’s just that our love for God ought to be stronger. If it isn’t, we will go the way of Solomon and this SBC pastor. And the fact is, to love a son or wife or daughter more than God, is actually a failure to love them. God is the inventor, owner and sustainer of love. God IS love. To not love him above all others is to lose the essence of what love is. Then what do we offer them?