I know this topic is something many of you have talked about a lot but I wanted to put some thoughts on paper, or screen, of the different questions that come to mind for me here. Some of these thoughts are newer to me than others.
What actually are people asking for when they want homosexual marriage to be legalized? I don't believe that homosexaulity should be illegal, but why should our government ackowledge or give its support to gay marriages when it doesn't believe it is right? There is a difference here I believe. I believe that the Church should say what they believe is right and wrong, but we don't need to make laws to make sure people live the right way. As Jay Bakker once said, "I would rather have people be drawn to Christ, not driven there!" It is the Holy Spirits job to get people to change their hearts; we can't force that. I was thinking that this means that the governmental marriage (which I believe is not the same as a Christian God Ordained Marriage) should not limit this from including gay marriages, but that was mean that the government would have to change what has been said in the past about marriage to something they might not see as right.
So again what are we people asking when they want marriage to include sam sex couples? Are people looking for the government to condone what they are doing? If that is the case I don't think that the government needs to do that. Are people just wanting more benifits from taxes from being classified as a family? Can't a civil union do this, which I am not sure if this is already allowed by law or not. Or maybe we need to see the legal marriage as a civil union of sorts because it is not the same as a Christian marriage.
Many argue that the government marriage was founded on Christian principles so we need to keep all unions with the marriage title sacred. If we are trying to claim this by protecting marriage from including sam sex unions, we are being really hypocritically selective here. Government allows marriages that don't acknowledge that marriage is a God ordained thing at all. We are allowing people to get married without much thought to what they are doing and without making vows to God in addition to just eachother. Why are we not objecting to these as well? And why not object to 50% plus marriages breaking their vows in divorce? This doesn't make sense that we want to protect this legal marriage from including same sex couples if we are not objecting to all these other corruptions of marriage. They are all just as corrupt.
It does make sense that we as a Church do not include homosexual marriages in what we choose to preform or participate in. We also as the Church need to be very careful that we are not forgetting that the greatest commands are to love God and love others like Chirst loved us. God does love people that are homosexual and we need to do so as well. I beleive that this means welcoming them into our families and caring for them as image bearers of God, because that is what Christ did. We can still have sinners in the Church and still be the Church. Wait, that is a pretty obviouse statement, because we all know that we are sinners who are not beyond the need of God's grace. We can't ellivate one set of sins above another and we still need to try to live the way God instructs us to live in His Word and help others to do so as well in love.
This also means that we cant just allow are brothers and sisters in Christ to go down the wrong road without putting ourselves in the way. We can't give our friends support for the sins that they are commiting and we can't condone our friends actions or lifestyles if it is not what is morally right in God's eyes. My pastor brought up a good example of what he said to one of his really good friends that told him that he was gay. He told him that he can't condone or approve of what he is doing because he knows it is wrong. In the same way my pastor wouldn't expect to get his friends approval if he were having affairs with other women if he said that this is just the lifestyle that I have choosen. And most people would agree with that.
So I ask that we consider what we are trying to protect and I ask that we really examine daily the areas in our own life that we are being hypocritical. We can't just keep pushing people away from the Church because they don't have everything together, the Church is for the broken people, It is a hospital! This is what Jesus told us and so we need to start helping people and healing ourselves.
