Looking at Tony de Carlo's painting of Saints Serge and Bacchus and remembering the recent decisions by the church of my childhood, the Methodist Church, I think that there are few people more truly isolated in the world these days than gay Christians. We are shunned by church institutions and most other Christians as heretics, or even as demons. We are perhaps more justly reviled by other LGBTQs as deluded fools at best and traitors to a mortal enemy at worst. And indeed the most murderous hatred of our kind clothes itself in purple piety.
And yet we persist and we persevere.
We cannot let go of a God who loved us enough to live and die as one of us, a God we can call "friend" and even "lover." Few other Christians lived out the Way of the Cross more literally -- and all the way to its fatal end -- than we have. We've died on thousands of Calvaries from executioner's fires to mob lynchings to murders in darkened streets and violated homes, to lazarettos filled with isolated plague victims. We know fully what it is like to be "despised and rejected of men, a Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief." We know in our beings and experience that the Crucified stands as a living rebuke to all ambitions to power, to all designs to conquer and dominate other people (especially Christian ambitions). We know more than most that "God has chosen what the world counts folly, and to shame the strong, God has chosen what the world counts weakness. He has chosen things low and contemptible, mere nothings, to overthrow the existing order. And so there is no place for human pride in the presence of God. You are in Christ Jesus by God's own act, for God has made him our wisdom; he is our righteousness; in him we are consecrated and set free."
Our enemies tell us we are freaks, perversions of nature, though we and scientists know that nature is full of same-sexuality and that we are as natural as the rainbow. After creating the world, God blessed it and called it good, and we claim that blessing since we are part of that world and created in God's image.
We must stand up and fight for love in a way that no one else has to do. We and our loves will always be illegitimate in domineering eyes that hate us. Those who claim to love us in God's name try to destroy us or torture us into conformity to religious law that always tries to limit and define love. But it is love that always tests law for its justice. Our love that is hard won is deathless and indestructible guaranteed by Truth that is not a written text, but a Living Person, the Word made Flesh. Our Friend and Brother was born with a price on his head, lived most of his life in poverty in a remote province of a global empire, was despised and rejected as we are, condemned by religious authorities and civil powers as we are, and executed like a common criminal. He will welcome us into His risen life as among his most faithful and determined servants.
Where I was confirmed into the Methodist Church in 1972, University Park Methodist in Dallas, Texas.
My Methodist confirmation class in 1972. I am on the left in front right next to Dr. Trice, the head pastor at University Park Methodist. I actually enjoyed confirmation class. It was the first time in my life where adults were actually interested in what I thought about anything.
