The Substance of Softness

One terribly sad day in the mid-60’s, when I was about ten, in a family just one block over from ours, a man left his wife and three sons for another man. My parents had been close to this family so it was particularly devastating for them. Remember, this was the mid-‘60’s and it was small town West Texas. Divorce, for any reason, was a huge scandal. Back then, two people who were miserably married just tended to stick it out no matter who it destroyed for them to stay together hating each other. For a man to come out of the closet as gay and leave his wife was the unspeakable scandal and unpardonable sin all wrapped up as one.

I’ve tried the best I can to figure out why it was that, at such a tender age, I didn’t grow up hating gays because of that. Those three abandoned boys were some of my best friends. My parents and others tried to help soften the social blow for them by giving the family a place to land. Soon, though, because of the scandal and to make a living, their mom had to move what was left of the family out of town to a large city where she could start over. In all of that, though, I have no memory of my parents saying anything hateful or vengeful of that man. I knew they were heartbroken, but they didn’t use that as an excuse to belittle him in my eyes. If anything, I remember them being sad that a family they dearly loved had been irrevocably broken.

Some years later, one of my closest friends, the valedictorian of our senior class, confessed to me and another friend that he was gay. It was in the same small town, in 1972. I remember the night we sat in Karl’s Volkswagen van just outside my driveway and heard Jerry’s midnight confession. I didn’t understand homosexuality. I did know Jerry and his family like they were kin, which, because of church, they were. I had heard him pray and share Christ with other people. I was confused, for certain. But, I never remember thinking less of him because he was gay. The only solid example of how to respond to him was the one my parents had already given. Jerry has since devoted his life as a research physician to treating and finding a cure for AIDS. Only God knows which of us has done more good for humanity with the gifts we were given.

I’ve gotten in trouble with church people before not because, as their pastor, I failed to say more about our responsibility to orphans and widows, but because I refused to hammer gays about how they were going to hell for their sexual orientation. It has troubled me deeply that those, in the church, who oppose homosexuality tend to do so while quoting a very selected couple of scriptures and do so with a venomous anger, something like you’d see in a frightened wild animal trapped in a corner. Aside from the fact that there are far more orphans and widows than there are gays, there are three reasons why I just can’t slam that judicial hammer down on the pulpit.

My parents’ response to a hurting family was one reason. Long before I knew the theological meaning of grace, my parents modeled it for me, teaching me how to live it before I could define it. Both of my parents had been raised in one of the most conservative and racist regions of the world. Yet, something turned them toward grace instead of exclusivity. Whatever that was (like Jesus?) seems to have rubbed off on me. The older I get, the less I’m interested in excluding anyone from church or my life because they aren’t oriented to this world the same way I am. Frankly, my sense of orientation about lots of things in my own faith struggle gets so wobbly at times it scares the dark side of eternity out of me.

It’s always easier to judge homosexuality when it’s just an issue, like divorce or whatever. When “gay” is someone you know and love, a person with a name and eyes and a beating heart, it transforms “gay” from an issue into a human being, one for whom Christ also died. Some of my dearest friends are gay. Strange how the more friends of any kind you have the less possible it becomes to judge anyone for anything. Is judgmentalism a function of loneliness, something we can only do in isolation? Is community a cure for judgment?

For another thing, I don’t get to judge who goes to heaven. As someone recently said of another issue, whether Jews will go to heaven or hell, “I’m not the gatekeeper.” I only have the privilege of standing at heaven’s gate and inviting others to join me as I hope to enter myself, not judging how people got to that gate or who God allows to enter.

I got an email from a gay man this past week, a friend whose name and story I know well. He is hurting badly because of the way a church slammed the hammer down on him. I reassured him that people behave differently in groups, even at church, than they ever do as individuals. (See Scott Peck, “People of the Lie,” read the Bible or, attend church regularly). Sadly, I have no answers for his dilemma. I have no church where he lives to recommend to him as a place to worship, openly, as he is.

I share in his sufferings only because I, too, have felt the church’s judgment of what some call my “softness” toward sinners. Some of the meanest people in the world pretend to worship in pews on Sunday. For the most part, they’re only mean in packs, like wolves wearing their Sunday morning wool’s best.

One on one, by and large, mean church people have these things in common. They almost exclusively define sin as something outside of themselves, “issues” with which they’ve never personally struggled. With rarest exception, they are wimps; their knees get wobbly under the weight of trying to be mean face-to-face. Like the playground bully, they only act the way they do when they have an audience. In my dictionary, “mean” is defined as “yet unchanged by a personal encounter with grace in Christ.”

It is also true that the finest people I’ve ever known are people I met in church. It is one of the most mysterious paradoxes of my faith experience that those who are meanest sit right next to others in the church who have modeled grace beyond belief for me.

If I’m soft, so be it. The only people who have helped me find my way into and through the Kingdom of God are those who showed me mercy and grace, not judgment. Mercy and grace are much harsher taskmasters than judgment could ever hope to be. It’s much harder to live with forgiveness, both giving and receiving it, than to experience the sad relief that hammering or being hammered tends to offer. It seems to me that those for whom mercy and grace are exclusively defined as the substance of softness just haven’t yet personally experienced the high premium Mercy and Grace have paid in order for God to give us a hopeful place to land in our suffering instead of a place that would have destroyed us for sure.