I wrote the post below a few years ago, but I am compelled to share it now. As we in the UMC approach decisions that may well define our future, the broad theme that prompted me to write the post keeps confronting me. A speech at the 2021 Texas Annual Conference concretely illustrates that theme. A resolution was offered to suspend church trials related to human sexuality in light of the hope that our upcoming General Conference will end the stalemate at which the UMC has found itself for nearly 50 years. A delegate then argued against the resolution, saying that committing to not enforce our current policies against same sex marriage or ordination of openly gay pastors would be comparable to the Roman Catholic church having decided to not investigate and root out child abuse. The speech concluded with the sentiment that “Parents and grandparents do not feel safe leaving their children at a church that the people in charge allow [homosexual] tendencies.” 

Again, it was not anything unique to this particular speech that stood out so much as the broad theme its specifics represent. That theme is the harm wrought in the way the UMC has tried to be officially welcoming to LGBTQ persons while also harboring significant fear, ignorance, and dramatic misunderstandings of gay and lesbian people. I don’t know or care if the conflation of consensual adult sexuality with child abuse was intentional or careless. What I care about is the harm that we cause by being a place that is theoretically welcoming to gay and lesbian persons except for a handful of prohibitions (primarily marriage and ordination), while at the same time failing to challenge such conflation, with leaders even relying on subsequent fear, ignorance, and dramatic misunderstandings to attain the votes necessary to ensure our denominational position never changes.

That very type of conflation is increasingly common within and beyond the church – notice how often claims of “grooming” are included as reasons to support prohibiting LGBTQ affirming resources or conversation in schools. In the last few years, I’ve also heard it said by church leaders who publicly desire to welcome gay people into their churches “that if we let gay people get married, we’ll have to let people marry goats as well,” “that the gay agenda is all about trying to destroy the church,” “that if we change anything we’d have to let bisexuals marry as many people as they want,” and a variety of suggestions about the danger posed to children by the LGBTQ community. Claiming to be welcoming while ignoring (at best) and incentivizing (in practice) such wild misconceptions is itself a source of harm. 

There are obviously all sorts of ways people have argued for and against the biblical, theological, and traditional foundations of changing the UMC stance and policies or staying the same. I don’t here mean to comment one way or another on any of those. What I attempted to do below was take for granted the idea that “sinfulness” is a meaningful and specific category in United Methodist thought and that the “incompatibility” language of the Book of Discipline and its related policies name something that rightly falls into the “sinful” category. My point is that we are not thereby absolved from coming to terms with the actual, significant, ongoing harm caused to LGBTQ persons by the ways we live out our convictions about what sin is and what to do about it. 

To welcome someone into our church homes is to claim responsibility for our effect on that person, regardless of our intent. To hear the stories of same gender loving persons is to be confronted by the immense wake of direct and indirect harm that has been wrought in the name of purported accountability, correction, or faithfulness. What I’ve posted is my attempt to name and illustrate the effect of the status quo. It is framed in a provocative way, not because I intended to sensationalize something benign. It is so because I cannot think of a more adequate analogy to help me (and hopefully others) acknowledge the pain being expressed by real people. It is not yet clear exactly what the future will hold for United Methodism, but it is clear change is coming. Wherever I wind up, it won’t be acceptable to preserve the harmful status quo by valuing the right to speak our minds over the call to embody the radical hospitality of Jesus. My goal in acknowledging the harm we have caused is, before anything else, to do no further harm.

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I can still remember reading bits and pieces of Dave Pelzer’s memoir A Child Called It. I have no idea when or why I initially read the book but I recently rediscovered some of the stories it contains. Dave was abused as a child. He suffered everything from simply being blamed for his brothers’ misdeeds to having his arm held over an open flame on the stove. Dave was starved and beaten countless times by an alcoholic, abusive mother and forced to live in the basement. Dave’s brothers, on the other hand, were treated well and even participated in the punishment games his mother would play.

I share a bit of Dave’s story because it is the most stark real world example in my memory of a certain way of life. That way of life could more simply be called a cinderella story. Obviously, I don’t mean the part of the story with a pumpkin carriage and a glass slipper that leads to true love. I mean the part of the story that we so often gloss over or ignore. In the classic story, Cinderella lives a life much like Dave – her step mother is abusive to her and not her sisters, punishing her often and severely, while also refusing to give her things like the good food or new clothing given to her step sisters.

While most retellings of the Cinderella story understandably focus our attention on fairy godmothers and the possibility of a better future, the tragic, abusive, and horrendous conditions of Cinderella’s pre fairy godmother existence have a great deal more relevance to what far too many people experience everyday. The kind of favoritism shown by Cinderella’s and Dave’s caretakers is a particularly damaging and far too common form of abuse. 

What makes a Cinderella parent so abusive and damaging is not the specific acts of discipline against the singled out child (although such punishment often does result in its own kind of trauma); what makes a Cinderella parent so abusive and damaging is the dramatically disproportionate punishment handed out to one child over the others. Both children might try to sneak a cookie – one child might get a gentle slap on the hand and the other be forced to sleep in a basement closet for a month. Sometimes, by Dave’s recounting, he was the one punished even when it was his brothers who did something wrong in the first place. 

I fear that the United Methodist Church has long been Cinderella parents to same gender loving persons.

I am not here interested in entering the debate regarding whether homosexuality or homosexual acts are in any way sins. If they are not sinful at all, the unwarranted harm caused by the church is obvious. I am instead taking for granted the conservative United Methodist position that homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching. Even given incompatibility, I believe that we have long since singled out this one and only sin as uniquely worthy of swift and decisive response. In so doing, we have acted as cinderella parents. 

Language regarding homosexual persons being ‘sinners just like the rest of us’ is often intended to place same gender loving persons on equal footing with all others in the church. But equality is in no way embodied in the specific actions and responses the church takes. I, a typical, American Christian who can’t imagine any other life than the American way of material greed and gluttonous excess barely even get a slap on the wrist.* Our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters might as well be locked in the basement with how desperately we want them to be present in the house of God but not seen or heard from.

Instead of envisioning a positive view of sexuality through the lens of healthy, Godly relationship components like consent, intimacy, vulnerability, trust, empowerment, teamwork, attachment, mutuality, authenticity, commitment, public accountability, personal growth, sacrificiality, or respect we have instead narrowly confined our gaze on a single prohibition upon which we have decided that the entirety of the Christian faith and biblical witness rises or falls. And we continue to focus only on this one prohibition because we believe there is something inherently different between male and female despite the fact that we, in the UMC, no longer believe that difference to be lived out in any functional, hierarchical, or complementarian manner. Gender somehow has come to mean nothing except a line in the sand regarding with whom one can have sex. All of our talk about “speaking the truth in love” or needing “to have higher standards than the world” too quickly becomes the means by which we focus all our energy pointing out and arguing over the one and only sin over which we are willing to risk the existence of our denomination. 

Giving lip service to the idea that both of our kids did something wrong is nowhere near the same thing as embodying the self giving love of a parent. No matter the intent, the effect of our actions has made us Cinderella parents to some of the most vulnerable people in our midst. I don’t expect that a church made up of people will ever perfectly define and live into the values it claims to espouse. On the other side, I would never argue that the church should give up any moral standards in the name of being ‘nice’ or ‘inclusive.’ Put differently, my hope is not to find a fairy godmother to dramatically and beautifully solve all our problems. My hope and expectation is simply that we at least find a way to stop acting like Cinderella parents to this one subset of the children of God. Cinderella parenting is the opposite of the kenotic way of Christ.

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*I fully recognize that there is room to disagree about exactly how to define such potential sins and to understand how lax or ambiguous the church’s stance has become on any given issue. It is the shear weight of how often and how profoundly the church singles out homosexual behavior as especially deserving of rebuke and correction that prevents me from being able to ignore the profoundly different treatment of same gender loving persons. 

It is often said that the Bible is “clear” about sexuality. My problem is not with the truth or falsity of that claim – my problem is with the extent to which the criteria for what we mean by “clear” is exclusively applied here and nowhere else. I doubt a full list of sins and thorough analysis of how meaningfully/appropriately we respond would be fruitful, if even possible. Instead, I offer here a list of some of the most obviously problematic, related, and potentially damaging ways in which the church not only fails to condemn what we claim to be sin, but in some cases even condones and supports deeply problematic systems that produce outcomes “clearly” opposed to specific teachings of Jesus and Christian tradition. 

We have found and embraced a multitude of healthier ways to respond to other changes, behaviors, identities, choices, and realities that challenge the way things had always been done. That we cannot articulate why one thing and not another is worthy of swift and decisive response, instead defaulting to an imprecise assertion of scripture’s “clarity,” reinforces the patterns of harm explored above. Again, my argument is not that it is desirable to ignore sinful behavior nor is my argument that we should take radical steps to restrict or fight against the actions below; my point is that not responding comparably to so many other potentially comparable sins is a specific cause of actual, meaningful, lasting harm to at least one subset of the children of God. 

1. Regarding other aspects of human sexuality
   1. Premarital sex – I’ve officiated over 30 weddings. Around half of those couples were living together for months or even years before the wedding. I know plenty of other colleagues who could say the same. The UMC has taken such a lax stance on celibacy before marriage that it would be easy to question from the outside whether we actually care about this traditionally clear requirement.
   2. Divorce – There is a ‘joke’ among some UMC clergy that you can continue to be appointed as an ordained leader up until your 4th divorce. There are plenty of reasons that allowing for the possibility of divorced and remarried clergy was a good and reasonable choice. But one of the most widely quoted verses against homosexuality in Matthew 19:4 is an explicit prohibition against divorce. Yet almost no one argues for the exclusion of divorced and remarried clergy as a general rule.
   3. Heterosexual Marriage – The rampant notions of destiny and romanticism that define modern views of marriage do more to undercut any semblance of Christian commitment than anything same gender loving people could do. Even dating sites that promise compatibility convey a picture of marriage that has almost nothing to do with the mutual submission, overcoming of difference, and self sacrifice at the heart of Christian love. Any argument that allowing lesbian and gay persons to marry would suddenly and uniquely undercut the sanctity of marriage is absurd on its face given how far heterosexual marriage norms already stray from anything remotely resembling a biblical understanding of marriage.
2. Regarding other potentially sinful aspects of human life
   1. Money – Luke is uniquely focused on the impossibility of the wealthy finding comfort among the followers of Jesus. Acts goes so far as to portray tithing as a matter of life and death through the story of Ananias and Sapphira. The use of money is a central concern through much of scripture and yet little is ever said against those who most blatantly flaunt their wealth in church. If anything, love of money is a driving force behind church decision making rather than the deeply problematic force portrayed by Luke.
   2. Drunkenness – Drunkenness is listed alongside homosexuality in at least two of the most often quoted verses used against allowing a more inclusive attitude toward same gender loving persons. Further, United Methodists were one of the most influential organizations in the passing of the prohibition amendment. It would seem scripture and a great deal of church history fall on the side of temperance. Yet, few Methodists even consider the idea that drunkenness in its own right (meaning drunkenness not leading to abusive acts or causing harm through an accident) would be grounds for stripping a pastor’s credentials or removing someone from church leadership.

I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on a previous post – Scripture and Change – in part because the delay of General Conference means even more uncertainty and anxiety regarding potentially radical changes in the UMC. But the broader theme of ‘comfort with’ vs ‘rejection of’ anxiety and change seems to animate so much of what’s happening both in the broader Christian church and the world beyond. I get especially frustrated with the prevalence of Christian voices advocating for a return to [insert whatever golden age or specific practice was most meaningful and comforting to that person or persons], when faithfulness to God has always required an openness to the uncomfortable new things the Spirit of God will do next.

In times of anxiety, we can seek out control or rely on trust. Control implies ‘we’ have the answers and if ‘they’ would just go back to x, y, or z then everything would be fine. Trust requires that we stand first on the foundation of God’s love for us, which then makes it possible to love each other more fully no matter what love requires – no matter how new, uncomfortable, different, or challenging it may be to do so. The Christian calling is and has always been to learn how to proclaim the unchanging gospel in a way that a rapidly changing world can continue to hear it. I grieve the extent to which so much of public Christianity seems more intent on getting back to a more comfortable and familiar place than on moving toward a more radical and transformative way to love as God first loved us.

Between war, technological shifts, the tragedies and general malaise of covid, the brokenness of politics in the US, the uncertainty of where the UMC goes from here, and any number of other challenges and trends, I don’t know how anyone could look at the world and not feel some level of anxiety about where all this goes in the next 5 to 50 years. I am the kind of person who is somewhat hard wired to prefer routine, habit, and tradition over uncertainty or change. A big part of me loves the idea of getting back to a simpler time and a less anxious world. But I don’t really know what that means or who gets to decide what point in the past represents the “ideal world” since different people in different times and places have always had very different experiences of that “ideal.” And just as importantly, I don’t know how to read the Bible or take the Christian faith seriously without seeing that the most basic and consistent expectation of God’s people in times of anxiety and change is to get ready for the new thing God will do next. The love and mission of God never change – what it looks like to be faithful to the love and mission of God changes all the time.

I don’t know how to take the Bible seriously – to see Abram and Sarai leave everything they knew, Rahab betray her people, Joseph forgive his brothers, Moses go to Egypt, the law on Sinai redefine God’s people, kingship established, the temple built and rebuilt, Jonah swallowed by a fish, exile predicted and then experienced, Paul struck blind, James and John leave everything, the women flee the tomb, pentecost give birth to the church, galatians redefine tradition, Peter encounter Cornelius, Jesus lift up Naaman, eat with Zacchaeus, heal and glean on the Sabbath, reject violence, repeat the phrase “but I say unto you,” lift up a samaritan, and finally go to the cross to conquer death itself (and on and on and on) – and to then expect that the solution to the problems of the church and world is to go back to the simple and straightforward way things used to be. In other words, I don’t know how taking the Bible seriously could ever entail embracing a handful of arguments, truisms, or rules while rejecting almost every theme, assumption, event, and trajectory that the Bible itself contains.

My prayer for today, for the Lenten season ahead, and for whatever uncertain future awaits is that no matter what changes take place in the church or the world beyond, I will never let my comfort be more important than the call to faithfully follow a God who is always making new ways in the wilderness. I don’t know what that will look like. I don’t like that there is so little certainty. But I know that my calling is not to control the future – my call is to trust in the one who will be faithful to the very end.

Perhaps the least discussed but most incoherent aspect of the United Methodist Church’s divide over human sexuality is the fact that we don’t have a robust and common definition of sin. The statement at the center of our brokenness – “homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching” – surely rests on the conviction that sexual acts with someone of the same gender are sinful in some intrinsic way, but very little is ever said about what sin is such that certain actions could be considered sin or not. 

There are, to be sure, some traditional notions of sin that are presumed to be operative. Sin is something like “missing the mark,” “breaking fellowship with others,” “causing harm,” “disobedience to God,” “outside of God’s design,” or a variety of other sometimes nuanced and varied ways of talking about sin from Christian history and the Bible. What they share is at least a generic notion that something about a given action is wrong, unfaithful, divisive, broken, problematic, or otherwise bad. 

As a theoretical exercise, there is obvious value in attempting to determine if an action or category of action can be appropriately labeled “sin” or not. Something as clear and near universal as “thou shalt not steal” points away from the harm we might do others by taking what isn’t ours; it points toward our need to find sufficiency in the gifts of God; and it points toward the necessity of trust in community. 

As anyone who has ever taken a course in ethics knows, the moment we start to evaluate actual, specific, real world actions, things get far more complicated. Perhaps the “sin” was stealing a loaf of bread. But what if stealing was the only way a parent could imagine feeding their child? Surely allowing a child to starve would have been just as sinful as taking bread. And what if the desperate parent was only in that position because the bread maker had cheated the parent out of the paycheck they’d been anticipating to feed their child? And what if paying for the bread would be funding a business that runs on the exploitation of workers through labor trafficking?

Ethical debates can complicate a seemingly simple action almost infinitely. No complication makes theft an intrinsically good thing, but each nuance and circumstance challenges us to more closely consider what might be properly labeled sin and to consider whether any conceivable action could be sinless. In every case, an action’s sinfulness or lack thereof is determined to a significant extent by an arbitrary designation of the context we are willing to consider in evaluating that action. 

Lest this exercise seem too academic to be relevant, the same exact dynamic plays out in scripture – most clearly in Matthew 12. Jesus and the disciples plucked grain on the Sabbath, which was an explicitly sinful action. When called on it, Jesus didn’t deny that work on the Sabbath was sinful nor that plucking grain counts as work. Instead, Jesus complicated the Pharisees portrait of what mattered in evaluating their actions by quoting scripture and pointing to the hunger of the disciples. Again, doing so does not make plucking grain on the Sabbath intrinsically good – but it certainly challenges us to consider the meaning and implications of labeling an action “sin.”

When human sexuality is debated in the UMC, whether or not homosexuality falls on the “sin” side of the line is often central to the conversation. Conservatives say yes. Liberals say no or ignore the question altogether. Rarely do we pay enough attention to what is meant by sin such that both sides could even be engaging with the same underlying questions. 

To meaningfully engage would require us to start with a prior conviction in Methodist thought – that we are uniquely insistent upon Grace as the foundation for all that follows. At the risk of oversimplifying, starting with Grace means at least starting with the conviction that we are first given the unearned love of God and everything about faith and a faithful life is a reflection of and response to the love and relationship God offers. 

1st John 4:10 begins, “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us.” In the words of Jesus, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” 

To start with the love and relationship God offers and embrace the assumption that any law or faithful Christian action is grounded in love of God and neighbor is to necessarily define sin in relation to that love and relationship. In other words, sin is necessarily a secondary concept that only takes on life and meaning in so far as it names an action that falls short of, breaks, harms, or otherwise distorts the love and grace of God. The distortion sin may cause is never a generic flaw; it is specifically a distortion of God’s relationship with us.

When we instead act as though there is a “sin” box and a “not sin” box into which any action must be placed, we treat sin as though the concept has inherent meaning. We might go about labeling theoretical actions as sin or not. And then, as above, start complicating our analysis by bringing in all sorts of considerations that render an action more or less palatable. Perhaps we arrive at some sort of score card for complicated cases: +2 for feeding your child, -1 for stealing bread, -(-1) for having been harmed by the baker first. As long as it’s not a negative score we might at least give it a pass. Or if we want to be hard liners we might say any negative points involved at any point means it’s a sin and a sin is a sin no matter how big or small. 

Such analysis fails to account for at least two problems.

First, every action can be found to be sinful on some level if we simply define the context differently. Buying cheap vegetables in the US from the wrong store might facilitate child labor exploitation in Central America. Staying at the wrong hotel might make you complicit in labor trafficking. Whether or not it is fair to blame anyone for third or fourth order consequences is irrelevant to the fact that a choice of what counts must be made and that choice is significantly determinative of the resulting “score.” 

Second, failing to make explicit the disconnect between a given action and the love and relationship of God treats sin as a primary concept. Instead of scoring/losing points for action, intent, result, utility, and whatever other aspect of a given situation we deem relevant at whatever level of analysis we choose, sin should be measured relative to the components of Godly love and relationship – such as consent, intimacy, vulnerability, trust, empowerment, teamwork, attachment, mutuality, authenticity, truthfulness, commitment, public accountability, personal growth, sacrificiality, or respect. 

The extent to which any action breaks relationship by subverting (or simply failing to build up) these relational components is the extent to which that action may be appropriately viewed as sinful. To be sure, such analysis guarantees that every action will fall short in at least some way and the fact that there is no way to require the level at which analysis of a given action must take place ensures that there will be no objectively “correct” way to “score” anything. In other words, God is God, we are not. The best we can do is strive to relate to one another with the love and relationship presumed in 1st John 4:10.

To the extent that sin is falling short of the love and relationship of God rather than some objectively defined list of particular actions, we must be extremely wary of holding fast to theoretical definitions of actions traditionally understood to be sinful unless we can articulate the particular ways in which that action inherently and even now falls short. Sexuality presents us with a fairly unique case. (Considering whether or not there is a conversation worth having about the possibility of Godly sex outside of marriage may be a conversation worth having, but it is a question outside the scope of what follows. I am here taking for granted that sex and sexuality are only appropriately expressed and acted upon within marriage.)

A traditional understanding of sex as appropriate only in the context of monogamous marriage between a man and woman is surely informed partly by the positive concepts of relationship building above. For instance, the role monogamy can play in building trust is obvious even if one doesn’t believe monogamy is necessary for trust and even though it certainly isn’t sufficient. Conversely, lying to a spouse will undoubtedly harm trust in many, though perhaps not all, cases. 

Marriage, then, is a particular, covenantal expression of the love God is. Our hope is certainly to be as if not more intimate, vulnerable, committed, accountable, sacrificial, etc in marriage than any other relationship. No human relationship can perfectly embody the love of God. But marriage is at least the commitment through which what is different is not allowed to take precedence over what binds those two people together. As in the body of Christ, our unity in diversity makes us greater together because we then have eyes for sight, ears to hear, and a nose to smell; so in marriage, our unity in difference makes us greater than the sum of our parts.

On these terms, the strongest case I can discern against marriage between two persons of the same gender is that a stronger marriage bond is one that overcomes a greater amount of difference. Because gender would be definitionally the same, that marriage could not overcome as much difference as a heterosexual marriage. That claim, however, is remarkably tenuous given that there is no functional, hierarchical, or complementarian difference believed to exist between male and female in the UMC. No definition or difference of gender is ever offered or argued other than the simple statement that God created us male and female. 

How could a difference without distinction be the sufficient cause to prohibit same gender persons from entering a marriage covenant? How, especially, could the lack of one specific difference be sufficient to prohibit marriage given the pervasive assumption and reality that we already view marriage as a union between two people who are more alike than not? And if nothing else, how could this specific lack of difference be sufficient to render same gender marriage impossible, while no other difference (or lack thereof) is ever even relevant to any argument about any marriage? The only exception might be the encouragement for Christians to marry other Christians so as not to be “unequally yoked,” but here again it is our expectation that married people be more alike, not less, that drives the argument.

What, then, would be the constructive case against same gender marriage or sexuality? In other words, what constructive embodiment of the love and relationship God has for us is impossible within a monogamous, covenantally committed same gender couple? If there is something, I have no idea what it would be. If not, I can’t see any way to view same gender marriage as sinful that does not finally rest on an arbitrary choice or score card to determine which traditional or scriptural prohibitions and ethical exhortations to hold onto (perhaps don’t murder or steal) and which must be open to change or reinterpretation over time (such as divorce or women in leadership).

Given how often and how radically the Bible, Jesus included, pushes us to reimagine tradition in light of the particular shape of the love of God and never the other way around (in short – the Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath), “tradition says” is hardly a sufficient battle cry for labeling a specific action to be sinful in all times and places. I cannot help but place the burden of proof on those who would wish to maintain a traditional definition of marriage to offer any hint as to where same gender marriage or sexuality falls substantively shorter from God’s love and relationship than the marriage and sex between husband and wife. And I cannot help but see a faulty understanding of sin playing the pivotal role in justifying the status quo.