Let’s deal with the facts as I know
them to be first.
Surely you’ve heard the news by now.
Kim Davis, a Kentucky clerk in Rowan County, suddenly is the centerpiece of the
fight over same-sex marriage. Davis refused to issue marriage licenses and
wound up in jail where she sits as I write this.
So-called progressives have
rallied around the deputies of Davis who have issued those marriage licenses.
Conservatives have rallied
around Davis, who is being compared by them to Dr. Martin Luther King.
Back it down there folks. Simmer down Nellie.
Some have said that Davis is
the first person in the United States to go to jail for being Christian.
Let me say that I have
preached a sermon based upon the Big Tent Revival song, “if loving God was a
crime, I’d be an outlaw.” I hope that would be true.
But let’s make this clear before
we become full of opinion and ranting breaks out. Davis wasn’t sent to jail because she was a
Christian. She didn’t go to jail because of her beliefs. She is fully able to
believe whatever she wants to believe. If she believes same-sex marriage is
wrong, that is perfectly acceptable, too, for freedom of expression and religion is still, still the law of the land.
She also wasn’t sent to jail because she broke a law for the
truth is there is no law about same-sex marriage because only Congress can
write laws. She went to jail because she violated a court order. If you and I
violate a court order, we, too, will go to jail. It doesn’t have to have
anything to do with our beliefs. You can’t violate court orders willy-nilly.
You just can’t. If one can begin to do that, we will have even more chaos than
we have now.
So, she’s in jail, and apparently is perfectly content to
stay there. She believes she is there because she’s exercising her beliefs.
That’s fine. She can believe what she wants to believe. That’s still the
country we live in. Near as I can understand it, she could do her job and go
out later after work and throw a hissy with signs and such. There is a
difference in civil services and religious services in this country. Though I
believe that separation goes too far at times, I can’t say this is one of them.
But this is the beginning of what will be a particular battle
in the culture war in the future.
How do we deal with all this? How does the Christian church
deal with what will soon be the law of the land and yet some read the
scriptures as say this can’t possibly be while others read the same scriptures
and tell us why they don’t mean what they same to say?
To paraphrase a friend, do we really want a country that if a
Muslim is working at the local Pizza Hutt who refuses to put Pepperoni on the
pizza because he won’t touch it? Or if a Hassidic Jew won’t work on Friday
evening through Saturday evening even though the job calls for it? Or as
happened late last week where a converted Muslim flight attendant was suspended
because she won’t serve alcohol?
Can a country that stresses freedom for all deal with
religious freedom versus religious constraint?
But ask yourself this: Do we really want to live in a country
where we refuse to do business with sinners? And just how are we going to
decide who those sinners might be? And whose business is it going to to be to
decide who will be served?
To me the difference in the Kentucky situation and say the
other situation where cake bakers refused to do a wedding cake for a same-sex
couple is we are talking about an elected official, who must be an official for
all people, as opposed to someone in
business whose religious beliefs certainly it seems to me might be most
important. But even there is baking a cake the equivalent of blessing the
wedding or is it just a cake?
Understand me, this is not a column about same-sex marriage.
That’s perhaps for another day. This is a column about how to live with each
other, despite our differences, our different beliefs, our different ideas
about where we’re headed.
Jesus came and ate with sinners, with drunks, with
prostitutes.
That’s our Lord. The Pharisees, er, didn’t understand him
doing that.
He cared for those who were broken, who were lost, who were
the least, who were different, who weren’t the religious but instead were the
exceptions. He did what he did because he loved them.
I wonder, and again it’s just me wondering, but I wonder if he would have gone to jail or whether
he would have been compassionate towards those who came to him wanting something.
I wonder, now what Jesus would do, but what Jesus did. I know, or I believe, he
died for us, and I also know he told us to be unified. How’s that going?
In the country in which we live, we’re going to have to deal
with these issues, with these problems.
To do that, we must take steps. We can vote our conscious. We
can work for candidates who might change things or extend the way things are. Or we can refuse to talk to each other while
we’re doing all this.
But I still believe that Jesus shakes his head sometimes when
he watches what we pick our fights about. I know he said that unless we give
mercy, we won’t receive mercy. I don’t know how much more plain that can be.
Hobby Lobby, Chick-fil-, a court clerk in Kentucky, a band in
Rankin County, Miss., where will the next outbreak of 24-hour coverage begin?
What will be the next accelerant poured on a social-media fire? It might have
happened from the time I wrote this to the time you read it.
This is Know: According to the Abortion Counter web site,
there have been 6,860,546.8 (as I write this) abortions since Roe Vs. Wade and
no one seems to be going to jail to prevent this, and there are persons who
profess Jesus as their Lord in this country who see nothing wrong with this.
If I – and this is only I – were going to pick a fight, Lord
help me it would be there.
No comments:
Post a Comment