Teetering on the edge

Today I confess. Today I ponder my confession. Today I reject my confession. 

That's where I am, folks. I'm well aware that this blog will have little affect anywhere, but it is what I feel, and think, on this sunny may day.

Let's start with I'm a traditionalist, which is a new word for conservative. I was born white and male, full of privilege I never knew I had, but upon reflection is what I did have. It carried me to job opportunities that perhaps I wouldn't have had. 

The problem is this informs my life, my thoughts, my positions, my opinions. I CAN'T HELP IT. I am whom I am.

What I can't be, and can't completely empathize with, is a woman, black or white, a person of color of any gender, a LBQTI person. 

But I'm teetering. Like a huge rock that has hung forever over a chasm, I'm teetering. 

As more clergy come out as gay, I'm teetering because I do understand -- at least a bit -- how it would be to have a child who is gay, or to be gay and have to lie about it to follow what you believe to be your call from God.

I hold on to my scriptures that tell me homosexuality is a sin, particularly Romans where Paul wrote "Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed seamless acts with men and received in their own person the due penalty for their error."

I hold on, but more informed and, well, smarter folks give me a thousand reasons to ignore those passages. The problem is I can't do that. It seems so clear to me. 

I have a greater problem with what Jesus said in Matthew 19:4-6, "Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said 'For this reason a man shall his father and his mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall be one flew. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."

What am I to do with these verses? If I start ripping out the things Jesus said, where do I stop?

But I'm teetering, primarily because I know gay persons that I care about, and I know they are good folks, and I know they would like the same privilege I have had with my wife for 30 years, and the privilege that I've had in ministry for 17 years, and the privilege I've had in church for 21 years. I have relatives who are gay that I care about. And I just don't like feeling that I'm hurting them. I don't. Call me crazy or a theological nut but I don't like turning them away. I've long felt that if anyone, and I mean anyone, can't come to the church as the one place where you can cry and be yourself before God, then what are we doing? 

But I hang on, primarily because of the name calling and such. 

As my denomination meets and decides the fate of many, many persons in our own denomination, I'm holding on by my fingernails to the edge of the cliff. I'm teetering, but not falling.

I understand that I'm being called a relic, a bigot, a hater -- none of which is true -- but I can't fall because I can't get rid of those verses. I'm a sinner who has fallen short, who falls short, who sins still despite my best efforts to not do so. I love  persons in my church who might differ from what I believe, but I don't get the same feeling sometimes in return. 

I'm teetering. Close to falling. So very close. So so so very close.