Go Bill!

Recently I shared a brief reunion with a significant community in my life, a Church authority with responsibility to hundreds of thousand of local church members and hundreds of contexts in which the member churches' work is located. Walked right into the midst of many deeply held shared passions, and some longstanding disagreements.

Ahead of time I’d given thought to avoiding this particular moment in the collective body’s life, because I’m not really a part of that in the same way at the moment. We are in a figurative marriage through my membership and ordination, but I have chosen a mild trial separation while I do some intentional study and experience life and the world from different angles.

Here, outside responsibilities of the pulpits I’ve filled, I make this assertion: I don’t believe homosexuality is a sin. I don’t think earnest investments in mutually loving relationships are ever in the most idealistic sense sinful.

I realize this can be a very troubling statement. Nonetheless, this is what I have come to believe. God will continue to breath life into my understanding, I’m confident of that, and I will seek God continually.

We seem to need to see others within a template, in comparison to standards; I don't believe our infinite Creator has such limits.

I’m not a radical libertine. I do think homosexual acts on my part would be sinful, but I won’t go into specifics on that apart from offering that it is not a match for my spiritual understanding, desires, hopes or values. I do believe if some of the variables within me were different I could be both homosexual and a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. I could not be a United Methodist pastor if this were so.

For me coming to this place started when a man came up to me in a park and propositioned me more than thirty years ago. I said ‘no’, and found that he did not accept my response. I was more clear and reinforced my message with eye-contact and expression. He understood and left me to finish writing letters in the park.

I found the experience personally troubling, and tried to process it within community. In some ways this didn’t help: I found a number of people who thought I should have responded with physical violence. “I would have slugged him,” several said. Things may have gone a similar direction in someones response: a week after my encounter in the park, in the local paper there was an article about a man being shot in the park.

Those who know me well know I have always been single, and I’ve not sustained a lot of long-term dating relationships -- so concurrent with this experience with this man in the park and my attempt to process it I was reflecting on my own experience with dating, and how challenging it can be to tastefully approach and discern mutual interest between yourself and another person.

Having now met this man, however unwillingly I’d been brought into contact, I pondered in my heart the thought that hunger for relationship was more complicated than I had to this point known it to be. I prayed the man in the park would find something good and nurturing which could resonate with who he was at that moment. (I was then a member of a more liberal denomination, so I don’t know what conclusions I would have drawn as a United Methodist youth, and know from experience one isn’t the same as another.)

I am thankful that God reaches out to me in my uniqueness and I have every confidence that God wants that for each individual. It is a sin of people, not the expressed will of God, that we people make homosexuality a part of a sort of ‘threshold’ we present to the world. It is a sin, we feel need to assert, and in doing so advance a prioritization of sins -- as if we didn’t all have sins -- homosexuality over gossip or consumerism or militarism or any of a number of things pretty destructive and harmful and beyond God’s hopes reflected in scripture.

Here are some other troubling assertions regarding sexuality I will make: In my ordination I have practiced celibacy in singleness -- and I’ve discovered what I discern to be nuances of celibacy which can be personally sinful. Among them, there are ways that walling myself off is not good. So it is complicated, it is my journey, prayerfully finding my way through my singleness. The fact that others have been single really doesn’t mean anyone can truly understand my life, simply that they have some understanding of their circumstances as a lens to interpreting what they perceive of my life.

In counseling folks in the midst of marriages I have also seen some discouraging ways in which sexual sinfulness can operate in marriage. I won’t go further in describing that, sensing that, as it is possible to go from preaching to meddling, it is also possible to go from blogging to meddling. Sexuality is not simply OK in marriage, not OK out of it. It’s a component of who each one of us is, uniquely expressed in each of us. Our responsibility for this gift is expressed moment to moment.

This week I went back to my community to express my best personal discernment, to vote that a good man after God’s heart, who practices as much commitment to the person he loves as our culture permits him to... can serve the Church he loves. By the grace of God he now gets the opportunity. Early indications are good, in so far as his part goes.