On Thursday, I wrote a response to, well, the responses to President Obama's statement on same-sex marriage... what follows is some excerpts from that post. (If you'd like to read the whole thing - entitled "Hot Links w/a Side of Political & Spiritual Opinions" - it's on my personal blog.)
on getting our news from TV & radio...
We've learned some very bad habits from both the mainstream media and from conservative talk radio regarding the "art" of yanking quotes out of context - if it's bad Biblical exegesis (and it is!) to prooftext, then it's bad form to do it with our political discussions as well.Of course it's OK to quote public figures in order to expose their hypocrisy - there's no ethical, moral or Biblical problems with that. But we must do so while preserving the context & tone of their original remarks.
What in the world makes us think that by attacking our political opponents that people will suddenly say, "Oh, wow - you know, I've never seriously considered the claims of Christianity... but hearing you trash the President I voted for has totally opened my eyes to my need for grace & forgiveness"?
on grace & love (from Ed Stetzer)...
Building bridges and showing grace and love is needed, lacking, and essential when dealing with people with different views and values.
Some Christians seem driven by the need to take every opportunity to condemn homosexuality. Instead, I do not think you or I need to begin every conversation with a statement of our opposition of homosexuality. We can, indeed, show grace and friendship to those who struggle, while believing and teaching what the scriptures clearly say. Without hiding our beliefs, we need to look for opportunities to have conversations, build relationships, and show grace.
on what I believe...
I really do believe that:
- pornography
- heterosexual sex between two unmarried people (fornication)
- prostitution
- heterosexual sex between a married person & someone who is not their spouse (adultery)
- polygamy
- group sex
- homosexual sex
...are all sexual sin of equivalent weight, regardless of the orientation and/or inclinations of the person(s) involved. They may have different consequences in a temporal sense - what effect they have during our lives on this earth - but they all have the same spiritual consequence. A quick example to clarify: someone who downloads pornographic pictures is less likely - at least at the early stages of the behavior - to have less emotional & physical health consequences than a prostitute. But both the streetwalker & the upstanding businessman with a hard drive full of downloaded videos are in the same boat spiritually - they've sinned.
Sin, btw, is not simply "doing bad stuff" or "doing stuff Mark doesn't like" or "doing stuff that is distasteful to someone/thing who has set themselves up as a moral authority." Man, I wish it was that easy - we could just change authority figures & get a new set of rules to live by.
According to Ephesians 2:1, you were "dead in your trespasses & sins." The two Greek words are paraptoma (trespasses) and hamartia (sins). The definition of paraptoma means "to go off the path, to wander," while hamartia means to "miss the mark or target." The implication is that sin is failing to be the people we were designed to be - people of purity & honor & integrity.
God created man & woman and the marriage relationship not only for our pleasure & for procreation, but also to act as a picture of His love for us... and same-sex marriage warps that picture just as surely as adultery does. We've missed the mark... we are, as the old hymn writer put it, "prone to wander."
This means that we have to approach the conversation in a different way - this is NOT about "homosexuality vs heterosexuality." It is about marriage between a man & a woman vs a plethora of lesser & more destructive options - one of those being same-sex marriage.