People dealing with same-sex attraction by being faithful to Scripture called ‘heroes of the church’
Craig M. Kibler, The Layman Online , June 20, 2006
217th General Assembly
Birmingham, Ala. BIRMINGHAM — “Persons who deal with same-sex attraction in a way that is faithful to Scripture are heroes of the church,” Dr. Robert Gagnon said Monday afternoon, because they take “very seriously” the message of the Gospel.
Gagnon, a professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and the author of The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics, told more than 100 people packed into a meeting room at the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex for the OneByOne luncheon that “it’s a straightforward call to discipleship. ‘Anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple,'” he said, referring to the Luke 14:27 passage.
“That passage shows the great inclusive love of Jesus,” Gagnon said, “the great, gracious, inclusive love of Jesus that goes out to all. But his demand is total. To take up one’s cross is to deny one’s self – so much for the way self-fulfillment is defined in the church today. If we seek to gain our life in this world, we will lose it.”
He said that Paul “took this injunction very seriously.” He referred to Galatians 2:19-20: “For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God. I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.”
“Paul,” Gagnon said, “says he no longer lives, but that Christ lives in him. The great reorientation that matters is the reorientation of one’s entire life in faith to God, putting to death one’s entire orientation and having God live in us.”
He then gave a definition of faith. “I must die,” Gagnon said, “in order that Christ must live in me. That means I don’t get to do when I want to do with whom I want to do it with.”
In the Sermon on the Mount, he said, “after the Beatitudes, there are six antitheses.” Gagnon said that here, Jesus said, “I’m closing these loopholes and making the order of God more insistent.”
“Two of those six have to do with sex,” Gagnon said, referring to Matthew 5:28 (“But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”) and Matthew 5:32 (“But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.”)
That, he said, “is the intensification of the sexual ethics of God in Jesus’ ministry. That two of them have to do with sex seems to make it a pretty important part of Jesus’ ministry.”
There also is “no record of any violation of the prerequisite in the covenant bond of marriage between man and a woman anywhere in this period.” Jesus, though, “narrowed it even further,” he said. “He made more rigorous the demand of God.”
That is why, Gagnon said, that “people working through same-sex attraction consistent with the Gospel are wonderful paradigms of what we should be working through in the church. The witness of Jesus and Scripture on this issue is crystal clear.”