The sermon took a sudden hard turn toward “hot button issues,” a rant it seemed to me.

Now, I may not have heard it that way except for the young man who sat beside me. His mother is a lesbian. She’s got the soul of a poet. Gentleness and compassion are her answer to a world that has been relentlessly cruel.

You would like her.

I felt this mother’s son withering beside me as the barrage went on. Fighting words. Telling the dirty, disgusting world what for. You think I’m exaggerating. After church, we sat in our driveway together for quite some time, my friend and I. He couldn’t get out of the car. It was awful.

It was awful because this sweet, intelligent young man – he a master-class hugger – had been weaving his way into the fabric of our family, all the way in. We didn’t stand a chance. He is dear to us. I was hungry, desperate, in fact, for him to know Jesus.
I could only think to myself, “He’ll never get over this.”

I was wrong about that – how thankful I am to say it. He is my true son in faith now. But, for good or for ill, there is a strange and lasting influence to things we overhear. We take them as true, as in, “They weren’t even talking to me, so why would they lie?”

What, then, could he have been thinking but, “So, this is how Christians talk about my mom. So this is what they think of her.” How else must it have seemed but that we were caught speaking unguardedly, our actual attitudes leaking out because we looked around and were sure it was just us.

Now, I don’t mean to be unfair. It’s hard to know how harsh to be toward that pastor. Clearly, he didn’t think that anyone like that was hearing him. He didn’t think he was leaving a mark.

He didn’t think.

And I don’t necessarily take issue with what he said. You and I cannot take any other view on human sexuality than what Christ and his apostle did. We owe the world – and our own friends and loved ones – thoughtfulness and clarity on all such things. No, I think it was the how.

Some things are best said with tears in our eyes.

It’s an uncomfortable story to tell, because it should be. It’s meant to heighten our awareness of the ways we express ourselves on matters so sensitive, on things that sit so heavy at the center of unrelenting pain or shame, loneliness, or frustration. This is to get us thinking about who may be listening. In a digital age, our stuff – sermons, presentations, podcasts, devotions, articles – will inevitably make their way “out there” to people we may not have had in our minds at all.

For that matter, do we think we know the struggles of the people “in here?” No one sitting in their own well-worn spot in the sanctuary is same-sex-attracted? No one is broken up over their gender identity? Are you sure about that? Is this a safe assumption? And don’t only think of the countless messages the church disseminates. Think about a normal everyday gathering of Christians. The subject comes up. You know. Some “hot button issue.”

What do you want people whose stories you don’t know, whose hearts you cannot read, whose wounds you do not comprehend – someone now holding their breath, bracing themselves – what would you have them catch you saying in an unguarded, overheard moment? Think about it. This is you at your most credible, you at your most convincing.
Oh, and if you’re struggling to find the words, how about these?

I’m sorry

I once read a story about a Christian who sat in the middle of a “woke” audience as a contemptuous speaker gleefully wound them up. He raised his hand during the Q&A and said, “I just want to say that whatever the Christian church has done to you, I’m sorry.” This simple sentence defused the situation.

I took it as an interesting case study in how to “change the moment,” so I told my friend about it, and I’ve never forgotten what he said.

“That’s too easy.”

With that, his emotion wells up. He leans in close. He’s got my attention.

“I’m not sorry for the church. I’m sorry for me! Who heard me calling someone gay and laughing . . . like it was clever or something . . . like it’s some sort of joke? Uh-uh. No. I reject that. I’m sorry for me.”

So am I.

I have no doubt that the man in the story was genuine. It took courage. But what strikes me now is that I’m sorry “for the church” could become instead some sort of Christian virtue signaling, this act of repenting for those people over there. Repentance without pain or cost. Repentance without change.

I’ve thrown my share of words at “hot button issues” – can you tell I don’t care for that expression? That lesbian woman at the top of this essay? Her name is Holly. She is not an “issue.” She’s a human being.

Before I took the time to know her, I was the one who just didn’t think. I’ve spoken as a fool about things I did not begin to understand.

I’m afraid it’s entirely possible that I still am.

“When one part suffers, every part…” what, stands back to dissect it?

I’m sorry for me.

What if people looking in from the outside were to overhear that? Or those on the inside who are right now contemplating the door? Might we change the moment when changing the moment is the last thing on our minds? When what’s filling our minds is something else entirely?

How a guy like me hopes that whoever may have heard me might extend me this grace and give me the chance to say, “I was wrong. I have no explanation. You deserved better. I hope you can forgive me.”

We are not so different after all.

On the top of a page write, “Who am I?” Then make your list of personal identifiers. I’ll make mine. Next, we’ll each rank whatever came into our minds. Let items settle to the bottom where you have very little a stake. You’re a dog lover, let’s say. At the top whatever lives closest to the core.

Now we set our two lists side by side.

Where our lists are the same – where identities overlap – there we experience what someone has called “the sharing of human stuff.” In each moment of, “What? Me, too!” hides a beautiful potential. We are connecting. We might just come to matter to one another. Really matter.

If we lack any such recognition of a deeply shared humanity, down deep at the level of who we actually are, what poor Christian ambassadors we would be–or worse, what poor friends?

A prominent Christian spokesperson who left the LGBTQ world wrote candidly that sexuality wasn’t her real problem at all. Her problem was pride. It was autonomy. It was “no one is going to tell me what to do!”

I don’t assume she speaks for everyone. Not at all. But when I first read that, I said, “Oh.”

We’re not so different after all.

You were born that way? Well, I was born this way. And it isn’t pretty. Disordered desires. The common pain of the sinner. We are sexual offenders, one and all. We have fallen the same fall, you and I. We are no less broken. No less needy. We each have our secrets, things to make us cringe at the thought that they should ever see the light of day.

Differences recede.

We all have the same need to come clean. No one gets to come at this from a position above. I don’t care who you are, and I don’t care who hears me.

We all need Jesus.

We need his call to get ahold of us though it would undo you and me both, shake us to the core: “Anyone of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:33) We are alike – indistinguishable, in fact, in our need to daily die to ourselves and daily rise with him. It is at the cross of Jesus that all pride and personal autonomy go to die.

“You are not your own, you are bought with a price.” (1 Corinthians 6:20)

Who am I? God alone knows.

I am his.

There it sits, incandescently beautiful, at the top of our two lists to transcend any lesser identity that can be thought of. Yes, differences recede. The one vital thing between us is Jesus, what he has done for you, what he has done to me.