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As soon as we believe in Christ, we are no longer the
same. In fact, we cannot encounter Christ and continue
to remain as we were, for both the entire world looks
different to us, and we have an entirely different
relationship to it. Therefore, belief truly does
entail death. And yet, it is also death-in-life, which
leads us into Life, both for ourselves and for those
around us. As the seed, which must first die to become
alive, so does our faith bury us within fertile soil
so that we may grow beyond all the boundaries we know
and bring rest to the entire world. Our faith makes us
new creatures, in one sense dead, but in another sense
most fully alive.
When we believe, we find that we are living the life
of the exile, of the immigrant, of the multi-ethnic.
We find ourselves living in what has been called the
border, the margin. We discover that we no longer have
a place in the world as we knew it, both because we
see that differently, and because that world looks at
us differently. This idea has been very prominent over
the past forty years: In political discussions, it
comes up in the issues that surround immigrants, who
will never be at home in their new world, and that
surround such multi-ethnic groups as Chicanos, whose
homelands are both too American and too ethnic to fit
in. And in philosophical discussions, it comes up in
the difficulty we have pinning down the meanings of
words. When we try to say anything, we force our words
to limit themselves to only one possible meaning: yet
the other meanings still exist, in the margins,
waiting to erupt into our sentences and disrupt the
possibility of our saying anything.
Understandably, both problems make many conservatives
nervous, since they shake things up, disturbing the
status quo and questioning the very existence of
truth. And yet, isn't this what Christianity does? It
shakes us up, revealing to us that the world's ways,
which we have followed for so long, are completely
ineffectual. It forces us to see that everything we
thought we had pinned down as true and reliable is
nothing more than grass, which withers at the heat of
the sun. It shakes up the world, as God bursts into
the life of humanity, offering us a better way, but
only by showing us the futility of the life we have
been living. And so, as Christians, we find ourselves
suddenly unable to participate in the world we knew.
We now live on the border between heaven and earth,
called by God to bring Life into a world which is
dying, if not already dead. The riches of the world,
the prospect of power, the hope for fame -- all these
desires die away for us, vanities of vanities.
And at the same time, we find ourselves rejected by
those we knew, by those we loved, by those we grew up
with and cherished beyond life itself. We can no
longer follow in their ways, and our rejection
frightens them. We become a danger to them, for just
as we have been unsettled by the sudden appearance of
Christ in our daily lives, so does our presence
threaten to do to those around us. We find ourselves,
then, living in a border which most people want closed
off. Hence we become the truest subversives the world
has ever seen; people who reject the world even as we
reach out to save it. As LGBTQA people, we are already
familiar with this life. As LGBTQA Christians, we see
ourselves living between two places, in a borderland
which is really two margins located in the same place:
We are not wanted by the church because we refuse to
accept their false sexual morality, and we are not
wanted by the queer community because we refuse to
reject the God in whose name we are daily persecuted.
Insofar as we live in this borderland willingly, we
live in exile -- never again able to return to the home
we knew, now settled in a much safer and better place,
and yet always thinking of those who still remain
behind, who still need the hope that there is a place
of refuge, of rest, and of peace. Because the Kingdom
of Heaven is still in the future, we are not yet where
we will be; but because of our love for those in our
lives, we cannot fully live life where we are. We are
constantly travelling between the one and the other,
trying to be the bridge across which our world will
find the Love of Christ Jesus.
In this sense, belief makes us holy. We are called out
by God, set apart for a new purpose. We no longer live
for the reason we lived before. We now have a special
use, a different meaning to our lives. Too often we
think of holiness as meaning "pure, abstaining from
contact with the things of the world." Our idea of
holiness comes from those who do not drink, do not
dance, do not go to R-rated movies, do not cuss, from
those who still believe that what goes into the body
can defile us. But this is not what holiness is.
Holiness is being set apart, the way we might set
apart our fine china from our daily dishes. Like
china, we will get just as covered in filth as any
other plate. Our holiness does not mean that we stay
permanently clean. The difference is that we are
called out for special occasions, for special
purposes. God has something different in mind for us,
something more precious, more particular, more
distinguished. We are no longer commoners, but
royalty, representatives of a great kingdom, living as
ambassadors to our land of birth, given a mission, a
message, a task to perform. We might find ourselves in
the war zone, in the tenderloin, in the filthiest of
places. But the task has been assigned us, and if we
trust the One who assigns it to us, we will remain in
the safest of all possible places.
Belief changes us completely. We can no longer go
along with the world as we knew it: we see through the
lies and the illusions, finding that God alone is
worthy of our trust, both for our daily bread and for
our eternal salvation. But the world sees this change
in us, and pushes us away, marginalizes us, treats us
as outsiders and aliens. And at the same time, we now
have a much more important position in the world than
ever before, because now we are the conduit through
which God explodes into the world, disrupting the
status quo, shaking up all the world holds dear, in
order to draw all things to God, who is the most
gentle lover and most powerful protector. Through our
faith in Christ, we have died, and yet we have become
alive again beyond what we could ever hope or imagine.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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Suffering in the Service of Christ
"Family Values" and Scripture:
Also In This Issue:
Fear and Loathing at the Ex-Gay Conference
A Christian Response to the Sept. 11 Tragedy
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