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Welcome to my humble abode. Feel free to sit down a while and warm yourself by my fire. I write here mainly to inspire, encourage, perhaps confront, to empower, and to change. If you leave with a lighter step, an answer to a question, really questioning long held ideas that may not be taking you where you need to go, or with a lot of new things to consider, I will have done my job. Please enjoy your stay. With love, ~Mother Star

Saturday, June 29, 2019

"The world is watching us make a colossal difference between homosexual and heterosexual sin and claim that we do so because there is no difference!"

If I wrote an ethnography on my country and its attitudes toward homosexuality, I would not say there are people who have a construct of homosexuality being inborn and part of a person, and also people who disagree. I would say we have people who have said construct and deeply value it, and people who have the same construct but maintain a very ambivalent relationship with it, denying that they have it at all.


You can't behave like homosexual attraction or behavior makes one "other" and still say that you don't perceive it that way. It seems most church people do that though. There are numerous people I have met at work in my life who are church going people and cohabited out of wedlock or were having blatant affairs people at work all knew about. Wearing Christian shirts and leading church projects and talking to everyone about Jesus and their church and trying to witness to people while living in open sin. If they were homosexual they might have been kicked out of church, or just not been allowed to lead anything. More likely the former at the time. If homosexuality is grounds for dismissal from work, exclusion from certain occupations and military service because it is a sin, then why are adulterers and promiscuous people allowed to do these things? "It is a sin" does not justify exclusion from certain things unless it excludes everyone, except if this particular sin makes the individual a whole different kind of creature and different kind of case. If I said, "this is a different case than these other sins because it is a sin," I would sound crazy right?

Besides that, where does a Christian's responsibility begin and end? If a cashier gets fired for refusing to sell condoms to a gay couple on grounds she is "standing up for her faith" (I remember hearing about this happening sometime, I think...), did she ring up the product for other couples that may not be married or that clearly are not? If she is responsible before her maker for what the customer does with what they intend to buy, it would definitely be better not to be a cashier anywhere... You have to decide where the boundaries of your responsibility before your Maker lie and be consistent with them. If you "stand against" something on grounds of your responsibility before your maker and you do not have responsibility for it anyway, the person you are "standing up" to does, this is not "living out your faith" it is attempting to control someone else. It is a boundary violation. Jesus gave us all free will and with it comes individual responsibility. Now, if you attempt to force people to comply with the will of the Lord when no violence is occurring if you do not, this is not living your faith, it is violating the boundaries set down by the Master between you and that other person. You can't use responsibility before Jesus to get bullheaded about things you are not even responsible Him for, but people often do that.

I agree that a minister cannot stand and pronounce the blessing of Jesus Christ on a same-sex marriage, but I also see that if a person is leaving a spouse for a new one, the minister cannot pronounce blessing on that either for the same reason; it is not part of the biblical plan for marriage. Why are so many minister's performing blasphemous weddings? Kim Davis was on her 4th husband. There is this guy that plays bass in a local band around here who is on his 5th wife; he left every previous wife for whichever one was next. Most weddings are performed by allegedly Christian ministers, right? Who is doing all these blasphemous weddings WITHOUT ANY
CONTROVERSY? And why is that without controversy while we have churches splitting over homosexual marriage? It's all fornication right? These unions are wrong for the same reason homosexual marriage is wrong, it is against Jesus' plan for marriage, as He clearly stated in Matthew 19. Why do the heterosexual sinner's emotions matter so much that we have to ignore the word's of Jesus Himself to accommodate them and watch family after family be destroyed, and do not defrock the minister's who participate? Families torn apart and who knows what the fallout will be like for all those broken homes, but allegedly doesn't pose as much threat as a same sex marriage? People come up with all sorts of reasons, some of them absurd, why same sex marriage will destroy society, and watch their society destroyed by fornication in another form with comparative docility. If the word "fornication," or the term "sexual immorality" depending on your biblical translation, means sexual sin period, then we need to start acting like it. In the meantime we truly do manifest hate and discrimination, and cannot use the bible to justify our rage, because we are not really following it in any case.

"3 Then the Pharisees came to him, testing him and saying to him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for any reason at all? 4 He answered and said to them, Have you not read how it was that he who made man at the beginning made them man and woman, 5 and said, For this thing shall a man leave father and mother and cleave unto his wife, and the two shall be one flesh? 6 So then, now they are not two, but one flesh. Let not man therefore put apart that which God has joined together.
7 Then they said to him, Why did Moses direct to give a testimonial of divorce and to put her away? 8 He said to them, Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, suffered you to put away your wives. But from the beginning it was not so. 9 I say therefore to you, whoever puts away his wife (unless it be for fornication) and marries another, breaks wedlock. And whoever marries her who is divorced, commits adultery.
10 Then Jesus’ disciples said to him, If this is the case between man and wife, then it is not good to marry. 11 He said to them, Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. 12 Some are chaste who were so born from their mother’s womb. And others are chaste who were made so by men. And others are chaste who have made themselves chaste for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He who can receive it, let him receive it."

I think it is obvious that "whoever can receive this..." in Matthew 19 doesn't mean "Whoever wants to." Sometimes people leave you and you do not have a choice in the matter. They sinned, you didn't. Most marriages in the world are arranged (according to my anthropolgy professor, sometimes marriages are arranged by parents for impure reasons like greed or selfish ambition. I don't know that it happens all the time, but it happens. My church will not even recognize a forced marriage as valid, actually, and priests are required to make sure people are not joined in a previous union before they agree to do the wedding. If people are forced into a marriage against their will and can prove it or can prove some other legitimate thing nullifies the vows they took, the priest can still do the wedding. The priests are accountable for what they stand representing Christ to bless and bind, and take it very seriously. Therefore I think they have credibility in saying they cannot do same-sex weddings because it isn't in accordance with the divine plan. They are consistent in upholding said plan. But people who have blessed numerous adulterous unions without a thought, or blessed a union they did not expect to last for some reason, "What God has joined together let no man separate," violating the divine plan have no credibility in fighting gay marriage because they care so much about the divine plan. That just looks stupid. To say, "Well, I just don't receive it," for any cause whatsoever does not work, and you can't say anything about upholding biblical standards for marriage if you do not honor them yourself.

If you do not believe people are naturally and physically wired to be bouncing from one bed or one union to another, and sit talking about brain chemicals like oxytocin to state that we are wired to mate for life, but treat sins of promiscuity and adultery different from homosexuality, you have no credibility when you say you oppose "lgbt agenda" on grounds of it being a sin. The language "lgbt agenda" indicates an attitude of otherness too... We can't watch that show because it has homosexuality in it, but we watch unmarried sex every day and in every film, and we won't listen to songs about homosexuality that do not tempt us, but listen to songs about promiscuity and adultery, some of which very possibly might tempt us. We do this stating that we are walking out our convictions that homosexuality is "a sin just like other sexual sins and not anything different". We say fornication refers to sexual immorality period (it does), then we get entertained by what we call "fornication" and do not mind, but will not watch or listen to homosexuality "because it's a sin". We say we believe something but behave another way. Fornication is fornication, so either start acting like it is or stop talking.

Repentance is needed here. Jesus is the SAME yesterday today and forever, is no respecter of persons and doesn't make a difference for what kind of sins you are doing, as if some are actually ok (how would sin be ok?) and some not. If the church intends to be a living witness to the unconditional love, justice and mercy of our creator, then a lot more needs to be addressed than same-sex anything. Consistency is key. We are NOT being the same all the time and do not treat every sexual sin the same, especially if it is homosexuality. Ask yourself what you think is wrong to listen to or watch if it doesn't stir temptation in you, and be consistent about it. Where does your responsibility and your preacher's responsibility begin and end, exactly? Be consistent. Is it ok to watch shows and listen to songs about heterosexual unmarried sex? If so, you do not have a valid argument for the immorality of watching gay shows or listening to gay songs either, let alone to demand to have it taken off the air. You might not enjoy watching it (you might want to ask yourself why you do enjoy watching the other in that case...) but there would not be moral grounds. I'm NOT saying what you should watch or not, I'm saying, sexual sin is sexual sin, period. Do you really treat it that way? If not, think about what you need to change to make your behavior and your professed beliefs line up.


The world is watching us make a colossal difference between homosexual and heterosexual sin and claim that we do so because there is no difference!
It needs to stop.

Godspeed.

~Mother Star