"And...I'm gay."

A long time ago I routinely rode the bus to and from work. One day when the bus was making its way through the downtown I saw a preacher at a street corner punching the air with one hand and holding a Bible in the other. I couldn’t tell what he was shouting but whatever it was he did it passionately. He was condemning something – perhaps everything - and from what I could tell, no one was listening because no one was even close to him or paying any attention. It’s hard being a prophet when the audience couldn’t care less.

He reminded me of another street preacher who travels the country evangelizing in the open air mostly on college campuses. Recently I watched one of his YouTube videos on how to lovingly street preach truth to sinners. He engaged only one man and it didn’t appear he made any headway with either truth or love. In fact, from my vantage point it seemed the evangelized, who was gay, was more considerate and thoughtful than the evangelizer.

In June 2022, Dillon Awes, while preaching at Stedfast Baptist Church in Watauga, Texas, took a stab at judging sin by calling out homosexuality as an abomination worthy of death. Here’s what he said from the pulpit:

What does God say is the answer for the sodomites? What does God say is the answer, the solution for the homosexuals in 2022 here in the New Testament, here in the book of Romans - that they are worthy of death. These people should be put to death. Every single homosexual in our country should be charged with a crime – the abomination of homosexuality that they have. They should be convicted in a lawful trial. They should be sentenced to death. They should be lined up against the wall and shot in the back of the head. That’s what God teaches. That’s what the Bible says. If you don’t like it, you don’t like God’s word.

The doctrinal statement from Stedfast Baptist Church supports the death penalty for murder, rape, homosexuality, bestiality, adultery, witchcraft, striking or cursing your parents and any other capital punishment outlined in the Old Testament which is not expressly done away with in the New Testament. That seems like pretty harsh stuff coming from a group of Jesus followers. I wonder what Jesus would say to Dillon if his wife slept with another man. Go ahead and pull the trigger doesn’t sound like something the Savior would say.

Jesus didn’t come into the world to pull the trigger on anyone. He came to save it by showing us how to live. He would leave the work of the conviction of sin to the Holy Spirit who would follow him, although during his ministry he encountered sinners every day, some of whom were notable enough to be mentioned in the Gospels.

Zacchaeus was a tax collector who likely was considered the personification of repugnance by his fellow Jews. Anyone working with the Romans to collect money to fund their military occupation would have been esteemed lower than a prostitute. It’s not clear he committed any specific sin, but he was simply of a character that enjoyed making money regardless of the cost to his neighbors or his reputation.

There was the Samaritan woman who came to draw water at a well where Jesus was resting and waiting for his disciples to return with lunch. The woman had gone through five husbands and she was not married to the man with whom she was now sleeping. Then there was the woman in Jerusalem whom the religious leaders brought to Jesus after they found her committing adultery. The law required the woman to be stoned to death and they brought her to him only to test him to see what he would do. He dismissed her with the counsel that she should stop sinning.

Finally, there was Judas, the keeper of the money pouch and known to all the apostles as a thief. It’s unlikely the other disciples wouldn’t have told Jesus what this pilferer was doing behind his back. The gospels are silent as to whether Jesus ever confronted him about his wrongdoing. For the man who could see the inside of every heart, he saw not only the act but also the malevolence that came with it, and he let it go.

Once a young man confided he was undergoing drug therapy to become a woman. He wanted to know if God could still love him if he continued towards this goal. A friend revealed he was having a sexual affair with his sister-in-law. He wanted advice about what to tell his wife. Another friend finished an hours-long lunch by telling me he was gay. He wanted to know if that admission would change our friendship.

Sometimes it seems the knee-jerk response to things that don’t square with the algorithm of right and wrong embedded in our brains is to judge and condemn. Such judgment is quite easy when my very own beliefs and conduct are used as the standard of measuring correctness. I don’t have to go far to find all the rationale I need to ascertain whether what I’m witnessing is acceptable.

I remember when I was a teenager I questioned the genuineness of my grandmother’s faith in front of her son (my father). It seemed to me that because the practice of her faith didn’t resemble mine - and obviously my faith walk was in perfect alignment with Scripture and above reproach - she couldn’t possibly be born again and be a real Christian. My father was indignant in a reserved, lawyerly kind of way and said if she weren’t an authentic Christian then he didn’t know anyone who could be. That was the last time I tried to judge a person’s faith only by the manner of their worship, or by their habit of reading the Bible, or by my own self-righteousness.

Dillon has already decided that sin should always be punished and the more severely the better because that’s exactly what God would do. He would tell the emerging transsexual he’s going to hell because he’s violated God’s design of his birth identity. He would tell the adulterer he’s going to hell because he’s violated his marriage vows and defiled his bed. He would tell the gay man he’s going to hell because homosexuality is the vilest of all sins and Romans chapter one is the proof. In Dillon’s world, lots of people go to hell because they don’t live and breathe precisely as he does. They don’t read his Bible version, or attend his church, or say his prayers, or conduct themselves in the mold he’s made for himself.

Making moral judgments in this world is hard. On one hand, the doctrinal books in the New Testament leave little doubt about the kind of behavior that pleases God and the kind that earns his wrath. On the other hand, there’s Jesus looking me in the eye and daring me to cast the first stone. He didn’t castigate any individual sinner his entire life, and that includes the decadent King Herod and the despot Pontius Pilate. He would have had a great deal to denounce about these two men, and the perfect time for that righteous reprimand would have been when he was standing shackled in their presence. Yet he was mostly silent.

He could have refused to deal with either the Roman centurion’s son or the other centurion’s servant, but he granted healings for both. It doesn’t take much deliberation to determine that corrupt tax collectors, lascivious prostitutes, pathological thieves, and merciless soldiers are all sinners and need at least to be loudly condemned if not physically punished. Even Ananias and Sapphira dropped dead after they lied to the Holy Spirit.

Remarkably, the Son of God doesn’t do the easy thing, which is to rebuke. He does what comes naturally to him. He willingly spends time with women he should not even look at and he listens compassionately to men who one day will kill him. He even invites a future defector to consider what fellowship with God would be like even though the man is already a weak-willed, hot-headed malcontent and deceiver.

I wonder how Jesus would have reacted to Dillon’s sermon that Sunday morning in Texas when he strongly, and perhaps even cheerfully, encouraged gunning gays in a lineup. I can’t imagine what Dillon would have done with all the sinners Jesus encountered. Wait! Everyone the Savior met was a sinner. What a bloodbath that would have been if Dillon had been the Messiah!

One group of people for whom the Lord showed no patience was the league of religious zealots who populated the Great Sanhedrin and filled the membership rolls of the Pharisaic and Sadducaical movements. He never commended them for their academic depth, or their appetite for parsing the dots and tittles of the law, or their astounding, theatrical ability to appear contrite and humble before God. According to Jesus, their signature attribute was unrivaled hypocrisy. In fact, they were so painfully sanctimonious that Jesus didn’t hesitate to tell them they reminded him of the devil, and asserted they could have been his children.

I find myself easily motivated by mercy when a friend confesses the sin with which he’s struggled for so long and hidden so well. Perhaps from simple love or the fact I can identify, the choice to forgive and encourage requires no contemplation. It’s almost an automatic reaction.

Admittedly, I have more trouble with leniency when it comes to confrontational sin, where the selfishness or transgression or immorality is on full display, like the sinner is taunting me with ever-increasing levels of indignity. Then I’m more inclined to throw the book at them, and if things go poorly for them, then I recline contentedly knowing they got what they deserved.

Possibly I’m just as pretensive as the Pharisees. With my friend I’m understanding, but with the rest I’m condescending. With my friend I’m an equal; with the others I’m morally superior. When my friend says And…I’m transitioning to become a woman, or And…I’m having sex with my wife’s sister, or And…I’m gay --- these confessions don’t trigger anything in me. I have no difficulty putting my arm around them and telling them it’s going to work out somehow. Yet, when transgendered males compete against biological females in sporting events I say Just a minute, pal! When married men sleep around like it’s just a Sunday afternoon nap I ask What the !@#$% do you think you’re doing? And when the rainbow coalition yells We’re out, proud, and loud my spontaneous stance is to yell back I can be just as loud.

I concede I’m not constrained to safeguard America from my transitioning, adulterous, gay friends with whom I’m inclined to extend love and mercy, but I feel compelled to shelter my way of life from entire populations of people who live differently from me. I might also disclose more than passing interest in creating some distance between myself and blue-state snowflakes, red-state deniers, tree huggers, open carry toters, and Hollywood trendsetters.

And before I forget, I don’t really want to spend a lot of time with pedophilic priests, Islamic jihadists, devil worshipers, hardcore socialists, delusional anarchists, aggressive atheists, East coast intellectuals, or West coast nudists. Let me add I don’t have much compassion for flash mob looters, carjackers, sex traffickers, drug runners, crazies with AR-15s, neo-Nazis, xenophobes, skinheads, gangbangers, pornographers, or anyone who loves coarse jokes, lewdness, public intoxication, bigotry, bullying, or bigamy. I could go on, but let’s not.

Maybe Dillon and David aren’t all that different. Maybe we’re fine being with people just like us, or with friends who are diverse, but when someone else says And, by the way, I’m X, Y, or Z we get self-protective and start drawing lines in the sand. Dillon and I can like you – and even love you – but first you’ll have to change, and we won’t be dropping these stones in our hands until you do.