This blog post is for both religious and secular people.  In light of the recent Boy Scouts controversy, as a Christian woman I would like to say a few words about God’s love and his attitude towards sin.

The label “Christian” means that I live my life with the intent of resembling Jesus Christ.  I hope this post speaks Jesus’ words and not mine.  I take my label seriously and don’t want to misrepresent my cause.  The first part of this post is a concept taken from the Bible.  As for the application to Boy Scouts, my task is not to tell you what you should believe.  I just want to make you think, and to represent Christ to the best of my ability.  And as always, I would love to hear your thoughts about this.

Because I am a Christian, I strive to love my neighbor. Even if my neighbor happens to be attracted to the same sex.  

Now before you make any assumptions about who I am and what I’m about, let me unpack what I’m trying to say.

Let’s not forget the story

Some of you reading may be Christians — let me start by reminding you that you were not born this way.  You did not start out in a right relationship with God.  And you did not earn your right relationship with God.  God loves you not because of anything you do (or don’t do).  He loves you solely because he IS love.  1 John 4:8 says, “Whoever does not know God does not love, because God is love.”  He loves you because of Himself: Jesus.  Jesus, the source of all love, is SO full of love that He does not discriminate between who he loves.  His love is powerful toward everyone, like gravity, wanting each person to be near.

Some of you reading may not be Christians — let me start by telling you that God’s love doesn’t discriminate. Jesus didn’t come to be born on Christmas to come help the people who pretend they already have their lives all together.  One time He said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick” (Matthew 9:12).  He came for the people who are broken and who are constantly told they’re not good enough.  The people who, in fact, know that they are not good enough.

Jesus came for the people who know they could really use a hero — even though they don’t deserve one.

Secondly, I would like to remind you all that none of us are worthy of being in God’s club.  To be in a relationship with God, we need to be absolutely perfect.  He can’t stand sin.  He hates it.  He can’t stand murder or cheating or lying.  He hates selfishness just as much as He hates murder.  God hates “holier-than-thou” attitudes just as much as He hates premarital sex.  And He hates homosexual behavior just as much as He hates heterosexual lust.

And yet, He loves the pastor who looks at porn just as much as the He loves the girl who sleeps with another girl.  He loves the druggie just as much as the pregnant girl.

God doesn’t favor the virgin over the girl who had an abortion.  He doesn’t favor the straight Boy Scout leader over the gay one.  He couldn’t possibly love any person any more or any less because He loves us all INFINITELY. 

God, a perfect and holy and righteous God, is crazy about YOU.  The most powerful person in the universe sees the hardship you’ve gone through and He is grieved by it.  Your maker sees the suffering that our evil has caused, and He has compassion on us.  He loves you, no matter what you’ve done or who you are, “for God does not show favoritism” (Romans 2:11).

And He hates sin.  At the same time.  No matter which sin it is. Habakkuk 1:13a says of God, “Your eyes are too pure to look upon evil; you cannot tolerate wrong.”

So because God loves us, He can’t stand being away from us, even though we have looked at His commands, disobeyed Him, and told Him, “Screw your rules.  I’ll live how I want.”  How could we possibly be separated from our sins?

The union of love and justice

God looked at you and me and said, “Child, you are not your sin.  What you do is not who you are.  They are separate things.”  He knew this in His mind. But in order to make it reality, in order to make it real to us, he came to meet us right where we were, in our dirtiness and our suffering.  He came to set us free and to make us clean, so we could enjoy him shamelessly and be loved by him completely.

So he banished his own son from his comfortable mansion and said, “Go show them how much I love them.”  Not only did Jesus give up heaven, and not only did He live with (and heal many of) the diseased and the outcasts, but he willingly died the most painful death known to man.  He was tortured, he was wounded — his gashes were dug into with a cat-of-nine-tails five, six, seven times over.

Paul describes his own witness of Christ’s great exchange in 2 Corinthians 5:18-19a: “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them.”

An innocent man was sentenced to torturing and death.  Why?  What punishment was He taking?  The punishment we deserved for doing things God hates.  A few verses later, Paul states, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Jesus took all the punishment and wrath of God that we deserved.  Every lie you’ve told, every person you’ve slept with, every evil intent of your mind, Jesus redirected that hatred onto Himself, even though He was innocent.  The prophet Isaiah wrote of Jesus (700 years before his birth, I might add):  “But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5).

An innocent man died because of you, and because of that man, you go innocent before God.  He trades places with you.  If you merely choose to accept this trade of accounts, you’re innocent.  You’re forgiven.  Not only that, but you now belong in Heaven, because that’s the possession that was on Jesus’ record.

Let’s remember that God chose to let us in his club.  I’m not talking about some church building or social club.  I’m talking about Heaven.  He invited all of us, even if we didn’t want to come, even if we’re not Christians.  We’re all invited to Heaven, a place we don’t earn our way into.

We’re not forced to accept, but we’re all invited into a relationship with a God who wants to entrust to us everything he has.

Back to Boy Scouts

That being said.  When it comes to the Boy Scouts decision that’s coming up soon (as of the time I’m writing this post), because of what I’ve learned about God, I can see both sides.  I can see how allowing gay scouts and leaders, since you’re allowing other equally broken and sinful people into the mix, could be risky.  It can and will have implications on how the program works and how people react.

On the other hand, banning all gay-identified people from Boy Scouts perpetuates the idea — even if it’s not intended this way — that it’s okay to reduce people’s whole core identity to a label about one aspect of their lives.  That we should define people not by the good that God can do through them (see Romans 8:28), but fear that we may have of them and what they are capable of (1 John 4:18).  It keeps certain people whom God loves from having to brush shoulders with and serve with other people whom God loves.  It keeps those who are supposed to represent Jesus, from having as many opportunities to show the relentless, merciful love of God to certain leaders and certain boys who often don’t hear much about God besides that He hates them.

When I was a sinner, an enemy of God (James 4:4), when I did things he hates, he didn’t label me “sinner.”  He called me his dearly beloved daughter.  He washed me clean.

When it came down to his hatred of sin and his love for my soul, he chose, well… both.  God is love, but he is also the unchanging standard of justice (see Psalm 11:7).  He still hated my sin (sweeping any wrongdoing under the rug would be the farthest from justice), but He redirected the punishment for that onto his own son — an innocent man!  He loved an estranged sinner more than His own innocent son!  And yet Jesus was the only man who was strong enough to take this punishment on himself and still live.

When it came down to either rejecting me because of my sin, or separating my sin from my identity, He chose the latter.

 

No matter what Boy Scouts decides, I know that I’m glad God saw me for who I really am — that is, who he has given me the freedom be.  I couldn’t be me without him.  I would just try to be whoever everyone tells me I am.

No matter what you label yourself as, I’m glad God has created you, named you before language even existed, and wants to call you his own.

No matter your birth, my Father wants you to be reborn into his family as a son or daughter.

No matter how many clubs you’re allowed in, if you accept Jesus’ plea to be your friend, he will tell the bodyguard at the door of heaven to let you in.  And I hope we can be friends too.

See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.  Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.  All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.”  ~ 1 John 3:1-3