Don't Panic, by Rick Lawler

So what would help us in our discussion of human sexuality as a Church? I’m assuming we all love God and seek God’s will. Something along those lines is the beginning. But it is clear well-meaning committed people can come to mutually exclusive conclusions regarding God’s will.

Gregory of Nanzianzus

So the next step is knowing ourselves and being true to ourselves. What has God said to us through scripture and experience? What has God revealed to us through our prayer and relationships? I think we need to be true to that whether it places us on the left, right, middle, or all of the above. We must speak our truth without fear. If we’re convinced God’s will is for the full acceptance and inclusion of Gay folks in the Church we need to live out that truth. If we’re convinced the Bible reveals gay people as somehow living an inherently sinful life we need to live out the implications of that truth. We must speak that truth without fear.

The questions that then arise are:

• Can we agree to disagree?
• Can we love our opposite-minded brothers and sisters and accept they have different perceptions of truth?
• Can we work together to follow and serve Christ in honest debate where necessary and dialogue where possible?
• Or is it time for some of us to leave?
• Or all the above?

I guess I don’t see the present issues as anything unusual for the Church. The Church has always struggled to articulate the faith. The Church has always had lots of different answers to essential questions. We’ve sometimes been able to stay together and sometimes had to let go and strike out in a different direction from our brothers and sisters. The mystery of the Church will survive, even if the particular form of the Church we have known changes, even dramatically.

I remember reading somewhere the idea that Gregory of Nazianzus with his fourth century eyes would have found the twelfth century Church of Francis of Assissi in some ways incomprehensible. Francis would likewise struggle with many aspects of Luther’s sixteenth century Church who would not know what to do with twenty-first century Christians. (Did I get those centuries even close?) But the point is we’re always changing and we need not panic because of the changes we are struggling with.

Maybe that’s my real sense of the way forward. First, don’t panic! Trust God to be with us all, through it all, in it all. Trust the Spirit to lead us even if we’re lead in different directions. How enormous that early split between Paul and the Jerusalem Christians must have felt. One branch died and another flourished. But does anything ever really die? Isn’t every death a seed going down into the ground to be raised by God into something else? So this is my thought. There’s nothing to be afraid of, don’t panic.