Jesus loves me, this I know. And not because the bible tells me so. I’m gay and I’m Christian, and therefore, some people think the bible says I’m going to hell. Well, think again.
I was born into the church. My parents are missionaries, their parents were missionaries, their parent’s parents were missionaries and, well, I think you get the picture. My entire youth was spent going to church meetings, events, prayer sessions and I even did a couple of years missionary work myself.
I met people from all walks of life. There were drug addicts, ex-convicts, alcoholics and murderers. They were people who were black, white, coloured, fat, thin and somewhere in between. They were people who were straight, bi, gay, trans* and in the end none of that actually mattered. What mattered was that in my eyes they were all loved by the big JC.
At the age of 12 I started realising that I was different. Firstly because the church that I belonged to was quite an eccentric one and the other kids at school – the ones who didn’t go to my church, which was basically everyone else – picked on me for this and secondly because I was having these funny twinges in the bottom of my stomach when I saw attractive girls… although it took me a while to figure out what that was all about.
When I was 20 I realised that I couldn’t ‘hide’ any more. I didn’t want to marry a guy just to make my parents happy. It would have been unfair to him and even harsher on me. So I came to a junction in my life that I did not really know how to cross. Be gay and forget about my faith? Or march on in my faith and deny who I really was? These were the only two options I could imagine. After a year of living option one, I could see that my problem just wasn’t going away, so I decided to do some deeper research into my faith.
I don’t want to get all biblical on you here but, unfortunately, I will have to for a second to explain why you’re not going to hell for being gay. A lot of people read into the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and see it as God condemning gays to death. But that’s not correct. What it is condemning is the practice of rape. Actually, all the instances of what seem to be condemnation of homosexuality in the bible are not quite as they appear.
When you look at the etymology of the words in the bible in their original form it does not say ‘a man should not lie with another man’. What it says is ‘a man should not lie with a boy’. Historically, at the time those lines were written, it was common practice for Roman men to take on boys as forced sexual partners. There was no free will involved.
So the bible is condemning paedophilia, not homosexuality. And the two, as we all know, are mutually exclusive.
We can be Christian. And we can be gay. We can also go to church. Although ‘church’, as it stands, is an interesting proposition, since so many think of a church in a Catholic context, even though every religion has its own church. Or temple. Or shrine.
When I was younger I had a friend who was from a Muslim background. She had never stepped into a church building her entire life. My younger sister invited her along to our youth group one day and she had a million and one questions about what it would be like.
‘Will there be a steeple? Will there be a bell? Will there be nuns in habits and priests with bald heads?’
And the answer to all those questions was no. No priests, no nuns, no bells and no steeple.
Most people for some reason have it in their head that this is what makes up all churches, but this only describes the Catholic Church. There are Christians who are not Catholics – in fact Catholicism is just one of hundreds of denominations of Christianity.
The true meaning of church for me does not involve bells or nuns or priests. The real church is in the heart. It is in the words of Jesus himself, from the Book of Matthew – ‘Come to me all you who are weary’ and I will love you and accept you as you are (ok, so that last bit is my interpretation of what JC says, but if he’s inside each of us – as I believe – then I think I can speak for him, or him through me).
So it’s not God who doesn’t want gays in Heaven. It’s only people who have forgotten how to love.
Joey Cookman (the other JC)
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