Wednesday, 11 April 2007 – Equality Ride Day!

When we stepped off the bus in front of Northwest University in Kirkland, Washington—just a few miles outside Seattle’s city limits—Rebecca, the stop organizer, turned to me and said, “This place has an oppressive feeling to it.” Stopping for a moment to gather my thoughts and feelings, I had to concur. Unlike the other schools who had welcomed us onto their campus, no waiting party stood at the sidewalk to usher us inside their walls. My mind recalled the true sin of Sodom.

Inside the administration building—we consulted a map to locate it—we were met by a few administrators, staff, and students for the “Introduction to the Campus Hosts”. Little pretense of hospitality was offered, minus a minute-long afterthought to send us off to our classroom visits; even the students seemed to think this conversation was unnecessary and unimportant.

We were already spread thinly: half our full strength at Seattle Pacific University for a much longer day, both breakfast and dinner included. Rebecca, Cylest, and I walked with our hosts—Kelly and Dani—into the lion’s den that was Professor Blaine Charette’s New Testament History & Literature course. The day’s topic, planned from the beginning of the semester, was “Paul’s Teaching on Human Sexuality”. Did I miss something? Perhaps it is just semantics, but didn’t Paul have more than one teaching on human sexuality? I felt the entire class was a typo. One would think that any discourse on 1st century sexual ethics might begin with some effort to set the stage.

The class introduction concluded that sexual morality was the only subject with which the gentile world was unfamiliar; this morality—obviously, Charette asserted—was an unchanging, unwavering Jewish morality unmatched by any other. And ever so typically, ancient Jewish morality translates perfectly to a modern-day Christian morality. These are of course the same assumptions that lead the everyday Christian to assume that the Bible—both Old Testament and New—is an inerrant, perfect, and profoundly Christian book. Ironically, the word, Bible, suggests something different in the original language: a collection of books, sifted out from hundreds of others by fallible scholars, from ancient Jewish oral and written traditions and mid-1st century through 4th century Christian oral and written traditions, to be passed through the fire of canonization, translation and retranslation, and interpretation down to the present day. In my opinion, such views are, at least, lazy and irresponsible. At worst, they lead us away from God instead of leading us toward God.

I walked away from class heavy. In forty-five minutes, I had been grouped with liars and murders. I had been called a sinner, for being “homosexual” but more so for being resistant to God’s continuous call to change me. According to Professor Charette, I was unnatural, lustful, and disordered: something he reminded me of more than four times as the class went on. Apparently, it was his Christian duty to tell me this. The entire day was a prayer for me to be something I am not.

My only respite: two conversations and a private prayer of my own. I must thank Dani, Kelly, and Sarah for those conversations. They were beautiful moments of true dialogue where I felt I could be myself, fully, and be listened to and accepted with equal voice. I must also thank God. After Charette’s class and the chapel service—where the Evangelical Christian, who holds in this country the largest voting majority, prayed for the “Persecuted Church”—I felt terrible: voiceless, diminished, dehumanized, and undelivered. I went behind the chapel building, alone, and prayed. And I felt peace again: suddenly I had a human voice that was strong enough to reach my Creator. God answered me with a resolve that carried me through the rest of the day. But those moments were the only time I felt God on this campus.

Ironically, the assumptions that lead us to accept the Bible as inerrant and perfect are the same assumptions that stop us from fully including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals into our churches and schools. At its base is the assumption that our worldview is shared, unchanging and unwavering, throughout all time and every category we would claim for our own. It is a form of prejudice. And the foundation of it all is fear: fear of our ability to cope with change, fear of having to wrestle with new ideas and situations, fear of losing our Self, fear of being alone, fear of being wrong.

Faith cannot grow in concrete ground. It needs good, tilled earth. So we must wrestle with the earth we are blessed with, to sift it and question it, to tug at its roots and examine them, to prepare its branches for the grafting of new truths and revelations, to water it with thought, and nourish it with fervent study. Uncertainty cannot scare us, and—like Scripture asserts—we must prepared to submit our deepest truths to the ways of God. If we are to become the new creature, transformed, we cannot fear. There is no fear in love; that is the lesson—Northwest University included—must learn.

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