While there is widespread ambiguity about how to arrive at a Biblically unified understanding of gender, sex, and sexuality… there’s no ambiguity about the mistreatment, and marginalization of people. When we deny a human being full inclusion in the church it sends us headlong into a whole host of Biblical directives that tell us not to shun, label, scapegoat, marginalize, or otherwise, victimize any human being. We think we're good followers of God’s law by excluding gay people. Do we not realize that the people who killed Jesus also thought they were good followers of God’s law? Remember how the religious leaders wanted to get Jesus killed before sundown? Why? Sabbath started at sundown, and God’s law prohibited work on the Sabbath. In other words, they broke one law to make sure they didn’t break another law! (When you’re murdering someone you want to make sure you do it according to God’s law.) We, contemporary religious people, are operating in the same fashion. We’re breaking one law to fulfill another law. We victimize gay people to stay Biblical. This is an untenable position.
We cannot, of course, say that people who identify and practice as homosexual are always right, but neither can we say this of the heterosexual. We don’t know. We don’t possess that kind of insight. What we do possess is the intuition that everyone should be loved. Additionally, we have the revelation of the passion story, that is, that our way of peace and our way of ordering is built upon unconscious (and conscious) victimization. But, it’s not his way of ordering or his way of peace. Jesus showed us the truth: the outsider is innocent. If Jesus treated every outsider in his time with love shouldn’t we treat them in our time with love? If Jesus became one with the marginalized in the first century, shouldn’t we become one with the marginalized in the twenty-first century? And if Jesus healed, forgave, had dinner, befriended, and identified with the foreigner, cripple, divorced, glutton, drunkard, extortionist, prostitute, diseased, tax collector, Samaritan, beggar, leper, least of these… can’t we, at least, welcome gay people into our church?