On a small urban farm, a gardener was about to throw away a dirty tomato when he was stopped by the farm manager. “Don’t throw that tomato away,” the manager said. “But it’s dirty,” the gardener complained. The manager took the tomato, dipped it in a tub of water, then handed the shiny tomato back. “And now it’s clean,” the manager explained. Three days later, the same gardener found a dirty cucumber on the ground, but when he attempted to clean it, the manager stopped him again and said, “You cannot wash that cucumber, because it is written that dirty cucumbers need to become tomatoes before they can be washed.” This greatly confused the gardener, but he obeyed the manager’s authority and threw the dirty cucumber away.
As the first openly gay CPI student, I often feel like the cucumber in this parable. On the one hand, I have spent almost two years enjoying an incredibly welcoming Christian academic environment. On the other hand, many Christians still struggle with my willingness to live an unapologetically homosexual lifestyle. Pondering on this disparity between Christianity’s love and its law-derived hesitation, I ask, “Is heterosexuality truly a prerequisite for salvation and moral righteousness?” In other words, should cucumbers become tomatoes before we wash them and stack them neatly into a produce box?
This brings to mind the barriers some Christians face when they are homosexual. Many of us know one of these individuals within our own congregation. They sing beautifully in our choirs, help with our Bible studies, volunteer at homeless shelters, and display the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Despite their righteousness, however, some of us still call them unclean, and believe they need to change their sexuality before we can truly and fully embrace them. I argue this is no different than when first century Jewish Christians avoided Gentile Christians. If God eradicated the drama of those ancient differences, can’t God do the same for our contemporary struggle with homosexuality? I hope so, because if we believe that what is written has more authority than the Holy Spirit, we will continue to chase homosexuals away from Christ, and our congregations will split apart.
For decades, I thought it was blasphemous to challenge the early Christian church’s stance on homosexuality, because I associated the Holy Spirit’s guidance with the irrefutability of an apostles’ wisdom. But I am no longer afraid to challenge the apostles, because Paul’s own letters suggest he and the other apostles were capable of misinterpretation. For instance, before God used Paul and the Jerusalem Council to confirm Gentiles did not require circumcision for salvation, some apostles argued the exact opposite even after they were blessed with the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. Therefore, the apostle’s original stance on uncircumcised Gentiles displays a moment in Christian history when the Spirit had to correct the apostles after they had already taught their misinterpretations as divine facts. Based on the resulting recantation, we know God’s spiritual leaders can teach an inaccurate or outdated message for hundreds of years before the Holy Spirit finally corrects their understanding of righteousness and the law.
This suggests the Holy Spirit is an infallible godhead of the Trinity working on the ignorance of fallible human ambassadors. In that case, just like the ongoing process of sanctification, the Holy Spirit was gradually updating and clarifying the apostle’s understanding of God’s will, and the apostles had to recant their prior stance on circumcision to fit this newly revealed truth. For this reason, I suggest the Holy Spirit did for the apostles what Jesus Christ attempted to do for the Pharisees. To compare, Jesus also told the Pharisees they had an incomplete understanding of the law and righteousness, and the Pharisees rebelled against Jesus’ corrections just like Peter rebelled against Paul.
When we establish that our religious forefathers were not perfect and needed the Holy Spirit to correct their beliefs for the greater good, a precedent is set for the Holy Spirit to similarly adjust contemporary expectations on behalf of groups we deem unclean, including homosexual Christians. Relating these instances of apostolic error and divine correction to the Christian church’s current debate on homosexuality, perhaps the Holy Spirit still has additional lessons to teach us about human sexuality and marriage. For example, maybe the Holy Spirit is compelling congregations to love and support respectable homosexual Christians as moral equals just like the Holy Spirit compelled first century Jewish-Christians to support respectable Gentile Christians. If the Holy Spirit revises and updates our relationship with the law, a truer reflection of righteousness may be revealed that contradicts the early Christian church.
If the Holy Spirit is asking Christians to affirm homosexual Christians like it asked Jewish-Christians to affirm Gentiles, how does a church transition into having gay-affirming congregations? Once again, the integration of Gentile believers remains the most effective example of how contemporary Christians can embrace homosexuals, because the parallels between uncircumcised Gentiles and homosexual Christians are arguably comparable. Just like some first century Jewish-Christians struggled to accommodate Gentiles whose rejection of circumcision labeled them unrighteous, some 21st-century Christians struggle to accommodate me because I reject heterosexuality. Likewise, if Paul argued the only prerequisite for a Gentile’s salvation was faith in Christ, then the only prerequisite for a homosexual Christian’s salvation is faith in Christ. Venturing further, if Paul, undermining ancient religious laws, said circumcision was not truly a standard of righteousness, a contemporary Christian can also plausibly argue heterosexuality is not a standard of righteousness despite pre-existing laws.
Based on these parallels, changing the status of homosexual Christians is similar to changing the status of uncircumcised Gentiles. Therefore, the inclusion of homosexual Christians only requires us to appraise homosexuals by their sincere faith in Christ, and their willingness to be a servant of God, while also asking homosexual Christians to adhere to the rest of our Christian values. For example, in addition to saying Gentiles did not require circumcision, Paul doubled down on other serious laws and customs that offended Jews greatly. In other words, the Holy Spirit eradicated one small stigma to help Gentiles adhere to the rest of the law, as if giving a young child a booster seat to sit at the table among equals. Likewise, when we decide a practicing homosexual can be righteous, that homosexual Christian is held to a higher moral standard by the very same religious institutions we currently deny them access to, including marriage.
While some Christians argue churches should not validate same-sex marriages, Christians like me argue this stance is counterintuitive to moral formation and righteous living. To explain, when homosexuality is spiritually destigmatized in the same fashion as uncircumcised Gentiles, a congregation will expect its homosexual Christians to save themselves for marriage. Returning to Paul, marriage was a way for Christians to resist the temptation to commit immoral acts of passion. For Paul, it was better to be married and exercise those needs in a disciplined and respectable way than to resort to casual encounters and prostitution. In that case, an affirming congregation supports same-sex marriage, because it encourages homosexual Christians to model Christian romantic expectations instead of engaging in sex without a spiritual commitment.
Furthermore, same-sex Christian marriages also give the children of homosexual Christians healthy Christian role models. Some of us do not always consider that we harm these children of homosexual Christians when we distance homosexual Christians from the church. As any Christian knows, faith usually begins at home. Therefore, we risk losing some tomatoes when we refuse to embrace our cucumbers. Bringing homosexuals into the fold as equal participants serves the sanctification of their children. Even Paul agreed with this in a letter to the Thessalonians, teaching fledgling churches that a parent’s belief made otherwise unclean children holy.
In the end, until the Holy Spirit explicitly makes God’s will known to us all, who truly knows for certain whether the Church should affirm homosexuals or not? For this reason, I cannot say who is right or who is wrong. All I can do is show that Scripture sets a precedent for challenging Christian forefathers who are usually considered irrefutable. After all, if Scripture shows that even our esteemed apostles misunderstood law and required the Holy Spirit to correct them, there is a chance that the Holy Spirit may need to correct us on the morality of homosexuality. Continuing this premise to explore hypothetical outcomes, if the Church ever consequently determined heterosexuality is not a prerequisite for moral righteousness — just as we abandoned countless Levitical laws in the past — homosexual Christians are then free to practice a higher standard of righteousness, mirroring the lifestyle and expectations of their heterosexual counterparts, and this normalization will go on to bless their children with stronger faith in Jesus Christ.
As you ponder on my ideas, I leave you with one last question. If you found a dirty cucumber in your vegetable garden, would you wash it and add it to your harvest, or would you throw it away because it failed to become a tomato? As you answer this question, remember the Lord, our savior, demands a full box and a bountiful harvest.