Preach on, girlfriend

An astonishing sermon yesterday at Washington National Cathedral, which caused several mid-sermon walkouts, but also produced a standing ovation.

The full text can be found here.

Highlights (emphases mine):

"It is, therefore, a self-serving and cynical ploy to remain ignorant of the nature of sexual attraction. Same-sex love is neither a lifestyle, nor an option, nor a perversion, but a gift as irresistible as any person’s gift of hope and desire. Desire for a member of the same sex is no more a choice than desire for a member of the opposite sex. In both cases the longing for the other arises from depths that do not yield to, but determine, human will. Attraction testifies to the urgency with which we want to be made whole, to find flesh of our flesh facing us, since even God knows that it is not good for human beings to be alone. The crucial point here is to understand that God intends to sanctify, not overthrow, what God has made. It is blasphemous to cut off faithful witnesses to God’s power and grace to reconcile all things.

As I come to know myself, what I discover about how I am made is the natural category that I inhabit. Natural categories cannot be condemned; only behaviors can be condemned. While love cannot be chosen, it must be guided. How to discipline desire into virtue is a challenge as old as philosophy; the solution has never been to deny and condemn. Permission to be but not to act is pernicious; it is a counsel of despair. Sexual behaviors can be reprehensible and abusive and self-destructive in either heterosexual or homosexual forms, but desire that longs to express itself as tenderness and nurture and delight and union is, to that extent, like God’s longing for us. The Church ought to consider itself obligated to provide guidance for virtuous and godly living that allows all its members to grow into the full stature of Christ—but it cannot do that by telling an entire population that any and all expression of its affection is condemned. That not only puts God to the test, casting doubt on God’s redemptive power, it also abjures the Holy Spirit, given to the Church to guide it into all truth and to discern what makes for the building up of the entire Body of Christ into an edifice of praise to God."

And....

"The Church has no more persuasive witness to the unalterable and unequivocal power of God’s redemptive love than the testimony of Lesbian and Gay Christians who have heard, in spite of the contempt and double-dealing and evasion and bigotry indistinguishable in the Church from the same in the surrounding culture, that in spite of that, God’s promise is sure, God’s forgiveness pervasive, God’s love enduring, and God’s life unending, in all of which we participate, not through any merit of our own, but by the same grace received by all the saints in ages past. "

Looks like common sense is rearing its head in the wake of the elections. Stay tuned.....

In a lighter vein, Jet and I insist you race to the new release shelf at Blockbuster, tonight, and rent Girls will be Girls. So funny, that Jet insists it be bought. Hurry!