Is homosexuality a sin (2)?

from believeoutloud.com

Having responded to this question earlier (see https://www.linkedin.com/homosexuality), I have to admit that my response of ‘no’ is an answer I slowly backed into.

Backing into truth is a frequent experience for me. Much wisdom comes by musing on events which persist in being re-visited … as though life demands our going through not just one but many conversions, just to remain in touch both with God and with the world swirling round us.

For example, to discover that Jesus is to be found among the poor regardless of what makes them poor, has been a major ‘backing into truth’ for me. Meeting with poor people repeatedly has gradually imprinted them as one of life’s great screen-savers, not only in my ongoing transformation, but in my understanding of Jesus as ‘Immanuel, God with us.’

The Apostle Peter had many instances of ‘backing into truth’, perhaps none more than when he had to defend himself after meeting with a group of Gentiles as recorded in Acts chapters 10 and 11.
In giving his defence to his bewildered fellow believers, the Bible records:
“As I began to speak,” Peter said, “the Holy Spirit fell on them, just as he fell on us at the beginning.  Then I thought of the Lord’s words when he said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ And since God gave these Gentiles the same gift he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to stand in God’s way?” Acts 11:15-17 (See also Acts 15:7-11)

No doubt his fellow Jews would have been perplexed with Peter’s actions. It bordered on both infidelity to his Jewish faith and outright heresy. One can visualize his friends swarming Peter with their Bibles and concordances in hand.
They’d be referencing all those verses which say in say in black and white that only the descendants of Abraham are God’s chosen people, not for God’s sake those heathen Gentiles. They would have reminded Peter that even Jesus himself said that he had been ‘sent only to the lost sheep of Israel’ (Matthew 15:24), that he had earlier commanded his disciples to go only ‘to the lost sheep of Israel’ (Matthew 10:6).

So what was Peter doing parting ways with both the Bible and the earlier instructions of Jesus?

Note that Peter didn’t respond by bashing his brothers with bible verses. Not because there weren’t bible verses that didn’t apply, but in the realization that what God was doing now required everyone to revisit the Bible with a new pair of glasses. As Peter put it: ‘as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell on them, just as he fell on us at the beginning. Who was I to stand in God’s way?’

There is no way we can equate as Christians today, the incredible hurdle Peter’s Jewish friends faced in accepting the Gentiles as among God’s chosen. Far greater than any hurdle we face in accepting LBGT believers as fellow Christians today!

So yes though I am hard pressed to point to bible verses that definitively say: ‘GAYS ARE IN', I have met many on whom ‘the Spirit has fallen.’ Like Peter I found myself asking ‘who am I to stand in God’s way?

Could it be that just as an insurmountable hurdle came down for the Gentiles to be counted among God’s own in Peter’s day, a similar hurdle is coming down for LGBT people in our day?
If so, God be praised!