This week the SCOTUS put into law the movement that we all saw coming. No one is surprised that same-sex marriage is now the law of the land. Some Christians have looked at this as the end of Christianity. However, I think of this as more of the start. A couple years ago, I wrote a book called Is Love Wrong? The book followed the deep friendship that I had with a gay man in Dallas. Don and I became good friends who had deep differences in the way we lived our lives. Cancer cut his life short in 2010. I wept openly for my friend. His partner killed himself several months later as he struggled to deal with the grief. During our friendship I was able to share unapologetically the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the hope that we have in Christ to not only Don, but the gay community.

I know that if Don were alive today he would be rejoicing with the Supreme Court’s decision.

WHY WE SHOULD REJOICE

I rejoice as well. Not because I have given up traditional marriage. Rather because the landscape of Christianity is going to change. It will no longer be cool or socially acceptable in the South to attend a church. Churches, like ours, holding to the traditional view of marriage will be marginalized as irrelevant and foolish. But all first century Christians were seen as irrelevant and foolish. But the belief in an actual Jesus and an actual resurrection for the dead has propelled Christianity to be the largest religion in the rest of the known world. My deep set of passionate beliefs created a deep friendship for Don and me. He wanted the very thing that was my existence. He would ask question after question at restaurants and coffee shops trying to figure out what made me hold fast to words written over 2000 years ago. Sometimes he would cry in deep remorse over the sin in his life as he wondered why Jesus would die for him. Other times he would rail in frustration at the antiquated beliefs of our conservatism and question how I could believe in such a broken institution as traditional marriage.

I think the reason why Don and I connected so well was that I went into his neighborhood. I spent time at his house and with his friends where he felt comfortable. He wasn’t worried to be seen as the gay guy. He was just Don in his world. The SCOTUS decision has now opened up more opportunity for those who were marginalized to approach Christ from a place of comfort as opposed to a place of judgment. The pharisaical moral majority that made people feel inferior is now gone. We who marginalized so many as the moral majority are joining the ranks of the marginalized giving God back his role of judging those who don’t subscribe to our orthodox set of beliefs.

MY PRAYER

I pray the result of this SCOTUS decision is that a spirit-filled minority will rise and the Christian public square will be filled with love even though our beliefs may be different. Let me break down for you what we as Christians believe beyond traditional marriage. We believe that God created the earth (not getting into young earth v. old earth here). We believe God spoke the world into existence and gave men and women he created the breath of life. We believe sin came and disrupted that which was perfect and marred the the relationship between God and man. God made a way for sinful man to be reconciled to himself by sending Jesus (And not only that, we believe Jesus isn’t just a man, he is a God-man). The incarnation sounds crazy. But we believe it. We believe that this God-man is not a myth, but he walked around earth healing people and destroying the works of the devil (Oh yeah, we believe in an actual Satan, too). Then Jesus was murdered on a wooden cross outside Jerusalem around 33 AD. He was buried in a tomb nearby of which we don’t know the exact location, because those who would go back to commemorate his death and remember him never had a chance to–because he rose from the dead. We believe that Jesus’ death was more than a tragedy of an innocent cynic crucified by a government drunk with power, but rather Jesus died as part of the cosmic plan to forgive sin and reconcile God and man. Jesus’ blood was shed for those who would believe and be reconciled to God. Now we wait for Jesus to come back the way he came (he left by floating into the clouds).

“I pray the result of this SCOTUS decision is that a spirit-filled minority will rise.”

So believing in traditional marriage in Post-Christian America will be crazy. Believing God’s design for marriage is one man and one woman will probably be insane. However, isn’t it crazier to believe everything else Christians believe? Traditional marriage is just the tip of the current social iceberg.

WELCOME TO POST-CHRISTIAN AMERICA

I hope to have more friends like Don. I hope to have more people that look at me with an inquisitive look as I tell them my traditional view of marriage. And I’m excited to share what they may think to be a laughable story of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. I’m grateful that we are going to see an end to Americanized Christianity. The god we conformed into our image of comfort will fade from orthodoxy and the real Christians will rise.

Over the next few weeks you are going to watch the former moral majority stand up to save our “way of life” furthering the divide between “us” and “them”. I want to challenge Christians to stand up and ask God to save souls damned to hell and use you to do it, as opposed to saving a “way of life” comfortably coasting to destruction.

I love you all,

Pastor Chris