Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality (13 page)

Perhaps the clearest reference in the New Testament to what Lewis called “the weight of glory” is found in 1 Peter, Todd said. There we read that “the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious [to God] than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—[will] be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1:7).

In “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis emphasizes how staggering these texts are. It seems incredible, mind-blowing, almost far-fetched that God would lavish us with glory, that the Bible not only highlights the creation-to-Creator, humanity-to-God direction of praise but also highlights its Creator-to-creation, its God-to-humanity direction. “How does this work?” I wondered out loud in Todd’s flat. “How can
God
glorify
us?”

Clustered around the New Testament affirmations of future praise and honor for Christians are other affirmations that go
a long way toward answering my question, as I’ve come to see. In the first place, the New Testament affirms the forgiveness of sins and our “inclusion” or “incorporation” in Christ as the basis for our receiving glory from God. According to Paul, for example, Christians are able to stand “holy and blameless” before God because “we have redemption through [Christ’s] blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses” (Ephesians 1:4, 7). God will judge the secrets of men, Paul says similarly in Romans,
according to the gospel
and
by Christ Jesus,
the one who died to make forgiveness a reality (2:16; 3:21—26). The divine accolade redounding to our glory on the judgment day will be based on our forgiveness and justification.

But not only on our forgiveness. Christians’ glory will be in accord with the transforming work of God’s Spirit in our lives. When Jesus died and rose from the dead, he unleashed power to live in a way that pleases God, a way that will elicit God’s praise. “Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, [Jesus] has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing,” Peter said in a sermon to the crowd who witnessed firsthand the Pentecost display of the Spirit’s power in Jerusalem (Acts 2:33). According to Paul, on this side of Pentecost, we live our daily lives by the Spirit. “For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness”—the hope of future glory (Galatians 5:5). Praise from God, as Lewis recognized, is only possible because of the work of Christ and his Spirit.

But Lewis doesn’t end there. Pondering this future glory, he says, has implications for how we think about our lives now. God’s
acceptance of us in the future, his being pleased with us, means that we may be pleased with ourselves in the here and now as we live our daily Christian lives; or, more precisely, we may be pleased that we are pleasing to God.

In Lewis’s view, however, this isn’t the same thing as pride. “There will be no room for vanity…when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased him whom she was created to please.”
⁸

At that moment,

she will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her own doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex forever will also drown her pride deeper than Prospero’s book. Perfect humility dispenses with modesty. If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself.
⁹

According to Lewis, the promise of a future accolade from God means we can be satisfied with our work—our lives, our imperfect efforts to serve and love God—now.

Many Christians, however, even many great and mature ones, saints and careful theologians throughout church history, have questioned this idea of Lewis’s. These Christians have thought that the closer we get to God, the more we must sense our own remaining corruption and sinfulness. The ladder of spiritual growth is one of paradox: the higher we climb toward heaven, the lower we see ourselves sinking into the muck and mire of our shortcomings. “Oh…if God’s people knew me, as God knows, they would not think so highly of my zeal and resolution for God, as perhaps now they do!” exclaimed the melancholy American
missionary David Brainerd. “I could not but desire they should see how heartless and irresolute I was, that they might be unde ceived, and ‘not think of me above what they ought to think.’”
¹⁰
In a similar vein, the Russian Orthodox Christian and novelist Leo Tolstoy rued his inability to live up to God’s standards. “I do not preach,” he wrote in self-disgust to critics who were all too aware of his moral failures. “I am not able to preach, although I passionately wish to. I can preach only through my actions, and my actions are vile.…I am guilty, and vile, and worthy of contempt for my failure to carry them out.”
¹¹
Brainerd and Tolstoy are just two examples. There have been and are still many Christians who express similar sentiments.

I know why these Christians talk this way. Listening to them, I hear echoes of my own feelings. As a Christian wrestling with homosexuality, I too, at times, feel like Tolstoy—“guilty, and vile, and worthy of contempt for my failure” to live out God’s ideal. And yet, since reading C. S. Lewis’s “The Weight of Glory,” I wonder: Does the New Testament really support this kind of negative self-conception?

My landlord once decided to renovate the bathroom in my apartment while I was living there. Things had gotten a little drippy and dilapidated, and when he hired someone to help him rip up the curling linoleum and replace the shower and cabinets with new ones from Home Depot, I didn’t complain. I remember coming back from a job interview one day and, as I walked past the open bathroom door, hearing the pounding of a hammer and the cracking of plastic. I poked my head inside to see what was happening. The bathtub was broken open like a giant eggshell, and a stench of moldy, water-damaged boards and soap scum was
wafting out through the jagged fissures. As I thought about it later, I realized that this image is the one many people have of their Christian lives—on the outside, clean and shiny, but on the inside, beneath the cracks, full of the moral equivalent of loathsome smells and mildew. But is this really the Christian vision? Is my stinky bathroom really the right metaphor for our new life in Christ—the more you look under the surface, the more dirt you find?

It is true that Paul viewed his efforts at obedience even as a Christian to be flawed and tainted by sin. Like a glass of water with a drop of ink dissolved in it, everything we are and do, even as “new creatures,” is tinged by our fallenness.
¹²
“We all stumble in many ways,” states James epigrammatically (3:2). And John warns: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). Yet, for all this, it would seem that the whole tenor of the New Testament is strikingly positive when it comes to describing the Christian experience of trying to live in a way that pleases God. Not triumphalistic, but positive. Maybe even
optimistic.
In short, rotten fruit isn’t the right analogy.
¹³

Sounding forth like a trumpet from the pages of the New Testament gospels, letters, poems, and visions is a message that something dramatic, invasive—something apocalyptic—happened in the death and resurrection of Jesus and the sending of the Holy Spirit. The world was irrevocably changed by the events of Good Friday, Easter Sunday, and Pentecost. By the same token, the New Testament declares that something liberating, transforming, and renewing happens every time a person turns to Jesus. Through faith in the Son, a believer’s “heart,” the core of her being, is “cleansed” and indwelt by the Spirit (Acts
15:8-9; John 14:16-17). From the inside out, from top to bottom, a believer is “sanctified,” set apart by God’s special favor (1 Corinthians 1:2; Ephesians 1:4; Hebrews 10:10); called out and rescued from the domain of darkness and transferred to the kingdom of the Son and his “marvelous light” (Colossians 1:13; 1 Peter 2:9—10); enabled to keep the requirements of God’s law (Romans 8:3; 13:8-10); filled with the fruit of righteousness, the fruit produced by the Spirit (Galatians 5:22—23; Philippians 1:11). Through faith, a believer possesses God’s own seed and an abiding “anointing” from God (1 John 2:27; 3:9); she is taught by God himself to love her fellow brothers and sisters in Christ (1 Thessalonians 4:9). “Thanks be to God,” exclaimed Paul to the Romans, “that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart…, and having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness” (6:17—18).

The human heart that has been redeemed by Christ has been made new. And that heart leads to a new way of life. And that way of life will be honored when Jesus appears on the last day with a “weight of glory,” a divine accolade.

What might this mean for a homosexual Christian?

More and more, I have the sense that what many of us need is a new conception of our perseverance in faith. We need to reimagine ourselves and our struggles. The temptation for me is to look at my bent and broken sexuality and conclude that, with it, I will never be able to please God, to walk in a manner worthy of his calling, to hear his praise. But what if I had a conception of God-glorifying faith, holiness, and righteousness that included within it a profound element of struggle and stumbling? What if I were
to view my homosexual orientation, temptations, and occasional failures not as damning disqualifications for living a Christian life but rather as part and parcel of what it means to live by faith in a world that is fallen and scarred by sin and death?

“People with same-sex attractions who profess Christian faith…will accept their homosexual desires as their cross—as a providential part of their struggle to glorify God and save their lives in a sinful world,” writes Thomas Hopko, an Eastern Orthodox priest. He adds:

They will view their same-sex attractions as a crucial part of their God-given path to sanctity…, both for themselves and potential sexual partners. And they will see their refusal to act out their feelings sexually as an extraordinary opportunity for imitating Christ and participating in his saving Passion. They will, in a word, take up their erotic sexual desires, with their desire to love and be loved, as an essential part of their personal striving to fulfill St. Paul’s appeal: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.”
¹⁴

My homosexuality, my exclusive attraction to other men, my grief over it and my repentance, my halting effort to live fittingly in the grace of Christ and the power of the Spirit—gradually I am learning not to view all of these things as confirmations of my rank corruption and hypocrisy. I am instead, slowly but surely, learning to view that journey—of struggle, failure, repentance, restoration, renewal in joy, and persevering, agonized obedience—as what it looks like for the Holy Spirit to be transforming me on the basis of Christ’s cross and his Easter morning triumph over death.

The Bible calls the Christian struggle against sin
faith
(Hebrews 12:3-4; 10:37-39). It calls the Christian fight against impure cravings
holiness
(Romans 6:12—13, 22). So I am trying to appropriate these biblical descriptions for myself. I am learning to look at my daily wrestling with disordered desires and call it
trust.
I am learning to look at my battle to keep from giving in to my temptations and call it
sanctification.
I am learning to see that my flawed, imperfect, yet never-giving-up faithfulness is precisely the spiritual fruit that God will praise me for on the last day, to the ultimate honor of Jesus Christ.

My continuing struggle for holiness as a gay Christian can be a fragrant aroma to the Father. I am coming to believe that it will be, in C. S. Lewis’s words, “an ingredient in the divine happiness.”

The gospel tells us that our obedience matters to God, that he takes note of it. He sees our struggle to live faithfully with same-sex attractions. He helps us with grace through his Son and Spirit. He values our perseverance.

In J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, there is a wonderful scene in which Sam, Frodo’s companion on the quest to destroy the evil ring made by the dark lord Sauron, reflects on the “narrative quality” of his and Frodo’s experience.

We shouldn’t be here at all [Sam says to Frodo], if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say. But that’s
not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually—their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on—and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same—like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of tale we’ve fallen into.
¹⁵

Sam goes on to wonder if he and Frodo will someday be talked about, be remembered, by those who recount their story. In Peter Jackson’s wonderful film version of
The Two Towers,
Sam says:

By rights we shouldn’t even be here [on this quest]. But we are.…I wonder if people will ever say, “Let’s hear about Frodo and the Ring.” And they’ll say, “Yes, that’s one of my favorite stories. Frodo was really courageous, wasn’t he, Dad.” “Yes, my boy, the most famousest of hobbits. And that’s saying a lot.”