LGBTQ+ LIVES, GOD'S GRACE, AND THE UMC

When I was a campus minister, a student came to my office extremely troubled by an experience she recently had with a para-church campus ministry organization.

“I realized there was something missing in my life. I saw these students living with meaning and purpose. They were a part of this religious organization. I wanted what they had. They welcomed me with open arms and invited me to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That excited me! And so I began my journey to Christ and it felt so good! Then they discovered I was a lesbian and told me I was sinful and couldn’t have a real relationship with Jesus. If it’s a personal relationship, how could they decide if my connection to Christ was right or not?”

That student’s question has long stuck with me—if, indeed, each of us is invited to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, can we dictate to one another what that relationship must look like? Isn’t the point of a personal relationship that Christ meets us where we are—which is unlike where anyone is—to offer us the fullness of life in God?

We United Methodists are a people grounded in Grace: Grace, Grace and more Grace—Prevenient, Justifying, and Sanctifying Grace! This is what sets us apart from so many other denominations: there is a Love that will not let us go, that is always seeking us, going before us, inviting us to a relationship with God that heals, forgives, frees, and restores the image of God in us. John Wesley used the metaphor of a house to describe grace, breaking it down to a three part act: Prevenient Grace meets us on the porch, inviting us to take a journey with/towards God. This Grace is always available to us, just waiting for us to say, “Yes.”

What comes next is Justifying Grace. Justifying grace is the doorway, where we experience forgiveness as we turn towards the new life God offers us. It sets us on a path to salvation through the life, death and resurrection of Christ.

To enter the house is to experience Sanctifying Grace. Here we live and move in God’s generous and expansive grace as the image of God is restored in us and we increase in the knowledge and love of God and neighbor.

I love John Wesley. I am a bit (?!) of a MethoGeek. But I have found the house metaphor to be limiting. Recently, I was at a retreat center in Cody, Wyoming. The retreat center was the former home of an Episcopal priest/artist. Her artwork is throughout the retreat center. There, high on a shelf in our meeting room, was a perfect metaphor for grace—it is a picture of two dancing figures. While they are depicted as angels, I see in them humanity and God. Prevenient grace is God extending a hand, inviting us to reach for it; justifying grace is God teaching us the steps for this life of faith—the old steps that led us astray are replaced by the rhythm of God’s love that teaches us a new way to move in the world; sanctifying grace is allowing ourselves to lose ourselves so completely to the Divine Dance that we experience a oneness with God—we are made anew as the image of God is restored in us.

While United Methodist theology and spirituality are grounded in Grace, there are some who have sought to limit the reality and presence of grace in the lives of LGBTQ+ United Methodists. In fact, there are those in the church who refuse to believe—in spite of the spiritual gifts present—that LGBTQ+ people have truly experienced God’s grace and the new life that comes from submitting to God’s Law of Love. Because it is not their experience, because it doesn’t look the same as their (straight) life, there is a damning assumption that LGBTQ+ people are beyond the grasp of God and are instead mired in sin.

When will we understand that our human categories are far too small for the fulness of God? There is nothing holy or faithful when we segregate or sever from the Body of Christ those whom God has sanctified or impose sanctions on sacraments and rituals against those whose lives we may not understand. When we do that, we mar the image of God that exists in the lives of God’s beloved children and we do harm.

I love United Methodism and while I mourn that the denomination that helped me experience God’s Grace may be dying, I will do all I can to help those around me—no matter who they are, no matter race, ethnicity, ability, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age—fall into God’s waiting arms, so they can learn the unique dance steps God seeks to teach them, so that they may lose themselves in life in God, and thereby find themselves coming into the beautiful creation God intended for them.