Ralph Blair’s opening remarks at Philadelphia’s Pridefest, 1998.
Emmylou Harris and Robert Duvall sing a duet on the CD of “The Apostle.” It’s a mid-nineteenth century hymn written by an English woman. Here’s some of what she wrote: “I love to tell the story of Jesus and His love … because I know ‘tis true [and] some have never heard the old, old story/Of Jesus and His love.” Jesus and His love. They’re very simple words. And yet it was Jesus and His love that gave her life its most profound meaning. It was in being thus loved that she worked with other Christians for the abolition of slavery.
I remember this hymn from my childhood. Its theme formed my own self-identity, my understanding of my deepest self, long before I ever identified as gay or understood what that could mean.
“Jesus and His love” means I am loved. It also means that I’m to love, too. One way that I try to express that love is to work on behalf of other gay men and lesbians. I’ve been doing that since the early 1960’s (back then with Philadelphia’s own gay and lesbian pioneers, Clark Polak and Barbara Gittings).
People wonder why I’m still a Christian and why I identify with the evangelical wing of Christianity, where so many cultural conservatives oppose lesbians and gay men. I’m a Christian because of Jesus and His love and because I believe Christianity is true. I’m an evangelical Christian because I think that evangelical theology takes biblical truth most seriously. There are some nasty Christians, especially some who call themselves evangelical. But they are no more reasons to give up Christian truth and faith than some nasty gays are reasons to become “ex-gay.”
With as much as twenty-five percent of the American population identifying as evangelical, there are many – including boys and girls – who need to know how to put together their Christian faith and homosexuality. That’s part of a serious Christian’s lifestyle of daily discipleship. They and their families and churches, too, need to know that no hostility, not even in the abused name of Jesus, can overturn the reality of Jesus and His love.
Evangelicals get our name from the Christian evangel or gospel. The term literally means “good news.” And this good news is that God loved the world so much that He not only would do anything for us but did do it in Jesus and His love. Relying on God’s grace we can fully come alive; relying merely on ourselves we’re dead. According to the Bible, we all belong to God, the cosmic Creator who was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself. It is the worst ingratitude for any recipient of God’s amazing grace to presume to countermand God’s claim on any of us.
Self-styled evangelicals practice the sin of self-righteous cruelty when they systematically and relentlessly refuse to treat others as they themselves have been graciously treated by God and as they themselves want to be treated in matters of sexual intimacy. When they use the name of Christ to abuse to “least of these” in this way, they are according to the Bible, abusing Christ Himself. It’s high time they stop thumping the Bible and read it and apply to themselves what can be plainly read.
Writing to Christians in first century Rome, the Apostle Paul said something that I’ve quoted at the top of the page of our national newsletter for almost a quarter century. Paul wrote that he was convinced that nothing would ever be able to separate believers from the love of God in Christ Jesus. I take it that that word “nothing” surely includes arrogant homophobia and heterosexism inside and outside churches as well as misplaced lesbigaytransgendered pride.
And so I love to tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love – especially to those who’ve never really heard it above the noise of so many self-satisfied superficialities.