How do we help the healing?

I’ve not really had any interest so far weighing in on Ted Haggard, but I’ve been reading and hearing some interesting viewpoints on the issue, and it got me thinking. Ellen Goodman’s recent column in particular focused on how Haggard’s story and the repulsion he has expressed with himself has really highlighted the fundamental differences between how the two sides in the debate on same-sex relationships view such circumstances:

How do we think about this repulsion? In the aftermath of his revelation, reactions were as bifurcated as our culture. Sympathy came in two varieties.

On the one hand, there were congregants, fellow ministers and letters-to-the-editor writers who heard a man wrestling with real demons. Their sympathy was for a sinner.

On the other hand, there were people who heard a man wounded by the culture of demonization. Their sympathy was for a man primed for repression and deception by the teaching of homosexuality as a sin.

This really brought home to me exactly why this issue is so divisive within the church; we’re talking people’s salvation here. I don’t mean that in the “who gets into heaven” sense—I mean the deeply rooted differences in exactly how to save people like Ted Haggard from the rock bottoms they’ve spiraled down to. To do that, you have to attack the root cause, and that’s where the differences are so deep. To conservatives, the homosexuality itself was the sin. Not the feelings, perhaps, but acting on them in any form. If that’s the case, then Ted’s climb back from rock bottom would involve therapy to help him deal with these feelings so he could learn how to not act on them. Basically, what he’s been doing all along with little success.

But what if his sexual orientation was not the problem? What if the root sin was denying who he is? What would climbing back from rock bottom look like then?

I suspect it might look a lot like D., a woman I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know while working against the Arizona marriage amendment. D. became involved in a same-sex relationship with S. in college. When her conservative Christian parents found out, they pulled her out of school and forbid any contact between her and S. She went through all the self-loathing Ted Haggard describes, trying to connect to God hoping he’d change her and even going to a church where she was assigned someone to watch over her and help her change. But instead of leading to healing, it only led into deeper and deeper depression and despair to the point where she wanted to die.

Eventually, D. and S. found each other again. D. got away from her parents’ influence and stopped trying to be something she wasn’t . She and S. rekindled their relationship and got married in San Francisco during those few days in 2004 when city hall was performing same-sex weddings.

Today, D. and S. are one of the healthiest couples I know. They’re the kind of couple you just want to be around because they’re so good together. Knowing them, I can’t reconcile the concept of the inherent sinfulness of same-sex relationships with the reality of how healing their relationship has been for D. Sin, no matter how good it feels at the time, always brings brokenness. Ted Haggard is example enough of that. But when D. admitted who she was and stopped trying to be something she wasn’t, when she and S. built a life together, she wasn’t made more broken—the brokenness finally began healing.

I know a lot of people like D. I know a lot of couples like D. and S. They make me wonder, what if Ted Haggard had decided not to struggle against his sexual orientation when he was younger? What if he hadn’t gotten married to a woman and had five kids with her? What if he had formed a healthy relationship with a man instead? Would that have kept him from the meth? Would that have kept him from visiting prostitutes? I don’t know, but I do know that’s exactly how healing happened for many other gay men and lesbians. And if the conservative church is wrong, if same-sex relationships are not inherently sinful, then the way we treat the issue, by urging people to change, to struggle against who they were meant to be and to pretend to be what they are not—that’s the root sin here. We the church are causing all this misery.

Now, I get that if the progressive church is wrong then being lenient on sin could contribute to it. I certainly used to think that way myself, but the evidence I saw in the real lives of the people I’ve met just didn’t bear that out. If there’s even one D. and S, even one couple whose same-sex relationship has been a source of healing, isn’t it incumbent upon us to consider whether or not it’s our interpretation of the Bible that’s wrong? If there’s reasonable doubt, shouldn’t we look for the solution that best allows people their own relationship with God and their own path to healing?

What if there were a third way to deal with this issue, a way that didn’t rely on us being right? When Jesus was asked what to do with the woman caught in adultery he saved her from the scorn of others by pointing out that everyone is a sinner. And when he told her “go and sin no more,” he didn’t define the sin for her or hound her into accepting his definition of sin. He let the grace of his salvation work on her heart in its own way. Did she stop sinning? I’m sure she didn’t, because no one has successfully cut sin completely out of their lives. She may have stopped committing the specific sin of adultery, but we don’t know one way or another because it’s irrelevant to the story. All we do know is that she received Christ’s grace anyway. Wouldn’t this be the best model for the church to follow in how we treat GLBT people? If we were to make it our goal to get in the way of the people throwing rocks and let that grace work on the would-be targets, then it wouldn’t matter how we define sin. We’d be opening the door for God to work on people’s hearts without our interference.