God, save me by your grace! And spare me those believers!

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast.–Ephesians 2:8–9So what follows is my rant, in the tone of the Gay Catechism: stating the faith for all to hear and come to believe: If we are saved by grace through faith, what’s wrong with my faith? Isn’t my faith good enough for God to decide to save me for Christ’s sake, sheerly out of God’s grace? Are the promises of God reliable, or are they not? The Christian church needs to be clear on this, or all the rest of it is worthless myth and pointless tradition.Of course, conservatives say that we must repent, we must heed the call to repentance. Well, I’ve already repented of everything I can think of, several times over, and of every thing I’m capable of. And some things don’t repent away! They aren’t gone because I have repented. Some place Jesus says pluck out your eye if it causes you to sin. Well, how do I tear out my heart? Most Christians over the centuries have understood that as rhetorical or hyperbole because it is impossible. My sex, my race, my orientation, my gender identity, my sexual drive simply do not go away no matter how much I feel sorry or regret or promise to have done with them. Paul’s advice that I must die to self and rise to Christ sounds very pious and religious, but he must be thinking of other things, because a big part of me seems to be “cast in concrete”. And the concrete which is me is not my sinful, rebellious nature but my very self. Even Paul seems to know that, for doesn’t he say somewhere else, “the very thing I don’t want I do, and what I do want I can’t?”

The truth is, repentance is never a complete or successful renunciation of all that is wrong with me, or of me in total. Repentance in the Greek language means turning, and repentance in the New Testament means that I turn from my path to hear the promises of God, and to follow Christ’s path.

Christ calls me to love and to risk and to take up my cross and be willing to lay down my life. But even though it seems he asks for perfection on our part, he never demanded it from the people he forgave, healed, accepted, welcomed or defended. He was born among the poor. He as a refugee like undocumented foreigners. He accepted the lepers and the outcasts. He hung out with sinners. He turned back the mob which was about to stone a woman to death because of a sexual sin. He was also accused of being lawless, sinful, and trying to corrupt the nation and destroy religion!! He was also false accused, and, as he died with criminals he forgave the very people who executed him.

That is the Christ I am asked to follow, to accept as my Lord, and whose commandment I am expected to obey. And that commandment—in contrast to the Ten Commandments or those 613 detailed legal requirements of the Law of Moses—is to love others.

So if I am doing my best to love, if I am doing my best follow Christ—generously and sacrificially, selflessly and constantly—if I have already turned from my own aimlessness or wandering like a prodigal son or a lost sheep and hear the divine promises to accept me (save me) purely out of God’s grace and not by my own efforts or achievements, then all I have by which to cling to these promises is my faith that they are true, and that they are available to everyone.

So, don’t tell me that there is fine print in the contract, or that I will be excluded at the last second or on the judgment day because of some failure on my part, some sin I forgot to confess or didn’t believe was sinful, or because I loved the wrong person, or because I didn’t have enough faith. Let me be!! Let me be the child God created. Let me trust the promises of God, unmolested by somebody else’s judgmentalism or doubt or hair-splitting. I want to be a spiritual person, and I know that the Spirit of God will guide me and help me, if only other so-called Christians will just let up, “back off” and take care of the enormous beam in their own eye instead of the speck in mine!

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles