What is the greater sin?

I spent a very refreshing couple of days back at my alma mater, Westminster Seminary. Its biblical rigor grounds me. Each year, there is a preaching conference. I have had the privilege of attending the last two, and both have bolstered me. But this one was also very tough.

Dr. Bryan Chappell of Covenant Theological Seminary delivered the message home so powerfully that God loves me, no matter what, no matter what I have done. This truth is there for all Christians, that God has chosen them, that there is no abandonment. Sometimes, when it feels like I am out there by myself, I can lose that center.

But then we had the alumni dinner. It was another powerful occasion, sharing the successes of the Seminary, catching up, looking forward. But one of the things the Seminary participated in was a mass mailing to I think it was over 57,000 congregations in California and the other states with the ballot initiative of defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

In a stroke, the tyranny of the majority was going to undo, especially in California, the public committments that two people in love had made to one another to be exclusive to one another until death did part them. And this was celebrated as a triumph in the Seminary that is so central to my grounding in God's Word.

And it makes me sad. The mercy of God is from everlasting to everlasting, but there was no mercy in that moment. I am only one voice, standing on the other side of the line in the sand they have drawn on the issue of interpreting Scripture and homosexuality. I am not sure I am worthy, or even have the words to preach to them, they are so dear to my heart.

This was a similar fight I had when I attended. It was the reason I could not pursue ordination in the Presbyterian denominations they train pastors for. The issue was the ordination of women. There was a very intense biblical interpretive construct of why that could not be. And I do not question their scholarship. But I attended and was nurtured in a mainline Presbyterian Church with a woman pastor embodying the best in ministry.

What God revealed in the practice of God's people and what God's people saw God revealing in God's word were at odds in that moment. I chose what I saw in God's people. I chose to understand and interpret Scripture from a wider perspective, using broad themes of freedom and considering the more restrictive historic circumstances in which Paul and other authors of Scripture wrote from.

I am there again. There are people, committed Christians, for whom their sexuality is not a choice. But they are marginalized as either lying or too messed up in their sexuality to know what is 'right' by good and loving people who, I believe, have taken the interpretation of Scripture in a wrong direction.

God is good, God is love, God does not marginalize or exclude those God loves. And I accept the authority of the inspired canon of Scripture. So there is a problem in the interpretation, somewhere. Are we willing to prayerfully find where we have fallen and correct our mistakes?