We buried my uncle this past week. It’s the second death in our family in two months, the first being my husband’s stepbrother who passed away in August. Both of these men helped teach me something important about being a Christian: we are all sinners in need of Jesus and standing on a cause is not Christ-like. Loving the lost is what Jesus did. He did not walk around holding a sign that read “Homosexuals are going to hell.”
The truth is, everyone who rejects Jesus will go to hell. The most straight, clean-living, caring person will go to hell if they do not accept Jesus as their Savior. This is what the Bible says along with condemning homosexuality. All sin is condemned in the Bible. In fact, pride is listed far more often than any sexual sin categorized in the Word of God and I know a lot of prideful Christians, myself sometimes suffering from the terrible “church lady” disease.
Both my brother-in-law and my uncle were gay and I loved them very much. Before I became a Christian, I saw nothing wrong with their gay lifestyles, but I can’t say these men were happy living against the grain. Actually, they were both tormented souls in their own way and after I became born again, both asked me if I thought they were going to hell because they were gay. I told them, “No, I don’t think you are going to hell because you are gay. People go to hell because they reject Jesus as their Savior.”
“But you are a Christian now so you think I’m a sinner,” my uncle pressed me one day as we stood on my porch while he smoked a cigarette.
“Yes, Uncle, you are a sinner. I’m a sinner too. So was Grandma.” My uncle deeply loved his mother, my grandma who lived a very clean life and was faithfully married to my grandpa until the day he died, but who never did accept Jesus as her Savior to my knowledge. “We are all born sinners. I don’t see a difference between your sin and mine,” I explained to my uncle. “Jesus died for both of us. He loves you just as much as He loves me.”
“Really?” asked my uncle as if he could hardly believe it. It was during these years that my uncle began attending church with us. My uncle and his partner would sit with our family three rows from the front near the altar and I was so grateful to have these men beside us.
When the whole gay marriage debate flamed up in California, many Christian friends asked me to put signs in our yard and join in fighting for this cause. I refused to make a fuss with the Christian community not because I believe in gay marriage, I don’t. The Bible says that marriage was made for a man and a woman and it also says that marriage is for life, though Christians overlook this other biblical principle all the time. One nonbeliever said something I thought was profound about the gay marriage debate. He stated in an editorial response in the newspaper, “Why should we have to live by the Bible when Christians don’t live by their Bible? Christians say gays can’t marry, but Christians divorce right and left. They commit adultery all the time. When Christians start living by what the Bible says, so will I.”
Powerful.
True.
And heart-breaking.
I can count on one hand Christians I know who truly live by what the Bible says. Most Christians stand righteously on causes such as gay marriage and abortion and then turn around and disobey the Bible in a hundred other ways.
At my uncle’s funeral, the song Victory in Jesus was sung. Hot, hopeful tears streaked my cheeks because I’m not sure if my uncle made his peace with Jesus before he died. I do know my uncle wanted peace with God. He pursued peace with Christ by coming to church with us these past four years and the Sunday before he died, he sat beside me where my last words to him were, “Uncle, let Jesus heal you.”
My uncle was 72 years old, a diabetic, and hadn’t been feeling well for awhile, though none of us knew how sick he was on Sunday. I put my hand on his cheek in church that day when I said this to him. My uncle closed his eyes and smiled a little smile that is forever burned in my memory. He died a few days later.