Why we deserve to lose Prop 8.

So it’s January 1, 2009.
What a last few weeks we had in 2008.
It began with inviting a comedian to take our entire Sunday service to kick off Christmas – even my open minded, golf playing, now also pheasant and Bambi hunting wannabee yuppie younger brother who loves the music of Queen and has over 5000 songs on his iPod sync’d to his big Merc thinks that was pretty risky!
Then it was running a church service with two adults suspended on a plank of wood at what seemed like 30 feet high (it was more like 4 feet) all to illustrate Joseph going out on a limb for God. It felt like 30 feet high because inadvertently one of the people I spontaneously chose to help me suffers from acrophobia. And then another couple I chose might be more than a couple …maybe there were three people out on the plank. Of course we’d calculated the weight to anchor measurements – hopefully we had it right…..as we heard the plank make a breaking sound!!!
Sunday service planning and execution is no easy business.
But then came the request to host a funeral service in our worship center – for the local Buddhist congregation – incense, Buddhist altar and all.
The last month of the year was a risky month.

But is love not always risky.
We went ahead with the Buddhist ceremony in our facility because Jesus told us very clearly to ‘love our neighbors.’
Never easy to love.
Risky to love.
Hard sometimes to love.
But is that not the core of our faith.
Love.
Love moved God.
Love moved Jesus.
Love called us.

So we sit at the start of 2009.
I know this year will have its share of risky decisions. Not because our church staff is sitting around dreaming of what next whacky thing to pull off just to be controversial - although sometimes we get up to that also (how else do pastors have fun) - but because we are committed to following the way of Jesus which is a way of love.
Love can’t not be risky.

What is so sad, and so urgently in need of fixing, is that this risky form of love is the very opposite to how people perceive Christians.
Let’s take the Prop 8 battle of November.
Whether right or wrong (check out my blog of June 11, 08 “Are you martyring or being a martyr.”) Christians cannot enter into this debate without being viewed as bigots with hate and homophobia because for way too long Christians have failed to show any love - even a crumb of love towards those who do not share their views.
That historic failure leaves Christians with no right now to speak.

There is a warning Christians in America need to heed from what happened in the UK in the late 1980’s. Christian hate and bigotry left them powerless to speak with any impact and subsequently Christianity slid from a place of influence to a silent, mocked voice. The results - Evangelicals dropped from 25% of the population down to a mere 7% and are still slipping.

May 2009 be a year we put the brakes on our arrogant assumption that because we’re right we should be listened to, and may it be a year that we hit the throttle of demonstrating risky love.