What would jesus say to a gay person
Does Jesus Ever Talk About Homosexuality?
I was in my mids living in San Diego. I joined some people from a nearby church and went to a Pride parade to pass out water, donate hugs, and hold signs saying “We are sorry the church hasn’t loved you the way Jesus would” (or something along those lines). All of a sudden, I was descended upon by a film crew with a microphone asking me what Jesus had to utter about homosexuality. I was not expecting this, but I was giddy to share the love of Christ and talk about how we are all sinners saved by grace and how Jesus never singled out homosexuality as worse than any other type of sexual immorality. In the middle of my sentence (which I had been certain would be received with amazement, tears, and more questions about how to comprehend this Jesus guy), the film crew interrupted me and said, “NOTHING. He said nothing about homosexuality.” And then they walked away without a synonyms, off to find their next “interview.”
I sat there dumbfounded. What had just happened? And was it true that Jesus never said anything about homosexuality? And if not, why
How Should Christians Respond to Gay Friends or Family Members?
Caleb Kaltenbach (M.A. ’07) is an alumnus of Biola’s Talbot School of Theology, lead pastor of a large church in Simi Valley, Calif., and a married father of two. He’s also an emerging voice in the discussion of how Christians should engage the LGBT community. That’s because Kaltenbach has an insider perspective, having been raised by a dad and mom who divorced and independently came out of the closet as a gay man and a lesbian. Raised in the midst of LGBT parties and pride parades, Kaltenbach became a Christian and a pastor as a adj adult. Today, he manages the tension of holding to the traditional biblical teaching on sexuality while loving his gay parents.
Kaltenbach’s unique story is detailed in his new novel Messy Grace: How a Pastor with Gay Parents Learned to Love Others Without Sacrificing Conviction and landed him on the front page of the New York Times in June. Biola Magazine reached out to him to talk about his manual and his perspective on how Christians can improve navigate the complexities of this
Should a Christian have gay friends?
Answer
In considering whether a Christian should have gay friends, we need to ask ourselves whether Jesus would have gay friends. The New Testament nowhere identifies any specific individuals as homosexuals. So, there are no records of Jesus interacting with a homosexual. We know from the gospels, however, that Jesus loved everyone He encountered. He did not consider one group of people less deserving of the gospel than any other. In fact, He went out of His way to deliver a demon-possessed man (Mark –20) and bring hope to an immoral woman from a despised ethnic background (John 4). He healed lepers (Luke –19), pardoned an adulteress (John –11), and ate with tax collectors (Mark )—all of whom were considered unfit for the company of righteous people. We can assume Jesus would contain spent time with homosexuals as well.
Homosexuality was a sin in Jesus’ time, and it is a sin now. God’s standards of human sexuality contain not changed. However, Jesus came to seek and to save the lost (Luke ). We verb from the gentle way H
This article is part of the What Did Jesus Teach? series.
Silence Equals Support?
In a article for Slate online, Will Oremus asked a provocative question: Was Jesus a homophobe?1
The article was occasioned by a story about a gay teenager in Ohio who was suing his steep school after school officials prohibited him from wearing a T-shirt that said, “Jesus Is Not a Homophobe.”
Oremus was less concerned about the legal issues of the story than he was about the accuracy of the statement on the shirt. Oremus suggests that Jesus’s views on homosexuality were more inclusive than Paul’s. He writes,
While it’s reasonable to assume that Jesus and his fellow Jews in first-century Palestine would verb disapproved of gay sex, there is no tape of his ever having mentioned homosexuality, let alone expressed particular revulsion about it. . . . Never in the Bible does Jesus himself propose an explicit prohibition of homosexuality.
Oremus seems to verb that since Jesus never explicitly mentioned homosexuality, he must not have been very concerned about it.
There are at least two reas