The Uninvited Guest

Have you ever had one of those dinner guests who you invited only because you have a lot of mutual friends? Have you ever gotten to the end of the evening to find that the only guest left drinking your wine and sitting in your favorite chair is the one person you were ambivalent, at best, about inviting? Yeah, you know exactly whom I’m talking about. Well, allow me introduce myself. I am that guy. I’ve been taking up a precious spot at an exclusive dinner party for well over a decade now, and I haven’t had any real plans of putting down my glass and pushing back from the table anytime soon. But lately I’m starting to get the distinct impression that the party is over, at least for me.

It all began recently when I had the overwhelming privilege of spending the day amongst a group of heroes. Not the kind of heroes our society lauds (although any one of these individuals could easily change the world, and likely will). And not the typical, seasoned leader that has normally held “hero” status in my life.

On the contrary, I spent the day sitting in a circle with a dozen mostly twenty-somethings, who have defied the odds on a journey of faith, integrity and true grit to stand as young, gay Christians caught between two worlds that have told them they should not, or cannot exist. As a thirty-something who has only recently found the voice to articulate my own journey, I was leveled by the power of a small group of young people whose stories both broke my heart and shattered my notions of what it could be like to be a gay Christian in 2011.

How was it that in a room where I had at least a decade on the young adults sitting around me, I was the one learning a lesson about conviction and commitment? I was challenged by the commitment to faith even at high personal cost evident from each and every person’s story.  I was inspired by a shared commitment to live an integrated life in spite of the voices (internal and external) that have told many of us that we cannot be both gay and followers of Jesus. And most importantly, I was laid bare by their steely commitment to justice, a cause to which I have dedicated my life and career in the pursuit of for other vulnerable people, but not on behalf of myself and people on a similar journey. While I resonated with the first two commitments, it was this commitment to justice for which I found myself without a leg to stand on.

Walking (or should I say hobbling?) away from this experience, I felt at the same time uplifted and, quite frankly, floored by the courage of conviction in the room and the tough questions posed to me by these young believers. Questions I thought I had answers to, but after hearing myself give those answers out loud, have realized don’t satisfy even me, and certainly not the people who were asking them.

The questions boiled down to this one defining issue: Why do I continue to hold my place at a table where many of the people who set the table don’t want me to dine? 

I used to answer quite confidently that the reason I held my place was because I believed God was calling me to change my corner of the evangelical church by pushing myself closer to the table and holding on tight. But over the course of the past few months, I’ve begun to wonder if that answer has really just been an excuse for participating in my own oppression and the mistreatment that comes from being treated as the uninvited guest.  Or even worse, has it been the excuse I’ve used to let the people who set the table and made the guest list off of the hook for trying to exclude me in the first place?

I’ve always opted to give people the benefit of the doubt on these issues, but as I come more fully to love myself as the person God made me and as I experience more fully the unconditional love of God and a handful of good people, I’m finding I’ve run out of excuses for those who’ve tried to keep me from experiencing that love from the beginning.

The answer isn't a simple one. From what I can tell, there are less and less of us gay Christians who are willing to sit silently at a table where we are not welcome.  In fact, many of the people I've been talking with lately are ready to overturn the damn thing and go to a dinner party where we are not only invited, but treated as the guests of honor. And as I've already shared in this post, it's a question I've been wrestling with myself.

The thing is, this particular blog is about finding hope. Even though hope may be difficult to find when we read the news and hear the painful stories of people like us, I do believe there are some bright spots on the horizon, and they are the silent majority of Christians that exist in many evangelical churches who want to fully embrace their LGBT brothers and sisters and believe that we should be invited to the table. We have allies, and many of them are the people we've been seated next to in the pew and hugged and prayed and cried with more times than we could possibly remember. And all along, they knew much more than we though they did about who we were, and grew to love us for that and not in spite of it.

So rather than sit in silence as an unwelcome guest, or rather than get up, overturn the table and storm out of the room, I believe that we gay Christians may need to do something that feels a bit uncomfortable for those of us who have a new-found confidence in who we are. That difficult step is to entrust the role of "re-setting the table" to our brothers and sisters (straight or otherwise), who are willing to use their positions of influence and integrity to validate our presence at this dinner party we call "church." It will require that we swallow a bit of our recently discovered pride, and it will involve taking a risk. But ultimately, I believe this is the only way we can experience true reconciliation, along with the elusive experience of welcome that each of us (most certiainly me), yearn for.

Here's hoping I will see each of you the next time we gather for that special, weekly dinner party more commonly known as the communion of the saints.