Encore Posts: Another great question concerning the threads from previous weeks: love is love, homosexual inclinations, physical deformities, and now: virtuous acceptance of sin.
It shouldn’t surprise us that a sinful world misidentifying love would also fail to accurately recognize hatred. This has been a moving target over the past ten or twenty years. The sequence was tolerance, acceptance, celebration, and elevation. This sequence applied a moving standard to Christians. We were deemed hateful by failing to meet the current pagan standard of what is allowed outside of the 6th commandment.
Tolerance: you will allow LGBTQ lifestyles. It was the toe-in-the-door. The pagan world told Christianity that we shall not define acts outside of the 6th commandment any way other than acceptable. The choices wouldn’t be called preferential or good. But, anything less than acceptance was deemed hateful.
Acceptance: LGBTQ lifestyles are good and acceptable within your social circles. There are two things happening here. You must allow these folks into your social circles. And, their absence from your social circles is cause for suspicion. Your failure to include LGBTQ persons in your peer group may see you judged as a hater by this former standard.
These first two goal post positions defined my youth and young adulthood. I was coming of age during this shift. Churches began to allow lifestyles defined solely by their setting aside 6th commandment. Sex is a gift only rightly enjoyed by a man and a woman, married to each other until death. Society disagrees with God’s Law and was succeeding in pushing incremental change into the church. Soon, LGBTQ persons would be invited to the altar, then the pulpit, then the church hierarchy.
Celebration: LGBTQ is a laudable lifestyle. All aspects of culture and faith must embrace it within themselves. Here, the lifestyle must be judged “good” in a moral sense. You may not call the thing sin any longer. Our identification of sexual sins as sin is sinful, in the eyes of our pagan culture. Instead, we must recognize and celebrate the LGBTQ persons in their lifestyle.
Elevation: this lifestyle is morally superior to CIS gendered existence. CIS is a pejorative term that may not appear in your lexicon yet. It means all forms of heterosexuality and fixed gender identity. The category of people diminished by this term also includes folks engaged in unacceptable heterosexuality, according to the 6th commandment.
It is preferable in the current stage of elevation for people to be in the LGBTQ community. They are allowed to exclude and belittle CIS persons for their closed-mindedness and hateful views. Consider TV, film, and other media. More often than not, the LGBTQ characters are smarter and morally superior to other characters in portrayal. The killer, the evil actor, or the perpetrator are most likely a CIS male, or for want of one, a CIS female.
Each of these progressive phases encourages sin. “Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.” (Romans 1:32)
Love can never encourage sin. That’s the opposite of love. Behavior that encourages our neighbor to sin is actually hatred. If we allow our neighbor to persist in the idea that their sin doesn’t separate them from God, we want them to perish eternally. What can that be, other than hatred?
“For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous. Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you. We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” (1 John 3:11-15).
Our Lord died to forgive sin. Faith in that promise flees from sin. Tolerance, acceptance, celebration, and elevation of sin are a rejection of the forgiveness that Jesus won for us.
Live instead in that forgiveness.
Rev. Jason M. Kaspar
Sole Pastor
Mt. Calvary Lutheran Church & Preschool
La Grange, TX
and
Mission planting pastoral team:
Epiphany Lutheran Church
Bastrop, TX
©2021 Jason Kaspar. All rights reserved. Permission granted to copy, share and display freely for non-commercial purposes. Direct all other rights and permissions inquiries to cosmithb@gmail.com.
