If one asks the question, “Have we, as Christians, demonstrated a lack of love for gay people?” the answer must surely be Yes. This must be so because love is not the starting point but “the goal of the Christian life.” If Christ is the beginning and the end, we are not at the end: we are closer to beginning. We are beginning with Christ, who is very different from us in the ability to love. And if we do not appreciate that we do not yet possess the power to love, I wonder if we can really claim to have begun at all.

Christ’s call to love is not – is it? – ‘Start loving, which you certainly know how to do’. It is ‘Do as I have done’, ‘Follow me’. Embark on

the journey from self-love … to pure love.

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Mind you, some Christians say the answer is, No, we have not demonstrated a lack of love for gay people.

No, we’ve been falsely accused of showing a lack of charity and a lack of love because that was very convenient to the arguments of the other side.

Well, is that answer viable? Could we really argue that gays and lesbians have been shown love, but have simply denied it –

because it’s politically useful to their cause to depict Christians as mean-spirited or bigoted or hostile to people just because they don’t like something about them?

I agree entirely that favouring one definition of marriage over another does not mean hostility, either to gays or to Christians. I can certainly see what evidence we might call on to argue that gays and lesbians are not victims of the defense of the traditional definition of marriage. Was it really justified to cry ‘H8’ in response to California’s Proposition 8 (which defined marriage as between one man and one woman)? If you believe that marriage is heterosexual marriage, is that an expression of hatred toward gays?

But still, could you say that, because you don’t hate, you love?

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Do you hate your child when you punish him? No. So, was your punishment an expression of love?

A parent knows better than to answer this glibly.

When it comes to your children – people you actually love – you know better than to come on guiltless: it depends entirely on how you corrected your child, what you actually said and did. You know better than to excuse yourself because … the punishment was just, which is a true thing that will just stick in the craw of any sorry parent. And we are all sorry.

Is it right? is a much smaller question than Is it love?

Is it true? is also a much smaller question.

Is it true that … [insert here some Biblical fact about homosexual acts]? Yes, it is true, but what are you doing with this fact; how is it being received; are you building those people up with this ‘help’ you are giving them?

The big issue is love and it makes quite challenging demands. How to love is not so obvious to us, which is why we are lost without a shepherd. And it is a serious business because it is the lack of love that is the wolf.

Edward Tingley

SOURCES The quoted remarks on love (as “the goal of the Christian life” and the whole Christian life as a journey “to pure love”) are from a talk by Fr. Maxym Lysack, not on this issue but “On the Prayer of St. Ephraim,” given in March 2014 at Christ the Saviour Orthodox Church in Ottawa

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