Joyful Generation: Advent of Integration 3
‘Perhaps what we modern people most need is to be genuinely shaken, so that where life is grounded, we would feel its stability; and where life is unstable and uncertain, immoral and unprincipled, we would know that, also, and endure it.’
Fr. Alfred Delp, Advent of the Heart
Kevin greeted me joyfully last week as I boarded the plane in Bangkok for our Southeastern Asia Conference in Ubon: ‘You don’t know me, but I went through Living Waters; I am here with wife Sue from New Zealand (Kevin is Thai) and new baby Grace. We are excited to be joining you!’ Whew. He said a lot, said it all.
Jesus envisioned Kevin, a same-sex struggler, to live what is most true about his gender—to honor a woman in love and to father children. The Greek root of gender means to generate new life. We have nearly lost that meaning today. We disassociate gender from our bodies, from the other gender, from creating new life. The result? Degeneration, all dressed up in love, love, love. Bleech.
Amy Grant, evangelical heartthrob (in her day) and recent Kennedy Center for the Arts honoree, boasted of hosting her ‘gay’ niece’s wedding and gushed: ‘What a gift to our whole family’…; ‘Love God and each other’ was how she justified Christian advocacy of LGBTQ+ causes.
Amy, we love God and others by honoring His will for our sexuality. Our gendered lives tell a true story of one way we ‘image’ the Creator: by creating new life! We deface Him and fool others by advocating for ‘gay’ unions that block our unitive and procreative capacities. Note to Amy’s pastor— work on that girl’s foundation. She mirrors the world, not Jesus, in her sunny inane commentary.
Amy drank the same cool aid that has intoxicated Congress. By the time you read this, the ‘Respect for Marriage’ Act may well be enshrined in our constitution. Flying through both chambers then amended and primed for another House vote, this legislative mockery of real marriage dared to include the subterfuge of protecting inter-racial marriage as a way of sweetening the package.
Apples and oranges! Racial differences in marriage and in our world are God-given and beautiful. We image God in our ethnicity; we defame Him in dressing up degenerate sexual unions in the language of justice and marriage and ‘love.’
One person who got it right: Candace Cameron Bure left Hallmark to help lead another channel—Great American Family—as to ensure (among other things) that story lines would exclude LGBTQ+ subplots. What a girl! Rather than bend the knee to the fake new normal, she will only honor marriage in curating the network’s line-up. Whether these movies are your thing or not (beautiful yet bitter Manhattan journalist finds love and livelihood as a Vermont chocolatier), we applaud her chutzpah in granting viewers respite from the rainbow delusion.
America, wake up! What we export matters to the ends of the earth. That was obvious in our Asian gathering where Filipinos, Cambodians, Indians and a host of Thais joyfully took ground in their gendered gifting. Our bodies give us clear starting points; in Christ, our Designer becomes our gender Redeemer who frees us for the adventure of a lifetime. On this third Sunday of Advent, we rejoice with Kevin and Sue and the gift of Grace—their new baby who says it all.
‘The blind regain sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them. And blessed is he who takes no offense at Me.’ (Matt. 11:4)
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