Kingdom Kindness: Love Burns

We celebrate Pride Month by showcasing Jesus’ Kingdom kindness: how His love invites and enables sexually wounded people to become fruitful. May every testimony we feature this June persuade you that ‘the kindness of God leads us to repentance’ (Rom. 2:4). 

‘You’re burning me, but it’s like water you’re pouring to wash me. Please repent and become a Christian like me.’ St. Charles Lwanga

No way around it. Lwanga, a teen page in the court of a predatory king in Uganda, was martyred for refusing ‘gay’ seduction. Today the Church honors him, and so does every Christian who refuses to bend the knee to forces that conform us to life under the rainbow. Empowered by Divine Love, Lwanga burned to death rather than burn with lust for the powers-that-be.

It’s profound to me that my successor and junior colleague Marco Casanova was born on this Feast Day of that 19th-century saint. Every year, Marco celebrates with Charles the noble virility of living a chaste life. It’s costly for someone half my age. For the last 6 years, Marco has drawn near to the prophetic fire of love entrusted to DSM. He never expected from us a magic cure for his same-sex desires, just an opportunity to stoke devotion to the One who won His heart amid his temptation to worship many gods.

Most magnetic to Marco was DSM’s commitment to living prophetically, out loud, so as to stay true to God in our sexual humanity. That means chastity: aspiring to an undivided life and refusing a host of identity and relational configurations under the rainbow.

And true he is. Marco’s the first to confess his weakness and welcome the kindness of Jesus. Now a lightning rod for naysayers in the Church and without, he holds fast to the greater compassion of Jesus that leads all to repentance. He invests his time and energy in nourishing healing communities around the country.

And he’s stealth. When he sees compromise in the Body of Christ, he moves towards muddy waters to impart a cleansing stream. Marco is bright and nuanced yet directive. He pleases God first, hoping humans will listen.

The other day, in a roundtable with Christian university leaders concerning their rainbow group on campus, Marco posed a better way than integrating identity disorder. Using his own story, he made an excellent case for how Jesus breaks the domination of ‘gay’ identity and desire and frees us for fruitful love. He did so in a way that was hopeful and realistic, Jesus’ Kingdom reigning in his vulnerable humanity.

Later, Marco said this: ‘I want to live and die as a prophetic witness of true chastity in an increasingly seductive and ‘queer’ culture, now apparent even in our churches. I will not baptize ‘LGBTQ+’ selves! Jesus freed me to live my God-designed sexuality; I want to lead others to do the same.’

Lwanga and Casanova make clear that love burns up worldly notions of kindness. The Kingdom of God summons something radiant in our humanity, a virile chastity that discerns compromise and refuses it.

You could say that the American Church is killing itself with such kindness. Under the sway of powers that insist on making peace with disordered desire, the Church appears to be settling on ‘you can be gay; just try not to act on it.’

Not Kingdom kindness. Not what Casanova lives for. Not what Lwanga died for. His blood seeded pagan Uganda which today is 81% Christian, a beacon for Africa. Pray with me that Marco’s leadership will light today’s Church with thousands of chaste lamps: humble, radiant witnesses that burn with Love Divine.  

C.S Lewis said it best in The Problem of Pain:        

‘By love, most of us mean kindness—the desire to see others happy. What most of us mean by God is not so much a Father in Heaven, as a grandfather in heaven—a senile old benevolence who liked to see the young people enjoying themselves…

But if God is Love, then He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask God to cease to be God.

Love demands the perfecting of the beloved. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them but Love cannot cease to will their removal.

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.’

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