Well, good morning, Menlo Church. Welcome back. Thank you for continuing this journey this week through an important conversation about the body, gender, and sexuality. Shout out to all of our campuses in San Mateo, Mountain View, Menlo Park, Saratoga, and those of you joining us online.
I know that for some of you, you're here for the fourth week in a row of church, and that's the most number of weekends you've attended church in a row in your life. So thank you so much. I know that it represents a choice to be here and not somewhere else. That is not lost on me.
I also know that this is a really personal conversation, and I want to reiterate a few things before we dive into our conversation today. Often, we can, if we're not careful, make our position clear on an issue in a way that overshadows the love and care that we are called to demonstrate today.
I want to personally apologize for any time that that has happened to you in a church, this church, or even in this series. We all need grace, undeserved favor from one another and for each other in this, including me. Thank you so much.
I want to personally and specifically thank the LGBTQ community in our church who has been so kind, even as they may disagree, and parents of LGBTQ kids and students who have extended kindness and grace in this country. I want to personally thank the church for their support and their support for this conversation as well.
Now, my intention has been to ensure that we are joining together in thoughtful discussion and dialogue to provide resources and events. I would love for you to check out Menlo as a place that you could belong before you believe. That's what we want it to be for everybody.
In addition to that, if you haven't checked out the resources, events, etc., you can find them and sign up for them at menlo.church.org.
Today, we're going to talk about the unique combination of unconditional love and uncompromising faith that Jesus lived with in his ministry, and he calls us to model in our lives as we seek to follow him.
I'm going to pray for us. If you've never been here before or never heard me speak, before I speak, I pray kneeling. Part of the reason that I do that is the regular reminder it provides for me and for us as a community that God's power and plan for us is bigger than ours. It's designed that we would submit to his power and his plans rather than asking him to submit to ours.
So would you pray with me?
God, thank you so much. Thank you for the incredible gift that you have made your will known. And beyond that, God, you have made the way to pursue your will and the grace for all the ways that we fall short of it possible through your son, Jesus. Would you help that message, God, that we are loved, all of us, by you? And that there is a path of restoration and hope forever in you for all of us. It's in Jesus' name. Amen.
I remember it like it was yesterday. I was heading to high school with one of my very best friends. I was a sophomore, and he was a senior. He seemed pretty nervous and he wasn't talking very much. Then at one point, he just blurted out, he said, "Phil, I just need you to know that I'm gay."
Phil, I knew that how I needed to show up in this was really important. So with as much nuance as a sophomore in high school could muster, I looked at him and said, "Thanks so much for telling me, man. Like, you're not telling me that you like me, right?"
Now, I know that that was not what I should have said, but I was trying to relieve the tension. I was trying to be funny. I got in trouble for it, as I often have in my life. But we went on to have a conversation.
In that conversation, we committed to something that was really important to us. Here's what we committed to: we committed to the fact that we would not let this end our friendship. That we would fight for relationship no matter what.
Maybe you've had a conversation like that with a friend or with a family member. Maybe it was your son or your daughter. And your belief about something wouldn't become a barrier to someone. You just decided that.
Now, you're in really good company if that's true for you. Something amazing about Jesus is that people who were nothing like Jesus liked Jesus, and he loved them. The reason that he could do this is because of this unique combination of how he always led with grace while leaning on truth.
Now, before you start writing me an email, I've gotten a few over the last few weeks. My email does still work. I know that there are grace people who are very disappointed about the way that this series has offered clarity around understanding of the biblical vision for gender issues.
I know that there's a lot of people and many women who have experienced this. There's something very important about sex itself. Sex exists to happen inside of the covenant of marriage between one man and one woman for a lifetime with God at the center of it.
Modern gender theory and the biblical understanding that we've presented—that biological sex and gender are not different things, that actually they are complementary to one another—those are really hard. For you, you're furious that we've said that. That I just said that.
For others of you, you're truth people, and you are frustrated about the kind of both-side-ism that I've communicated this with. You want me to take a stand. You want me to let them know. You want me to get more angry. And the compassion that we've tried to have in this conversation, you feel like is really compromised.
I get it. I think we all fall along this spectrum somewhere, but Jesus is so good at offering both all the time. The pattern of Jesus that we want to model is that we lead with grace while leaning on truth.
For some, it's leading with grace that will be a challenging concept because you want to be right about something. For others, it's leaning on truth in a way that might feel wrong to a person. We all have to recognize our propensity.
One of the things that can get us into trouble in this conversation are the kind of specific Bible passages that we can jump into, oftentimes out of context. We want to make the complete answer to these questions. But the thing is, I love fortune cookies. Fortune cookie faith is a terrible idea.
Fortune cookie faith is when we take one passage or one verse or one phrase and we build our faith around it. The Bible is not written for us to do that. That's not the point of it.
So we're going to take a look into the different genres of the Bible. That's what we do all the time. We're going to look at one specific Jesus narrative, one story of how our approach can be informed by grace that we lead with while we lean on truth together.
One of the best examples of this approach by Jesus comes from John chapter 4, when Jesus takes a route that Jews didn't take to talk to a woman that Jews wouldn't have talked to and offer hope to that Samaritan woman that they normally would never have received.
As Jesus sits by the well in the heat of the day, John begins the story this way: "A woman from Samaria came to draw water. And Jesus said to her, 'Give me a drink.' For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food."
The Samaritan woman said to him, "How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria? For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans."
Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water."
The woman said to him, "Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?"
See, Jesus, he wasn't breaking the law by having this conversation with the woman who's at a well in the middle of the day. It was a time when only people that went in the heat of the day like this were people that were trying to avoid other people.
As we're going to see in a minute, she had reason to feel ashamed. She had reason to feel ashamed. She had reason to feel ashamed and didn't want the level of ostracization that she would have felt normally if she'd gone at other times.
Jesus, he wasn't violating the law, but he was violating social norms and he was violating specific teachings of other rabbis or teachers of the law. See, different rabbis, they would have different ways of interpreting and applying the Hebrew scriptures. They were called yokes or their own interpretation of the Jewish law.
When Jesus says, "My yoke is easy and my burden is light," he was saying that his pattern of following God that he presented was simpler than the other rabbis, but it was actually more demanding at the same time.
It has been easy in this time for the Jewish people to avoid interacting with those who are different than them. They'd created a culture around it. Samaritans were considered half-breeds, half-Jewish, half-Gentile, and they'd been ostracized their whole life.
The options for them to worship God at the time were not the same as the options for them to worship God at the time. They were very limited. Jesus, he's using this interaction to show this woman who he is, but she's skeptical.
She had really good reason to be skeptical because of the experiences that she had had her whole entire life. She had faced unimaginable pain in her life. Now she was getting water in the heat of the day, headed back to a life far different than the one she had dreamed of as a little girl.
After a bit of back and forth about the living water of Jesus, she asks Jesus about this water that he was offering. That's when things get interesting. Jesus, he responds this way: "Go, call your husband and come here."
The woman answered him, "I have no husband." This is that moment with Jesus, right? We're like, we've seen some grace, now we're going to get some truth.
Jesus said to her, "You are right in saying, 'I have no husband,' for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you've said is true."
The woman said to him, "Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship."
Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.
But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth."
The woman said to him, "I know that Messiah is coming, he who is called Christ. When he comes, he will tell us all things."
Jesus said to her, "I who speak to you am he."
And like his Yoda way of saying, "I'm the Messiah." Jesus, who led with grace and compassion in our lives, said to her, "I am the Messiah."
He began the conversation, shifts to reveal the truths of this person's life. And here's the thing, we read this and we go, "Jesus, you just met this woman. Maybe give it some time, dude. Build some relationship. Spend some time with it."
Did you hear her story? Now, Jesus had some spiritual discernment we don't have all the time, but he always led with grace and he always leaned on truth. He was showing her that there was a path to relationship with God that she thought had been removed.
She calls out the impasse that the way that she knew to resolve sins wasn't available to her. See, she didn't have open access to the system of animal sacrifice or regular temple practices that the Jewish people did to restore themselves to God.
Even if she could have gotten there, she wouldn't have been welcomed. The practices would have been limited. But Jesus calls out this really major change between the old covenant, what we call the Hebrew scriptures, and the new covenant, the new relationship with God that would be freely made available to everyone.
Instead of a place to ask for forgiveness, there would be a person who would offer it. The place could be anywhere. Jesus says that true worship would no longer be about a place, but about a person. That with spirit and truth, we could worship God anywhere and everywhere.
That we could experience God's forgiveness everywhere. The word that we see here of spirit is actually a translation from the Greek word "pneuma," which is the same Greek word that translates with God the Holy Spirit.
This woman eventually references what everyone in that day would have referenced during a theological debate. When they were trying to figure out, okay, this rabbi says this, and this rabbi says this, and what should we do, and how should we believe this, and how should we understand this?
She says, "When the Messiah comes, he'll tell us what we need to understand. He'll clear it up for us." Sometimes as Christians today, we don't say it that way, but we say, "I'll ask God about that when I get to heaven."
And here, for the first time in Jesus' earthly ministry, he's been performing miracles. He's been teaching things to people. And here, this woman who would have been excluded, would have been deleted, would have been overlooked, would have been ostracized, for the first time, Jesus offers the most clear statement we see yet of his divine Messiahship to a woman who had been discarded.
Jesus reveals that the Messiah she was waiting for is here. He knew her sin, and he loved her anyway. He wasn't minimizing her sin, and he was still offering hope. He was full of grace and full of truth.
See, Jesus never minimized people's suffering, and he never minimized their sin. He still doesn't in my life. If we are genuinely interested in people, it's usually pretty obvious when we know someone's story of what happened to them, or maybe what's a decision they've made that's like, "I don't know."
While we want to make villains and victims, there are no villains and victims. It's always a combination. Like we say a lot, hurt people hurt people. Oftentimes, the person that you want to discard, you want to think is beyond the reach of God, he loves them unconditionally.
The choices they're making are a result of a whole bunch of things that have happened in their life, and God still has a path back for them too. This pattern from Jesus here with religious leaders, with skeptics, with seekers, and with even other women in similar circumstances and societal categories throughout his earthly ministry, we see why we lead with grace while leaning on truth.
None of us are perfect. The more pressure that we feel in a situation or in a cultural moment, the more we want to default to unhealthy extremes. The more we want to become culture warriors or culture capitulators instead of the ambassadors that God calls us to be.
See, if you are more of a grace person, you might have some cleanup conversations with people that you've misled. It's been easier to be a chameleon in social situations, and everybody in your life thinks that you agree with them. You vote like them. You believe like them. You agree to the same things.
If they described you to someone else, they would be describing themselves. I would just say, for some of you, you've misled them. And if you're a truth person, you may have some cleanup conversations because you've mistreated them.
If you're a truth person, you may have mistreated people because you haven't heard their story, because you don't know where they're coming from, because you don't care. You just want to make sure that they know the truth.
But this combination of Jesus, full of grace and full of truth, it wasn't that sometimes he offered this and sometimes it was that he was the perfect embodiment of both. And as we follow him, we become that too.
Now, there are two what-ifs or what-abouts that I want to cover in the rest of our time together. I know these are not comprehensive, but that's why I keep steering you to menlo.church.com for more resources, more conversations, more events.
I think that this is a really important conversation. We have been getting conformed to the world's pattern in this conversation around gender, sexuality, and our understanding of the Bible our entire lives, whether we like it or not, through education, information, and entertainment.
A few 30-minute messages are not enough to counter that. But some of you, you're wondering, "Why can't we just let this conversation go?" I'm thinking something like this: "Phil, if we don't change our theology, we will lose the next generation."
My quick response would be, we are already losing the next generation because of how culture has changed our theology already. So what does it look like? Not for us to change our theology, but for us to change our approach, for us to acknowledge our own hypocrisy. I think that's what Jesus would have us do.
If you missed this in week two, I want to be clear. This isn't about LGBTQI plus people. I'm so sorry if you're LGBTQ for the way that you and your community have been scapegoated in this conversation, for Christians to be able to avoid the difficult self-examination that God calls all of us to, that has allowed the church, not just this one, but the church, capital C, to ignore the mountains of heterosexual sin that have gone unaddressed in our midst.
That doesn't mean that we just let everything go. Remember, we lead with grace, but we lean on truth. That's the way of Jesus, and it should be ours too.
The next generation is being told that their sexual and gender identity is the most important thing about them, and it's not working. A couple of weeks ago, we talked about the implications of the sexual liberation movement that promised more fulfillment and more satisfaction while delivering less.
Last week, we talked about gender, and even secular studies are showing that the promises of modern gender theory aren't coming true. Gen Z is simultaneously the highest in recorded history in terms of identifying in various categories of gender and sexuality, and also experiencing staggering rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidality.
I'm not saying one is causing the other. I'm simply saying when we put them together, the promises of modern gender theory and the sexual liberation movement, they're not coming true.
You don't have to believe like me. You can believe like whatever you want to believe. That's absolutely your right to do, but I'm simply saying, let's not just believe like me. Let's not just take the culture's word for it that it's working when it's not.
Now, throughout this series, I've referenced a book called "The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self" because of how foundational this shift in identity formation is in our culture. There's a concept that I want to drill down to a little bit in this shift that we're talking about.
Christians have historically followed a pattern of leading with grace and listening and leaning on truth that looks like tradition, then reason, and finally, experience. You can see how experience is incorporated, but it's not at the top of the authority funnel in our lives; it becomes one of the filters.
A version of that has been how Christians have approached their faith and their life imperfectly but consistently for a couple of thousand years. In the last several decades, it's flipped to look like this: our identity is now shaped primarily by our experience, and then if anything from tradition, reason, or scripture contradicts our experience, we just eliminate it. We just discard it. Our experience has become ultimate.
I know that this is very countercultural in a world that is more anti-institution every single day, but the promise of our postmodern, sexually liberated culture, those promises are not coming true.
Whether you call yourself a person of faith or not, we can acknowledge this without abandoning all social progress for marginalized people. We can look at the way of Jesus and the way that he loved everyone.
So when we are having these conversations with people that we love, we always want to lead with grace, the undeserved favor that God offers to all people. But we don't want to lean on the cultural teleprompters. We lean on God's truth for our lives. It has been way more steady and way more consistent for way longer.
All right, so here's the other what-about that I want to talk about in this conversation, which is the single phrase that's taken out of context from Jesus. Maybe you're like, "Phil, what about 'thou shalt not judge'? Who are we to even have this conversation?"
Again, I like fortune cookies; fortune cookie faith is a bad idea. See, there's an out-of-context reality to this clause that I want us to be honest about. I could listen to a sentence you said in the last week and pull a clause out of that sentence, and you would sound a lot different than you may be.
If we are talking about non-Christians, let me be clear, we should absolutely not judge non-Christians for not living like Christians. I know this is going to sound crazy. It's because they're not Christians. Like, they're not trying to do it.
All we're supposed to do in a world of non-Christians is love them and trust God to convict them, to pursue them. All we do is love them and our life. That's what we're supposed to do.
This passage from Luke 6 that this passage gets pulled out from is about how Christians hold other Christians accountable. In it, Jesus says this: "Judge not, and you will not be judged. Condemn not, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you."
So there you go, right? The level at which you judge others, you will be judged. Seems like Jesus is on board with our live-and-let-live modern approach to life, right? Just whatever people want to do, except that Luke isn't done recording the words of Jesus here.
He continues, Jesus says, "He also told them a parable. Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit? A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.
Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but not notice the log that is in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Brother, let me take out that speck that is in your eye' when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite. First, take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother's eye."
He's not saying you can take out yours and then hope one day they see theirs. No, no, no. We let God work in and on us so that we might help other brothers and sisters in Jesus do the same.
Jesus isn't condemning holding one another accountable. He actually affirms us holding one another accountable, Christians for Christians, repeatedly. What he condemns is hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy is exactly what the church has done in this conversation. We haven't been honest about our sin while we have judged others for theirs. And we should stop doing that.
The problem, if you're a Christian, is that you've probably had this done so poorly in your life, or you have seen this done so poorly for someone else that you just think, "Let's just avoid it altogether."
We kind of run into one of our extremes. We either run into the culture warrior extreme, and we let people know where we stand, devoid of compassion or empathy or grace, or we run into the grace category of cultural capitulators and go, "This is uncomfortable. Let's just avoid it altogether."
There are so few spaces left to challenge our cultural assumptions together. But that's exactly what Jesus does over and over again in his ministry. The foot of the cross is level for all of us.
Sin has left all of us simultaneously loved by God as image bearers of the divine and broken by what we've done and what's been done to us. I want to remind all of us over and over again that Jesus loved you so much. That's why he came to earth.
God hates sin so much that he was willing to die to redeem you and me from the consequences of our rebellion, that we could live in a secure relationship with God right now and forever.
This week on American Idol, a past winner, David Archuleta, came back to perform on the show. David grew up Mormon, and early on in his musical career, a lot of his writing and performing was connected to his faith.
Over the course of it, he wrote his newest song, which is called "Hell Together," and it's about coming out to his mom. He described the experience of sharing the decision to leave the Mormon church with his mom, and he was unsure how she was going to respond, but he knew that it was a big risk.
To his surprise, she had also left the church underneath the premise that if they couldn't go to heaven together, she would rather go to hell together. It's a provocative statement from a loving parent who was coming to grips with their own process of faith and loving their child.
My guess is, even if you're not Mormon, I'm not Mormon, if you have an LGBTQ child, you can relate to this sentiment, this desire that says, "I'm going to fight for a relationship no matter what."
Here's the chorus from the song: "If I have to live without you, I don't want to live forever in someone else's heaven. So, let them close the gates. They don't like the way you've been, the way you're made. Then they're not any better. If paradise is pressure, we'll go to hell together."
Like I said, I'm not Mormon, but the thing I love to do is just give David and his mom a hug.
See, I think that there's this underlying assumption that sometimes we can live with, sometimes we can lead with, sometimes we can just leave unsaid that if you are LGBTQ, somehow you are cursed. You have a prescription to hell that's irrevocable, and that's just not true.
We are all sexualized. We are sexually broken. The good news of the gospel is that God loves each and every one of us exactly as we are, and he loves us way too much to let us stay that way.
There is steady and ongoing work in my life and in yours. If you're a follower of Jesus, it's called sanctification. It's a lifelong process where God is bringing more and more and more and more in my life and yours under the control and lordship of Jesus.
In whatever way you have felt, in whatever way you felt like your sin made you less than, oh my goodness, I'm so sorry.
See, this tension in their faith and the idea of the way we love people, it's made some people think that they're worse than everyone else, that other people are better, and that's wrong. None of us are better. We all need the same grace from Jesus.
It's been said this way: Christianity is just one blind beggar telling another blind beggar where to find food. We all need the hope of heaven, and we are all for it. We're all beautiful and broken at the same time.
In a world that wants to make you one or the other, the grace and truth of Jesus tells us the truth. The pain of this is that our culture has narrowed the response of someone that makes this kind of disclosure into our lives into one of two categories.
We either celebrate or we condemn. That's it. Those are the only two categories. If you don't celebrate, you're condemning, and if you aren't condemning, then you're celebrating.
But Jesus, he offers a third option. Cultural ambassadors lead with grace and lean on truth. Because of that, we don't celebrate or condemn. We offer compassionate clarity.
We live in a way that will take shots from the grace-only people and from the truth-only people, and we have a good model to follow in Jesus because it happened to him too.
The first week, I told you that we were going to learn how to live in this tension, in this conversation, and how easy it is for us to run to an extreme and avoid the tension altogether on a side.
I hope that you are still being challenged by Jesus on how to love people well as you lead with grace, lean on truth, and live in the tension of that.
Now, if you are a parent of an LGBTQI child, and you're interested maybe in what an ongoing conversation like this looks like, there are two interest groups I'm going to point you to.
If you're a parent that would love to get into a group with other parents facing similar challenges, or if you are yourself LGBTQ and you're interested in exploring faith, we have two sites.
Sign-ups that you can find, you guessed it, at menlo.church/wonderfullymade. We hope that this will allow this conversation to be more than just a few weeks, that we can have resources, and we can have books to check out and events to have.
For many of you, this is not a sermon series. This is your life and figuring out how to get the support you need and how to walk in a place where you can belong before you believe.
We're committed to helping this be that place for you. I know that this conversation is hard. Thank you. Thank you for leaning in. Thank you for being the kind of people, the kind of church that can make sure that we live in this tension.
You are loved. No matter who you are, no matter what you believe, no matter what you've done, no matter what's been done to you, no matter what identity you hoped would fulfill you, no matter what desires you are wrestling with, I know that many of you are suffering, that this is a conversation you have prayed to go away, and it's felt like it's just maybe at times been minimized in the church.
I am so sorry for that. God loves you, and it's in him that we find living water, just like he offered to a Samaritan woman 2,000 years ago.
Can I pray for you?
God, there is something so profound, I think, about all of us recognizing the hypocrisy that is hardwired into us, that it's so easy to look to other people and to point out the problems and the shortcomings that they have while we ignore our own.
So, God, I pray right now, Amen.
That you would bring conviction to our lives, that you would show, even right now, in our own mind and in our own heart, this incredible and beautiful combination of grace and truth, that you would show us those areas of our life that you want to declare yourself Lord over that requires change and the grace by the power of your Holy Spirit to see that change happen.
Help us, God, to be a church that walks in radical openness and honesty about the work you're doing in our lives as we seek to see you do the same in others.
God, we love you. We thank you for all of this. We give it to you. Even as we sing, God, I think about the words. God, we just want to give you your breath back as we worship you now.
It's in Jesus' name. Amen.
on May 03, 2024
