It is the shortest verse in the bible. It is a verse that came to mind while watching a video of a Baptist preacher from California as he ranted with homophobic glee about the tragedy in Orlando. It always amazes me how people, who claim to be Christian, reach back into the Old Testament to justify their hate. They refer often to Leviticus about how homosexuals should be put to death. They say that we should be happy when the Sodomites are killed.
I don’t claim to be a bible scholar. I just grew up in a church that taught me about loving people. And what I recall are the stories they told me about Jesus. The one who inspired a religion. The one who was all about love. The one who told us that the Law (you know all that stuff you find in the Old Testament, thou shalt or shalt not) could be summed up in 2, just 2, commandments: To love the Lord, my God, with all my heart, mind, and soul and to love my neighbor as myself. There was nothing in that about hating or killing homosexuals.
I think back to the first time I met a gay couple. I was a junior in college and a long way from home. I was with a group of people I had known for all of a day. Among the group was this couple and they were breaking up. One was ready to move on with his life. The other was not. He was still in love with a man who no longer felt the same. It was in listening to his story, hearing the pain in his voice that I realized that he was not any of the things I had been led to believe. He was a human being with a broken heart no different than I in that he wanted to love and be loved. And so these people, who barely knew one another, showered him with love and tried to ease his pain.
I think about my friend, who came out to me after she’d been married and divorced. She was still the person I had known most of my life and I loved her. The fact that she is a lesbian does not change that. I am happy that she can be who she is without hiding parts of herself for fear of rejection by her family and friends. But I am also afraid that she may become the target of strangers for being who she is.
I think about two childhood friends who were lost to AIDS when we were still saying that people died of something else, anything else. Because not everyone knew that they were gay.
And so, in the midst of our latest tragedy, I think about all of these people and many others. People that I have known, people that I have loved. And I think of what they have meant to me. How they have impacted my life. How they have helped me to be a better person. And I think what kind of person I might be if their paths had not crossed mine.
Would I be the kind of person that would delight in the death of so many people? I think not; because I know a Jesus who wept. And as I listened to the preacher, shedding tears of my own, I felt that Jesus was shedding tears too; for those grieving and even for those rejoicing.