Deliverance From Pride and Lesbianism

God Would See Me Home

Some instructive thoughts from Rosaria Butterfield: 

In April 1999, I felt the call of Jesus Christ upon my life.  It was both subtle and blatant, like the peace inside the eye of the hurricane.  I could in no way resist and I in no way understood what would become of my life.  I know, I know.  How do I know that it was Jesus?  Maybe it was my Catholic guilt, my caffeine-driven subconscious, or last night's curry tofu?  We, I don't.  But I believed--and believe--that it was Jesus.

At this time, I was just starting to pray that God would show me my sins and help me to repent of them.  I didn't understand why homosexuality was a sin, why something in the particular manifestation of same-gender love was wrong in itself.  But I did know that pride was a sin, and so I decided to start there.  As I began to pray and repent, I wondered: could pride be at the root of all my sins?  I wondered: what was the real sin of Sodom?  I had always thought that God's judgment upon Sodom (in Genesis 19) clearly singled out and targeted homosexuality.  I believed that God's judgment against Sodom exemplified the fiercest of God's judgments.  But as I read more deeply in the Bible, I ran across a passage that made me stop and think.  This passage in the book of Ezekiel revealed to me that Sodom was indicted for materialism and neglect of the poor and needy--and that homosexuality was a symptom and extension of these other sins.  In this passage, God is speaking to his chosen people in Jerusalem and warning them about their hidden sin, using Sodom as an example.

Importantly, God does not say that this sin of Sodom is the worst of all sins.  Instead, God uses the sin of Sodom to reveal the greater sin committed by his own people:

As I live, declares the Lord God, your sister Sodom and her daughters have not done as you and your daughters have done. Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty and did an abomination before me. So I removed them, when I saw it. (Ezekiel 16:48-50)

I found this passage to reveal some surprising things.  In it, God is comparing Jerusalem to Sodom and saying that Sodom's sin is less offensive to God than Jerusalem's.  Next, God tells us what is at the root of homosexuality and what the progression of sin is.  We read here that the root of homosexuality is also the root of a myriad of other sins.  First, we find pride ("[Sodom] and her daughters had pride . . ." )  Why pride?  Pride is the root of all sin.  Pride puffs one up with a false sense of independence.  Proud people always feel that they can live independently from God and from other people.  Proud people feel entitled to do what they want when they want to.  

Second, we find wealth ("excess of food") and an entertainment-driven world view ("prosperous ease").  Living according to God's standards is an acquired taste.  We develop a taste for godly living only by intentionally putting into place practices that equip us to live below our means.  We develop a taste for God's standards only by discipling our minds, hands, money, and time.  In God's economy, what we love we will discipline.  God did not create us so that we would, as the title of an early book on postmodernism declares, "amuse ourselves to death."  Undisciplined taste will always lead to egregious sin--slowly and almost imperceptibly.  

Thirdly, we find lack of mercy ("did not aid the poor and needy"). Refusing to be the merciful neighbour in the extreme terms exemplified by the Samaritan traveller to his cultural enemy left to die on the road to Jericho (Luke 10: 25-37) leads to egregious sin.  I think this is a shocking truth and I imagine that most Bible-believing Christians would be horrified to see this truth exposed in such bare terms!  God calls us to be merciful to others for our own good as well as for the good of our community.  Our hearts will become hard to the whispers of God if we turn our backs on those who have less than we do.  

Fourth, we find lack of discretion and modesty.  ("they were haughty and did an abomination before me.")  Pride combined with wealth leads to idleness because you falsely feel that God just wants you to have fun; if unchecked, this sin will grow into entertainment-driven lust; if unchecked, this sin will grow into hardness of heart that declares other people's problem no responsibility or care of your own; if unchecked, we become bold in our sin and feel entitled to live selfish lives fueled by the twin values of our culture: acquiring and achieving.  Modesty and discretion are not old-fashioned values.  They are God's standards that help us to encourage one another in good works, not covetousness.  

You might notice that there is nothing inherently sexual about any of these sins: pride, wealth, entertainment-driven focus, lack of mercy, lack of modesty.  We like to think that sin is contained by categories of logic or psychology.  It's not.  So why do we assume that sexual sin has sexual or affectual origins?  That is because we have too narrow a focus about sexuality's purview.  Sexuality isn't about what we do in bed.  Sexuality encompasses a whole range of needs, demands, and desires.  Sexuality is more a symptom of our life's condition than a cause, more a consequence than an origin.  

Importantly, we don't see God making fun of homosexuality or regarding it as a different, unusual, or exotic sin.  What we see instead is God's warning: If you indulge the sins of pride, wealth, entertainment-lust, lack of mercy and lack of discretion you will find yourself deep in sin--and the type of sin may surprise you.  That sin may attach itself to a pattern of life closely or loosely linked to this list.  While sin is not contained by logical categories of progression, nonetheless, sin is progressive.  That is, while sin does not stay contained by type or trope, if ignored, excused, or enjoyed, sin grows and spreads like poison ivy.  . . . 

These passages forced me to see pride and not sexual orientation as the root sin.  In turn, this shaped the way that I reflected on my whole life, in the context of the word of God.  I realized that my sexuality had never been pure and my relationships never honoured the other person or the Lord.  My moral code encompassed serial monogamy, "safe" sex, and sex only in the context of love.  Love, grounded only in personal feelings, as mine had been, changes without warning or logic.  The truth is, outside of Christ, I am a manipulator, liar, power-monger, and controller.  In my relationships with men and with women, I had to be in charge.  I killed with kindness and slayed with gifts.  I bought people's loyalties and affections.  . . . 

In understanding myself as a sexual being, responding to Jesus (i.e., "committing my life to Christ") meant not going backwards to my heterosexual past but going forward to something entirely new.  At the time I thought that this would most likely be celibacy and the single life.  Sexuality that did not devour the other person seemed unimaginable to me.  And while I never really liked the idea of growing old alone, I accepted that if God could take me this far in life safely, he would see me through this next part too. 

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor's Journey into Christian Faith. Expanded edition.  (Pittsburg: Crown and Covenant Publications, 2014), pp.29-33.