Rosaria Butterfield - Grand Parkway Baptist Church - Session 1

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For more information about Grand Parkway, visit GrandParkway.org.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I think I think Neil is trying to give me some new book titles.

But I promised my family I'm gonna do something else for a while.

It's a pleasure to be here.

How do I tell you about my conversion to Christ without making it sound like an alien abduction or a train wreck?

The truth be told, it felt a little like both.

The language normally used to describe the odd miracle of conversion simply doesn't work for me.

I did not read one of those tacky self-help books with a thin coat of Christian themes, examine my life against the tenets of the Bible, you know, the way one might hold up one car insurance policy against all others, and cleanly and logically make a decision for Christ.

While I did make choices along the course of this journey, they never felt logical, risk-free, or even sane.

And neither did I feel like some victim of God's sovereignty, powerless or choiceless in the face of something called irresistible grace.

Heretical as it might sound, both Christ and Christianity seemed imminently resistible.

My Christian life unfolded as I was just living my life, my normal life.

And in the normal course of life, questions came up that exceeded my secular feminist worldview.

And those questions remained dormant until I met a most unlikely friend, a Christian neighbor and pastor, Ken and Floy Smith.

Well, by the time that I had met Ken and Floy Smith, I had already spent one decade of my life in serially monogamous lesbian relationships, and two decades working to advance LGBTQ rights.

So the world that we live in now, the one with constitutional rights to gay marriage and to abortion, is in so many ways the world that I helped create.

The blood is clearly on my hands.

I am the face of the problem.

Well, everyone's story of sexual sin, everyone's story of repentance is different, and that's because sin makes a lot of work for us.

And stories are ultimately about how we worked all of that out.

I actually did not see myself as a lesbian until a long time after other people did.

In my twenties, I dated men.

And as I was publicly dating men, I was finding myself at a fairly increasing rate to be falling in love with women.

And my lesbian friends just told me that my coming out was just a matter of time.

And so at 28, I met my first lesbian partner, and truly, life just came together for me and made sense.

My life as a lesbian simply seemed normal.

I considered it an enlightened, chosen path.

Lesbianism felt cleaner and even more moral to me.

Always preferring symmetry to asymmetry, I believed that I had found my true and real self.

And the name Jesus, which had rolled off my tongue in a little girl's prayer and then rolled off my back in college, now made me recoil in anger.

Now at this time, I was a professor of English and women's studies at Syracuse University.

And I tired of students who believed that knowing Jesus gave them the right to not know anything else.

Christians seemed like very bad readers to me, which was ironic because you all told me that that Bible was the true truth.

But Christians used the Bible in a way I had never heard anybody use before, actually, and something that Marxists would call vulgar.

Christians would use the Bible to end a conversation rather than to deepen it, sort of like Bible as punctuation mark.

And that was very frustrating to me as a thinker who just wanted to delve deeply into things.

But the most frustrating thing to me about Christians was that you all just wouldn't leave consenting adults alone.

I didn't understand that.

I cared about morality and justice and compassion.

As a 19th-century scholar, I was fervent for the worldviews of Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin.

And I strove to stand with the disempowered.

And my life at this time was happy, meaningful, and full.

My partner and I were involved in important things like AIDS activism, children's health and literacy, our Unitarian Universalist Church, our Golden Retriever Rescue.

It would be hard to argue that she and I were anything but good citizens and caregivers.

And the LGBTQ community that I know values hospitality and applies it with skill and sacrifice and integrity.

And indeed, the hospitality gifts that I use today as a pastor's wife, I learned in my lesbian community.

Well, after my tenure book was written, I began writing my next one on something that was just a burning desire for me to write on.

It was on the religious right and their politics of hatred against people like me.

And truth be told, I considered you all, members of evangelical churches, or even just visitors who wander into evangelical churches for the fun of it, as chief hate monongers.

You people terrified me.

And 20 years ago, I faced my fear of you by starting to write a book about why the Bible and its applications were irrelevant in a secular world.

To write this book, I began reading the Bible.

Funny, I had not actually done that before.

And I was amazed.

I took note that the oh, is it my earring?

Okay, I'm sorry, guys.

I am having an earring problem.

See, I asked Neil, I asked Neil if this was affecting his his, and he said no.

I guess it's just is it just that one or is it this one too?

Right side.

Right side?

Okay.

You guys have to tell me this.

You know, you just I hate to hear myself talk, but I especially hate to hear myself click.

Okay, is that better?

Okay, is there anything else?

Do I have spinach between my teeth?

Okay, we're friends, you would tell me.

Okay, thank you.

I'm sorry it took me a few minutes to realize that.

So, anyway, this book.

This book.

I started to write this book, but before I could write it, I had to read the Bible.

And I was blown away by it.

Nobody told me that the Bible was an engaging literary display of literary, literally every genre and trope and type.

I had no idea how beautiful this book was.

I had no idea how the narrative stories completed an idea with such poetic force.

But at the same time, this book embodied a worldview that I simply hated.

I mean, sin, repentance, Sodom and Gomorrah?

I thought that was totally absurd.

And so at this time, the Christian men's movement, the promise keepers, came to town, and I don't know what they did.

I mean, I think probably my favorite parking spot was missing that day or something.

It was some egregious transgression against my personhood.

But um I ended up writing a little article that was published in a New York magazine, and the title of it was The Promise Keeper's Message is a Danger to Democracy.

Well, that article, it was before the internet, so we can't say it went viral, but it made a lot of traction, so much that I had two boxes on each side of my desk, one for hate mail and one for fan mail, because if you're me, hate mail and fan mail are equally as terrifying.

So open the envelope, put it in, open the envelope, put it in.

One of these envelopes, one of these letters came from Pastor Ken Smith, who was then the pastor of the Syracuse Reform Presbyterian Church.

To this day, it was the nicest letter of opposition I had ever received.

And I still get a few of those letters, too.

It was it was disarming, it was fascinating.

And at the end of this letter, he he said, We'd like you to come over, Floy and I would like you to come over for dinner.

And uh, you know, I thought that was fascinating because I actually didn't know Christians practiced hospitality.

I just thought that's what gay people did.

Um because this is New York, this is the 90s, this is when AIDS is just ravaging our community.

And what happened during this season in New York, in my lesbian community, is that somebody's home was open uh every night of the week for food and fellowship and just to talk about a new diagnosis or something.

So I actually didn't know that you all got together like this, also.

So I I was delighted to accept his invitation.

And my my reason was not entirely decent.

Um it struck me that I was writing a book and I didn't know Greek and Hebrew, and I didn't even have any friends who would call themselves believers, and so I thought that Ken Smith had the right pedigree to be my unpaid research assistant.

But something else happened.

Ken and Floy and I became friends.

They entered my world, they met my friends, we did book exchanges, we talked openly about sexuality and politics, and they did not act as if such conversations were polluting them.

They never treated me like a blank slate.

And when we ate together, before we would eat, Ken would pray for the meal, and it was the most unusual prayer I had ever heard.

He would actually repent of sin in front of me.

I mean, sometimes I'd wonder when we were going to get to the food part of the prayer.

You know, it was it it went on and on.

Um but but so everything about this home, everything about these people, and everything about the gospel they were trying to lay before me was disarming.

But the most disarming thing about Ken and Floyd Smith was what happened at the end of the first night that we were together.

The meal is about to end, I'm about to leave, and I kind of gear myself, right?

You know, get good ab training, I gear myself for the great punch in the stomach that's going to come, right?

Because I've read the rule book, you've read the rule book, right?

You have the radical lesbian feminist who just co-authored the first domestic partnership policy at your university at your table.

What are you gonna do?

It's the end of the meal.

Well, you know, they shook my hand, they said this was fun.

Do you want to come back next week?

And I thought, well, wait a second, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Aren't you supposed to invite me to church?

Aren't you supposed to share the gospel and tell me I'm gonna go to hell?

I mean, what if I get in my truck and I drive a mile and I'm hit by a meteor?

Isn't it your fault?

But there is something about Ken's patience and also something about the fact that Ken and Floy really just wanted to get to know me.

They, they, I was not a blank slate.

And so at the end of that evening, when I didn't get punched with what I thought was evangelical manipulation, when Ken said, let's do this next week, I found myself saying, I would love to.

I would really, really love to.

You see, I was not Ken's project.

I was Ken's neighbor.

And this was my first introduction to what it means to have a Christian neighbor.

So I started meeting with Ken and Floyd regularly, reading the Bible in earnest with pen in hand and notebook in lap.

Um, I am an English professor by training.

I could be the chairperson of Overreaders Anonymous.

And I also was not raised in the evangelical church.

I didn't know you're supposed to, you know, just kind of pull out a verse, verse of the day like a like a butterscotch, if you will, kind of suck on that all day.

And then tomorrow find another butterscotch.

Dare I say, maybe even a fortune cookie, suck on that all day.

I just tell people, go try to read Jane Eyre like that.

All right, just try.

If you're wondering why biblical illiteracy is shallow, it might be because we're not reading it like a book.

So, not having been raised properly, I read it like a book.

I read each book, I would just sit down and read the book.

Start from the beginning and finish when the book was over with.

Um, I was on a research leave at the time.

I had about five hours a day to read the Bible.

You can imagine what the Holy Spirit can do even in the life of a hardened unbeliever if you are reading the Bible for five hours a day.

But anyway, I was just doing what I was trained to do.

I was reading uh one book at a time, and I was finding myself really fighting with some issues.

It wasn't going down easily.

It wasn't, it didn't taste like a butterscotch to me.

Um, I was fighting with the idea of textual authority, of authorship, of canonicity, of internal hermeneutics.

But I kept reading.

And slowly and over time, the Bible started to actually take on a life and meaning that really startled me.

I would really look forward to my time of Bible reading, even as I was frustrated and mad and didn't wanted to know where I was in the story.

And what was happening is that some of my well-worn paradigms, they just weren't sticking on this book.

They stuck on every other book I've read.

But I couldn't get them to stick on this one.

And I just had to ponder the hermeneutical claim that this book was actually different from all the others.

I mean, all the others.

That's kind of a lot to ask somebody like me to swallow.

But this book has both a progeny and an origin that sets it apart completely.

Well, the idea that God is inherently trustworthy and true, and that I could know that on the pages of this Bible, that was a strange idea for me.

I I mean I just I just I just thought that was naive, careless.

Um but what I really didn't like about the Bible, I know this is going to come as a as a shock, was its doctrine of sin.

I mean, that was not good on my self-esteem.

It just didn't land nicely.

But also this idea that the Bible was God breathed, it just made me feel cornered, kind of like a trapped animal.

So I would go through my mind, well, what do you all believe?

And why, where do I square off with this?

So this is what I came up with.

Christians believe that because Jesus paid with his life for the sin of those who will repent and believe in him, Christians have Christ's power to flee even from unchosen sin.

And the Bible records even unchosen sin as treason against God, punishable by death and hell.

And I noticed that as I was reading the Bible, that any time you had an admonition about sin, not very far after that was an offer of grace, even in the Old Testament.

And I'll just tell you, that does not show up on placards at gay pride marches, or at least when I was, you know, in the business.

Um so that was really striking to me too.

That was very compelling, and I thought that was a very, that that that showed a kind of the heart of God.

But truly I wondered how in the world would this system work for me?

I thought that must work very nicely for you people.

The butterscotch tastes really good for you people.

But how was that going to work for me?

Um, I didn't think I was hurting anyone.

I didn't think I was sinning against anyone.

I believed I was being my authentic self.

And I recoiled at the idea that being a lesbian was living in sin.

I mean, who in a right mind would choose a God you cannot see over a lover you can?

It seemed to me then that the gospel was both illogical and very bad news for people like me, people who identified anywhere on the LGBTQ spectrum.

But I have to I had to ponder one thing that I couldn't quite dismiss.

If God is the creator of all things, and if the Bible actually has God's seal of truth and power, then it did seem logical to me that the Bible had the right to interrogate my life and my culture and not the other way around.

You see, even as a postmodern professor, I understood the idea that authority can only depend upon that which is higher than itself.

I mean, I was a professor after all, and if your paper was due on Friday and you didn't get around to giving it to me until Monday, it just was not going to go well for you.

I mean, you might be very nice.

You might walk your dog and water your plants and, you know, all that kind of stuff.

But I just had more authority than you did.

And so it seemed to me that I had to ask the question, who is higher than God?

Well, my friends knew that I was reading the Bible and that it was becoming more than a research project for me.

And at a dinner gathering that my partner and I were hosting every Thursday night we would do this, my transgendered friend Jill cornered me in the kitchen.

Jill put a large hand over mine and said, Rosaria, this Bible reading is changing you.

And I'm scared.

And I felt exposed.

Jill was absolutely one of my wisest friends and often was right about things.

And so I said, Okay, I have a hard question.

What if it's the truth?

What if Jesus is a real and risen Lord?

What if we are all in trouble?

And I share this with you so that you know what gay rights activists talk about in the kitchen.

Right?

Because it's true.

Because it's true.

God has put eternity on all of our hearts.

This is absolutely true.

We all have a longing for dignity, and nothing but the gospel is going to deliver that.

But I asked that question.

And Jill exhaled very deeply, looked me in the eyes, and said, So I never told you this.

But I was a Presbyterian minister for 15 years.

I prayed that God would heal me, but he didn't.

If you'd like, I will pray for you.

Well, this conversation, of course, gave me a kind of secret, tacit permission to keep reading the Bible and digging into it and just rooting it out for life help and meaning.

But quite frankly, what my friend said to me also enraged me.

I was a gay rights activist.

I didn't want her to pray for my healing because I didn't need healing.

So I completely rejected what Jill had to say.

And at the same time, the Bible I was reading didn't say I needed healing either.

I didn't have a sinus infection.

The Bible I was reading said I was a sinner and I needed to repent of my sin, and I didn't want to do that either.

So characteristic Rosaria fashion, I just rejected both.

And the next day when I came home from work, I found two big milk crates of books in my driveway.

These were Jill's books from seminary.

And Jill was giving them to me.

Now for the young people in the audience, I know this is going to be news, but back in the days of ancient Rome, no, back in the days of Rosaria's ancient past, people would, this would be a book, an example of a book, and people would take pen and write in the margins.

And this is called marginalia.

And as long as it's not a library book, it's completely kosher to do.

And when you have a dear friend's book with a dear friend's handwriting, it's a very powerful thing.

It's almost like you're reading someone's secret journal.

And so I picked up a book that was on the top.

It was Calvin's Institutes.

It was, yeah, I don't know.

You know, God's sovereign, man, what can I say?

It was the treatise to Romans.

And in Jill's handwriting was this be careful.

Watch Romans 1.

So with Jill and Calvin, after I let the dogs out, I sat down and I opened my Bible to Romans 1.

And I realized, I said, oh, that's that passage I keep skipping.

I know that passage.

But there's something about the encouragement of someone you love, someone's marginalia.

So I thought, okay, I'm going to read it.

So if you have your Bibles, you can open to Romans 1.

I'm going to start with verse 21, because that's what Jill had underlined.

For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, and birds and animals and creeping things.

Therefore, God gave them up.

That to me is the scariest line in all of Scripture, but I'll go on.

Therefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed for ever.

Amen.

For this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions, for their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature.

And the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another.

Men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

Well, as I said, I had I had skipped that a few times, and those were hauntingly terrifying verses.

And so when I'm terrified, like my man brain goes, like I kind of like flip into my left brain, and so I immediately started just mapping this as a literary text.

I reminded myself it's just a book, Rosaria.

You have a PhD in how to read books, you don't have to be scared about this.

And so the first time through Romans 1, I mapped it out like this.

Romans 1 is a haunting literary echo to Genesis 3, where Eve's desire to live independently of God's authority made perfect sense to me.

And these two literary frames, one in Genesis and one in Romans, actually stood out to me potentially as the table of contents of what might even ail the whole world.

And indeed, Romans 1 does not end by highlighting homosexuality as a morally neutral form of sexual orientation.

Okay, Romans 1 doesn't talk about homosexuality as a discrete and separate category of inherited personhood that many people believe it to be today.

And instead, what I found so fascinating as I kept reading in this passage is that it seemed to find its crescendo in how one sin, homosexuality, morphs into other sins.

So you can read with me, starting with 29.

Being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, they are gossip, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful.

And although they know the ordinance of God that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also they give hearty approval to those who practice them.

Well, this last line really grabbed me by the throat.

It told me that if I cannot receive a blessing from God, I will demand one from men.

Let me say that again.

If that doesn't sound like our world, I don't know what does.

If you cannot receive a blessing from God, and if you are sinning against God, you cannot receive a blessing from God.

But what this verse told me is if you cannot receive a blessing from God, you will demand it from men.

Why?

Because the dignity of the human soul, that is itself a reflection of God's image, needs and craves God's approval and blessing and love.

Well, as the faculty advisor to many LGBTQ groups on campus, this really got my attention.

But I also took note of the theological diagnosis.

Homosexuality in the Bible is presented here as one step in the journey away from God's blessing and protection.

And I also took note at what the Bible does not say about homosexuality.

The Bible does not recognize homosexuality as a noun, as a category of personhood.

You see, the world has accepted that the 19th century invention of sexual orientation, you might have thought that sexual orientation was like one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

It's about 150 years old.

I'm serious, it was invented by Freud, and it's not one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

You can tell I'm a homeschool mom and we did a lot on ancient history this year.

I'm sorry.

I'm trying to leech myself out of this.

But the world has accepted that this 19th century category of personhood is accurate and true, but that is simply not how the Bible understands homosexuality.

Homosexuality, from God's point of view, is Adam's thumbprint on some of us.

It's uh identity-rooted ethical outworking of original sin.

And therefore, when people say to me, I was born this way, I don't give any pushback.

You want to know why?

Because we're all born this way, one way or another.

We are all born in original sin.

We are every single human being, unless you're dead and you don't know yourself well enough to know what that is yet.

You all desire something that God hates.

And homosexuality is no different.

That's what homosexuality is.

It's Adam's thumbprints on some of us.

And I thought about it, and that thought simply terrified me.

And I talked to some of my friends in the church, and what they said made me even more frightened.

And I should say I'm not actually in a church right now, but I'm at a university, and people know I'm studying the Bible, and so the liberal chaplain and everybody else is kind of feeding into me here.

And across the board, I was told that God has one category of personhood: that we are male and female image bearers of a holy God with a soul that will last forever.

There is simply, and this is what's very frustrating to me.

I'm reading the Bible now many times through, and I could not find any biblical category of personhood subsumed under that 19th-century category invention of sexual orientation.

Instead, the Bible declares that we are made in the image of God, and that we have a sin orientation in Adam, and a soul orientation in eternity, and once born again in Christ, a new citizenship, one that will come in exchange for the life that you loved, not in addition to it.

In spite of believing, living, and teaching the idea that gender and sexuality were social constructs, the Bible made clear to me that God has actually set ethical and moral responsibilities, blessings, and constraints for being born male or female, and that I am accountable to those responsibilities, whether they felt natural or good to me or not.

Now I had taught, studied, read, and lived a totally different reality or understanding of homosexuality.

And for the first time in my life, my adult life, I really wondered if I was dreadfully wrong on a very important topic.

So threatened by what this book was doing to me, I tried to toss the Bible and all its teachings in the trash.

I really tried.

I thought this is this is not a research project I want to take on.

Thank you very much.

But because Ken and Floyd were my friends, and only because they were my friends, I decided that I would keep reading the Bible.

I'd put the research project aside and just study it for my own life.

Among other things, I was really fighting the idea that this Bible is inspired and inerrant, that the biblical authors were moved by the Holy Spirit to record the Word of God, and that the Bible is completely true and without error.

I mean, how could a smart cookie like me embrace such things?

I didn't even believe in truth.

I was a postmodernist.

I believed in truth claims.

I told my students over and over again that the reader constructs a text, that a text's meaning is found only in the power of the reader's interpretation of it.

Without a reader, I told my students this book is just paper and glue.

How dare this one book lay claim to a birthright and a progeny radically different from every other book on the planet?

And after years and years of this struggle, and I mean years and years, I had somebody interviewing me on the radio who said, Wow, how many weeks did Ken and Floyd hang on with you?

No, not weeks.

Not weeks, years, years and years, something happened.

It was very subtle at first, but it was unmistakable.

The Bible got to be bigger inside me than I.

It overflowed into my world.

I fought against it with all my might.

And then one Sunday morning, two years after I first met Ken and Floyd, and two years after I started reading this Bible for research, I left the bed that I shared with my lesbian partner, and an hour later I ended up in a pew at the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church.

I felt like a freak sitting there in church, and Ken Smith had never taken some class on how to make freaks feel comfortable in church.

So I start to walk in from the back, hoping I'm gonna find a seat in the back.

I'm not noticing a lot of other women with butch haircuts or Doc Martin, so I'm going to sit in the back.

And Ken says, Oh, Rosaria, you're here.

Why don't you come up right here and sit next to Floy?

So as I said, he never took, he never got that memo about how to make, you know.

Floy was so sweet.

She just put her arm around me and she said, You know, I love you.

So, what did he say that day in church?

Who knows?

Because I kept thinking about last year's Gay Pride March.

Wide as it was with people just like me, people who made me feel safe and loved, people I valued as family.

And when I crossed the threshold of the church door, I knew I became a traitor to everybody I loved in the world.

But I kept going back to church to hear more sermons.

And I had actually made friendships with people in the church by this time.

I was perplexed by how they referenced the Bible in the details of their days.

So I should tell you, English professors by training love textual cross-referencing.

And if you've memorized long passages from an ancient text, that's even better.

So it's kind of my love language, right?

But I thought about it, cross-referencing the Bible with your life?

That seemed really dangerous.

I was not planning on trying that.

Because it puts you inside God's story.

It actually puts you inside God's ontology.

And I wondered, is this safe?

Is it deadly?

Are these people crazy?

But I was noticing something else about my Christian friends, even like the engineer types who were not exactly known to be good readers.

It's true.

They were actually getting things out of the Bible that I wasn't.

They were understanding how the Bible fit together as a whole.

And furthermore, I watched them at faculty meetings and other things.

They were clearly fueled by something that was not natural.

They would forgive their enemies.

They didn't gossip.

How do you get through a faculty meeting and you know, gossip?

My goodness.

I didn't understand what I was seeing.

And I didn't understand why I wasn't understanding.

Well, one Lord's Day, Ken was preaching through the Gospel of Matthew.

And the Gospel of Matthew is a very literary gospel.

It's got these crazy metaphors, these, you know, unsuspecting folks separated under the gospel, seeds choked by the world, and then some poor and nameless kids bread and fish.

Now, if I were the editor of Matthew, that kid would have a name.

Okay?

He was very important to a very important story.

He's nameless.

It was driving me crazy.

Well, one Lord's day, Pastor Ken just stopped right there, and he repeated Matthew 15, 16.

Jesus' cutting question to impetuous Peter, do you still lack understanding?

All right, Ken uttered those words and then he just stood completely silent.

And I thought, okay, what does the frozen chosen do when the old man behind the pulpit is having a heart attack?

Like, what do they do?

Who calls 911?

Who does something?

But no, they just sat there obediently, frozen.

And then after the longest pause, Ken left the pulpit, came down out in the front of the church, and said, People of God, did Christ ever say that to you?

Why do you still lack understanding?

And for this split second, before I could just shove down what he was saying, I had this terrifying question.

Because this startled me.

This was my question.

And I had this horrifying thought.

Who was speaking?

That old man I thought who was having a heart attack?

Or the Godman behind the creation and the foundation and the redemption of his people.

And without any control over it, the image that crashed like waves in a raging sea of me and literally everyone I love suffering in hell vomited into my consciousness and gripped me in its teeth.

Not only because we called ourselves gay, but because we were proud.

We wanted to be autonomous.

We rejected the Bible's interpretive authority over our sexuality, our sexual identity, and our sexual practice.

And at that moment I realized that if the Bible is true, I was dead.

And people of God, if the Bible is false or semi-true, or only true in the red letters, or only true if my sexual orientation lines up with something, then you are simply staring at the biggest fool on earth.

But God's promises started to roll in like another wave of waves into my world.

And the following Lord's Day, Pastor Ken was preaching on John 7, 17.

If anyone wills to do God's will, he shall know concerning the doctrine.

Well, this verse exposed the quicksand in which my feet were stuck.

See, I was a thinker.

I was paid to read books and write about them and tell other people what to think about them.

And I expected in all areas of my life, understanding would come before obedience, not the other way around.

I wanted God to show me on my terms why homosexuality was a sin.

I wanted to be the judge, not the one being judged.

Perhaps I thought, like Eve in the garden, I wanted to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil so that I could become and replace God.

And then I wondered, hadn't I already done this?

I mean, hadn't we all?

If my consciousness fell in Adam's sin, as the Bible purports, well, no wonder I couldn't think my way out of this quandary.

This wasn't a game of thinking and of matching of wits.

But could my heart echo God's call for obedience?

Could I will to do God's will just this once?

The stakes were so very high because they always are.

But this verse promised understanding after obedience.

And I wrestled with the question: did I really want to understand homosexuality from God's point of view?

Or did I just want to argue with him?

And so I did something wacky crazy that night that I hadn't done all the years that I had been reading the Bible and all the months I had been going to church.

I decided I was going to pray.

I mean, I knew that was pretty dangerous, so I wasn't going to rush that one.

So I actually prayed that God would give me the willingness to obey before I understood.

I prayed that God would be pleased to reveal his son in me.

I prayed that I would be a vessel of Jesus.

And then a terrifying thought came into my mind.

I'm not just a vessel of Jesus, I'm not just a vessel, I'm not just a shell, I'm not just a person, I'm actually a woman.

And I have no idea what in the world that means.

And so I don't know why, but I had this terrifying desire to make biblical sense of myself as a woman defined by and covered by God.

And so I actually prayed that God would make me a godly woman.

And then I laughed out loud in the unbelief and the ridiculousness of that prayer.

And so one of my housemates, a wicked, Witch, you know, she's knocking at my door.

Are you okay in there, Rosie?

No, I am not okay.

So truly, I left my first night of prayer a complete bust.

I thought, I don't know how you people do this.

I really don't.

But praying to be a woman was a terrifying prayer.

And I had never thought about these things before in my life.

And so I ended up leaving that night of prayer simply pondering one question, a simple one.

Could original sin be for real?

And could original sin actually distort me?

Is my sexual desire for women a reflection of the real me?

That's what I thought.

Or is it a distortion of the real me through original sin?

Is being a lesbian my authentic self?

Or is it Adam's thumbprint on my life?

Who am I?

I wondered.

Philosophers distinguish between the real, that's the lived and the felt, the material, and the true, the ontological, the deeper realities of past and future.

And I wondered if being a lesbian, while very much real, was perhaps not true.

And then I thought about it.

If Jesus could split the world asunder, divide the soul and the spirit, judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart, could he make my true identity prevail?

Who am I?

Who will God have me to be?

You see, I still felt like a lesbian in my body and my heart.

That is, I felt my flesh's identity, but what is my Christian identity if there is such a thing?

You see, the Bible makes clear that fallen flesh and a redeemed mind will always be at war, this side of eternity.

For many people in the Bible, their redeemed identity and calling comes only after a long struggle with God, with wilderness, with dreams and hopes and plans, dashed and destroyed.

What will become of me if Jesus takes over?

The cross is ruthless.

The cross is an instrument of execution.

The cross makes no ally with the sin it crushes in the death and resurrection of the Lord.

But what if I commit my life to Christ and my lesbian feelings never disappear?

Does that mean that God does not love me or hear me or care?

Is the gospel good news?

Or is it bad news for people who identify on the LGBTQ spectrum?

Who is this Jesus?

Did I know him?

Did I still lack understanding?

Could I trust him?

And then one ordinary day, I came to Jesus.

This is a Presbyterian church, so the guy whose back of the head I stared at for, you know, he'd get his hair cut every six weeks, I could tell you that.

He had no idea what was going on in the pew right behind him.

We were singing from Psalm 119, line 56 exactly.

And when this line, This has become mine, came out of my mouth in congregational singing, I gasped in horror.

I had actually just sung condemnation unto myself, and I was thrilled that I was so in tune with the Holy Spirit, I could actually feel his convicting rebuke.

This Bible was not mine.

Oh, I had read it seven times through, I get that.

But I had scorned it and cursed it and despised it and taught thousands of college students to do the same.

But I had read the Bible enough times, and I actually saw for myself that it had a holy author.

I saw for myself that it was a canonized collection of 66 books.

I could follow the unified biblical revelation.

But for the first time in my life, singing in that church, I heard for myself that when the phrase, this has become mine, came out of my mouth in congregational singing, I was actually attesting to this one simple truth.

The line of communication that God ordained for his people required this wrestling with Scripture.

And I actually wanted to hear God's call on my life, and I wanted God to hear my prayers.

The fog burned away.

The whole Bible, each jot and each tittle was my holy highway to God Himself.

Well, my hands let go of the wheel of self-invention.

I came to Jesus alone, open-handed and naked.

I had absolutely no dignity upon which to stand.

As an advocate for peace and social justice, I thought I was on the side of kindness, integrity, care, compassion, diversity.

And it was a crushing revelation to discover it.

It was actually Jesus I had been persecuting the whole time.

Not some historical figure named Jesus, but my Jesus, my prophet, my priest, my king, my savior, my husband, my friend.

That Jesus.

Well, of course, there's only one thing to do when you meet the living God.

You must fall on your face and repent of your sins.

I started to repent of my pride.

The pride that led me to believe that I could invent my own rules for faith and life and sexual autonomy.

The pride that said that I was entitled to live separately from God.

The pride that led me to believe that self-worth was self-invented.

I learned that repentance is the daily posture of the Christian and is the only threshold to a holy God that exists.

I learned that repentance is the only no-shame solution to a renewed Christian life because it proves only the obvious that God was right all along.

Well, conversion did not immediately change my sexual desires for women.

You see, I was not converted out of homosexuality, I was converted out of unbelief.

But converted I was, and therefore I could not make a false peace with anything that God called sin, even if I thought it knew my name before I knew my name.

So I had to break up with my girlfriend.

And then I had to do something even harder.

I had to break up with all women.

You know, the most important sexual organ that you need to control, that I need to control, is my mind.

And that was a very big hurdle.

Now, when I say that I had to break up with all women, what I mean is I had to break up with the idea that I could ever look at another woman again as a sexual object.

It could not happen.

That would be a that was a that's a sin against God, it's a sin against her.

And it was a terrifying time.

But recently, when I've talked like this, the breaking up with all women part, I've been told in this evangelical world that that's called spiritual abuse.

But people of God, I know from life experience that that's called wisdom.

You see, the gospel comes in exchange for the life that you love, not in addition to it.

Gospel life is cross-bearing life, and sin, even unchosen sin, produces suffering.

And in this way, same-sex attraction for many believers is simply Adam's thumbprint.

No big news there.

Everybody's got one.

And if you are listening today and you are fighting against same-sex attraction God's way, you're in the battle.

You're not making false peace with the battle.

You are forsaking the false identity of LGBTQ and the rest of the alphabet soup for the true identity of image bearer of a holy God.

You know that the gay rights movement is playing you, but Jesus never will.

You are forsaking through grace any sexual identity or sexual practice that God calls sin, and you are embracing either chastity and singleness or fidelity in biblical marriage, then you, agonizing struggle and all, you are called a hero of the faith.

And you should not be despised or demeaned, but rather embraced as a brother and sister in Christ, fighting the good fight, a decorated soldier, standing in robes of righteousness.

Now, for me, something in addition happened after I crossed the threshold into faith in Christ.

My prayer to be a godly woman morphed into another prayer, to be a godly wife.

Now I need to pause here and remember that while biblical marriage is a wonderful gift, it is not a gospel requirement.

And I believe that there is a vital and powerful role for singles in the church.

I do not think that singleness in Christ is selfishness or secondhand gospel citizenship.

And I do not believe that singles need to be fixed or fixed up.

Okay?

Got it?

But I felt called to be a godly wife if God would do this.

I wanted to be a helper in all aspects of life to a godly man.

I actually wanted to step out of the spotlight and get behind the scenes.

And a year later, I met my husband Kent Butterfield, and we have been joyfully married for 18 years, walking the Lord together.

And my role as Kent's helper and the mother of our children is my daily witness that we serve a God who lives, who hears our prayers, who loves his people, who liberates captives, and who equips us to live fully in Christ, as the strongholds of sin are broken down through the grace of Christ's blood.

You see, the gospel is always costly, and the crosses that the Lord meets out are not democratic.

If you think this that grace is fair or that the gospel is fair, you are drinking some powerful evangelical Kool-Aid.

Because it's not fair.

Look around you.

Some people get ten crosses, some get one.

Our job is to help bear the weight of the cross that each one is given, not lean on it.

But we are promised that no tear will be wasted and no hardship will be for naught.

Now, this was a long time ago.

And I will tell you that I could not talk about this story if this were not a long time ago.

When I had first become a Christian, you know, 20 years ago, people would say, share your testimony.

I'd say, No thanks, I'm having a hard enough time living it.

All right.

But sometimes when I share my testimony in today's culture, it really does seem like a foreign language.

My life as a lesbian and the cultural landscape of 1998 appears as outdated as the ruins of ancient history.

What happens?

The gospel hasn't changed, but the culture has.

And I think it's important to look at some discrete moments.

Number one, when Ken Smith and I started gathering for hospitality and meals and really Bible study, but not some fill-in-the-blank Bible study, but like, what do you mean this is what it says?

And you know, those kinds of things.

It was a little more organic.

You know, he told me up front that he accepted me, but he didn't approve of me.

Now, that wasn't hate speech in 1998.

That's hate speech today, but it wasn't, you know, 20 whole years ago.

And when I walked through the door of the church, I knew that the church believed that homosexuality, both as a sexual practice and a personal identity, was a sin.

I didn't think they thought anything else.

The message was loud and clear.

I also knew I was an atheist.

You know, it makes you long for the days when atheists knew they were atheists.

So refreshing.

But today, so many churches regard homosexuality primarily as a category of personhood.

And people who experience homosexual desires as a separate kind of person, somehow not like everybody else.

Now I want to say something that is going to sound very radical.

It might even sound offensive.

I do not mean it to be offensive, but I'm going to say it.

And if you're the tweeting type, you can tweet it and really, really make me look like a fool.

But I'm not on Twitter, and I'm living proof that you can eviscerate me on social media and nothing happens.

So I'm going to say it.

I go right on with my Saxon math lesson, you know.

I'm going to say it.

Gay is not who anyone is.

It may be how you feel.

There is no such thing as a gay person ontologically.

There is no such thing as a trans person.

These are impositions from the fall.

These are categories that are downstream from Genesis 3.

And I'm sharing this with you, not to make a theological point, but because my heart breaks for my friends in the gay community who are longing for dignity and are settling for something so cheap.

The gospel gives identity of the highest order.

You are made in the image of God.

And in Christ, you can understand your identity in the knowledge and righteousness and holiness of the God who made you and loves you and looks out for you and wants to be in eternity with you.

So we need to remember that gay is simply not ever who anyone is.

And we have to reflect that in our language.

For moms and dads here.

You haven't lost your children.

Your prayed-for children?

You're telling me you could lose your prayed-for children?

No way.

Because gay or trans is simply not who they are.

It may be how they feel.

And yes, Satan has made some powerful inroads on this.

There is a a worldview of difference between who and how.

And the church should never buy into a false gospel.

Yes, there are wolves in sheep's clothing.

And you know, I wonder if the church even knows what a wolf would look like.

You know, what do you think a wolf is going to look like?

You think he's going to come in stinky?

No, he's going to come in nice and smooth.

Nice and smooth.

Every generation has had something that attacks the gospel.

Right?

And today, the gospel is on a collision course with the category of sexual orientation as a description of who people are.

If you love people in the gay community, don't buy it, even if they do.

Because gay will never be who anyone is.

Although it very well may be how Adam's thumbprint provides a sense of how.

So I'm going to close now and I'd like to pray.

Let's pray.

Our gracious God and Heavenly Father, we have talked about hard things, about personal things.

I know I've said things that are sinful.

And I pray that you would take all the sin out of any of the good that you have had for me to share today.

I pray for each person in this room, God.

I know that we are all praying for someone heavy on our heart.

Maybe we're praying for ourselves.

And I pray, dear Lord, that you would hear our prayers.

And I pray that you would give us victory in Christ to fight the good fight.

Lord, I pray for this church that you would bless it.

And I pray now, as we move to the QA, that you would just empower people to be bold and to be vulnerable, and that you would equip me, Lord, to have words of grace.

And we love you, Lord, and we pray all of this in the matchless name of Jesus.

Amen.