Our Favorite Sins

My friend Anna and I were in her bed watching Grey's Anatomy one night during my junior year. Callie's mother told her that she would not be attending her wedding to Arizona because she couldn't stand the thought of her daughter marrying a woman--she couldn't stand the thought of her daughter, who she loved, spending the rest of her life in Hell. I immediately became disgusted, while Anna literally cheered the mother on. Immediately, I turned around and looked at Anna as if she had slapped me across the face. Anna is one of my best friends, but there she sat, cheering on a fictional mother as she told her fictional daughter that she would be spending her eternity in Hell for... marrying a woman. Anna and I immediately got into discourse with Anna's greatest defense being the morality of the Christian religion, her upbringing, the book of Leviticus, and the very limited references made in the New Testament (let it be noted, none were said by Jesus). I, in response, quoted a theme that occurs repeatedly over the course of both the Old and New Testaments: judgement. We'll discuss the aftermath of that conversation later.

This week, Jason Collins of the Wizards, formerly the Celtics, made the very bold announcement that he is gay--the first athlete of America's four biggest professional sports. I wasn't going to put much commentary in the conversation because I had already tried to state my position last year during the whole Chick-Fil-A debacle (oh, you didn't read What a Waste of Waffle Fries?!). I actually defended the idea of purchasing food from Chick-Fil-A. But what inspires me to address this Jason Collins issue is the comparisons that have been drawn throughout this week. I hear about how Tim Tebow has been persecuted for being a Christian and how terribly he has been bashed as a Christian player, while Collins is being revered for being an openly gay athlete--and that's where my issue comes up. Tebow, a Christian, has been bashed? As a child, I used to try and make the case about what it was like to be white or to be a boy or to even be a Christian. There's a lot of prejudice in the world, and I'm not saying that there's not prejudice against white people or men or Christians, because there is. There truly is. But in my twenty-three years of life, I can say that I've never been told that being any of those things was wrong, and I was surely never told that I would go to Hell for them. My eternal damnation was never on the line because of my race or gender or religion. And I dare say, this is not the Crusades anymore. Christians are not blamed for blowing up buildings; Christians were not gassed or burned in small confined spaces. If the Christian religion's biggest current hurdle is being criticized on MSNBC, then I think we're doing okay.

Posted the morning after the Collins
announcement

And I say we because I, myself, am a Christian. I find my religion to be immensely personal and not the topic of frequent conversation. My prayers are mine and God's, my beliefs are only applicable to me because I don't think it's my place to determine the rights and wrongs of others. I struggle enough doing right on my own. But I find it hard to explain to agnostics, atheists, non-believers what our message is and who we want to be when in the midst of our own "persecution," we use announcements like Collins as a "general reminder" that homosexuality is a damning sin. 
I don't write this to defend the followers of my religion or to convince others whether homosexuality is a sin or not. And I definitely don't write this because I'm a lover of sports. I'm an atypical cookie cutter man--I find very little interest in sports. I recently joined a volleyball league in DC, and it's practically a miracle that I did that because sports were the source of my unhappiness for the longest time. When I tried the whole sports thing in elementary school, that was the first time someone called me a girl. Toward the end of elementary school, when I wasn't coordinated enough, that was the first time I was called gay. When I moved to middle school, that changed to faggot. I wanted nothing to do with sports because when you weren't good enough, that's the kind of thing you became: a joke, a mockery, what others observed as a second rate human--and then after getting called that long enough in the sports setting, it began to stick. I was called those things outside of the game, and then it was my eternity that was in question. I went from not being good at sports to being eternally damned.
So when I saw the story of Jason Collins this week, I nearly cried reading it. He spoke of why he kept his sexuality a secret for so very long. He talked about how no one had done this in a major sport before him. He brought up the way that gay people have been viewed in the sports community, and then just for a paragraph or so, he talked about his faith. He spoke about his religious roots and how he still holds on to those things he learned, and he spoke about judgement. But when I think about Collins' proclamation to the world, I don't see it as some giant thing for the professional sports world--though it is. I don't expect a string of players to come forth and announce their homosexuality. I do, however, anticipate that this is the beginning of a new normal--where it's no longer okay to call someone a faggot on the playground because he doesn't know how to properly throw a football. Because calling someone  gay should not be an insult. And for the gay kid that does know how to throw a football (please teach me--I can't throw a spiral to save my life), I imagine that this is the beginning of a time when we'll evaluate his skills and not his personal life.
So, back to Anna. I left Anna's room that night out of frustration. We didn't go back to discuss the conversation because there was no way I could convince her and no way she could convince me. We didn't even mention the topic for months. And then one night, she sat with me on the porch of our dorm and she began to cry. She told me that everything she had ever known had been turned upside down. She explained to me the gay people that she had met and how great of people they are. She told me, If you ever told me you were gay, I just couldn't believe that alone would send you to Hell forever. I just can't believe that, and it doesn't make sense to me anymore. I don't look at that conversation as a victory--like I had beaten her or something. I did, however, look at it as a victory because her world had been challenged and for once, the idea that one sin could damn someone to Hell forever became incomprehensible to her.
And that's what I urge the world to do--to quit putting weight on your favorite sin, or any sin for that matter. Worry about yourself and quit trying to interpret what God views as okay or not okay in other people. Do not use the triumph of humanity as a crutch for an unrelated agenda. We did not tell the world this week whether or not it's moral to be gay--that's honestly not a question that anyone should be discussing in a public forum. But with it being such a point of contention, ask yourself if you are moral--in every sense of the word. Ask yourself if you've sinned, and then cite James 2:10. I do not see homosexuality as a sin, but I do see the persecution of others in the vanity of your own beliefs to be. We moved forward this week--we're one step closer to eradicating the terrible stigma that comes with "being different." And I don't think Jesus could be happier about it--his words in The Bible are meant to push our humanity forward. It's surely not meant to be used as a roadblock to keep us further separated.