God's Children on a Less Traveled Path

By Richard A. McFarland

Modern Christian denominations are deeply split about whether or not heterosexual relationships between one man and one woman are the only sexual relationships permitted by God. Several denominations, including the one to which the author belongs, consider evidence of any sexual relationships other than heterosexual relationships to be sufficient evidence to bar the participants from church membership. The book you are holding contains the story of the author's extensive search through scripture, coupled with his direct experiences with LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people), all of which led him to a different conclusion than that of his church. May this book bring comfort and hope to those LGBT people everywhere who are sincerely searching for Christian fellowship. And may it help them find grace and acceptance as both gay and straight Christians work in peace and harmony while praising God above all, trusting in Christ's death and resurrection for salvation and showing sacrificial love in all things, including their sexual lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781640829022

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God's Children on a Less Traveled Path

Richard A. McFarland

Copyright © 2018 Richard A. McFarland

All rights reserved

First Edition

Page Publishing, Inc

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc 2018

ISBN 978-1-64082-901-5 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64082-902-2 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Dedication

To all God’s Children

Introduction

I have a problem with gay and lesbian people. It’s not their fault, and it’s not entirely my fault either. It’s a quandary in which I’m caught without any easy way out.

Over the past couple of years, I have intentionally sought out and become acquainted with several homosexual people. You’ll understand why by the time you’ve read into the latter chapters of this little book. All these people are religious people, as I am, and we share our faith in Christ as Savior as well as having other Christian values in common. The problem is that none of these people attend the church where I worship (a Missouri Synod Lutheran church in Southern California). If I want to worship with them, I have to travel to their churches, all of which are Lutheran churches, but not Missouri Synod Lutheran (LCMS) churches.

It’s not that gays or lesbians can’t walk into our church on any given Sunday. It’s that if they do, they will be warmly welcomed only until other people find out they are gays or lesbians. At that point, they will be automatically barred from becoming church members, from being baptized, from taking communion, and there will be serious resistance to their becoming teachers, being officers of the church, or assuming any duties in which they come into close contact with youths. For example, they will be unlikely to be accepted as den mothers or pack leaders in our church-sponsored Cub Scout Pack.

These proscriptions against homosexual people have been around for a long time. As a youngster in the 1940s in a Missouri Synod Lutheran elementary school and high school, I was taught that homosexuality was sinful, but frankly, the subject rarely came up. It seemed to be assumed that homosexuality was weird and something to be avoided. When I was a college student in a living group with about a hundred other young men from all kinds of backgrounds, homosexuality was something occasionally joked about, sometimes crudely, although if I knew any gay men (and I must have), I wasn’t aware of it back then in the early 1950s.

It wasn’t until I obtained a PhD in psychology and began teaching and doing research in the area of the physiology of emotion that I became curious about the root causes of sexual preference. This topic was never a significant part of my research; however, as part of my general reading, I became aware of studies showing that homosexual behavior is common in several species other than humans and appears to be a natural part of those animals’ behavioral repertoires.

A while later, published was a study of homosexual people that concluded that homosexuality is not a mental disorder but is rather a natural trait found in a certain minority of people who are no more prone to psychological disorders than heterosexual people. They simply differ from most other people in being sexually attracted to people of the same sex as themselves rather than to people of the opposite sex.

The causes of this difference in sexual preference appear to be largely biological and hormonally driven in lower species (e.g., rats) but is much more complex in humans. One thing is certain, namely, homosexual attraction does not arise by choice of the person; rather, the person discovers it in the same way heterosexual attraction is discovered. That can lead to considerable anxiety and confusion, as homosexual teenagers wonder why they don’t feel the same way about the opposite sex as their peers do.

Another frequently demonstrated fact is that once homosexual attraction appears, it can be every bit as strong and persistent as heterosexual attraction is for most people. That is why interventions that attempt to convert a person from being a homosexual to a heterosexual are so difficult and so seldom fully successful. That shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who is strongly heterosexual and tries to imagine what it would be like to attempt to switch to homosexuality or even to celibacy.

And yet those are exactly the kind of choices that my church (LCMS) will demand of any homosexual people wishing to become members. There may well be members or children of members in the congregation who know they are gay or lesbian but are successfully hiding that from everyone because to admit it will result in severe consequences imposed by the church.

You may be asking the same question I asked myself for years. Why have I been concerned about these things? As a straight man, I can sympathize with homosexual people who experience discrimination because of that trait, but where religion is the topic, several Bible passages seem to clearly condemn homosexual activity, and no place in scripture are there any passages praising people who are acting or desiring to act homosexually. It does seem unfair to blame people for a trait they don’t choose, especially if they use it to show love to another person while not acting inappropriately with other people. However, I always come back to the conclusion that fairness is not the measure of right versus wrong. God is just, and if He declares something to be a sin, then that must be the determining factor.

Nevertheless, I’ve never felt comfortable with that conclusion. I even wrote a paper in which I promised that, given the opportunity, I would do my best to make any homosexual people feel welcomed if they were sincerely seeking fellowship in our congregation. Given what I’ve said above, you probably won’t be surprised to know that, to my knowledge, no openly homosexual people have visited our church in the years since I made that promise.

In those years, I was occupied with many things: my job at the university, my duties as an elder at church, travel, my work as an officer in a charity, watching my children and then my grandchildren, rejoicing in their successes and sharing their disappointments. But I continued to search the scriptures, and one of the things to which I found myself returning was scanning the passages dealing with homosexuality for any encouragement that could be offered to practicing gays and lesbians and that would indicate some path for their acceptance by God (and by the LCMS) without demanding that they change themselves into something they are not.

When I found what I was looking for, it was not what I expected, and it was not where I had been expecting to find it in scripture. What I found was the answer to my question about homosexuality, but it was much more than that. It was a new (for me) way of understanding what God expects of us as Christians and a new perspective in which I should view myself and others before deciding whether or not we are acting in obedience to God’s law.

In the pages to follow, I invite you to join me as I retrace the steps of my journey in search of a pathway by which my church and the faith-filled LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) people can find reconciliation and peace. I encourage you to read this in the order in which it is written. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 provide important background information about (a) what God’s law was when it was given to Moses, (b) how the purpose and content of God’s law changed when Christ came and fulfilled it for us, thereby placing us into a new covenant with God, and (c) how God’s law has continued to evolve in the centuries since the scriptures were completed. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 deal specifically with the relationship between homosexuality and God’s law and how that relationship is applied (and misapplied) within the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod.

For those of you who are reading this primarily out of your interest in how the church deals with homosexuality, don’t worry. The discussion in the first three chapters flows smoothly into chapters 4 and 5, which discuss how we as an LCMS Christian church must treat our LGBT neighbors if we are to remain true to our pledge of faith alone, grace alone scripture alone. Chapter 6 explores the sources of the attitudes of churches like the LCMS that teach that all same-sex sexual activity is sinful. Chapter 7 includes a number of talking points with which anyone engaged in a discussion about homosexuality should be familiar. Chapter 8 considers the possible outcomes of discussions about homosexuality and the importance of aiming for the outcome that is most likely to accomplish what is needed. Chapter 9 is written specifically to my own congregation, with whose members I share a special bond of commitment and love. Chapter 9 includes a comparison between the LCMS official statement on homosexuality (basically that all gay sex is sinful) and a different conclusion that offers some rapprochement between LGBT Christians and LCMS Christians and that does not require either group to publicly surrender their beliefs on the subject of homosexuality. PS: I admit up front that the basic idea for this other outcome was borrowed (shamelessly stolen?) from a marvelous book (A Letter to My Congregation by Ken Wilson).

Now let our journey begin. Bon voyage!

—R. A. McFarland

Chapter 1

The Evolution of God’s Law

I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.

—Matthew 5:18 NIV

Evolution is a word that implies that something has changed over time in order to function under changing conditions. Certainly, nobody will question the fact that world conditions have changed drastically since the time Moses hiked down Mt. Sinai carrying the stone tablets. The topic of this chapter is to begin to examine the extent to which those changes in conditions have required changes in the content, the application, and even the purpose of the law God gave to Moses. The passage at the head of this paragraph suggests that nothing changed for a long time until that pivotal point in history when Christ spoke the words from the cross: It is finished. Those words changed everything.

Law and Gospel

I attended public school for the first three grades and then was placed in the fourth grade at St. Peter’s Lutheran School in San Leandro, California. The change entailed a bit of a culture shock since, unlike at Washington public school, where all my classmates were in the third grade, at St. Peter’s the first eight grades were all taught by one teacher in the same room.

The curriculum didn’t change much, however, except that now, instead of the three Rs, I had to learn the four Rs (reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion). I remember enjoying the religion material. The stories were pretty interesting, and even the memory work didn’t seem too hard. The first topic we studied in religion class was the Ten Commandments. I was impressed. God’s own words telling people how He expected them to behave. I remember being a little peeved with Moses, though, for smashing the stone tablets. It would have been fun to check out God’s penmanship, what with me struggling to learn cursive writing at that time.

It’s been a long time since the fourth grade, but over the years, the idea of the law of God has always fascinated me. I used to think of law as being an Old Testament topic and Gospel as being a New Testament stuff. However, I’ve come to think of gospel as anything that reminds me of Christ and prepares me for the time He will come again. In that sense of the word, gospel (good news) is spread throughout the whole Bible.

Even as God was expelling Adam and Eve from the garden, He told Satan that at some future time, Satan would be mortally wounded by a descendant of Eve (Gen. 3:15). So if Adam and Eve were listening carefully, they would have heard the first gospel message telling them that Satan’s victory was only temporary. God, and therefore His earthly children, would win in the end. The rest of the Old Testament tells the story of how, over the next four thousand years, God prepared the world for the day the Messiah would be born.

Much of the story of those four thousand years doesn’t sound a lot like good news. But even the flood, the testing the patriarchs had to endure, the time of slavery in Egypt, the hardships of the forty years of wandering in the desert, the wars, the exiles into Babylonia and Assyria, and finally, the stifling and humbling occupation by the Roman empire—all these hardships were signs of God teaching, disciplining, and refining His chosen people so that they would be properly prepared as a nation to receive the Christ and His Gospel.

Throughout the Old Testament, God sprinkled messages by way of the patriarchs and the prophets, reminding the Hebrews of the Gospel message so that they would look forward to the time when they would fulfill their destiny as the nation from which the Savior-Messiah would come.

What I am saying is that law and gospel are inextricably intertwined. If the Hebrews had the right spirit, then they could rejoice to obey the law as well as possible because they had faith that God would keep His Gospel promise to send the Messiah. God, in turn, counted that faith to them as righteousness. Their imperfect obedience was perfected through their faith in the Gospel even as God counted it as righteousness when Abraham believed God’s promise to make his descendants a great nation (Gen. 15:5–6).

Old Testament Law

One critical period during this time of preparation for the coming of Christ was when the children of Israel escaped from the idolatrous nation of Egypt and headed toward Canaan, another idolatrous area, surrounded by still other people who worshipped gods made of stone and wood. The nation that was to be the birthplace and homeland of God’s Son could not be an idolatrous people, so God took every precaution to guide them away from idol worship and toward righteous living. His main weapon was the law of Moses.

Soon after the Hebrews crossed the Sea of Reeds, God presented His people with the Ten Commandments (a written code of laws requiring certain behaviors and prohibiting others). The very first of these commandments prohibited idol worship. The urgent need for this law was amply demonstrated in that during the short time Moses was away receiving the Ten Commandments, the Hebrews reverted to Egyptian-style idolatry by fashioning a statue of a calf out of gold and were wildly worshipping it when Moses got back down from Mt. Sinai.

The Ten Commandments used a wide brush to paint what God wanted from His people in each area of moral and spiritual behavior. However, God saw fit to add many detailed instructions, which I will call ancillary laws, some of which seem rather odd and unrelated to moral or spiritual righteousness. For example, don’t interweave two different kinds of yarn, or don’t cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip the edges of your beard, or males must be circumcised, or eating mutton is OK but eating pork is not (only one of many dieting rules), or don’t cook meat in a pot that has been used to boil milk. Then there were all the laws governing the offering of sacrifices and the scores of rules one had to obey to avoid becoming ceremonially unclean and to become clean again (which was sometimes a complex and time-consuming process to be avoided if at all possible).

You may wonder how these ancillary laws had any effect in God’s efforts to protect the Hebrews from idolatry—that is, until you