Into the Breach

How can you be a repairer of the breach if you don't understand the breach? Red State/Blue State, progressive/conservative, Christian/Muslim, Israeli/Palistinian, rich/poor -- the divisions are so numerous that we grab onto any convenient shorthand because the work of truly understanding these differences is overwhelming.
The church I serve in Virginia is part of the More Light network of Presbyterian congregations. Indeed, we are the only More Light church in the commonwealth. More Light is one of those "inside baseball" phrases that only Presbyterians recognize. It simply means that we welcome gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons into the full life of our congregation and work to pull down all of the barriers to their full participation in the life of the broader church.
That said, my congregation is a More Light church in need of more light -- literally. Our 1940s wired sanctuary is a dimly lit space. So we called an electrician who sent us to a lighting designer who came to visit last week.
In the course of conversation, he told me that he is a member of a Christian and Missionary Alliance congregation. Knowing a bit about that conservative denomination and its fundamentalist perspectives on interpreting scripture, I was eager to talk lights and not theology. It was not a day when I felt like letting someone try to hit me over the head with the Bible and its half dozen passages that are regularly used to deny the full humanity of GLBT folks.
But he kept asking questions about the church and I kept answering them, and eventually he had a pretty good picture of who we are. That's when the fun began.
We talked for at least an hour about the theological divide between us. It was more than civil. It was a first step into the breach taken by people who share a common confession of faith, but come at it from radically different perspectives.
He said several times, "I hope you don't feel like I'm badgering you, but this is the first time I've ever spoken with a progressive pastor who comes at these issues the way you do, and I'm just really interested in trying to understand how you got there."
There were no conversion experiences, but there was some small repairing of the breach. He saw a progressive who is not a monster (at least I hope!), and I encountered a conservative whose perspectives are grounded not in stereotypical bigotry, but in a well-understood theological perspective. The conversation was so much richer than any I have had with conservative Presbyterian lay people, who, on these particular issues have struck me over and over again as naive, misinformed and, well, just plain stupid much of the time. This guy is smart, thoughtful and knows his Bible.
Of course, he interprets scripture through a particular lens -- as we all do with any text we encounter. While I see the arc of the story of scripture as primarily about restoring relationships between and among human beings and between creation and its creator, he sees it as a story of God's call to human beings to be holy. Where I read through a lens of compassion, he reads through a lens of holiness. Where I understand justice as love in action, he understands justice a God's judgement on fallen humanity.
So, if this is the breach, how does one operative within it effectively? How do we go once more into this breach with any hope for mending, healing and wholeness?