I’m happy for Tony Campolo. Really. I am. I just don’t get
the fuss over his finally coming around, coming out, coming over, or whatever
other phrase you choose to describe his declaration of support for the
acceptance of gays and lesbians in the life of the church.
In a statement released this week, Campolo wrote, “It has
taken countless hours of prayer, study, conversation and emotional turmoil to
bring me to the place where I am finally ready to call for the full acceptance
of Christian gay couples into the church.
When I read that, there was big (ol’ southern) part of me
that just wanted to say, “well bless his heart.”
I don’t doubt the sincerity of Campolo’s current conclusions
nor of his struggle. Though we’ve met once, I do not know him personally and
I’m certain he has no recollection at all our meeting. Seven or eight years
ago, I provided transportation at some event where he was a speaker. I wound up
driving him and his wife, Peggy, from their hotel to the venue. He was charming,
as was she. I have no memory of the content of any conversation. It was
probably traffic or weather. That’s what we talk about in DC when we don’t know
what else to talk about.
I’m certain that I did not press him on his views on GLBTQ
concerns even though I could have. It’s not like everything that he needed to
study wasn’t already widely available at that point, and it certainly wasn’t
like there hadn’t been countless years of prayers from marginalized sexual
minorities around the world suffering oppression and outright persecution.
Christians who take scripture seriously know that God hears
the cries of the oppressed. That’s what God does. The cries of the oppressed
penetrate the heart of the Divine. Alas, God’s servants, as faithful as they
may be, often do not hear those same cries because we tend to be deafened by
our privilege. That same privilege often blinds us to others around us, and
deaf and blind we stumble through life trying to stay safely within the
protective bubble of our own privilege.
Campolo writes about his hours of prayer, study,
conversation and turmoil. I suspect the conversation and turmoil are deeply
entwined, and probably central to his change of heart for they are marks of
relationship. In my experience, nothing bursts the protective bubble of
privilege more effectively than authentic relationships with people who do not
share the same privilege. My bubble gets burst like that all the time. Campolo
goes on in his statement
to describe both the importance of his own marriage and of the relationships
that he and his wife have with same-sex couples. He writes,
Our friendships with these couples have helped me understand how important it is for the exclusion and disapproval of their unions by the Christian community to end. We in the Church should actively support such families. Furthermore, we should be doing all we can to reach, comfort and include all those precious children of God who have been wrongly led to believe that they are mistakes or just not good enough for God, simply because they are not straight.
Amen to all that.
At the same time, though, there is that part of me that just
doesn’t get the fuss being made about the turmoil
that some evangelical leaders are in now that marriage equality appears poised
to become the law of the land. Why all the public hand-wringing about their
struggles in 2015, when so little attention was paid when the first brave
Mainline Protestant leaders began working for the full inclusion of GLBTQ folks
in church and society back when I was a teenager? That was news.
My own beloved tells me that I’m the big brother in the
prodigal son story here – the one who stayed faithfully at home and resents the
party being thrown for the son who went walkabout. She’s probably right. She
usually is.
But I still don’t understand the attention that gets paid to
evangelicals who finally catch up to where their Mainline sisters and brothers
have been for so long. I don’t understand the attention paid to Tony Campolo
right now. I didn’t understand it when Rob Bell declared that he no longer
believed in a literal hell. I didn’t understand it when Rachel Held Evans
declared her acceptance of evolution.
These positions are nothing new under the theological sun,
so I don’t understand why they are news.
It’s not that I want a pat on the back for learning about
hell as an important myth from a Presbyterian Sunday School teacher in the
early 1970s, nor special commendation for embracing Darwin’s worldview as a
teenager. It’s not that I want a party to celebrate my support for marriage
equality – support, by the way, that cost me a job years before I chauffeured
Tony and his wife around DC.
To the contrary, I’ve been blessed by the education my
Presbyterian family encouraged, and I’ve been all the more blessed to be in a rainbow
party for many years now. I treasure the relationships that are the bearers of
that blessing. The education led me to seek relationships with people who do
not share my privilege as a straight, white, Protestant, married, middle-class,
educated, American man.
I still don’t have nearly enough bubble bursting relationships,
and I have lots of bubbles that still need bursting. Such bubble bursting comes
as a great blessing, and maybe that the news.
So, I reckon I’ll pass the blessing along, and when Tony
declares his support for same-sex marriage, and Rob leaves behind a literalist
understanding of scripture, and Rachel pushes for women’s ordination in
evangelical circles, I’ll just say, “why bless their hearts.” And I’ll mean it.
Blessings on these fellow travelers, sojourners seeking broken truth one
broken-open and thus blessed heart at a time.
