It’s time for a “Come to Jesus” meeting for Oregon bakery owner Melissa Klein and Kentucky Rowan County clerk Kim Davis.
Both women insist they are refusing to serve gay and lesbian couples (baking a cake and issuing a marriage license) because they are Christians and doing so would violate their freedom of religion rights.
Forget about their freedom of religion rights. That’s a constitutional decision courts will make.
The real issue for these two women and all their supporters is the fundamental difference between being a Christian and being Christian.
The former is about believing in Jesus. The latter is about following Jesus. Klein and David are successful in the former, but are failing miserably in the latter.
Take, for example, his teaching that not everyone who called him “Lord” would enter the kingdom of God, but only those who did the will of God (Matthew 7:21).
Talk is cheap, he is saying, when what matters are actions.
For these women to argue that their refusal to serve gay and lesbian couples is consistent with Jesus call to love unconditionally (which is what doing God’s will means) makes a mockery of his words.
Or consider his urging us to treat others the way we wish to be treated ( Luke 6:31). These women justifying what they are doing by insisting they are loving the sinner, but hating the sin hardly meets this ethical demand.
Jesus also said that in the final analysis being Christian rather than just claiming to be a Christian would be judged by how those who claim his name treat “the least of these” (Matthew 25:31-46).
The entire text in which this admonition appears underscores the fact that Christianity is less about personal morality and more about practicing social justice, showing compassion, being merciful, and responding to human suffering at every level and in all circumstances.
These few texts (and there are many more) are sufficient to make it abundantly clear that Jesus focused almost exclusively on the way we treat one another as he defined what it meant to live a righteous life. And that makes it also abundantly clear that neither of these women have a clue about what he actually taught.
But their failures don’t stop there. There is also the matter of hypocrisy.
Let’s say the women are sincere in not wanting to violate their Christian beliefs and moral conscience. What, then, do they do about serving people who are liars, cheaters, adulterers, take God’s name in vain, ignore the poor, promote economic injustice, are racists, refuse to forgive others, hold grudges, abuse their wives and/or children, or are guilty of other un-Christian behavior?
Are they refusing to serve these people? No they are not. Instead they are reserving their own version of un-Christian behavior for gay couples only. That is hypocrisy in action, rooted in their choice to read the Bible selectively and self-servingly.
The only hope for these women and all Christians like them is to have people in their lives who love them enough to tell them the truth.
That truth is that they need to learn the critical difference between being a Christian and being Christian.
Then their appeal to freedom of religion might mean something.
linnposts.com 