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Woe to You Shepherds
Woe to You Shepherds!
As a pastor, I constantly felt the stern warning of the prophet Ezekiel breathing down my neck: “Woe to you shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!”
Here’s the thing: many pastors and churches feel that allowing LGBTQ people in destroys the church. They genuinely and sincerely feel that they will defile the flock.
So they make it their business to exclude them… or at the most ruminate, consider, vote, study, vacillate, procrastinate, and equivocate forever while the LGBTQ people wait outside the fold.
I always thought this verse a little later on…
“You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd…”
… applied in this very situation.
2 comments
Oh how this touches my heart! I have come to realize, sadly later in life, that God is so much bigger that I could’ve imagined. I have a child in the trans community and this is the same child that when they were 4 and told us they wanted to get baptized, I thought they were too young. While praying while doing the dishes, I heard the voice of God tell me “Forbid them not.” They were baptized a week later. And when they came out to me, God told me “I can work on them or you can, which do you want?” All He wanted from me is to love them deeply. And what I have come to realize is that it was mostly me that He was going to work on. God knows and judges our hearts. And love “covers a multitude of sin”—-my sin. GO OUT AND LOVE DEEPLY.
This is something that is brought up within seminary once a week to my face or heard loudly and rudely discussed by peers. As someone who feels called to be a pastor, I have been welcomed in by a church that welcomes and ordained LGBT members (and yes, there are some churches that struggle with this) and people ask how I could ever think of being there orndoing my internship there and aren’t I worried about how friendly they are towards LGBT people? Some expect me to be the light and show them the "proper " way of being a Christian. Yet, it is in this church that I am seeing first hand honest authentic messy love. I see and talk with people who are both content in their spiritual path currently and those who want more. Your blog is a great reminder for pastors of how to love everyone.