How do you get into Heaven?

Here is an interesting idea, I’m not worried about getting into heaven by the deeds that I do here on Earth.

In reading, “How Good is Good Enough” by Andy Stanley, the question is asked, what do you need to do to get into heaven? A child in a Sunday school class answers, be dead. This got me to thinking and chewing on the notion and hope of getting into heaven. Philippians 3:20 says, But our citizenship (actually our real homeland) is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. As an evangelical follower of the Christ there is no task that I can complete, no good deed to do, that can get me into Heaven.

In reality, right now, and hopefully forever, I won’t have to worry about the end or eternity in heaven, it is far more important to live a Christ centered life here and now. Christ’s gift enables us for lack of a better word to only fret about today and what is directly before us, he says so. By his passion, crucifixion, death, time in Hell and resurrection Christ gave us the ultimate gift. He, fully God and fully man reconciled us to God, his father, the creator. By his deed, God’s deed, the plan, we have been given the everlasting joy of eternal life and salvation and all we have to do is believe, ask for it, ask for forgiveness and then model it to the best of our ability while trapped here on Earth.

I am not suggesting that we live willy nilly without discernment, planning, holiness and calculation but rather a more truly faithful and holy life. Christ’s gift challenges us to holiness not only in deed but in word. Matthew 12:37, for by your words you will be justified and by your words condemned, so to those who crucify with words, think first. Then when it comes to deeds, Jesus says in Matthew 5:9, Blessed are the peacemakers, for they well be called children of God. Peace on this level can be boiled down to a whole host of actions, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, comforting those in pain and modeling Christ’s life through action.

All of this thought about Heaven and Hell leaves me wondering about those protestors who I saw at N.C. Pride yesterday. Did they think that shrieking at us through bull horns and berating us with their belief that we were going to Hell helped any of us? How do they reconcile the words of Jesus Chris in Matthew 12: 37? How do they reconcile that God is Love, Jesus is Love and we are to love one another as we love ourselves and above all else love God. Do they really think that telling another human being and child of God that they are going to Hell is a loving helpful action?

I used to become agitated, angry and furious with these folk. No more, I now pray for them all. I pray that they see that by word and deed we are to love our fellow human beings and only by doing so do we guarantee a place for ourselves in heaven. Day to day we must strive for holiness…wholiness if that fits better, and makes better sense. You see that in and of it self is the task and deed to get us to Heaven’s gate and beyond. We go to the creator, humbly and ask for forgiveness and professing our belief. It has only to do with us, self and no one else. There is where so many others, the verbal crucifiers, the physical crucifiers miss their mark. They’re not worrying about themselves, they are abusing others and nowhere in the New Testament does Christ God the Messiah abuse the beloved chosen.

Now, I feel a profound sadness when I read the likes of John McCann or see the screamers at NC Pride, they are not helping people by showing them a Christ like attitude but rather they perpetuate the notion that there is no place in a Christian world for outcasts and folk on the margin. The reality, Christ made it perfectly clear in his ministry that the marginal are those precisely whom we are called to serve. If we serve them, if we befriend them, if we save them then they will to know how to get into Heaven, and in by doing so at the end perhaps God with Jesus at his right hand will say to us, “Well done.”

Happy Pride and a response to John McCann

Let’s agree to disagree…a rebuttal to John McCann local writer with the “Durham Herald Sun.” Durham, NC

Here again is a pundit and talking head taking on homosexuality a subject I dare say he knows little if nothing about. McCann like so many others seems to rely on the age old myth that gay folk, bisexual folk, trans folk and so on somehow made a “choice” to be what they are. I’d challenge that the above alphabet of folk, gbtl etc. no more made a decision to “be” what they are than McCann has. What they did decide is not to hide what they are or live deceptively. To that end I’d ask John McCann, when, just when sir did you choose to be straight?

Dear Sir, please tell me how many same sex encounters, even if they were only in your mind, did you have before you choose to be with women and women exclusively? If John is honest and I have no doubt he would be, and perhaps he says, none, I’ve never had that attraction. Well then, wouldn’t it be logical for me to say that I have never been physically attracted to the opposite sex? I haven’t and by not being attracted that way in no way makes me less of a human or less entitled to basic rights and respect. That’s why we march once a year and a lot of us work tirelessly year round demanding equal treatment under the law. News flash, John et al, it still eludes us. One would think that an African American man would get that.

You see us gbtl folk can’t marry, so there is no tax deduction or marriage recognition there and so unequal protection under the law. We can’t join the military openly and therefore no VA health care or G.I. Bill of Rights. Oh, we could join but being what we are; don’t ask, don’t tell flies out the window right along with us queers. Then should we choose to live with someone and own property and perhaps one spouse should die within our unrecognized family. Then property rights fly right out the window. When my partner John died, I had to hire an attorney to fight off his mother just to save my home, my car, my bank accounts, my furniture and my semblance of life built with the man I loved. How many heterosexual spouses have to battle that battle? I’d venture to guess, none.

So many of the McCann ilk and more extreme ilk seem to think that there is some sort of perverted choice at play here with so called decisions of human sexuality. Yet these same people deny that they ever made a choice most of the time. McCann even talks in his Friday September 26th column about a discussion he had with a friend of mine and male penguins raising an egg. He says there would be not egg without the female. True very true, but my challenge to John McCann when and if he comes to Gay Pride for N.C. tomorrow is take a look around at all of the gbtl families and notice that there are a lot of children being raised by single sex parents. You see we manage nicely with a donation.

Finally, what all of this who ha boils down to is bigotry; it manifests in interesting and unexpected ways but any way you slice it, it is homophobic bigotry. To mock, condemn, joke about gbtl folk simply because they are what they are is no different than doing the same thing based on race or color. We can synthesize it down to that simple a comparison, folk of color, whatever the color no more made that decision than gbtl folk made the decision to be what they are…they all are what they are...yes sir we are what we are, we’re not going away and we’re not going to live in shameful secret.

1 John and love, respect and etc.

1 John 3:18

Dear children let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth

So, here in late September 2008 we find America in the throws of the election season with venom spewed on the Internet and television alike. Each ad escalating the bend of their agenda and informing all of us just how low, degraded, degenerate and awful the other side is. Yet the pollsters, pundits, talking heads and media moguls alike sometimes wonder why America is a petty, foolish, selfish, self serving and punitive place. Is it any wonder?

When contemplating this verse from first John its easy to see that in America we don’t love with word, tongue, action or truth. We embroil and embody at times the worst in terms of human characteristics as all people do at times. This petty selfishness boils over in almost all aspects of day to day life. On our highways common courtesy is all but gone. Drivers willfully scoff law, drive at high rates of speed, weave in and out of traffic, litter, drive drunk and completely disregard their fellow human beings. In a word their actions embody hate, disrespect and selfishness.

In the grocery store, many people walk and talk with a cell phone to their ear so that they can avoid any sort of interaction with fellow human beings. You see I believe that it is easy to justify being rude to others if you have a phone to your ear because your mindset from the start is one of debasement of others. To simplify this observation, it’s like this, the telephone talker won’t even hang up a phone to deal with, interact with or be polite to other people right before them. The justification, well I was…on the phone, those real people around me or near me in real time, don’t count and don’t matter. Of course on the flip side, many a store clerk works with a phone to the ear so that they don’t have to humanize those that are right in front of them. Simply put this is meanness and disrespect at its level best.

Nightly on television we are faced with more channels than not that spin their take on the day’s events. It really doesn’t matter which side of the aisle you sit, it is spin. What most folks don’t realize is that television time, and most importantly “news” is a commodity that is for sale and that the owners of television stations don’t care what they sell over the public trust airwaves. To that end I had a television executive tell me so.

I had an email discussion with the news room manager of WRAL television here in Raleigh where I told him he should be ashamed by what his station transmits in terms of political ads. His response, don’t blame us we don’t make it, we just transmit it. To whit, my response was right on. By transmitting you are culpable. He just wouldn’t see it that way. Kind of like a Nazi dropping gas at Auschwitz and saying don’t blame me, I just drop it I don’t manufacture it. Is the Nazi soldier that drops the gas any guiltier or less guilty than the capitalist that makes the gas? I don’t think so. What fascinated me most with respect to the executive at WRAL was his complete disregard for his own and his company’s personal truth.

So then, what is the answer? I know for me it is staying out of the twenty four hour news cycle, its hype and lack of truth. For me it is a keen understanding that every ad, commercial and television talk show is trying to sell me something. It is tucking my cell phone away when in store and smiling at others and saying hello, it is driving the speed limit, letting others in ahead of me and attempting to be the person God expects me to be and my parents wanted me to be. Do I fall short? Absolutely, does that mean I stop trying, absolutely not.