Since I spent three weeks picking on Biblical literalism I thought I owed it to pick on my own this week.  Lately, my friends and I have been mourning the complete breakdown of Christian unity in American culture.  We do not know how to bridge the great divide between pro-choicers and pro-lifers, or lead healthy conversations between anti-racists and the all-lives-matter crowd.  As a gay man, I sometimes struggle to accept that I even believe in the same God as those family members who have rejected me and are ashamed of me because of my sexuality. And that’s just within Christianity, never mind the broad chasm between Christians and other religious groups like Muslims.   It’s easier to just not be in the same room as those people…whoever those people are to you.

John Wesley was not unfamiliar with this kind of diversity of opinion.  I mean, in his day, Protestants didn’t even believe Catholics were Christians.  Wesley wrote a wonderfully challenging sermon called A Caution Against Bigotry. His own people, the Methodists, were being called bigots because they were considered religious fanatics.  But Wesley’s sermon challenged his critics and cautioned them against their own bigotry, ‘defined as too strong an attachment to, or fondness for, our own party, opinion, church, and religion’ (IV.1).

The sermon argues that it should be the fruits that define ministry, not the different forms, strategies, or even beliefs.  The end of the sermon is to argue for a sort of religious pluralism that celebrates how God is at work in a diversity of peoples, rather than begrudging those whom God is using who hold a different set of values from your own.  John followed Mark 9:38-39 where the disciples forbade a man from casting out demons in Jesus name because the man was not a disciple of Jesus Christ, to which Jesus said, “Forbid him not.”  Wesley says, “Nor are any animosities so deep and irreconcilable as those that spring from disagreement in religion.  For this cause the bitterest enemies of a man are those of his own household.  For this the father rises against his own children, and the children against the father; and perhaps persecute each other even to the death, thinking all the time they are doing God service” (II.6).

Then Wesley explains that the qualification for a person being of God is her or his fruit of ministry: do they build up the church and help turn people away from sin and towards God?  This is where the sermon and the topic become difficult for me.  I view homophobia, xenophobia, and white supremacy as sins.  Fruit of ministry that I’m looking for is someone who makes disciples by turning people away from these things.  But there are whole swaths of Christians who in many ways are thriving in churches and ministries all the while perpetuating the sins of homophobia, xenophobia, and white supremacy.  They believe I have no fruit of ministry because I couldn’t overcome my homosexuality.  The fruit of anti-gay ministry is depression and suicide and lives ruined.  The fruit of the all-lives-matter movement is blindness to ongoing systemic racism.  The fruit of xenophobia and nationalism is the further disenfranchisement of refugees, the undefined internment of immigrants, with even children in prisons, separated from their families.  I’m sure the other side would say that the fruit of homosexuality is the breakdown of traditional family values.  That the fruit of pro-choicers is the death of the innocent.  That the fruit of Black Lives Matter is, I don’t know, socialism?  or something?  I’m still not sure why they’re against that one.

This is a tough subject, and I might come across as tone deaf for poking fun at my own people, the liberals, on the heals of four years of Trump.  But I’m trying to reflect on the possibility that unity can come through diversity of convictions, not uniformity of beliefs.  I honestly don’t know if it’s possible, but I am seriously challenged by Wesley’s sermon, and by Jesus’ simple words, “Forbid him not.”  I know that I can’t live my life in bitterness and resentment towards those people who think so differently from me.  I believe Christ can and does set us free from all bitterness and resentment.  I just wish it was easier to love.