Queer as Faith is a weekly column by Nathan Gunter.  Unconventional and thought-provoking, Nathan writes as a gay Christian struggling to live authentically in the real world.

Missed the first week?  Visit our QAF archive.

Week 2:
A Word Before... and After

Last week gave you a bit of a shock (I hope).  Here's a new weekly column for you to read and it starts off with me lying on a sidewalk, bleeding.  Lesson #1 in reading this stuff: I write where I am.

So where am I today?  Feeling bad that I didn't give you a better introduction of what this is all about.  Today: back to basics.

Recently I felt the need to unwind theologically and reflect on my own belovedness, so I picked up a copy of Brennan Manning's The Ragamuffin Gospel.  Reading the simple proclamation of the introduction that Manning writes to his book, I began to cry.  I was sitting there in a bathtub in my apartment in New Haven, Connecticut bawling like a child reading these simple words.

"It is not," Manning warns of his book, "for legalists who would rather surrender control of their souls to rules than run the risk of living in union with Jesus."

These were the words which set me off, for I realized in them more of who I am and what I want.  Having read them a million times, I never cease to be struck by their simple challenge, and it was that simple challenge that drove me to Scripture.

Galatians tells the story of a man who goes to any length, who speaks any word, to defend the Gospel that has changed his life.  Paul writes to a community living a lie.  That lie: our stance with God is contingent on something we do. We talk about grace and works, and it's easy to think our theology is "grace-based" as long as none of the works we're talking about are too hard.  But Paul wasn't talking about hard work.  He was talking about the human tendency to want to wrest from God the will to salvation, to claim for ourselves all the power and authority it takes to save us.

Flee from it, he says.  It is for freedom that we are set free.  We have this power.  We are given it; it is our inheritance.  We don't need to bend over backwards, to jump through the hoops of legalistic religion or fearful ways of thinking.  We can believe that we are loved and trust that when we abide in God, God abides in us.  And when God abides in us, crazy amazing things start to happen.

You'll hear stories of adventures here, on this page.  If I never have another new one in my life, I have enough adventurous stories to keep this column running for several years.  And it's not just me.  We are the people of faith, and it is our adventure to live.  Because when we believe in all this grace nonsense (for it is, by the world's standards, absurd), we can't help but want to embark on the greatest challenge and journey we can ever take, a challenge voiced in a simple command, a single word, a powerful entreaty:

"Love."

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