Wurm, Soul Care for Families with LGBTQ Members

Transcript (edited for readability).

I guess a little backstory on this, along with the paragraph that I wrote there. I think that St. Paul has some excellent insights for us on addressing a culture that is unhinged from reality. As I recently — I think it was Brian Wolfmueller, in one of his little Wednesday whatnots — talked about an author that he had run across. The guy's name is Peter Jones. He's a former professor at Westminster Theological Seminary, in, I want to say it's Escondido — I think that's right, in California. So it's an Orthodox Presbyterian fellow. He is an exegete, and also quite a bit of a historian, and he's written some great books that just haven't made their way around in our circles so much.

The first one I read was The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back. He wrote this book in 1992, and all but about maybe four pages of this book came true in the last thirty years. Peter Jones, The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back. He prophesied, like, the Greenpeace movement and kind of what it's been for saving the planet, and that becomes this great crusade that we have, led by Greta Thunberg, I think her name is — is that Greta? Is that right? Yep. He also talked about how gay marriage would ascend, and then other forms of quote-unquote marriage would come after that, with polyamory, and we see different laws in our land, especially in Bill's area over there, where polyamory is just fine and promoted — different numbers and inclusions of marriage and families. And then he also talks in this book about transgenderism, how he said that it is a necessary product of the feminist movement, of all things. It was just sort of fascinating to have him write so accurately.

But what's fascinating about this guy is he grew up — like, right next to a desk from him was John Lennon. That was his high school chemistry partner. They would go down Penny Lane and so forth afterwards. Of course, their lives took certainly different directions, but they were raised in the same culture, in the same neighborhood. Because of his family's upbringing and his Christian influence, of his mom and dad bringing him to church, and the Holy Spirit's work piquing his interest in God's order, John took a decidedly different course. There's an end to that story. And Peter Jones has a fantastic heritage that he has left to us. So I put this guy's name before you.

The second book I read of his was Capturing the Pagan Mind, which is all about Gnosticism. I touch on it a little bit in my presentation here today, but I cannot read any verse of Paul any longer without his treatment of Gnosticism in the first century in mind. And I see — well, he's a smart guy — he's kind of convinced me on how Paul was writing very specifically and accurately to the culture of his day, in the attempt to get them to understand the fallacy of Gnosticism in that day, and the beauty and the order of Christ, and what he gives to us here in this world. And then The God of Sex — how spirituality defines your sexuality. So he takes paganism and juxtaposes it to Christianity, and that's quite an insightful book too.

Most recently, this book from Gene Veith — he wrote it in 2020, so just a few years old — Post-Christian. A slow read, a great read, an insightful read.

How I came about on this topic is not by my own will or desire, that is for sure. Probably thirteen years ago, I guess it is now, I had an elder of mine who was Missouri Synod his whole life, sixty-three years old, calls me over and he says, "Matt, I'm a woman trapped in a man's body." Really? You've been married for forty-some years, you've got two kids — how did this happen? So we sat down, and I wasn't going to move him, because he'd been on hormones for the last thirteen, fifteen months, something like that. We were just on the cusp of excommunicating him. Oh, I so wish that we would have been able to do that. But our constitution and bylaws also didn't say that — he's still a member until he's released by the voters. By the way, if your constitution says that, and you're kind of bound by matters like this, that's a good thing — you still bring it before the voters. My problem there was, I couldn't talk about what I knew privately, publicly. I couldn't even share it publicly with the church, right? So they just left their membership. I really wanted to excommunicate him so I could talk about it, so I could manage the discussion, so I could direct all the rumors to be silenced, and frame up the whole discussion in compassion and prayer and in support of our community, because he was not getting support, of course, from our church. Elders came to him, and the next day I had a resignation letter on my office desk. So that's kind of my first foray into this.

Throughout the years, different people burdened with transgender — gender incongruencies, I guess what we call today gender dysphoria — would come to me, and I've had a great chance to visit with them and direct them to God's good order. And there was a girl who was bisexual, and she brought her girlfriend, and another gal from another Lutheran church in town brought her girlfriend as his date night at our lock-in. I didn't see that one coming — I had to deal with that one on the fly. And now this gal is pressured to identify as something other than a woman right now, right? And so this is right here in the heartland of America. There's no way we can avoid this.

So I started a support group. The resource that I kind of based my structure off of is this guy by the name of Preston Sprinkle. He's not Lutheran — he's an evangelical fella out of Boise, Idaho, runs the Center for Faith, centerforfaith.com. You can go there and check it out. I give him about a ninety, ninety-five percent accuracy on the theology and the teachings of scripture pertaining to this, that we would hold to. But that's far better than anything else I have been able to find out there. My hope and prayer is that over the course of the next number of months, I'll be able to put some sort of resource out like that, that's applicable for our family in the Lutheran Church.

I think one of the motivations he has is guilt over the way the evangelical church has addressed this topic of LGBT. So for them, in their, say, King James Only sort of Baptist framework — if there's any whiff whatsoever of you having a personal sin in your life — oh, God forbid that you struggle with the sixth commandment in a gay or lesbian sort of fashion, or transgender — you're kicked out right away, and the whole community comes against you and casts you out, much, I think, in many ways like the Amish community shunning people. So there's this movement now within the evangelical church to say this is really wrong, and there's like this emotional reparation sort of thing that they have to do. Either they do, I think, what Preston Sprinkle does, which is good — say, "We handled this really poorly, how can we handle this better?" — and then you've got guys like Andy Stanley. Andy Stanley says, "We're losing members out the door all over the place, we're doing this wrong, we've got to change our teaching." I know he's quoted as saying, "I know what God's word says, but hey, you just — you can't do that."

So, getting to my outline here: it's Jesus who changes our hearts and lives. I have three little stories for you.

Back when I was in college, at Concordia Mequon, there's a guy in my classes — Andy — he befriended me, I befriended him. He was really good at Greek, I wasn't very good at Greek. He was good at philosophy, I wasn't good at philosophy. He was helping with my paper — he's in my room one night, and it engendered a friendship, and then he says, "Matt, I like you — I'm gay." Well, that's interesting. I like you too, you're a nice guy, God's given you lots of gifts — let's talk about this, right? So it was a little awkward, but he shared this with me. He said, "My dad, who's an ELCA pastor" — his dad is an ELCA pastor — "my dad said to me years ago, 'I love you, son, I'll love you unconditionally, so long as you're not gay.'" Right? So my friend's reaction to that — I've lost track of him over the years, we're still Facebook friends, we communicate a little bit here and there — but he now is an activist who lives in Massachusetts. Any opportunity, he has something religious to put up on the internet, to be out there as an influencer, raising the rainbow flag over the Christian church and God's word. So that was probably not the best move for this young man's father, to say that. But I bring that story to light because of the way that a simple comment really kind of reveals the emotion of our hearts, and the pain and the tension of all this — of how that can direct the conversation, the direction of a soul, in a not-godly fashion.

The next story I have here is about the young man in my first congregation. Had a vicar at that time, and he's doing campus ministry — the guy was in college — and he comes to the vicar and says, "I've got this thing that's on my mind," and the vicar says, "Oh, you need to go talk to pastor about this — he's got a good thing for you, it's confession and absolution, it gives you life, it removes your sins as far as east is from the west. I'm just a vicar, I can't do that — you want to go talk to pastor?" So he comes and talks to me. He stutters, he's got this terrible speech impediment — wonderful young man, loved to hunt and fish, snowmobile, motorcycle. In an hour-and-a-half, two-hour-long conversation, he shares with me that when he was nineteen years old, a man got him drunk and sexually abused and raped him. And so he thought, "Well, I know the teaching of the church, of scripture — I've had this done against me, that means I'm gay, that means I can't go to heaven — that's why I haven't been coming to church." And I say, "No, no, no, that's not it at all. No. Here — the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanses us from all sin, right here — read this over and over and over again." In the sanctuary, got him dressed up, absolved him. He tried to forget it, it didn't necessarily go away. And then we're outside, and he's getting on his motorcycle, just making small talk with him, and I say, "What would have happened if you wouldn't have come in here to visit with me? You hadn't talked to the vicar?" And he said, just like that, "Oh, I would have killed myself." Now, his speech impediment, with his stutter, took him like thirty seconds to be able to get a sentence out. And just like that: "Oh, I would have killed myself."

So the point there is that when God's word, which He gives to us for the purpose of the ministry of life, is applied in these situations where people have been sinned against and the devil has done his work of getting us to go down his path toward death — when we have the chance to apply this sweet salve of the gospel, we do it, because it is life.

Lastly, a fantastic man. He was taken advantage of — spiritually abused. In Sunday school, he had a third-grade teacher, not in the Lutheran tradition, who sexually abused him. Okay? Third grade, Sunday school teacher — the guy's in jail, he'll never get out. And you look at the statistics, there's probably dozens of these little boys too. Anyhow, just headlong troubles in life — drugs, alcoholism, certainly strayed from the faith. He even went to two different Concordias along the way, wasn't even raised Lutheran. Matt, what was that guy's name — the one that got kicked out of Portland? Matthew Becker. Yeah, Matthew Becker was his teacher. Matthew Becker told him it was okay to follow your heart, to follow your feelings, when he was a student of our institution at Concordia Portland, and that threw him headlong into the gay lifestyle. He was the happiest man in the Missouri Synod the day that Matthew Becker was removed from our roster. Okay.

By God's grace, I threw a bunch of Reformed people — Moscow, Idaho — he came back to the faith. He's a Missouri Synod member. And I said, "What — what changes people? What changed you? What changes your friends who have similarly come out of the claw of death that the devil has upon those afflicted in such a way?" And he says, "Jesus. They'll never want to change until they love Jesus more than themselves. It's Jesus who changes us." The point — of Jesus. Not rocket science. He just pointed me to Jesus, right? Which is what we do all the time — John the Baptist, right there. So really, it's quite simple, but evidently profound.

So let's talk about Jesus's examples from ministry. Jesus comes to Zacchaeus. You guys know how that story goes. Zacchaeus is the outcast of outcasts — he has betrayed his people, he's like public enemy number one in the town, but they can't get rid of him because he's placed there by the oppressive government they have over him. And Jesus says, "Zacchaeus, I'm coming to your house." And Jesus does. It sends everybody into a tizzy, and afterwards Zacchaeus gives half of his farm — half of his "IRA" — to the poor, and repays anyone he's stolen from four times over. Jesus invites his disciples — Matthew, a tax collector, probably an outcast to a different degree as well — says, "Come, follow me." The rest of the disciples, Philip and Matthew. So there's this constant pointing — Jesus says, "Follow me. I have something better for you than what you have in your life right now. If you just look at me, then you're going to have greater hope, a greater order, a greater contentedness in this life than you've ever had." And we know that as pastors — so the devil wants to obscure that.

Point two: Jesus's headship and control of the conversation. In both of these, it's Jesus who initiates, it's Jesus who goes, it's Jesus who approaches. Similarly, with the parable of the prodigal son — you have this great image — really it should be called the parable of the loving father — who runs out and casts off all of the societal expectations of the day. In the Jewish culture of the time, if your son would do something like that, waste your Jewish money on pigs and prostitutes, that son would be cut off, not even a son anymore, just ignored, out of the family, like he's not even there. But the father runs and embraces him — and he's probably got the filth of the swine house on him. How many of you from Iowa know what that's like, right? So Jesus controls all of the conversation, and he does it with compassion.

A few more statistics here that I neglected. There's a survey out there that eighty-three percent of the people who identify as LGBT-plus grew up in the church. Eighty-three percent. The first story, about the young man I went to college with — eighty-three percent of the LGB community grew up in the church. Now, you should think, "Well, not eighty-three percent of people right now grew up in the church — what's the deal there?" So the way the church has handled this issue — Christianity, I think, in general, and Preston Sprinkle really drives on this point, and I would have to agree with him — the way that we have mishandled this conversation, by not leading and controlling the conversation with compassion, understanding, and clear words of hope and direction, it drives to despair. That's about thirty percent above the national average.

There's some other studies out there — last year Barna did one on the different generations. I guess I'm a millennial or something like that. The national average of those who identify LGBT is about four to five percent. Those who struggle with LGBT are probably about another four to five percent, so maybe nine to ten percent. But then those who are directly impacted at the next level would be about twenty-five percent, right — your kid, your grandkids, somebody in your family. Probably about twenty-five percent of the entire population of the United States. And we're in a room of, you know, forty-some pastors, and we're not talking about it because we don't know how. We're a bunch of guys, we're not going to do it because we're scared. I don't dance, but evidently I'll start a support group for LGBT-plus.

Twenty percent of Gen Z identify as LGBT — that's like the twenty-two-year-olds and younger — twenty percent, inching up. Last year I had a high school senior say to me, as he was graduating, "I think that every female in the Brookings High School" — there's about twelve hundred kids in Brookings High School — "every female is pressured to be at least bi. To not identify as heterosexual, to not say, 'I want to get married to one man and start a family, I want to live a godly lifestyle.'" I believe that's true. So this younger generation is vastly influenced — we could talk about a lot of reasons for that — toward this panoply of sexual activity.

So in the incarnation, Jesus comes our way, right? He didn't have to — I suppose God could have worked out salvation without sending His son Jesus Christ to the earth, and I don't understand all the ways of God, none of us will. But for some profound reason, He comes to earth, and He sends His son into the mess of this earth, who's rejected even before He's born. So He comes our way, and the author of Hebrews, Hebrews chapter 4, says: "Since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need." And so Jesus comes our way, and He gets us. He understands us. And maybe you have a better way of bringing this to bear for the teenagers, or whoever it is, who's struggling with this and other things, but Jesus gets us. He gets us in our flesh, and His understanding of even our feelings — that touch of Him knowing us — comes to us in the sacrament. We preach and teach it in the word, and we receive it there in the sacrament.

Then Hebrews 10, right: "Let us with full assurance approach this throne of grace, that we might receive mercy, to help — to receive help in our time of need." Verse 22: "Let us draw near with a true heart, in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful." And so we can, because Christ is with us in our flesh — He's right by our side. Profound words there in Hebrews.

Jesus gives us a place to belong. There's this constant theme, a recurring refrain, when I hear the stories of LGBT folk and the desire of their hearts — it's to have a place to belong. And you think of it this way: they're kicked out of, say, Brookings, South Dakota, because their pastor's out, somebody said something that was mildly offensive. So they move over to the Twin Cities, and they have a community there that says, "I love you, I'll do everything you want, we're in one hundred percent support of you." But when they leave that community, they're like public enemy number one. So eighty-three percent of those who are in this community still want to have a place back in the community of the church. And they can do that either by supporting the parades and the legislation, or they can repent, right, or they can be brought back by Jesus. So they still want a place back. And Jesus does give us a place to belong. He only welcomes sinners, and when He comes into our life, things change.

So I think there's a thing we can do, and Paul exemplifies it in 1 Corinthians, with the order of the body of Christ, in 1 Corinthians 12. He's going through and probably answering all these different questions about all the massive dysfunction that they had — I mean, a man's even got his father's wife as his own. And then in chapter 12, he talks about the body — one body with many members, and how we all have a place: if one suffers, all suffer; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. So the place, especially for a person who has these feelings within themselves, maybe incongruency with their gender or attraction for the same sex, is to have that place in that family, and experience the family of God in relationships, and become a godparent, and have deep friendships that are not about an abusive use of that other person. That body of Christ that St. Paul talks about is wholly opposite of like the Central West End in St. Louis, or the Third Ward in Milwaukee, or downtown wherever it might be — I don't even know where it is in Minneapolis. So there's a place for us in the church for ongoing care. The healing attributes of the body of Christ, our table fellowship, I believe — because all of it is in God's name. And in that table fellowship — I know Bill talks far more articulately about this than me — it's a common table fellowship, of just spending life together, going out in the field and working, or going to the game, making memories together with the body of Christ, with the family that are good, and celebrating that unity in the Lord's Supper, where Jesus Christ comes to us and wraps His arms around all of us. So there's great healing for this person who has probably been abused by the church in some form or fashion, that maybe has driven him this way — who knows, bad teaching along the way. And all of that is surrounded by God's name.

Mark chapter 5 is a fascinating story that I love, and I bet you guys do too, where Jesus goes to the hinterlands, to the Gadarenes, or the Gerasenes, however you want to pronounce it. And it's like there's these road-closed signs along the way — they say, "Jesus, don't go that way, there's a crazy man." And, you know, he's really crazy — he's breaking chains, numerous times he's playing drums with people's bones, I don't know what he's doing, he doesn't have any clothes on. That would freak me out — I would definitely say to my honored guest, "Stay away." But Jesus goes that way. He faces the devil, faces the chaos, and at the end of it, everybody else is afraid and they tell him to leave — they've been sanctified, their pigs are gone — and this man is sitting, clothed, in his right mind. And Jesus tells him, "Go home, tell your friends, tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how He has had mercy on you." And so the effect of Jesus — changing hearts and lives, driving out the works of our flesh in His flesh, and the body of His church healing us — He sets us back in the ordered harmony that He first created us for in the garden, and gave us our genders, gave us marriage, gave us sex. And He says, "Go, and tell." And so in this, there is this order restored, being cleaned and sanctified by Christ. There's ongoing holiness and fulfillment.

There's, of course — you guys know it, and should be interested in it, but maybe take this pause to think about it — the sixth commandment. Luther doesn't say, "Don't do anything." He just says, "Aim at this" — aim at marriage, aim at chastity, husband and wife loving and honoring each other. So in that, he doesn't give any prohibitions. And we wonder, well, why? I think it's because of the nature of the temptations of the flesh, and how they're linked to the mind — there's great wisdom in not saying, "No, don't do it," especially with adults. Adults are going to do what they want to do. If they don't love Jesus, it isn't going to matter what you say. But if you point them to Jesus, who is the one who gives us this great order, who gives us this gift of marriage and creation, who certainly upholds it — just like Moses, just like St. Paul, you know, Matthew 19 — then I think we're doing a better job than trying to fight and argue with all the statistics and the rational arguments, because those just don't work today anyway. So we point them to Jesus, where there's ongoing holiness and fulfillment.

All right, I'll take a pause here just to take a drink, if you have any questions or comments.

Yeah, thank you. [Question from the floor about not starting with the word "gender," since it's a linguistic term.] Yeah, gender is a linguistic term — I think you can do that. For the help of definitions, just to drive home, it's a male and female sex — we're different, we're complementary. But frame it up in a way that is positive, and say, "God has given us this complementary nature of our bodies for a good thing," right, and leave it at that.

[Question about Preston Sprinkle's use of the word "affirming," and whether the questioner agreed with his conclusion, since the terminology is loaded.] Well, Preston Sprinkle, when he uses the term "affirming," he uses it in reference to Christian churches that affirm the LGBT — I might call it an agenda. So they say being gay, the practice of homosexuality, the action of it, is fine — that would be an affirming church. Think of the mainstream churches today. He tries to draw the distinction between historically Christian and affirming — historically Christian would be his own standpoint. But he does use the word "accept" — Jesus accepted sinners, so we can accept gay people. But yeah, it is a bit confusing, the terminology.

All right. The path of Gnosticism today — I'll go through this fairly quickly. I am not a philosopher, as I stated earlier, but we got this the other week from Ed V, and it was fantastic. So, thinking back in the philosophy of the last five, six hundred years — you have the Dark Ages, you have the Middle Ages, and out of that pops up the Enlightenment, so reason comes back to the fore, and then the sciences blossom once again — we realize, through Copernicus, that the world is not at the center of the universe. Other sciences come out of that, and so the Industrial Revolution is born. Along with that, rationalism, romanticism — I don't know, they're kind of together — but along with romanticism, this romanticism is a search for subjective truth. And there starts to be a distrust, or a movement away, from reason alone, from science alone. Now remember, we as confessional Lutherans, we just say scripture alone — we just stick with God's word, and He's going to guide and direct all of our paths.

Modernism pops up then, and experience starts to have a little bit higher position of guiding and direction as an authority for thought. And then you have postmodernism — postmodernism, where I can have my truth, you can have your truth, it can be a hundred, you know, one hundred eighty degrees opposite, but we don't know how to talk about it, so we're just not going to talk about it. Your truth and my truth are not based necessarily on reason, though we're still sort of reasonable people. It's not necessarily based on science, because we're not just trusting science anymore. It's based more now upon my experiences. So I form my position, my understanding, my thought, my conversation, mainly through my experience, right?

Constructivism, as Ed V says, is this — that my feelings now direct how I think and what I do. My feelings direct all of my constitution. And so I reject everything about my father's beforehand — science doesn't matter. You see that in the transgender movement. Reason — we can't reason anymore. If there is critical thinking and reason, it is aimed at criticizing the institutions, to destroy all of that, so that the person and the feelings might ascend to the highest position of direction for our thought, and then likewise for our action. And so then there's this inversion of faith and feelings, right — so we have this phrase out there, "faith and feelings." Well, faith and feelings is really, really nothing — what that is, is just kind of a faith in yourself. What is the basis of the faith? The basis of the faith, of this spirituality of today, is in me — and when all of that is peeled away, it's in my feelings, okay? That's not how we think, as Missouri Synod Lutherans trained and formed from our seminary — that is not how pastors in this group think and discuss. But we are the minority.

So if we want to engage the culture, like Peter Jones is talking about, that is exceedingly Gnostic, he would argue — one that bases its direction of thought and understanding upon something totally different — we have to understand that culture, and we have to find ways in which to speak words of truth to it. So the basis of truth for these kids today, I think, that are in my youth group and in our school — the basis of truth is only upon themselves. You can do a quick little Google search on constructivism — I don't know, maybe if you have some wives or some kids that are in education these days — but constructivism is a method of the day, and it works to a point. It's child-centered education, where the child then constructs the learning environment, and in the end, constructs the truth by his or her own experience, okay? So that is formally how this generation is being taught — to construct their own truth, by their feelings, maybe based on their experiences. If they don't have experiences, it's based on the circle of friends and influencers, social influencers, around them, right? So how do we direct them to the truth?

Peter Jones, in his books — just kind of quickly here — Gnosticism in the first century, boy, that must have been a mess. A fascinating study. How Gnosticism was a Jewish heresy that probably came out of just our Lord being silent for nearly four hundred years, and the Roman roads going from west to east, and all these various spiritualities coming through and seeding these new technologies, new information, new people, new smells — all of this new information, a lot like the internet has done in the last twenty, thirty years for us — feeding it right there in the center of all roads, up from Africa and then over from the Middle East and from the West, and then dropping this new teaching, these new products, this new spirituality of Gnosticism. And so, in the first century, the Christians are called atheists, right? Because they believe that there is one God, and they don't worship thousands of gods like the rest of the culture does. It's the "spiritual but not religious" of that day.

[Comment from the floor, Jeff: appreciating the point about denying the incarnation.] Yeah, when you deny the incarnation, the flesh no longer matters — plus a lot else matters. Okay, great. Yeah, so the flesh is just there for hedonistic pleasure. Right, right. And that's a reminder to us of how, of course, keeping the incarnation at the center in our preaching and teaching matters — and when you look at the church, where this is accepted, you see the incarnation come to matter less and less. Excellent, excellent insight — I've been dwelling on that for the last number of months, especially coming off of Advent and Christmas, and what a joy the incarnation is.

[Another comment, referencing a daughter's college experience.] Yeah — my daughter graduated from a liberal-arts college, and I remember they had a college president come from that "world truth body," and they didn't call Jesus the Son of God — they called Him "the incarnate one." So they denied His deity. So what you're saying is that what happened years ago was a forerunner.

Yeah — a huge aspect in the Gnostic writings and gospels is androgyny. Yep, yep. So gender and sex matter — however you want to frame it up — we were made differently, right? All of this matters. Gnosticism — I mean, it goes all the way back to the worship of Ishtar in Sumeria. She showed up as a false god in Egypt and other places as well, but that's an androgynous figure. I just did a presentation this last weekend for college students where I found this image of Ishtar, who is depicted female on top, male on bottom — it is eighteen hundred years old.

For another point — I don't have this written down here — you've got to write down Isaiah 56. Isaiah chapter 56. I don't have that in this presentation, but — there we have it here, there we go. "For thus says the Lord: let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say, 'The Lord will surely separate me from His people'; and let not the eunuch say, 'Behold, I am a dry tree.' For thus says the Lord: to the eunuchs who keep My sabbaths, who choose the things that please Me and hold fast My covenant, I will give in My house and within My walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off." Isaiah 56. There's a — not a pun, but — this is for the eunuchs who had joined themselves in sacred, spiritual, pagan-goddess worship, and emasculated themselves, erasing the distinction of the flesh in pagan worship — really, worship of the devil. And the Lord says, through the prophet Isaiah, seven hundred years before our Lord Christ, that these eunuchs who keep His sabbath, who turn, who repent, who follow His promise, follow Jesus — He'll give them a better name and place than the children of Israel, His sons and daughters — these who repent. It's fascinating.

All right, so the Christians were named the atheists — I'm going to gloss over the matter of the flesh. For the Gnostics, the flesh was bad, matter was bad — that was really an inversion of Genesis. The God — our God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — who created us and gave us all things in Genesis 1 and 2, the Gnostics say that was bad, and so then the redeemer is Eve, through the serpent, through her work — I think it's in the Gospel of Thomas — through her work of seeking after knowledge, which is the knowledge of the tree of good and evil. So then the devil becomes the savior, and God becomes bad — so that's an inversion of good for evil and evil for good.

So we receive the deliverance of faith through the body of Christ. We have St. Paul's example in 1 Corinthians 12, but I think most encouragingly for us is in Jude, verses 3 and 4, where Jude says, "Contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints." Well, right before that, he says, "I was very eager to write to you, but found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith." And he says, "For certain men have crept in unnoticed, who long ago were designated for condemnation, ungodly people who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ." The incarnation matters — the fruits of the denial of that are the loss of the gospel, and the sensuality that continues from it.

I'm going to get into my last ten minutes here, I guess, with some insights from Preston Sprinkle and Grace Truth. These are kind of the practical things, I think, that you can take home when you ask yourself, "What should I do, how do I do this?"

First: change your mind that these are not "LGBT-plus issues." These are people. Nobody wants to be labeled and considered just an issue — like a thing to fix, to manipulate, to change. We're far more complex than a car's engine with a check-engine light on. We are made in body and soul, an image of God, reflecting His glory, but we fall in this. So speak of this as people, not issues — strike that phrase, "LGBT-plus issues," if you can. Hopefully you heard in my speaking today, I talked about people.

The question for a lot of them, and I think the fear is: "Well, I'm not going to have a fulfilling life, right? If I live a celibate life in your church, pastor, it's not going to be fulfilling. I've got a girlfriend, and I've got this whole other community that understands me, that gets me, that maps the world the same way I do. I want a fulfilling life — I only get one of them. And I watch these influencers all the time on my phone." So we have to, in a winsome sort of way — which I haven't entirely figured out yet — other than just pointing them to Christ, so that all fulfillment does come for us in Christ. Christ is the fulfillment of all things for us. And there is a great and fulfilling life, and a place for all sinners within the church, where each of us does our part — when one rejoices, we all rejoice.

Put people before arguments, and let God's word stand — the polemic of debating whether or not all of these different actions of homosexuality, transgender operations, hormone therapy, and so on, is not the thing to lead with, right? Because that sets up a pattern — if you're going to lead the conversation and start with that, you throw the first punch, if you will, right? They're in this position — I learned that with my elder. He had been on hormones for over a year beforehand. So if we're to lead this conversation, we have to still speak the truth — the objective truth of God's order for us — but do it in a way that doesn't come across like a first punch.

Something I have found is — I don't know, these teenage girls and boys, they never pay attention to anything, but when I talk to them about order, they perk up for about three minutes. Do you guys get that too, right? And I think the reason for it is, all of the world and society around them tells them, "You have to order your life, and your understanding of life, and your position in life, based off of constructivism, your experience and your feelings" — but I'm thirteen years old, what kind of experience do I have? I've never worked a day in my life. I just get information from the people around me, and the people — the "idiots" in my locker room — are far more smart than it seems, than in the past. So when we speak of just objective order, they perk up. So instead of maybe getting into the argument, just let God's word stand and say, "He loves you, He created you, there's good order, you have your sex given to you by God for a good purpose. He wants you to be married and to have a fulfilling life, creating souls for Him and caring for souls for Him, and the creation He has given to us to take care of. If you like animals, go take care of animals. If you like engineering things, go take care of engineering things." So we can have faithfulness to the word of God, and in that, the faithful care of souls — they can't be parsed apart, the two.

One of the points that Preston Sprinkle makes — and really, I don't fully understand it, I don't have all the answers for you guys yet — he says at the end, you've got to kind of watch your vocabulary. Watch how you use the word "gay." Don't assume that everybody who says, "I'm gay," is actively in that practice — but that's just how they identify themselves. So something I've learned to do — probably a question, a topic for another day, is: what do you do about pronouns? I just don't get so hung up about pronouns, and how you talk to people, and — what's my last name — Wurm, I got called all sorts of names, I just don't value names all that much. I do value the name given in Holy Baptism — that formal name is very, very valuable, right? But these names we use, and the way we describe people, do have meaning. So it's probably — you should ask whoever it is you're working with how they want to be referred to. Like, "Are you a gay Christian?" Well, what does "gay Christian" mean, right? And maybe they'll say, "Well, I'm a Christian, and I want to marry my boyfriend or my girlfriend, and I'm, you know, same-gender." Or maybe they'll say, "I'm just a Christian who desires to live the celibate life, and I love Jesus," right? So seek to define — ask them how they want you to refer to them. It would be quite insulting to refer to someone who committed adultery and got divorced continually as "an adulterer," right — "that person, he's an adulterer." Yeah, he's "an adulterous Christian" — sins are forgiven, we should forget about them.

The thing he says there is: be a safe person. With my youth, in my youth group, I used to have this thing — before I got ordained and had the collar — that people would talk to me about anything. I grew up playing hockey, blue-collar landscaping, dirt-track racing, and my nickname at the track was "the Rev." At the end of the races, anybody with any spiritual question would come to me, and I wouldn't know how to answer them, so I'd go back to school — I went to Fort Wayne and St. Louis to get the answers. And then I got ordained, and then they quit asking me those questions, because there's this assumption that the church is going to judge them right away. So the first thing they hear out of the pastor's mouth is, "Don't do it," instead of, "There's a better way — I'll show you a more excellent way." That should ring in your ears as the last words of 1 Corinthians chapter 12, where St. Paul, after spiritual gifts, says, "Now let me show you a more excellent way," and he launches into the love of Christ — how that ordering of God's love for us exemplifies perfect patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness — love does not envy, does not boast — all of the humility of Christ's love for us. That is the more excellent way.

In the line from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, at the end there, in reference to Aslan, who's quite frightening, who's the Christ figure — "He is not safe, but he is good," right? And I don't know how to get around this one, because our whole culture around us is, "You've got to go to a safe space." You can't climb a ladder unless you're eighteen years old at a workplace, because it's not safe for you. But the reality of the world is, it's not safe. Ed V talks about how, when the Twin Towers came down, he thought that would have wiped out postmodernism, to say there is reality in the world — it is not a safe place, there is evil, right? And so that is real. But God gives us the goodness of Christ, and He gives us new life in Christ. So when the reality of evil, and the lack of safety, raises its head, we point to the eternal safety, the eternal goodness we have in our Lord Jesus.

Wrapping up here — I think, and I'd add one more point to this, maybe a good model in what I employed for this little support group I started: I just put it on the calendar and promoted it. Just make up your mind and do it, right? If you operate that way — if it's on the calendar, you're going to do it, do it. I think you can. If I can do it, you guys can do it. It's not — it's so life-giving for the members of my congregation. I extended it to other people in our community as well. We've got a Wesleyan guy who comes regularly, and a Roman Catholic family that's got a lesbian daughter who comes regularly, and they will not miss it — they arrange their schedules so that they come to our support group, because they've got nobody else to talk about it with, right? And I do, I think, a pitiful job of trying to help them, but just in listening to them, it does more good than I could ever imagine.

So what I do is I kind of use this structure here, with Preston Sprinkle's Grace and Truth — you could do your own. There are dozens of news articles every week that come out that relate to this, and you can use those to talk about it. I think if you're doing DOCC too, you're some sort of a Seelsorger already — if you just point them to Jesus, and you listen with them, I think that'll be helpful as you ask guided questions, as you put your study together. It doesn't take a whole lot of time — it's far more scary than it is to actually put the time into it.

Point D: listen a lot. The hardest part for me is, I talk a lot, so I have to just shut my mouth and let the support group do what it's supposed to do, because the support group is very different from teaching confirmation class — this right here, confirmation class, is a different kind of support group, very, very different. Point them to Jesus. And if you can, eat together. Something I've been thinking about, after COVID, when nobody could get together, nobody could eat together — we were all divided in so many ways, and how much unity and joy is brought by just eating together, having fellowship together. So if you can do that at your church, after whatever services you have, just do that, and the body of Christ will probably flourish, especially in this direction.

So, well — Gordy, health plans will sort that out for us. All right.