One of the most shocking things about Christians in the world today is how many of them are against marriage equality. Some of them are anti-gay and loud about it, others bandy around that awful ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’ twaddle but I honestly can’t comprehend where it all comes from at all.

Well, apparently it’s biblical. I am sure many of you will have had certain verses quoted to you about just this thing! Well, one of my awesomesauce facebook friends shared a link the other day to a piece by Mark Sandlin called Clobbering “Biblical” Gay Bashing and I just had to take a look. It’s a long blog but well worth reading through in it’s entirety. One particular bit really struck a chord with me, and it was this on Romans 1:26-28

Without even knowing it, Lady GaGa has provided a better modern and contextual translation of physikos than the frequently used translation of “normal.” We will get to that in a minute. It doesn’t mean “natural” or “nature” so much as it means “produced by nature.” Those who use these verses as clobber verses tend to understand “natural” to mean something closer to “normal” than “produced by nature.” Not surprisingly, they also then define what is and isn’t “normal” based on their personal biases rather than on science or the reality of the world around them (e.g.: “I think gay people make me feel creepy, so I henceforth do hereby dub it as an act of not-natural.”).

In reality, physikos has more to do with how things naturally occur in God’s Creation. At this point, you may have begun to guess that physikos is based on the same root word from which we get the word “physics” which is, of course, the study of the realities of nature. Conveniently, the way Paul uses physikos here in Romans, it also means something very similar to “the realities of nature.” It is concerned with what is of our nature and not with what is defined as acceptable. That is to say, Paul is concerned with how God created something or someone to be. He is concerned with people going against their nature or in the words of Lady GaGa herself, if they are “born that way” he’s concerned with them behaving as if they were not.

That is the sin here in Romans, acting against the very nature of who God created you to be. In this case he seems to be addressing the idea of a same-sex sex act in which at least one of the two are not attracted to someone of the same sex; they just are not born that way.

As regular readers of my blog know, I’ve had some deep and meaningful wrangles with myself over my faith and my writing. I had an epiphany and that epiphany was brought on by Lady Gaga’s song ‘Born This Way’. You know how they say God moves in mysterious ways, well, this is God moving in mysterious ways.

So, is Homosexuality a sin? Is it heckers like (That’s Northern for ‘no’), it’s completely not a sin to be true to yourself.

Funnily enough the last sermon I heard was all about Luke 9.23 “if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” and was a discussion of what ‘denying yourself’ means. The conclusion was that as long as God is in the centre of your life you’ll know which bits to deny and which not. Just like you know what food you should say no to when you’re eating healthily. And the above quote backs this up I think. You have to be true to yourself and it is a sin to go against that.

So friends, be yourself, embrace yourself and don’t every deny the truth of exactly who you are.

If you’re looking for Christians like me who love GLBT folk then check out Believe Out Loud in the US and Inclusive Church in the UK. If anyone else knows of similar websites/groups of people then please comment below and I’ll add all the relevent links into this post, thank you.