Truth Will Out

            I am an intelligent woman. My search is only for truth. Truth is all I crave. Does not matter if it aligns with what I believe because truth always trumps belief. When faced with truth different from what I believe, I change. I have recently found that those who believe so hard in certain aspects of their rule following religiosity are dangerous and untrustworthy. They do not crave truth. They crave a desire to be right at all costs to still be able to feel comfortable that their ideas are mainstream truth. They crave that others will think like they do and to know their truths. Well, refusing to sell goods and services to people with different ideas than theirs certainly isn’t the best evangelistic tool. The only purpose I can see it serving is making the person who refuses feel like they have some sort of false superiority or belonging to a club that the others can’t join.

            I have sat in a parallel universe sort of world where the Christians on my friends list started arguing that discrimination was really ok. “We need to exclude, set out signs, and not participate in a capitalistic market in a fair and legal way. In fact! We NEED to protect our right to exclude and belittle.” Excluding and belittling is such an addictive mindset. It soon spreads to people who are excluded. All of a sudden, the formerly excluded are discriminating against those who excluded them first.

            Jesus wasn’t about clubs. Jesus wasn’t about excluding and setting out signs that said, “No Admittance.” He certainly spent a lot of time yelling at people who were. The people group intent on discrimination during His time were called Pharisees. Oh, I have heard so many sermons on how not to be like Pharisees. When I was small, the word used to scare me and I was made to feel the Pharisees were the bad men who killed Jesus. I shivered as a tiny three year old. As a full grown 38 year old, I still tremble as I look around at those I love and realize, “I am surrounded by Pharisees.”

          Before you start to scream, hear me now, I used to be one too. I remember how smug, pleasant, and easy it was to have things checked off my extra special list of holiness. Now I see, I have no holiness. I have no space to judge and exclude anyone. I have no special inroad to special benefits. Any holiness imparted to me is not mine. I believe that God sent His son to give me His holiness and I can not muster up any of my own. A part of me stands in utter humiliation. How do I go about demonstrating my gratitude out of this state of despair? Right now in this moment, it seems I need to say, “Make gay floral arrangements and wedding cakes. Stop being bigoted.”