Homosexuality and Murder - Aren't They Basically the Same Thing?

Cecil Sinclair was a Gulf War veteran who had suffered with a heart condition for some time. Cecil's brother Lee was a Christian who loved his brother and wanted happiness and health for him. Lee asked his own church to pray for Cecil and they were glad to do so. For six years Cecil was ill until he finally required surgery to keep him alive until he could receive a heart transplant. The surgery caused an infection, and just a few days ago Cecil passed away from the surgery complications. The family now needed more than just prayers, they needed a place to have a funeral for Cecil Sinclair.

High Point is a large non-denominational church in Arlington, Texas and Lee has been a member and employee of the church for some time. His church family offered more than just a location even though Cecil had not been a church member and he may or may not have been Christian. They offered to host the memorial service, to feed guests, and they volunteered to use their resources to create a video about Cecil's life to be shown at the service.

Most of us do not share very intimate private details of our lives with our churches, though certainly some do. Many of us may not even be aware of every doctrinal point in our church creed. For most of us, there are issues in our lives that our church officials would not approve of, but we are aware that all have sinned and fallen short. Not only that, but even members of the same church may not agree on what is and is not a sin. Just because we don't announce intimate things about our lives in church does not mean that we hide them. Your pastor may know that you slip outside to smoke a cigarette although it is not good for your body and might not please God, and though you may want to stop smoking you may struggle with it for awhile.

My own mother did not tell her church that she had married at eighteen only to learn that her new husband was brutally abusive. She did not tell her church that she divorced him. She was not even aware of the fact that her particular church believed that leaving an abusive husband was not a sin, but that marrying another man after divorce is a sin and is adultery. She was married to my father who was a good husband, father, and church deacon when she confided in a church counselor about her divorce. The counselor notified the pastor about the issue and my father was asked to step down from his deacon role due to his adulterous relationship with my mother. It was not until years later that I learned that why my sister and I were considered illegitimate by that church. We never attended a Christian church as a family again after my parents felt forced out of one.

My mother had not hidden her divorce any more than Lee Sinclair hid the fact that his brother Cecil was gay. In my mother's case, she was not proud of her decision to foolishly marry at a young age and find herself in a bad situation though she did not see her own situation as sinful. In Lee Sinclair's case, we do not know if he felt that his brother's orientation was a sin or or not. I doubt that the church would disagree, though, that every funeral they've ever hosted was the funeral of a known sinner.

High Point has a justification, though, for what happened in the case of the Sinclair brothers. The church officials contacted the family two days after the death of their loved one to say that their memorial service offer was being withdrawn. The family had known that Cecil was gay and had decided that this would not affect how they felt about him as a person even if it was against their own beliefs. They'd never hidden his orientation, though they hadn't announced it to the world either. The memorial service was to be a relatively private event, however, and the church had volunteered to go above and beyond for the family. The family had provided photos to the church so the video montage could be created. Cecil Sinclair had a life partner and the family had understood that Cecil loved his partner and that this was a part of his life. This doesn't mean the family agreed or disagreed with Cecil's choices in life, it just means that they understood how he felt. For the family, a memorial service was not a place to make judgments about who their family member had chosen to love. The photos were certainly not explicit, but they did show Cecil showing affection to a man that he loved. Church officials did not call the family to say that they felt uncomfortable and that they'd like to discuss the situation. They called to say that right in the wake of this death, they were withdrawing their offer as it was originally given, period. While the family could still hold the service at the building, they would need to find their own people to officiate the service and take care of the details that the church had originally offered. The church did edit out the photos they did not prefer and offered to throw some money at the situation by paying for another location if the family went elsewhere.

Rev. Gary Simons is the pastor of the church and he is the brother-in-law of well-known minister Joel Osteen. Rev. Simons was willing to explain the reason the church withdrew their offer. The Dallas News reported that the "pastor said that he could imagine a similar situation involving a different sin. Perhaps a mother who is a member of the church loses a son who is a thief or murderer, Mr. Simons said. The church would surely volunteer to hold a service, he said.

"But I don't think the mother would submit photos of her son murdering someone," he said. "That's a red light going off."Cecil Sinclair's family was stunned to learn that Rev. Simons compared photos of homosexual affection with showing photos of a murderer taking part in a homicide. It is hard to imagine how it must have felt to be in grief over the loss of a loved one and then to be asked to picture him as being like a murderous criminal.

I have been to many funerals over the years at many Christian churches. It is not uncommon to see photos of the deceased in a video or posted near the altar or coffin. I've often seen activity in these type of photos that many Christian churches do not condone. When a friend of mine was killed in a car accident, his mother wanted to provide recent pictures of him laughing and smiling to leave people with that image, and those pictures happened to show the young man holding a beer can with a clear logo. He was depicted engaged in a behavior that was considered sinful by many of the church members, but those of us attending the funeral were there to mourn our loss, to honor our lost one, and to pray for each other as we grieved. We weren't there to decide if the deceased was an alcoholic, a criminal, a gay man, or a lawyer.

Have we traveled so far in time that we think of Jesus only as a thin pale man hanging on a cross? Have we forgotten that the canonized New Testament depicts Jesus as a strong man, a carpenter, a man who openly associated with known female prostitutes and men who he knew would later lie and betray their teacher?

Of course, church officials have every right to conduct church business in the way that they wish. They have the right to teach about love, peace and beauty. They have the right to preach fire and brimstone. They have the right to pick and choose which sinners to reject whether by the type of sin or by the pocketbook. They have the right to offer a ministry to a family and then withdraw that offer. They even have the right to compare one person's idea of love to another person's idea of murder. I am not sorry to live in a place where religious freedom does exist more than in some places and where churches do have the right to make decisions such as this. I am only sorry to think about where the devout but unmarried and pregnant mother of Jesus would be able to go to church if she were alive today. Or, where such a crazy woman would be buried if she were to die today.