Of Christian reaction to Legabibo judgment

Dumi Mmualefe | Monday November 24, 2014 17:18

The church, as a body instituted and constituted in love, should be more loving than acting as accusers. A loving person seeks to understand before passing judgment. One who loves, even when they do not fully understand embarks on a journey to learn and hopefully have facts before condemning. In fact, a loving person does not condemn others but seeks to journey with them in love, and then maybe, through their loving kindness they can bring change, necessary change, and not forced change!

I wish to thank God and our High Court for the judgment on the LeGaBiBo case. For starters, the case is not even about legalising homosexuality but about their refusal to register an organisation that seeks to lobby for the dignity and rights of our brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, fathers and mothers; and indeed our sons and daughters who, at least some, not by choice find themselves falling outside a bracket of the heteronormative.

Some within the Christian fraternity who would not hesitate to burn non-heterosexual at the stake need to be informed more by science, in this case biology, than emotions that nature has more to both human life and animal life than what is held to be orthodox. We need to be honest; Christians who, like the disciples coming down from the mountain top experience where Jesus would not let them live permanently after having a foretaste of glory divine, met an epileptic boy at the foot of the hill. Down there a great confession was made; “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.”

The life of the Lord Jesus was a life of tension between what was perceived to be right, or wrong, and what the most loving thing to do was. The life of Jesus was to opt for love against legalism. It was a sin to do any manner of work on the Sabbath but Jesus chose to love on the Sabbath, thus sinning against what was perceived to be the most right thing to do.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus knew very well that the scriptures say “Now the Lord spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying, “this is my statute of the law that the Lord has commanded: …Whoever touches the dead body of any person shall be unclean for seven days. He shall cleanse himself with the water on the third day and on the seventh day, and so be clean. But if he does not cleanse himself on the third day and on the seventh day, he will not become clean. Whoever touches a dead person, the body of anyone who has died, and does not cleanse himself, defiles the tabernacle of the Lord, and that person shall be cut off from Israel” (Lev 19:11-13). 

Knowing this scripture, Jesus still expected the priest and the Levite to risk defiling themselves and missing out on performing their divine duties for the seven days following. He instead glorifies a marginalised Samaritan and calls him good. Jesus risked God’s condemnation by opting to love “good”.

Even if non-heterosexuals were wrong, I would opt to embrace them, to love unconditionally rather than condemn. But why would people want anyone to be prevented from having the right to lobby for instance, for unthreatened access to work, health facilities and attention, for protection from those who out of their phobia may cause harm to them? This is what the case is about. Who does not what to walk the streets of Botswana without having to look over their shoulders?

I understand that just as I did not choose my sexual body make up which is not only physiological but also mental, there are similarly those like me, but being unlike me in their biological make up who did not choose to be the way they are.

We cannot pretend this is not the reality within which we find ourselves. Just as we have short people whom we may not make  tall through prayer, why should they not be biologically sexually different people whom we cannot do the same. The reality is that we as a Christian community, that is some, and I admit the majority we must contend with is the risk that our behaviour towards the “natural non-heterosexual” bothers on rubbishing God’s intentionality in creating a diversity that colours God’s creation.

Sometimes I listen to how intolerant some Christians can be and wonder if they would rather accuse God to have faltered if the reality that some people are born different was to dawn on them. Can it not be that as we walk the paths of God there, many twists and turns coloured by shocks and surprises? Is it not possible that there is still more of God that we have to discover and learn as we traverse this labyrinthine creation?

I choose to love because God is Love.  I choose not to discriminate or oppress the other because the Lord said “as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you do it TO me” (Matt.25:40). I choose to love, even against what is accepted to be right for true righteousness is in Love! To God be the glory!