A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [91]
and refrains from doing any evil.
Do not let the foreigner joined to the LORD say,
“The LORD will surely separate me from his people”
and do not let the eunuch say,
“I am just 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.
And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD,
to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD,
and to be his servants,
all who keep the sabbath, and do not profane it,
and hold fast my covenant—
these I will bring to my holy mountain,
and make them joyful in my house of prayer;
their burnt offerings and their sacrifices
will be accepted on my altar;
for my house shall be called a house of prayer
for all peoples. (56:1–7)
These, of course, are the evocative words quoted by Jesus when he “cleansed” the temple, which for him didn’t mean cleansing it of “sinners,” eunuchs, and Gentiles—or of homosexuals and undocumented aliens—but of money changers whose religious-industrial complex excluded many and embedded the faith in the economy of the empire and vice versa. If there could be any question that God might soon change plans and revert from this campaign of gathering and including—hearkening back to a more traditional rejecting and excluding that religions seem to prefer—Isaiah adds these words: “Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather others to them besides those already gathered” (56:8).
And so the tension between exclusion and inclusion continues to today. When I was a young Evangelical, the issue was racial segregation. Then it was “those hippies” with their blue jeans, hairstyles, and rock and roll music. More recently it was Democrats, and now it’s gay people. Those who feel they must, to be faithful to Scripture, maintain a conventional policy of exclusion regarding gay people will not be convinced by this line of thinking, but I hope they will at least see that it is not the “throw out the Bible and anything goes” caricature that is often presented as the only option in a classic false dichotomy.
I experienced the power of this kind of inclusive ingathering many years ago in my early days as a pastor. Our little church had outgrown our living room and was meeting in an elementary-school cafeteria in a poor part of town, not too far from the University of Maryland, where I had been an instructor. I had recently met a Kenyan graduate student named Francis at a party and invited him to church. This was his first Sunday visiting. Francis had suffered from polio as a child, so he walked with braces, his muscular upper body poised like a robust triangle above his shriveled lower body. I remember after the service, after nearly all the metal folding chairs had been stacked away, seeing Francis sitting folded over on a lone chair in the middle of the room. He was gently shaking, his face buried in his hands, his forehead touching his knees.
I gently touched his shoulder. “Francis, are you okay?”
He raised his face, tears streaming down his coffee brown cheeks. “Oh, dear brother, these are tears of joy,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” I replied. “What happened?”
“This is my first time celebrating the Holy Supper,” he said, referring to the Eucharist.
“But, Francis, I thought you told me that you had been a Christian since childhood.”
“Oh, yes, but until today I have never shared in the Holy Supper,” he replied. “You see,” he added, as if his explanation would make perfect sense to me, “I am a child of the third wife.”
He went on to explain that the Anglican Church in Kenya, of which he was part, had made a policy for polygamous converts. Only the children of the first wife could participate in the Eucharist. “When I came here today, Brian,” he said, “and when you said that all were welcome