I am reading these words from Howard Thurman, and I have come across Jesus and the Love Ethic which I would like to quote here:

The solution which Jesus found for himself and for Israel, as they faced the hostility of the Greco-Roman world, becomes the word and the work of redemption for all the cast-down people in every generation and in every age. I mean this quite literally. I do not ignore the theological and metaphysical interpretation of the Christian doctrine of salvation. But the underprivileged everywhere have long since abandoned any hope that this type of salvation deals with the crucial issues by which their days are turned into despair without consolation. The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed. That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus. ‘In him was life, and the life was the light of men.’ Wherever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them.

Yes! I am feeling every bit of this quote as I think about how I have been treated as an openly gay man by the church. How I have been kicked to the curb, not allowed to move forward because of institutional practices or disciplines. I see the big C church as a place which has been consumed by ritual, laws, keeping people “in their place” that we have completely lost the demands of the gospel. Thurman’s words here call us to a place that offers a love ethic that Jesus offered. I must admit that I am hesitant to visit some churches because I already know how oppressive they are towards the LGBTQ+ community. We have a lot of work to do!