JESUS' RESURRECTION BODY

'Once incarnate, always incarnate, we might say...'
Wesley Hill, Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus, p.85.

YOUR WILL BE DONE

'In petitionary prayer, we set ourselves against what seems "normal." If a world filled with cancer, AIDS, sex slavery, rapacious greed, and toxic waste seems to us like "just the way things are," then petitionary prayer invites us to imagine a different world - the world as God meant it to be and will ultimately make it, a world in which those things are profoundly abnormal. To pray "Your will be done" is to adopt an appropriate distress over the world as it exists now and to hold on to the conviction that God will even now begin to change the world.' 

Wesley Hill, The Lord's Prayer, p.42.

FRIENDSHIP

'Friendship, then - for Christians who take their cues from the arc of the scriptural story - lives with pain. There's the daily pain of our efforts, as well as our failures, to love each others under the conditions of sin and weakness that we all experience, along with the resultant tensions, heartaches, and losses that such attempts can incur. And, additionally, there's the final pain of surrendering the beloved friend, and surrendering oneself, to death, whether metaphorical or or eventually, literal. Friendship, in Christian terms, is all about giving up oneself for the sake of love and embracing the cost of such radical loyalty. Friendship, in a word, is cruciform. If Jesus is the ultimate author and exemplar, then we can't fail to remember that his own practice of friendship ended with him strung up on an instrument of imperial torture, made helplessly vulnerable and wracked by grief. Friendship for him wasn't an escape route from self-sacrifice. It was the other way around: self-sacrifice was precisely the way he enacted a life of friendship.'

Wesley Hill, Spiritual Friendship, p.100. 

LONELINESS

'Friendship, I said, doesn't solve the problem of loneliness so much as it shifts its coordinates. Just as marriage isn't a magic bullet for the pain of loneliness, neither is friendship. It does, we hope, pull us out of ourselves, orienting our vision to our neighbors. But, no, I said, it's not enough. It's never enough.' 

Wesley Hill, Spiritual Friendship, p.98.  

BOOKS

'I am someone who makes sense of life with the help of books. In times of crisis, I'll pile up great stacks of them, looking for comfort and insight. Or, changing the metaphor, books become, in those times especially, the lenses through which I construct meaning out of my experiences, the spectacles through which I view the world.' 

Wesley Hill, Spiritual Friendship, p.90. 

SINGLENESS & FRIENDSHIP

'What I and others like me are yearning for isn't just a weekly night out or a circle of people with whom to go on vacation. We need something more. We need people who know what time our plane lands, who will worry about us when we don't show up at the time we said we would. We need people we can call and tell about that funny thing that happened in the hallway after class. We need the assurance that, come hell or high water, a few people will stay with us, loving us in spite of our faults and caring for us when we're down. More than that, we need people for whom we  can care. (As another single friend of mine put it recently, you want to be able to make soup for friends who are sick, not just have someone who will make soup for you when you're sick. In the absence of mutually recognized commitments, it's not always clear that that kind of reciprocity is welcome.)' 

Wesley Hill, Spiritual Friendship, p.42. 

CHRISTIANS & HOMOSEXUALITY

'Many times in my experience with homosexuality I have wished my life was different, that I had some other burden to bear - anything but this one. But I have also felt that if Someone is watching - taking note; caring about each footfall, each bend in the trail; marking my progress - then the burden may be bearable.

When the road is long and the loneliness and sheer longing threaten to extinguish hope, it helps me to remember that, like Frodo and Sam, I, too, am in a grand tale, with an all-seeing, all-caring Reader or Listener who also happens to be in some mysterious way the Author...my story and the depths of my struggle may never be observed or known by any human watcher. But I can still endure - I can keep on fighting to live faithfully as a believer bearing my broken sexuality - so long as I have the assurance that my life matters to God, that, wonder of all wonders, my faith pleases him, that somehow it makes him smile.'

Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting, p.147.

CHRISTIANS & HOMOSEXUALITY

'The Bible calls the Christian struggle against sin faith (Hebrews12:3-4; 10:37-39). So I am trying to appropriate these biblical descriptions for myself. I am learning to look at my daily wrestling with disordered desires and call it truth. I am learning to look at my battle to keep from giving in to my temptations and call it sanctification. I am learning to see that my flawed, imperfect, yet-never-giving-up faithfulness is precisely the spiritual fruit that God will praise me for on the last day, to the ultimate honor of Jesus Christ.

My continuing struggle for holiness as a gay Christian can be a fragrant aroma to the Father. I am coming to believe that it will be, in C.S.Lewis's words, "an ingredient in the divine happiness."'

Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting, p.146.

CHRISTIANS & HOMOSEXUALITY

'More and more, I have the sense that what many of us need is a new conception of our own perseverance in faith. We need to reimagine ourselves and our stuggles. The temptation for me is to look at my bent and broken sexuality and conclude that, with it, I will never be able to please God, to walk in a manner worthy of his calling, to hear his praise. But what if I had a conception of God-glorifying faith, holiness, and righteousness that included within it a profound element of struggle and stumbling? What if I were to view my homosexual orientation, temptations, and occasional failures not as damning disqualifications for living a Christian life but rather as part and parcel of what it means to live by faith in a world that is fallen and scarred by sin and death?'

Wesley Hill, Wased and Waiting, p.144.

CHRISTIANS & HOMOSEXUALITY

'...the struggles facing homosexual Christians...the struggle to be faithful to the gospel's "terrible decree" that we must hold in check our strongest urges and not engage in homosexual activity; the struggle to belong, to find the end of loneliness; and the struggle with shame, with nagging feelings of being constantly displeasing to God.'

Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting, p.127.

LONELINESS

'The remedy for loneliness - if there is such a thing this side of God's future - is to learn, over and over again, to do this: to feel God's keeping presence embodied in the human members of the community of faith, the church.'

Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting, p.113.

THE CHURCH

'...the New Testament views the church - rather than marriage - as the primary place where human love is best experienced and expressed.'

Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting, p.111.

CHRISTIANS & HOMOSEXUALITY

'When we homosexual Christians bring our sexuality before God, we begin or continue a long, costly process of having it transformed. From God's perspective, our homoerotic inclinations are like "the craving for salt of a person who is dying of thirst" (to borrow Frederick Buechner's fine phrase). Yet when God begins to change the craving and give us the living water that will ultimately quench our thirst, we scream in pain, protesting that we were made for salt. The change hurts...

...our pain - the pain of having our deeply ingrained inclinations and desires blocked and confronted by God's demand for purity in the gospel - far from being a sign of our failure to live the life God wants, may actually be the mark of our faithfulness. We groan in frustration because of our fidelity to the gospel's call. And though we may miss out in the short run on the lives of personal fulfillment and sexual satisfaction, in the long the cruelest thing God could do would be to leave us alone with our desires, to spare us the affliction of his refining care.'

Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting, p.67.

CHRISTIANS & HOMOSEXUALITY

'In the end, what keeps me on the path I've chosen is not so much individual proof texts from Scripture or the sheer weight of the church's traditional teaching against homosexual practice. Instead, it is, I think, those texts and traditions and teachings as I see them from within the true story of what God has done in Jesus Christ - and the whole perspective on life and the world that flows from that story, as expressed definitively in Scripture. Like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle finally locked into its rightful place, the Bible and the church's no to homosexual behavior make sense - it has the ring of truth, as J.B.Philips once said of the New Testament - when I look at it as one piece within the larger Christian narrative. I abstain from homosexual behavior because of the power of the Scriptural story.'

Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting, p.61.