God is Love
A friend of mine recently hosted a church service for pride week. The celebratory colour in the church was crowned with a banner across the front of the nave reading ‘Love is love’
I think they could have done better.
Not because they welcomed LGBT people into the church. People are to be welcomed into church – male people, female people, British people, Jewish people, black people, white people, trans people, cis people, gay people, straight people. All people are included in God’s kingdom on equal terms. The doors of the church (and the hearts of the people who make up the church) need to be open so that people of every identity can hear the good news of Jesus.
But no-one really believes that love is love.
The ancient Greeks had four words for love: philos (friendship), eros (romance), agape (charity) & storge (affection). Most of our banners are about eros, but we have different types of that too. Eric Clapton had enough bad love. Soft Cell rejected tainted love. Robbie Williams just wanted to feel real love. We just have one word for love and it gets used for everything from selflessly generous acts of humanity to self-gratifying, other-degrading porn-lust.
Some of our more honest social commentators are brave enough to point out that gay love, straight love and trans love are not the same. Relationships vary in normative emotional and sexual expression, societal expectation and biological consequence.
I once unwittingly went on a gay date, which turned into a theological discussion. My friend was very keen on the book of 1 John, which clearly states that anyone who loves God must love their brother. There’s a lot about love in 1 John, including the incredible one liner: “God is love”. According to this early second century Christian letter, love is not self-defining. It is an expression of the most innate quality of God. If you want to know what love is like, look at the gracious compassion of God towards people. Look at his longsuffering patience with the people of Israel in the Old Testament. Look at the self-giving sacrifice of Jesus for our sins in the New Testament. Look at his commands – that we lay down our lives for our friends. That’s the model the New Testament writers use for marital (including sexual) love. That’s the benchmark against which we measure Christian behaviour. That’s how we discern good and bad love. That’s real love – indeed that is the source of all love.
The gay relationships I observe include kindness and faithfulness that I can celebrate as a Christian. Your average Pride parade celebrates these things alongside degrading lust and sexual objectification that is profoundly anti-biblical and destructive to human flourishing. I think it’s all a bit of an unhelpful muddle, so I’m not ever likely to run a pride week service. But if I did and if I had a nave to hang a banner across, it would say God is Love.