Please bear with me, my friends.  I have an important point to make here, but a lengthy prelude is required to get there.  I hope you find it worth the time.

 I don’t speak often of my religious faith or beliefs.  They are private and personal to me:deeply held and valued, but private and my own.  Like my political principles, I prefer not to share them unless they are threatened, or unless I feel that I and my fellow believers are unfairly maligned.  And occasionally I will speak of my faith when I believe that my ‘co-religionists’ are misbehaving or just plain wrong.

 I was raised in a very small Presbyterian church, in a rural Texas community in which everybody was assumed to be Christian, with little distinguishing our denominational choices other than hymn preferences and dinner-on-the-ground BBQ recipes.  During my college years I learned of and became fascinated by other religions and ways of interpreting our spiritual nature.  I can’t say that I overtly abandoned Christianity, but I certainly laid it aside.  Of special attraction was Zen Buddhism, which lead me to spend two years studying the Japanese language – only my penury keeping from a semester in Japan – and whose influence I flouted openly, to the mild and patient dismay of my parents.

 For many years after that I simply disregarded the faith of my youth.  Christianity seemed worn out, plain, provincial – all the things I hoped to leave behind once I was free to live in the world beyond my insular boyhood.  A few months after finishing college I began working on ocean-going ships, visiting and learning of other countries and peoples.  A far vaster world opened to me than I ever imagined existed.

 For many years I floated around – professionally and spiritually – feeling no compunction to believe in anything in particular.  But for reasons I no longer remember, I began reading the Bible again in my 40s.  (Not coincidentally, the same time I began re-evaluating my leftist political beliefs.)  I came back to it with suspicion and doubt, but I remember thinking that I was ready to examine my inherited faith on new terms, to see if there was any value it; if I couldn’t find any, I could comfortably set it aside forever.  I wasn’t searching for anything; I read with an exegetical scrutiny, not a longing to fill some kind of spiritual void.  And I quite expected to be disappointed.

 I began with the New Testament.  Matthew in the lead-off spot, the scholarly chronicler.  Sure, the Sermon on the Mount seemed admirable – what’s not to agree with there?  But nothing particularly moved me. 

 Then I came to Matthew, chapter 22.  There we are told that Jesus was asked by a young man to declare what is “the most important commandment” of all.  Exactly what I wanted to know!  What the heck is God like, and what does a god really want from us?  Distill everything down to it’s most germane essence.  And Jesus answered with these two astonishingly profound and simple instructions:  “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind…” and “love others as much as you love yourself.” 

 That was it.  No other nuances or caveats.  When Jesus was cornered into nailing it all down – kind of a Christianity for Dummies nutshell – he said nothing about sacrifices, worship practices, sects or observances; nothing about diet or witnessing, nothing about race or creed or sex or righteousness or sinfulness; nothing about chosen people or outcast people; nothing, even, about right or wrong.  Two things, and two things only, did God hope from us: to love God and to love others. 

 I was struck by that passage as I have never before or since been struck by anything I’ve read.  If I could believe that a God existed, and if I could imagine anything that a God would hope for from us, this would be it.  I could not believe in anything more true to the spirit of a divine and perfect being than such a desire.  And I remember thinking that that is the only kind of God who would bother to put up with us, and the only kind I would hope to live with and put my faith in.

 That began a slow and cautious return to my own peculiar Christian faith.  I knew that I could believe in someone who said such a thing; that I could hope to be made better by following someone who said such a thing.  But I returned to it this time without influence, without church or pastor, without creed or denomination.  I didn’t then, nor do I now attend a church.  I don’t read religious books, and I care not a whit for the interpretations of others.  I am what I call a “red letter” Christian, after the old practice of highlighting the words of Jesus in red text, to distinguish them from what others have to say.

 So why do I write this?  Why would I share all this, since the subject itself is one I keep carefully to myself and which I find mildly embarrassing to share?

 I do so for a dear friend, whose child is sexually evolving and who may sometimes think that Christians will condemn this child she loves and who is struggling herself to understand.  To let her know that most of us are not that way.  We will love her and her child without reservation.  If we are true to the person who founded our faith, we must be true to what he said and what he asked of us.

 We must remember this: Jesus said “love others as much as you love yourself.”  Period.  He did not say to love other straight people, or other Christians, or others of your own race or faith or behavior or social class.  He tacked on no caveats, no disclaimers, no exceptions, no exclusions.  God excludes no one from His love.  If He does not, how dare we?

 I understand that other passages in the Bible condemn or disparage homosexuality or ‘alternate’ behaviors or choices we make (I don’t know what they are, and I don’t care).  They were not said by Jesus.  That is the point I was trying to make about being a “red letter” Christian.  Anything I read or am told that contradicts what Jesus said, I cannot hold to be true.  If the apostle Paul or anybody else said something else…well, as I once wrote about gay marriage, I am a Christian, not a Paulian.  (I am also a civil libertarian, but that’s a story for another day…)

 When I read or hear someone – Christian or not– who condemns others for any reason – for being gay, for being of a different race, even for being other than a Christian – I recoil in pain and sadness.  One joy of following Christ is having been given the clearest, most direct and precise guide for how God hopes we shall treat others – all living beings, poor and ornery as ourselves.  We disobey those instructions at the peril of disappointing God.

 I do not know how else to believe.  I don’t claim to live up to my beliefs very often, to what Christ asked of us – I am a deeply and habitually flawed man in an abundance of ways – but I still hold them up as what I hope to be.  I have never found anything more true, or more worthy of clinging to as truth than what Jesus said in those two simple sentences.  And I most passionately hope all other Christians believe the same.