This is the plenary address I gave in May at the 2016 FCA Canadian National Convention.
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Good evening! I am truly honored to be joining you here at the FCA Canadian National Convention to speak on a topic that I assure you I have never addressed in public before: What would Jesus say to Caitlyn Jenner?
Caitlyn Jenner attends the 2016 Vanity Fair Oscar Party (Photo by Karwai Tang/WireImage)
Who is Caitlyn Jenner?
For starters, who is Caitlyn Jenner?
Well, to talk about Caitlyn, we first need to talk about Bruce. As a child of the 1970s, I knew of Bruce Jenner. Everybody knew of Bruce Jenner. Winner of the gold medal in decathalon at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, he was lauded as an “all-American hero” and the “world’s greatest athlete,” one who had carried the pride of a nation as he shamed the Soviets in the midst of the Cold War.
As for me, as a small child I may not have understood the decathalon or the Cold War, but I knew Bruce Jenner as the hero immortalized on the box of cereal I ate at breakfast.
Fast-forward thirty years and Bruce Jenner returned to the public spotlight, albeit under somewhat less glorious circumstances. This time Bruce appeared as patriarch and stepfather to the tempestuous socialite children of his third wife, Kris Kardashian on a reality television program.
But even if reality TV was a long way from the Montreal Olympic Stadium, Bruce remained the senior statesman of sport, endurance, and the indomitable American spirit.
And then came the bombshell last April. It turns out that Bruce Jenner, Olympic gold medalist, all-American hero, and world’s greatest athlete had long concealed a deep dark secret. It’s called gender dysphoria, a term which refers to the ongoing experience of significant dysphoria or distress with one’s biological and socially recognized gender. To put it bluntly, all his life Bruce Jenner had never been happy with his male gender. All his life he had understood himself to be female.
But on that memorable April day, Bruce wasn’t simply announcing his dysphoria to the world. He was also announcing his intention to address it by transitioning, socially and medically, to becoming a woman.
A couple months later came the July Vanity Fair cover which introduced the remade one-time Olympic star to the world with the simple declaration, “Call me Caitlyn.”
The story of Caitlyn Jenner is not, however, simply the latest entry in the salacious twenty-four hour news cycle. At a symbolic level, Caitlyn’s story also embodies deep cultural trends toward redefinitions of sexuality, gender and personal identity, trends which many Christians believe are deeply opposed to a biblical and Christian view of the world.
The transgender issue is simply one of several issues that are included in an ever lengthening list of letters. LGBTI: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersexual. If you don’t know what all those terms mean, at least know that this broad coalition demands rights and recognition for sexual minorities that are seen to have been long censured and marginalized by the church and wider culture.
The challenge is not simply the transgender individual, or even the wider LGBTI community. Rather, the issue is the Christian witness to a world that often seems to be moving further away. Forget ships passing in the night. Increasingly we seem to be ships moving in completely opposite directions.
All this presses the question: how do we live Christian faithfulness to this world to which we’ve been called? How do we interact with the LGBTI community?
And what, after all, would Jesus say to Caitlyn Jenner?
What are (some) Christians saying?
Before we get to Jesus, let’s consider what some Christians have been saying. As you can imagine, the Christian reaction to Caitlyn has been decidedly negative, bordering on outright hostility. Popular Christian blogger Matt Walsh wrote an article for The Blaze titled “Bruce Jenner is not a woman. He is a sick and delusional man.” In other cases, the response was dismissive and sarcastic. Mike Huckabee, then a nominee for the GOP nomination for president, commented as follows:
“Now I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE. I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.’”
Whatever else you might think of Bruce or Caitlyn Jenner, it seems to me that Huckabee’s equation of the enduring pain and confusion of gender dysphoria to a flip excuse to get into the girls shower shows extraordinarily little by way of compassion or understanding.
Over the last year I have heard similar sentiments to those of Matt Walsh and Mike Huckabee shared time and again within the Christian community.
Here we find a kind of dismissiveness and hostility that, in its ugliest and most troubling forms, is sometimes expressed in outright hatred. In 2004 Jimmy Swaggart said the following of homosexuals in a sermon: “I’m gonna be blunt and plain. If one of ‘em ever looks at me like that I’m gonna kill ‘im and tell God he died.”
Granted, Swaggart’s sentiment may be extreme, but few can doubt that the Christian church’s response to the gay and LGBTI community has often ranged somewhere between stern disapproval and outright hostility. Philip Yancey notes in his book What’s so Amazing About Grace, one homosexual man he interviewed who observed pointedly: “As a gay man, I’ve found it’s easier for me to get gay sex on the streets than to get a hug in the church.”
Let’s pause there for a moment. Is this true? Is it really that difficult for a gay man or a transgender woman to get a hug in church? Of course, it depends on the church. But in many churches, the answer, surely, is yes.
Christianity and the Culture War
But perhaps you can forgive the church for this state of hostility. You see, remember those two ships I mentioned? The ones that are sailing away from one another? The church and culture? Well, they’re not just sailing away. They’re also firing incendiaries back at one another.
In short, the ships are at war, a culture war. In an article titled “Are Christians losing the culture war?” Os Hillman writes:
“In 1997 Ellen DeGeneres kissed a woman on national television. This led to a new strategy from the gay community. Come out in the open, portray a positive image, go into arts and entertainment and media as scriptwriters and actors and penetrate mainstream by showing healthy gay relationships on TV so that America will be desensitized to their aversion to the gay lifestyle.”
Hillman goes on to offer strategic directives to guide the church in defeating the gay agenda and winning the culture war.
So in the view of Hillman and many other Christians, we’re at war with the LGBTI community. It’s a culture war. And when you’re at war, hostility to the enemy is a predictable by-product.
And yes, that means that hugs are tough to come by. You don’t hug enemies.
Beyond the Culture War
I do agree with Hillman and other Christians that there are some significant differences in the beliefs, lifestyles, and goals of those within and without the church. But I disagree that a culture war is a helpful or accurate way to think about that difference. Certainly not if it is the primary way.
The problem is that I don’t see Jesus prepping us for a war with the world. Rather, I see him calling us to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19), to be salt and light (Matthew 5:13-16), to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to invite the stranger in, to give clothes to the naked, to nurse the sick, and to visit those in prison (Matthew 25:35-6).
The early church understood this well. In the mid-fourth century the pagan Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate worried openly about the way that Christians were winning over the hostile Roman Empire with their acts of love and compassion. He says:
“[Christianity] has been specially advanced through the loving service rendered to strangers, and through their care for the burial of the dead. It is a scandal that there is not a single Jew who is a beggar, and that the … Galileans care not only for their own poor but for ours as well; while those who belong to us look in vain for the help that we should render them.”
Now let’s put this in perspective. Julian is writing mere decades after Christians were being actively imprisoned, tortured, and executed for their faith. He writes as a Roman pagan who worshipped the ancient Roman gods. If ever Christians had grounds to judge a group their enemy, it was here, with the pagan Romans that had persecuted them. And instead, Christians chose to care for the poor and marginalized, not only of those within their community but those of their Roman persecutors as well. And so successful were they that the great pagan emperor Julian is shamed by their actions.
The early church understood well the old saying that the church is the only organization that exists for the sake of its non-members. Or as the sociologist might put it, the church exists not simply for the benefit of its in-group members, but also for the out-group, the outsiders, those who don’t belong.
In Jesus’ day, the in-group included the religious leaders, Pharisaical teachers of the law, members of the Herodian class. The out-group included the reviled and despised: tax collectors, prostitutes, adulterers, the handicapped, lepers, the poor and disenfranchised, the Samaritans, and so on.
Jesus wasn’t in a culture war with these people, with this out-group. Far from it: they came from far and wide to spend time with him. They sought him out. They loved him.
The church’s outgroup today includes many: secularists, Muslims, atheists, and yes, members of the LGBTI community.
And just as the fourth century church followed Jesus in loving those on the margins, so we are called to do so as well.
Our call is not to take up arms, but to extend our arms, not close our fists, but open our hands, not bar the door, but invite the other in. We are called, in short, to hospitality.
But what is hospitality?
Today we think of hospitality as inviting good friends over for dinner. But in the biblical vision, that which gripped the church, hospitality was very different. It centered on welcoming the outsider, the stranger, the outgroup. It welcomed the prostitute and the pagan, the tax collector and the Samaritan.
That was the ideal, anyway.
Sadly, the reality throughout church history has often been very far from that ideal. The fourth century church may have loved people to the chagrin of Julian the Apostate. But not every church has loved the marginalized as it should.
Failure to Love
I lived for two years in England while completing my PhD. During that time my wife and I visited a country church. As we walked through the quaint little church, we noticed that each pew had a little door at the end, and each door had a little lock. I asked the vicar about the doors, and he explained that the best pews in many English churches used to be rented monthly to the wealthier patrons. Often these private pews would include a brass plaque announcing the resident family of each pew. They also often included doors with locks, presumably to keep out the riffraff. I later learned that English pews were being rented as late as 1970.
Later, while studying this topic, I came across the description of a poor, unchurched Englishman who described the one time he darkened the door of an English church. “I did go once,” he wrote, “but the people were all shut in, and the folk in the boxes looked at me as if I had got in without paying: so after walking up and down several times, like a man in a station trying to get a seat when the train is full, I went home.”
How the heart of God must grieve at our locked and labelled pews.
Today, we may not have locked doors at the end of our pews, at least not literally. But how many invisible doors do we have in our churches and Christian communities which keep the outsiders at bay?
And how often do we fail to extend the hospitality to which we’ve been called?
Two years ago while on vacation I visited a church with my family. As we walked in the front doors a large sign declared: “You are awesome!” Well thanks, I thought, you’re not so bad yourself. We walked in the sanctuary and joined the singing. After twenty minutes, the pastor invited the congregants to welcome each other to church. Although we were surrounded by people not a single person made eye contact let alone shook our hands. For two minutes we stood their dumbly as people around us greeted, hugged, and chatted with one another.
Suddenly I didn’t feel so awesome anymore.
And if it’s often tough for the visitor, one can only imagine the challenge for a person who is visibly gay or transgender.
Philip Yancey offers the following observation:
“Every gay person I interviewed could tell hair-raising tales of rejection, hatred, and persecution. Most had been called names and beaten up too many times to count. Half of the people I interviewed had been disowned by their families. Some of the AIDS patients had tried to contact their estranged families to inform them of the disease but had received no response. One man, after ten years of separation, was invited home for Thanksgiving dinner in Wisconsin. His mother seated him apart from the family, at a separate table, set with Chinette plates and plastic utensils.”
I can’t help but think here of a passage from Brennan Manning’s Ragamuffin Gospel:
“The story goes that a public sinner was excommunicated and forbidden entry to the church. He took his woes to God. ‘They won’t let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner.’ ‘What are you complaining about?’ said God. ‘They won’t let Me in either.”
Jesus at War
While the sinners, the wayfarers, the ragamuffins, the outgroup, while they loved Jesus, make no mistake, he was at war.
But he was at war not with human beings. He was not at war with sinners. And he’s not at war with LGBTI people.
Jesus was and is at war with the devil. In Acts 10:38 Peter observes that Jesus “went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil”. As he delivered people from bondage, he beat back the devil’s hold in the world.
As his ministers went out to proclaim the kingdom Jesus exulted that he saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven (Luke 10:18).
And as I John 3:8 succinctly states: “from the beginning the Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil.”
Jesus didn’t come to do battle with sinners. He came to free them from the devil. In Hebrews 2:14-15 we read:
“14 Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— 15 and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.”
And as Paul observed in Ephesians 6:12, our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against rulers, authorities and powers of this dark world, and the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realm.
At War with the LGBTI Community?
At this point let me introduce an imaginary objector. He says: “Wait a moment. It may be true that in the grand sense we are ultimately at war with the devil. But isn’t it also true that very often those who are in bondage to the devil are also actively opposed to Christ? And thus, as we battle the devil, so we are battling his children. After all, in John 8:44 Jesus denounced his enemies by saying: “You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires.” Jesus denounced those who opposed his ministry as children of the devil keen to fulfill the devil’s desires. Given that fact isn’t it appropriate to think that we are in a battle with advocates of the LGBTI community insofar as we believe they are promoting a worldview counter to the teaching of scripture and the kingdom of God?”
In short, isn’t there a sense were we really are at war with the LGBTI community?
The short answer is yes. I do agree that there is a sense where those who are in bondage to the devil are at war with the kingdom of light. But having said that, let me make two essential follow-up points.
First, keep in mind whom Jesus is addressing in John 8:44. He isn’t speaking here to outsiders, those on the margins, the ordinary suspects, the usual sinners. Rather, he’s speaking to insiders, to religious leaders, to those who fancied themselves Abraham’s children. That which was true of first century Israel is true of the church today as well. In other words, those who fancy themselves insiders may in fact be working directly in opposition to God’s kingdom. And that’s a fact that should humble us all.
The English Christian writer Harry Blamires, a younger contemporary of C.S. Lewis, talks about this sobering fact in his book The Christian Mind. He writes:
“the discerning Christian knows that a cunning or intelligent man may lead a life of almost diabolical pride, in which he strives in every moment to minister to the desires and vanities of his own inflated self—and yet may pass for a respectable, law-abiding citizen. Indeed he may rise to a position of eminence in the world by the persistent and subtle practice of the most calculated self-service. He may become a judge, packing off poor men to jail with words of stern condemnation ostensibly reflecting the indignation of righteous men, and yet he may be, by virtue of a cancerous inner self-centredness, the greatest sinner, essentially the most evil man, ever to have entered the courtroom in which he sits—though its dock has accommodated a stream of murders, thieves, and perverts for the last fifty years. The Christian mind cannot overlook this possibility.”
Let’s say it again: the nature of the human heart is such that the greatest visible followers of God may be those most opposed to his kingdom.
So while we can remain open to the sense that we can be at war with members of the LGBTI community, we need to add with equal speed that we can be at war with the demonic elements of our own Christian communities. And as Paul memorably recognized in Romans 7, even of our own sinful nature.
Let me make one more point on the motif of battle before moving on. While Jesus could indeed construe his interaction with fallen human beings as a battle, the means of battle for those who follow Christ is revolutionized by Jesus. As we march into battle we adopt a cruciform shape, taking up our cross as did our Lord. And as he prayed forgiveness for those who persecuted and opposed him, so that remains our call as well. That’s what it means to do battle as we bring the life-saving message of the gospel, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. In Jesus’ topsy turvy world, war is carried out by acts of love.
Steps to Love
If we are called to extend hospitality to others, this is because of a prior call: the call to love. That’s why I really appreciate the title of New Testament scholar Preston Sprinkle’s new book, People to be Loved: Why Homosexuality is not Just an Issue.
While we are called to love people from the LGBTI community, I think it is important to be honest about two particular challenges to this call to love.
Christians (often) don’t know how to relate to the LGBTI community
The first challenge is the fact that, truth be known, quite often many Christians find it difficult to love people from the LGBTI community.
Philip Yancey honestly admits as much in What’s so Amazing About Grace? where he honestly shares the deep shock he experienced upon discovering that his close friend Mel White was homosexual.
In the 1980s Mel White was a leader in the Christian community. He taught theology at Fuller Seminary and he was a ghostwriter for famous Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. But he was also homosexual and had struggled with this deep, dark secret since his early teens. Yancey describes his own shock and confusion when Mel revealed to him his dark secret. Yancey reflects:
“I did not know one gay person. I knew nothing about the subculture. I joked about it and told stories about the Gay Pride Parade (which marched down my street) to my suburban friends, but I had no homosexual acquaintances, much less friends. The idea repulsed me.”
Well, Philip Yancey is surely among the more gentle, humble and Christlike Christians you are likely to meet. And yet he is honest enough to admit that the very idea of having a homosexual acquaintance or friend repulsed him.
Are you repulsed by the thought of a homosexual or transgender friend?
Let’s be honest with ourselves and recognize the personal obstacles that prevent us from recognizing that members of the LGBTI community are, as Preston Sprinkle says, people to be loved.
For many Christians, the key problem here is a distinction between sin and capital SIN. Lower case sin is what we do, and while it is wrong we don’t view it as placing us beyond the pale of love and forgiveness. By contrast, capital S SIN is especially offensive and evil and disgusting.
Here’s a capital S SIN if ever there was one: pedophilia.
In the film The Woodsman actor Kevin Bacon delivers one of his bravest performances as he plays a pedophile named Walter who is attempting to reintegrate to society and yes, to do the right thing. And yet, he continues to struggle with his own deep-seated sexual attraction to children.
It’s not an easy movie to watch, and Walter is not easy to like or to empathize with.
In a memorable review of the movie, film critic Roger Ebert poignantly observes, “We are quick to forgive our own trespasses, slower to forgive those of others. The challenge of a moral life is to do nothing that needs forgiveness. In that sense, we’re all out on parole.”
Truer words have rarely been spoken by a film critic. We are all out on parole. And if we understood the depth of our own sin, brokenness and alienation from God, we’d probably be less likely to ask, “how can I love that person?” and more likely to ask “How can that person love me?”
Do you remember when Rob Bell’s book Love Wins came out several years ago? When it did it ignited a firestorm of controversy because Bell seemed to be flirting with the doctrine of universalism, that all people may one day be saved by Christ, that nobody will be eternally lost, that eventually God may save everybody into heaven.
There are many good biblical and theological reasons to be skeptical of Bell’s hopeful thesis. But there are also bad reasons, and the very worst I saw was by a well-known Christian leader who said, if universalism is true then Nazis will be in heaven, and so will murderers, and rapists, and pedophiles like Walter.
Yes, and so will you and so will I. But who decides what is the forgivable sin? Don’t we all tend to draw the line of loveable and forgiveable in such a way that it works to our favor?
And yet, we are called to love all as Christ has loved us.
Love is not Acceptance
This brings me to the second problem with loving the outgroup. I find that often Christians are worried that extending love and acceptance of a person entails love and acceptance of the choices that person makes in life. But of course, that isn’t true.
My mother and father were married in 1967. On their first Christmas together, they decided to start their marriage out on the right foot. While my mother prepared a huge spread – turkey, potatoes, gravy, vegetables, fresh baked bread and pie – my dad drove their old van to downtown Edmonton until he found several homeless men standing around. My dad pulled over and offered them Christmas dinner at his house. Ten men piled into that van and enjoyed several hours of food and fellowship at a warm and inviting suburban home.
By inviting them to dinner my parents weren’t confirming the choices they’d made in life. They simply wanted to extend Christ’s love.
Let me give you another example. Rosaria Butterfield was a lesbian English professor in the late 1990s when she wrote a letter to her local newspaper complaining about the Promise Keepers event that was coming to town. She received a response from a local pastor in town.
But Pastor Ken didn’t denounce her as a sodomite who was living against nature. Instead, he invited her over to his house for dinner to visit. And that initiated a journey of relationship building with Ken, his wife, and their Presbyterian congregation which transformed Rosaria’s life and is told in her bestselling book The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert.
To love people is not to agree with them. But it is to make space for them. To allow them to be heard. To extend hospitality and build relationships and bridges.
Ed Dobson is a self-described a fundamentalist Christian minister. You might expect, then, that he would be among those angrily toting protest signs at gay pride parades. Instead, in the height of the AIDS crisis Dobson made it his mission to reach out to the gay community of his native city, Grand Rapids, Michigan with a special focus on those stricken by this terrible illness. Dobson observed: “If I die and someone stands up at my funeral and says nothing but, ‘Ed Dobson loved homosexuals,’ I would feel proud.”
Personal Transformation
Thus far I’ve been describing the call of the Christian to love members of the LGBTI community as a rather one-sided affair in which we need to extend hospitality to others out of love for them.
But it is never one-sided. When you open yourself up to interaction with others you open yourself up to being changed in the process. That’s certainly the message that comes through in Philip Yancey’s complicated and challenging relationship with his friend Mel White.
I have not had many experiences with members of the LGBTI community, but as often as not, the experiences I have had have provided me with grounds to reconsider my own walk with Christ. Allow me to provide you with a couple examples.
The first is from the year 2000 when I was living in London, England. I remember the day well. I got onto the Tube – London’s subway – and squeezed into one of the last seats available on the crowded car. Sitting across from me were two homosexual men. One had his arm around the other and his hand in the other’s lap. They looked happy and I looked on with a mixture of discomfort bordering on disgust. At the next station the doors swung open and an elderly lady – seventy years or more – got onto the car. She looked around clearly scanning for a seat. Thirty pairs of eyes – mine included – looked blankly back. To be fair, it wasn’t that I was openly refusing to offer my seat. Rather, it’s that it honestly never occurred to me to do so.
Suddenly one of the two gay men from across the car jumped up and warmly offered his seat while his friend flashed an inviting smile , waving her over and patting the seat. Immediately the Parable of the Good Samaritan flashed across my mind and I recognized myself as the teacher of the Law or the Levite too busy to stop and help. And there, right there, were two good Samaritans.
Fast-forward five years and I’m eating dinner with my wife and young daughter at Buddy Wonton Chinese Restaurant in Edmonton. Buddy Wonton has large plate glass windows and we were eating our meal right up against one of those windows. Suddenly a homeless man who was trudging by on the sidewalk stopped, sidled up to the window, and began staring through the glass looking at my plate of food.
This is the point in the story where I tell you that I got up and ordered an extra plate, right? Wrong. I waited impatiently for a couple minutes and then waved my hand dismissively in an invitation for him to “move along”. Immediately he snapped and the look of hunger was replaced by pure rage. “I’m going to kill you!” he screamed, pointing at me mere inches away on the other side of that plate glass window. “You. I’m going to kill you!”
I sat there stunned and embarrassed while the entire restaurant looked on, quietly chewing their chow mein as they took in the impromptu evening show.
There was a lesbian couple sitting a few tables away. The one lady was short and stocky with a brush cut. As I sat helplessly, she suddenly jumped up from her chair and walked outside to confront the man. She strode up to him and pointed a wagging finger at him. I don’t know what she said but after thirty seconds or so his shoulders slumped, he turned, and shuffled away. She came back into the restaurant and sat down with her consort to return to her meal.
A short time later we paid for our bill. And to my eternal shame, I never even said “Thank you”.
Conclusion
We began this talk with an individual’s pronouncement of gender reassignment which signaled a deeper cultural war between the Christian church and the LGBTI community. As we have proceeded I have encouraged us to recast our relationship to the world from that of cultural warfare to outreach, friendship, and love in emulation of Jesus Christ.
With all that in mind, I want to conclude with an illustration of the powerful impact of love from the ministry of Pope Francis, the beloved leader of the Catholic Church. As a Baptist, I have my share of theological disagreements with Francis. Don’t get me wrong. But I confess I have also been challenged by him.
In his first year in the pontificate, Pope Francis received many awards of distinction. But I have no doubt that the most surprising came from The Advocate, a well-known, public interest LGBT magazine which has been in print since 1967. The Advocate is the world’s leading activist LGBT publication.
Every year The Advocate has chosen to honor a person of the year who has supported the gay community. And in 2013 it chose Pope Francis.
Now one thing you need to understand immediately. Pope Francis has said nothing in his pontificate to revise the church’s teaching on homosexuality. That makes it all the more surprising.
So what earned him the title of person of the year? The cover of the magazine includes the following quote from Francis: “If someone is gay and seeks the Lord with good will, who am I to judge?”
In case you’re wondering, Pope Francis is saying nothing here about the moral status of homosexual acts. Rather, he’s reorienting the conversation toward the call for all people to be transformed by Christ.
This fact was not lost on The Advocate. In the article on Francis they admit that “Pope Francis is still not pro-gay by today’s standard.” What drives the award is not a shift in doctrine but rather a “stark change in rhetoric”.
As the article concludes the writer summarize the main point: “Pope Francis did not articulate a change in the church’s teaching today, but he spoke compassionately….”
Like St. Francis, we don’t need to articulate a change in church teaching to speak compassionately.
With that we can return to the question with which we began:
What would Jesus say to Caitlyn Jenner?
To be honest, I’m not sure what he would say and I always want to be careful about undue speculation. But if I don’t know exactly what he would say, I have a good idea what he would do. He would reach out in love.
Just as he reached out and loved the tax collector, and the woman by the well, and the Samaritan, and the leper and the woman caught in adultery, and you and me.