Alistair Begg and the Loving Thing

A Moment of Grief in the Tide of History

Alistair Begg’s preaching has been one of the most strengthening gifts to me over the past 20 years. The bit of New York where I live seems like the part of Ohio where he pastors, though his parts are probably flatter with better restaurants. Gently decaying towns and depressed cities, people whose families built the infrastructure that now so desperately needs renewal, middle-class, hard-working, as they say, salt of the earth. Listening to Begg preach to his congregation over the airwaves helped me to become acclimatized to living here. I gradually learned not to despise ways of life I didn’t understand and didn’t yet appreciate. It took me seven years to stop hating the hometown of my six children, and another seven beyond that to feel content about the garden. At the 21-year mark, I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night anxious that God will force me to move somewhere awful and hot, like Florida. Begg’s preaching cadence somehow made the sanctifying medicine of accepting a people and a place go down more smoothly.

Photo by Steve DiMatteo on Unsplash

Listening to this latest recording, it seems that the aftermath of the interview he gave—what he called a storm in a teacup—has aged him. His voice is shaky. He sounds on the edge of tears. Obviously, he did not expect what he said to be so controversial and was therefore deeply grieved to find an outpouring of, from his perspective, opprobrium, with some small amount of praise.

Before I go any further, I should say that I am grateful and heartened that Begg reiterated his orthodox position on human sexuality, and that he is not giving a blanket council for Christians to go to the weddings of same-sex people. I hope that someone he trusts is sparing no effort to try to work through the complexity of these issues, to help him understand why people who listen to him and love him are so upset.

I am grieved, though, that he was caught off guard. For a portion of the sermon, he recounts how often he has been at the forefront of preaching about sexuality. He has recently gone through Romans 1. In the past has gone up against some of the biggest cultural influencers on the subject of sexuality, people like Ellen DeGeneres. If that’s so, how does he not have a sense of how volatile this subject is, how what we say and do is under a microscope, how every day more famous and notable Christians are capitulating to the lie?

Which brings me to my problems with his sermon. Begg falls into at least one, if not more, category errors. Many Evangelicals today, he says, have succumbed to the trap of the first-century Pharisee who acted like the older brother in Luke 15. When the younger brother came home, the older brother would not come and greet him, but in anger sent a servant, and then accused the father of ungenerosity towards himself. The choice, Begg says, for Christians today is between condemnation and compassion. The grace of God is for both the younger and the older. In this vein, he spoke movingly on the subject of the grace of God.

The problem is, the person who is getting married to someone of the same sex, unless he stops the wedding and doesn’t go through with it, is not the younger brother. The person getting himself into such a union is nowhere in the story at all until he “comes to his right mind” and turns around. More crucially, Begg made much of the father going out to meet the son, failing to notice that the father did not follow the son into the far country. He waited for him to come back, and then ran to meet him. He didn’t go with him while he was spending all his wealth on riotous living. This is so key for us to see in a moment when so many fathers—and mothers for that matter—are being told that they must go with their sons into the far country, paying for their drugs and gender reassignment surgeries as the only loving thing to do.

I don’t know what Begg is reacting to when he likens Christians today to the Pharisees of yesteryear, those who were condemnatory of people caught in sin and confusion while doing nothing to help them. Perhaps that has been true at certain points in the life of the church. I can remember times in the eighties and nineties when Christians so feared the tidal wave of the sexual revolution that they sometimes expressed themselves with anger and condemnation. Sometimes those were the same people who gave heaps of money for missions, who went out of their way to help the very people they apparently feared. At the time, I found those expressions as embarrassing as people do today, except that now, looking back, it seems to me that everything those people warned about has come about in ways they couldn’t have possibly foretold. If anyone has repenting to do, it is those who despised the warnings of their fathers and mothers, those who are ungrateful for parents and pastors who tried to prevent the long tedious march into cultural degradation and sin.

Having covered Revoice and its adjacent companion, Spiritual Friendship, having endured the book about “Queer Marriage,” and worst of all, having walked away from a beloved denomination, I don’t know who these people are who are acting in unkind ways against the LGBTQ “community.” I know that is the accusation, but it is a false one. While in the past sometimes parents of same-sex attracted children were counseled to cut those children out of their lives, that has been repented of in spades. Now all the strident anger comes from those who cannot exact a blessing for their lives of sin out of their families and friends and pastors. Now people like Andy Stanely scold faithful Christians all the time while claiming the mantle of Love.

To say it another way, no one today—no one that I know anywhere—is telling grandparents to cut their gay grandchildren out of their lives. The prevailing wisdom is that relationships should be maintained, lines of communication kept open, love expressed in various and sundry ways for exactly the reason Jesus says in the parable, so that when the son turns around and comes home, he knows there’s a home to come to and a father who will accept him.

There has to be a home to come to. Someone has to stand still as a rock, sure and certain of what is real and true and loving. Love, if we are indeed speaking of love, keeps the fire of truth alive by speaking it, by saying it to the one you love the very best. Love builds a home and a community of such warm fellowship that the son, alienated and alone, remembers the food and the beauty and the shelter and finally turns around and comes back. Love spares nothing for the good of the other, enduring, sometimes, the same feelings of alienation, helplessness, and hopelessness of the beloved who has run away into the darkness. Love sits on the step and prays and waits and hopes that the lost grandchild who is walking down the aisle will suddenly remember her grandmother, how she loved her enough to tell the truth. Love stands still and waits for the beloved to leave that unholy altar and run back home.

Toward the end of the sermon, Begg said that he isn’t really part of this current brand of American Evangelicalism. He is of the British, John Stott variety which is more nuanced, which doesn’t get into these storms in teacups. And yet, only a moment before, he said he had been preaching in that congregation for forty years. Forty years is a biblical generation. My continued faith is one of the fruits of his faithfulness—a faithfulness that shaped the very thing now he admits he doesn’t understand. How is this so? Can Begg be a victim of American binary thinking? He has spoken at all the conferences, sat on all the stages, had his sermons listened to by everyone. And yet now, all those whom he has raised up don’t understand the difference between condemnation and compassion?

I don’t believe it. I think that this wonderful, faithful preacher has made a grave error and then, when in the face of an outpouring of grief, has tried to defend his position with a misuse of Scripture—something Jesus would never approve. I hope you will join me in praying that the Holy Spirit will convict his heart, will enlighten his mind, and put better and more loving words on his tongue.