I would one up you, Christ's church is for all sinners. The differentiation I would make is that it is for repentant sinners. The unrepentant may come and go; but, the wider church is the repentant. And that is the point I was making. Unrepentant sinners do not belong behind the pulpit. That is why scripture encapsulates a set of guidelines to give us a gist of what should and should not be. To the extent that a homosexual church is a church of practicing homosexuals, they've made their own covenant by not holding to the Christian one. It may be a religion; but, it isn't christianity. God didn't tell the adulterous woman merely "go", he noted the sin and stated "go and sin no more". He saved her phyisicl life to note that men didn't have the right any longer to stand in mortal judgement over her sins. If he forgave her, that was enough.. but, go and sin no more meant she was not to be adulterous any longer. It means the Homosexuals, theives, etc. all must turn from the wickedness of their sin in order to be one of us. Thus, Repent!
In that manner, Christ's church is one for ex-whores, not one of whores. And especially not one where an active prostitute is teaching the church. Coming to God to turn back into the worldly heathen is not the goal. But that is what many have made of the church with philosophy.. the wisdom of men.
Ok, so from what I have gleaned so far, you are asserting that there is a clear and convincing moral code for Christianity.
I agree.
You think it is in the Bible.
And I agree.
You seem to think that you know what it is.
Perhaps I will agree with your assessment, but perhaps I won't.
It worries me when you start talking about not picking and choosing in the Bible. We must, because the Bible conflicts. Deuteronomy tells us how to divorce our wives. Jesus tells us that divorce NEVER was the will of God.
God tells us in Leviticus and Deuteronomy that pork and shellfish render us impure. Jesus tells us that nothing a man puts in his mouth renders us impure, only that which comes out of it. But then Paul goes on about meat sacrificed to idols.
So, which is it?
Is it what God said to Moses?
Or what Jesus said to his disciples?
Or what Paul said in his epistles.
Three conflicting things.
Somebody's got to decide which.
When I read this, it is perfectly obvious what the answer is.
(1) The Mosaic Code applied to Jews, and only Jews, and Judaism passes by the blood. I am unfortunately not blessed with any Jewish ancestry of which I am aware, therefore I am not prohibited from eating shellfish and pork whether Jesus was God or not. Even if Jesus was not God but Yahweh is, Yahweh prohibited those things to Jews, and only Jews. The only thing God prohibited to ME, a descendent of Japheth (and therefore blessed) is the Noahide laws: not to kill man, and not to eat blood. Other laws, such as not to commit adultery, seem to creep into the Noahide "Canon" in other OT Scripture. So, I can eat pork, but not pork blood.
(2) Jesus says that nothing that goes into a man's mouth makes him impure. I could eat feces and not be spiritually impure, just sick in the head. Of course, as a Gentile, nothing I ate other than blood would have rendered me impure. But Jesus said NOTHING, and He was God. Therefore, I can eat blood pudding and blood sausage, or African blood soup and not sin. This WOULD BE a sin under the Noahide laws, but Jesus said that the blood prohibition was not from God, by saying NOTHING makes me impure by eating it.
Since Jesus was God, that ends the discussion.
(3) But ah! Paul, the Jewish lawyer and ex-Pharisee, says to refrain from eating blood and meat sacrificed to idols. He has his reasons, no doubt. No doubt some of them are his own traditions and prejudices seeping through. But no doubt, too, he is getting at something. And what he's getting at can't be the food part: Jesus was God and HE said nothing we eat can make us impure. Paul says to abstain from blood and idol-offered meat, but Paul clearly cannot overrule God. So, Paul must mean something else. Perhaps the practice of eating blood coupled with the practice of idol-offered meat. The problem was not the food, it was the temptation to idolatry that being in the presence of such rites, and the full knowledge that everyone then had about such rites, that Paul was aiming at. Indeed, in the ancient world, meat was usually obtained by sacrifice to SOMETHING.
In our day, meat is obtained from slaughterhouses, and neither it nor blood has any idolatrous connotations. Not only that, but biologically, the blood is no more "the life" than is the cells of the meat. So, the religious concerns Paul was aiming at have disappeared, and we can go with God's very simple message, spoken from his own lips: NO FOOD IS IMPURE.
Indeed, the more consistently one follows what GOD said IN PERSON, when he was here in the flesh, the more that all of the strange conflicts of the Bible disappear or are cleared up. They COULD mean a lot of things, but they DO mean what Jesus said. Because HE was God, and Paul and Moses weren't.
Simple. Sane. Clear. God doesn't play "Hide the football", and doesn't require literacy of his followers.
But it still worries me when you speak of not picking and choosing in the Bible. Are 1 and 2 Maccabbees in the Bible?