Q & R: Homosexuality, from a European young adult

Here’s the Q:

my name is [Mary], i am [in my twenties] from Sweden and i study theology [in a university here].
i must say i really enjoy your books on several levels, i find them exciting and radical and most of all you are brave in what you write and i really like it when people don’t follow the norm just because everyone else does. you dare to take new steps and i still feel you are very humble in the steps you take, which is important.
my question is actually about a question. just after reading the first page of chapter 18 in your book “the secret message of Jesus” i got hit by lightning almost 😉 so long have we over here, in sweden and i guess everywhere, discussed wether homosexuals can join the church or not. and/or other groups of people.
i am really tired of this question because to me, what Jesus says to us is “do not judge”, “love one another as i have loved you”. and the church is not ours, it’s Gods. our place is not to close the doors to people and say you can’t join and you can. not even Jesus was sent to the earth to judge, but to save.
and what hit me, (to make this as short as possible because there are alot more i would like to discuss and maybe we’ll find the opprtuniy one day over lunch 🙂 ) is have we been stuck on the wrong question? maybe the question isn’t IF they can join? because to me that is absurd, if they Love Jesus and want to follow him, everyone should be allowed to join. but how do we stand by what is written in the bible and keep the bible as the foundation. how do we change this?
in the first letter to the corinth paul writes in chapter 6 “Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”
all of these are we, we are so focused on the homosexual but what about the greedy? or divorces? i know this is an hard subject but we need the see the bigger picture here. “the one who is free from sin throw the first rock” i know i’m not free from sin.
and like you wrote Jesus ate with the sinners, went to their parties because he belived that he could show them by his example, live differently do like he did.
so i guess what i would really like if you ever come to sweden is to discuss this and the entire book, or if i come to USA, but for now: what do you think about this? have we been asking the wrong question? can we turn people away from church because of their sexuality?or any other reason we turn people away? or is the question different? what do you think the question is.
without being naive as you wrote! thank you for you inspiring books that get ones mind to start thinking and asking questions. i hope you understood something of what i wrote. my grammar in writing is not that great!

Here’s the R:
Thanks so much for writing. Your English is amazing, even more so in comparison to my (as-yet nonexistent) Swedish!
It’s so interesting the way you phrased this – “is the question different?” Because that’s exactly what I suggested in my more recent book, A New Kind of Christianity. There I suggest that homosexuality is the tip of the iceberg, a visible issue under which there are even bigger issues – the issue of human sexuality in general, and beneath that, the issue of our humanity, our embodiment. The theological term for this larger issue is “theological anthropology,” and it is related to an even deeper issue – our understanding of the biblical narrative and what we might call our “creation theology.” All that’s to say that I think your instincts are very sharp.
I hope I’ll get a chance to visit your beautiful country again in the future. Until then, keep up the good work, and keep growing in your faith and understanding. We need a new generation of leaders like you.