The Razor’s Edge: Celibacy, Shame, and how Words Build or Break Our World
We tend to think the hardest part of the Christian life is doing what Jesus says. But sometimes the real battle is deciding what His words mean in the first place.
When Jesus says, “Straight is the way and narrow is the path, and few there are that find it,” many of us quietly translate that in our minds as: “Miserable is the way and lonely is the path, and only a few unusually grim people ever walk it.” Yet Jesus also says His yoke is easy and His burden is light. Same Teacher, same mouth, very different emotional tone. The tension between those two sets of words is the space my guest Gregory Coles inhabits with his life.
Greg is a celibate gay Christian. Just that short phrase carries more landmines than a war zone. To some, “gay Christian” is a contradiction in terms; to others, “celibate” is a betrayal of self-acceptance and liberation. But Greg refuses the easy scripts on either side. He is not trying to “pray it away,” nor is he demanding that Scripture bend around his desire for a same-sex relationship. He has taken Jesus seriously at two levels at once: first, in what Jesus and the broader witness of Scripture say about marriage and sex; second, in the equally serious claim that His yoke is actually kind.
The result is what I sometimes call walking the razor’s edge. It’s that straight and narrow path Jesus spoke of – not the caricature of moralistic misery, but an honest, costly, strangely joyful obedience that lives between the shouting matches of our age.
And this is where the question behind the question matters. In Genesis 3, after Adam and Eve hide among the trees, God asks them two things: “Where are you?” and “Who told you that you were naked?” Greg helped me hear those words again, not as a divine interrogation, but almost as a grief-stricken wonder: “We used to walk together; I used to hear you, see you. Where did you go? And who convinced you that the way I made you needed to be hidden from me?”
Notice what God does not say. He does not introduce shame. He exposes it. He does not say, “Now that I see you, you really should be ashamed.” He says, in effect, “Shame came from somewhere else. It certainly didn’t come from Me.”
That distinction sits underneath Greg’s entire story. He grew up in a sincere Christian context. Like many young men, he heard the stock youth-group talk: “Boys, we know what you’re going through. You want to look at pictures of naked women. Don’t do it.” Greg concluded, quite earnestly, that he must be the holiest 12-year-old alive, because the temptation didn’t show up. It took a while before he had to face a very different reality: he wasn’t spared sexuality; it had simply shown up in a form he’d never been prepared for.
And then, as he put it, he moved from feeling like the holiest 12-year-old in the world to the worst possible 12-year-old in the world. Same boy, same body, same soul. The only thing that changed was the story – the words – available to him to interpret his experience. The operating system, to borrow a phrase we used in the conversation, rebooted with a new set of definitions. And like Adam and Eve, the first instinct was to hide.
“Who told you that you were naked?” could easily be rewritten in Greg’s case as: “Who told you that you were an unpardonable category, beyond what my love and calling can encompass?”
That’s where the razor’s edge appears. For a long season, Greg assumed the ex-gay script: if he prayed hard enough, obeyed faithfully enough, God would eventually make him straight. When that didn’t happen—not through adolescence, not through college, not after—it forced another question: If God is not altering my orientation, what do I do with my body, my desires, my longing for love? Am I to leave Christianity? Am I to reinterpret Scripture? Or is there a third path?
He went back to the texts. Among them, the passage I “stumbled onto” again the very day of our conversation: Matthew 19, where Jesus is questioned about divorce.
The Pharisees come to trap Him: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?” They appeal to Moses. Jesus appeals to the beginning: “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning made them male and female… the two shall become one flesh… what God has joined together, let not man separate.” Moses allowed divorce, Jesus says, “because of the hardness of your hearts,” but “from the beginning it was not so.”
The part that had never fully hit me before was the disciples’ reaction: “If such is the case of the man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” In other words: If marriage is that binding, that permanent, that serious, maybe we should opt out.
And Jesus doesn’t rebuke them for saying so. He follows it immediately with a teaching on those who live celibate lives – eunuchs who were born that way, made that way, or who “have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.” Then: “He who is able to accept it, let him accept it.”
Greg heard that not as a sentence but as an invitation. Celibacy is not a consolation prize for people who “can’t get” the better gift of marriage. It is, for some, a calling that Jesus Himself dignifies. That doesn’t make it easy, but it does mean it is something other than a life of spiritual leftovers.
And yet, we can take these same passages, attach different operating systems to the words, and we end up with radically different worlds.
This brings us to the heart of what Greg has spent his life studying: language. He grew up moving between English and Indonesian. He noticed early that his brain worked differently depending on which language he was using. Later, he was drawn to rhetorical theory—the study of how persuasion happens, how words shape our choices and our sense of self.
Language, he says, functions like an operating system. Change the language, change the way the world boots up in your mind.
Take the phrase “gay Christian.” For some, that string of syllables simply names a person’s enduring pattern of same-sex attraction alongside their allegiance to Christ. For others, the same phrase encodes an entire moral and doctrinal package: it must mean an affirming theology of same-sex marriage, or a political agenda, or a departure from orthodoxy.
The words are the same. The meaning assigned to them isn’t. The result is conflict before a conversation even begins.
The same is true for “love the sinner, hate the sin.” In our talk, I confessed how that phrase had, for years, still rung true for me in its basic intent: sin destroys; I hate what it does to people, including myself. But as Greg pointed out, he had mostly heard it from straight conservative Christians talking about gay people, and almost never in the same earnest tone about their own sins. The phrase, intended to communicate love, often lands as “I’ve identified your sin as the one we’re allowed to obsess over.”
Once he said that, the other shoe dropped for me: the phrase carries within it a subtle “othering.” The moment I say “love the sinner,” I’m quietly excusing myself from that category. “Those sinners.” It has the same structure as our modern use of “othering”: “They are the kind of people who other people. Not like us.” The accusation folds back on itself.
Words don’t just describe reality; they sort people into camps. They tell us who is “us” and who is “them.” And increasingly, as Greg has found in his graduate work and his fiction, they tell us whose sins deserve center stage and whose can safely remain implicit.
He’s explored that dynamic not only in theology but in story. In his science-fiction novel The Limits of My World, there’s a striking image: two groups of opposing protesters in the same city, each with signs that read, “Save the soul of our nation.” A character in a cab looks out the window and asks, essentially, “Which group is which? Who are the protesters and who are the counterprotesters?” The cab driver shrugs and says something like, “Most days I just go by the color of their clothes.”
Same words. “Save the soul of our nation.” But the phrase has been filled with opposite meanings. One side believes they’re saving the soul of the nation by resisting a cultural revolution; the other side believes they’re saving the soul of the nation by advancing it. You can only tell them apart by their uniforms.
That is Babel.
The Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11 is often reduced to a mythic explanation of why we have different languages. But it’s also—perhaps primarily—a warning about what happens when unified human power is disconnected from submission to God. “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves,” they say. God’s response is not petty jealousy; it’s a refusal to bless a humanity united around its own self-exaltation.
He confuses their language. Suddenly, they cannot understand each other. The project halts.
We are living, right now, in a digital Babel. In theory, we share a “common tongue,” especially those of us in English-speaking nations. In practice, we inhabit rival dialects. We don’t even need new vocabulary to symbolize division. We can divide entire electorates with old words: “freedom,” “justice,” “truth,” “democracy,” “patriotism,” “rights.”
“Saving the soul of our nation,” in our time, may involve relearning how to hear what the other person means when they say the words we think we already know. It may mean recognizing that when someone says “gay Christian,” they might be talking about an orientation and a costly obedience, not a celebration of behavior. It may mean that when someone says “justice,” they are not necessarily coding for a party platform, but for a biblical theme that runs from Genesis to Revelation.
And it will certainly mean refusing to weaponize Scripture in ways that insult the very One it reveals: the God who walks into gardens asking, “Where are you?” rather than announcing, “I knew it.”
When we attach the wrong meanings to the right words, we often end up misrepresenting God to each other. We can make celibacy sound like a life sentence to starvation, rather than an invitation Jesus names with honor. We can make marriage sound like a civil right to relational fulfillment, rather than a covenant that so sobers the disciples they half-jokingly wonder if it’s better not to marry. We can make “holiness” mean a kind of spiritual cleanness that forbids messy honesty, when in reality holiness is what grows when we stop hiding our real condition from God.
This brings us back to the razor’s edge.
Greg’s path is not everyone’s. Jesus Himself says, “He who is able to accept this, let him accept it.” But the existence of this path confronts all of us with hard questions: Have we reduced discipleship to God’s job of making us comfortable? Have we made our own sense of “authenticity” the final authority over what obedience can look like? Or, on the other side, have we defined faithfulness in a way that leaves no room for people to admit what they are actually feeling and thinking, lest they be excluded from “respectable” Christian circles?
There is a kind of fake narrow gate that is nothing more than cultural respectability cloaked in Bible verses. There is also a fake wide gate that calls itself grace but asks almost nothing of us except self-expression. Jesus’ actual narrow gate is neither. It is a Person. It is the Way. It is the One who refuses to adopt our shame, but also refuses to bless our self-deception.
If that’s true, then the straight and narrow path is not defined primarily by which group we belong to – conservative, progressive, affirming, non-affirming – but by whether the Voice we’re responding to is the same Voice that walked in the garden in the cool of the day and called out, “Where are you?”
I ended the episode with a simple conviction I’ve gained over a lifetime of study, struggle, and, yes, failure: you are created in the image of God, and God loves His creation. Greg ended with his: “I am deeply convinced that Jesus is kind and Jesus is worth trusting.”
Put those together and you get, I think, the heart of Christian ethics, including sexual ethics. The One who formed you in His image, whose likeness you bear in ways you don’t fully grasp, is also the One whose yoke is kind. If He calls you to lay something down – a relationship, a habit, a cherished identity, or the right to define yourself on your own terms – the call may be hard. But the One who calls is not cruel.
And this is, in part, where we’re headed on the show and in the coming episodes. As you heard in the sneak peek at the end of the program, we’ll be talking with an economist who thinks in terms of data and development, and with a philosopher who wrestles with truth and ethics in a fractured age. Different guests, different disciplines—but the same underlying questions: How do our words shape reality? What stories are we living inside? Which “gates” are we actually walking through when we use the language we use?
Because whether we’re speaking about sexuality, economics, or democracy, the stakes are the same. We can use our language to build towers to our own name—or to step out from behind the trees and answer, trembling but hopeful, when God asks, “Where are you?”
And perhaps, along the way, we can learn to hear that second question—“Who told you that you were naked?”—as an invitation. Not to deny our brokenness, but to doubt the voices, religious and secular alike, that tell us our only options are hiding or self-invention. There is another way. It is narrow. It is costly. And, if Greg’s story and the gospel itself are to be believed, it is good.
Coming up next week
If this conversation with Gregory Coles stretched you, pay attention to where we’re headed next. As you heard in the sneak peek at the end of the episode, next week’s shows will take this same question—how our words and assumptions shape reality—and apply it to very different arenas.
On Sunday, I’ll be talking with economist and professor Chinere Egbe about finance, education, and economic development in central Brooklyn and beyond: how data, policy, and language about “opportunity” and “access” actually play out in real communities. Then on Tuesday, I’ll sit down with philosopher R.J. Snell to explore truth, ethics, and the human person in an age where even our shared words—justice, freedom, the good life—no longer mean the same thing to everyone.
Different guests, different disciplines, but the same underlying pursuit: to discover how being created in the image of God shapes our sexuality, our economics, and our public life—and how we might learn to speak, and live, in ways that reflect that image more clearly.
