The man next to me in church who hated Koreans – the nice lady up the street who hated Jews – the volunteer who works with the homeless who hates Blacks – I imagine all of us can count at least a couple people we know personally who are the salt of the earth; kind, God-loving, church-going people, who, for some reason, hate a particular group of people. Nice people who hate. It is a problem we all deal with, but that doesn’t make it clear or understandable. Why do good people sometimes have these deeply hurtful biases? And to be clear, I know that we all have biases that we learn when we are young; judgment comes easily to us good people, no matter how much we work at being open-minded and welcoming. There is, however, a difference between bias and hatred, and we all should be on a journey to work those deficits out of our lives.
Jesus said it a couple of times: Your treasure is where your heart is. This phrase can be used in a lot of different areas in life; from how generous we are to the words we speak to the thoughts we hear in our heads that go against our core understanding of what it means to be good. And it isn’t that we have to love every single thing or like every single person; Jesus told us to love each other, which is hard enough to do, but He never told us we had to like each other. I hate blue cheese. I don’t like watermelon. Blue cheese makes me sick and disgusted; watermelon is just blah. Hate is a deeply felt thing, and when it is projected on people, it can turn the world into a dangerous and evil place. Hate leads politicians to legislate against groups who often can’t defend themselves. Hate is justified by religious people who pick and choose based on their infantile interpretation of Scripture. Hate is selective. Love is not.
When our congregation became the first ONA church in our part of Pennsylvania 10 years ago, we were met with a good deal of resistance. I expected it from certain flavors of Christians, but the reaction of some of our members was shocking. Nice, kind, welcoming people – who treated our LGBTQ folks with grace – left because they couldn’t abide by our openness. A few members left a couple of years later when I did two same-sex weddings; they could “put up” with having “those” people in the pew, but marriage, they believed, was between a man and a woman, just like in the Bible (proof that they hadn’t read the Bible). I listened to their reasons – their excuses – their hatred hidden in kind phrases – and I finally told them the truth. Our ministry will not be dictated by their hate. That did it. They found places of worship that were more to their liking.
We don’t have to totally agree on everything, and we should listen respectfully to people’s reasons when they disagree with us. But hate is not negotiable. Hate, like meanness, has no place in the Church, and there is way too much of both in our congregations. It isn’t easy to admit to our biases, but it is essential that we do so if we want to grow into mature, faithful people. We all have room to grow more into His likeness, and working at removing bias from our lives is one of those things we all need to do to make our lives and our congregations more like Jesus. God loves us the way we are. God also expects more.
Prayer – We thank You, God, for making us beautiful, and we ask You, God, to help us grow a little more into Your likeness every day. Amen.
Our art today is “Love and Hate” by Elin Bogomolnik.