Having announced I am preparing a sermon for Sunday on the theme of hate, someone whom I have known for decades, and whose judgment and Christian wisdom I hold in high regard, asked me why. Why at this time of all times, preach on a subject which is raw, painful and very much a reality in the emotional and mental experience of all who are still reeling from shocking events in Paris a week ago – and now further atrocity in Mali. So I have tried to answer those questions, and to do so with genuine hesitation and inward humility.
The problem with a brief statement of intent about a sermon subject is it gives little information about where the text is going to end up. The text in question is Luke 6.27, "Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you." My concerns are not about the right way to deal with the barbarity and loathesomeness of the terrorist attacks – those who do such things should be faced with all measures that remove them as a threat to others, including lethal force. I have no issue with that at all. The hatred Isis has for the West, and the hate speech of radicalised terrorists who defile the faith they claim, is not something that can or should be dealt with at the individual level for me or any other single person. The consequences of such entrenched hatred in terror atrocities, requires responses relating to national security, international judicial and military measures, and the co-operative efforts of governments to deal both with Isis and with the history that brought Isis into being – not least Western intervention in the Middle East.
But such practical and necessary responses to murderous and indiscriminate slaughter isn't the hate problem I feel compelled to confront as a Christian minister. Though we really need to ask why in our generation so much of the Islamic world hates the West, and should do so remembering that as I write we are still bombing in areas where there are innocent civilians. None of which could ever justify recent events in Paris and elsewhere. I have no interest in questioning the validity and justification of moral outrage, anger and hunger for justice that everyone is feeling in the aftermath of the Paris attacks- I feel the same emotions myself. They are natural, normal and an index of our humanity.
What is a hate problem, however, and something for which we do have to take responsibility, is the pervasive resentment and fear of Muslim people, the increased stereotyping and caricaturing of refugees, the conflation of the words Muslim and refugee into a suspicion that every Muslim seeking asylum and every refugee is a potential terrorist. It is a fact that 750,000 refugees have settled in the US since 9/11, the majority of them Muslim, and there is not one record of one of them being arrested or even questioned on terrorist related matters.
And yet in our own country, on Facebook, in many papers and other news media, a common discourse is the language that provides the umbilical cord of hate, caricatures stoking resentment, drip drip demonising of refugees, stories and rhetoric feeding the fear, and much of this with the disclaimer that the users of such language are merely telling the truth, issuing a wake up call to all of us to see and sense the danger, close the doors, and keep an eye on the new neighbours. Luke 6.27 is Jesus' veto; Christians cannot do that and be faithful to the teaching of Jesus and life the Christ life characterised by mercy, compassion and love.
The causes of hate are complex.
It's a ridiculously obvious truism that mutual hatred lies at the heart of some of the greatest wars and atrocities in our own lifetime.
But Jesus words compel serious answers to some of the hard edged questions provoked by those attacks in Paris.
- Does the Gospel have nothing to say that brings comfort to victims of hate fuelled violence, and especially at a time like this?
- What does a truly Christian witness sound like to a wounded world, coming as it does from those who have come to know a crucified and risen Lord, whose death was a confronting and defeating of sin, an enduring and overcoming of death and therefore a descent into despair only to rise in glory?
- How are we to conduct ourselves as Christians in a society increasingly fearful of the stranger, suspicious of 'any other" who happens to be different from us?
- How do we respond to hate language of prejudice and abuse in the workplace? Do we join it, dissent from it, ignore it, or don;t we think it matters?
These are key questions of Christian faithfulness and costly discipleship – and they are demands that certainly I feel deeply just now as a Christian who believes and stakes my life on a Gospel of love, reconciliation and atonement.
That's as best I can explain where my mind and heart is with all this. I take the privilege and burden of preaching with great seriousness. A decision to tackle these disturbing questions at this moment in our lives is not easily taken, nor is it taken in ignorance of the sensitivities. But. You know the saying, What would Jesus do? I think just as searching is, in the face of all this suffering and brutality, "What would Jesus say?" I would never be presumptuous enough to say I know what that is – but I feel profoundly the importance of looking to what Jesus has already said, what he actually said, and trying to apply that to where we are now.
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