Aug 18 | “What love looks like,” (Sermon, August 18th, 2019)

Some time ago, a journalist and writer named Luke O’Neil started a blog called “Hell World,” where he shares his own private musings, mostly about politics. In April of this year, he wrote a post called “I hate what they’ve done to almost everyone in my family.” In it, he first chronicles the changes in his relationship with his family as they became, for lack of a better word, radicalized by Fox News.  He then shares, with permission, stories from other young people who had had the same experience. Some of them are heartbreaking. One young man writes, “When I found my dad dead in his armchair…Fox News was on the TV. It’s likely the last thing he saw. I hate what that channel and conservative talk radio did to my funny, compassionate dad. He spent the last years of his life increasingly angry, bigoted, and paranoid.”

There are a lot of folks in our world calling for increased dialogue, civility, and kindness. An article like this, in which so many people admit that they have had to sever contact with family members; in which so many admit that they don’t leave their children alone with their grandparents, makes the work of mending fences seem impossible.

In some cases, we should absolutely seek to find common ground, to try to weave together a new bridge between our hearts. But in others, maybe, as Jesus says, we might be called to cut our losses for the greater work of compassion, and for our own health.

I think this is especially hard in Canada where we joke about how our favourite subjects for conversation are mundane things like the weather. The real joke is that now even that might lead us into an argument, depending on one’s conversation partner’s beliefs about climate change. What a strange world we live in.

On the other hand, we might say that never before has it been so easy to defend our faith. For we know that Jesus would not approve of much of the rhetoric that calls itself Christian in North America. We know he calls us to have open hearts and minds and hands. If we choose, we progressives can actually make the argument that “the Bible is very clear”! For, in the case of how to treat refugees or victims of violence, or how to conduct oneself in a position of power, the Bible actually is clear – and it does not call us to exclude and abuse and slander.

Of course there is always danger in making in-groups and out-groups. But there are two things to remember which Luke was kind enough to include bracketing today’s text. One is that we must not be afraid. The other is that we are called to love our neighbours as ourselves. So perhaps the danger does not come in standing firm in our convictions, or calling someone on their toxic behaviour. The danger comes from us forgetting that they too are people loved by God.

Sometimes reminding them of that love looks like giving them a good shake, and sometimes it look like gathering them up in their loneliness, and proving that the world is not so frightful and cruel as to excuse frightful and cruel behaviour.

Let me be clear that I don’t think we are always called to throw ourselves into debates and battles. Emotional labour and the fatigue that comes with it is a thing, and we all need time to handle it. But we can stand firm. That’s bigger than saying, “When they go low, we go high.” That sentiment so often presumes the aggressor is acting in good faith and will be shamed by our goodness, and all too often they are not. Instead they will claim that we are as insincere as they are, that we are merely “virtue-signalling,” overflowing with self-righteousness while simultaneously just as duplicitous and scheming as our detractors. That’s when humour as a response is most helpful – like Elijah doing battle on Mount Carmel with the prophets of Baal, cheekily suggesting that perhaps their god is not answering their prayers because he had to go to the bathroom; or like God and the hilarious living parable of the prophet Jonah and his doomed bush. Some people punch Nazis, and some people just cover them in silly string, or like the unnamed teen who, in one delightful story out of Scotland, drowned out a racist’s venomous street corner ramblings by standing next to him while playing the bagpipes, and subsequently followed him wherever he tried to spread his hate that day.

Jesus was never merely a gentle pastoral figure – the white, blue-eyed hippie with a guitar, or even the nondescript kindergarten sage many of us grew up with who told us to be nice, share, and work hard. This regularly happens to our heroes as the culture tries to sanitize them. Folks who call upon more activists to be “like Martin Luther King” forget how deeply unpopular he was in his time, particularly among white moderates, many of whom said he went “too far.” Not because being kind to others is too far, but because King named uncomfortable truths, like the fact that 11am on Sunday mornings was the most segregated hour of the week, or that the war in Vietnam was exploitative and ill-advised, or that sometimes rioting and property damage were justified because they provided a way to bring to light the anger of the oppressed against a deeper injustice.

The same thing happened with Rosa Parks, who tends to be painted as a genteel model of spontaneous nonviolent resistance, or at least that was the way her story was framed when I learned it in school as a kid. In real life, she had been an activist for years before the bus incident in Montgomery, and had even been arrested for other acts of civil disobedience prior to that action. It was also anything but spontaneous. She was chosen by the NAACP to perform the sit-in because of her prominence in the community.

Likewise, no-one killed Jesus for teaching us preschool ethics. He was killed because he stood up against an abusive system and challenged its narrative. He insisted that God had no use for hollow acts of servitude to the state, that God wanted more for us than knuckling under until we could realize some metaphysical reward in heaven. God wanted healing, community, and liberation. God wanted us to risk everything for the kingdom.

Sanding off the sharp edges of one who, now dead, accepted that they would sow division in life, is a way for the system who killed that one to dull the power of their message. Sometimes, taking a stand means taking a stand, and it will set us apart from the ones we care about. Sometimes controversy erupts out of the smallest acts of resistance, and it reminds you of how shaky the system really is. It runs the way it does because at some point we all agreed that it should, or were pushed to believe it was the only possible way.

Jesus was only one person, but he inspired a movement that changed the course of history – admittedly not always for the better, but the very fact that he could do that should be a testament to who he was. To sow such division in a world far less individualistic than ours, where the family was the central unit and had the final say in many people’s lives, proves to us that his presence was so utterly compelling that it upset the entire social order of his time. For him to claim that blood families had less of a right to a person’s body and soul than God’s family, a chosen family, was deeply radical.

We may find that in our own circles our faith doesn’t cause much trouble, and that’s nothing to feel guilty about. But we are called to allow it to deeply influence how we move through the world, and not to count the cost when it means we have to take a stand on behalf of a liberating, boundary-breaking God.

So take a stand for that God, whatever that might look like. Know that when you do it, if you encounter anger or oppression, you’re never alone.

Jesus is with you, and so is this church.