Hate or Love?

Have you heard the joke about the new arrivals in Heaven?  St. Peter takes them on a tour of the place, shows them the shining tall cathedral full of popes, the Anglican church with exquisite choirs, the Pentecostal glass building with the rock blaring full blast, the synagogues and mosques and so on.  Finally, they get to one building and Peter says “take off your shoes and don’t say a peep until we get past this place” and they go tiptoeing by as quietly as possible.  When they are out of range, someone asks, “why did we have to be so quiet?”  St. Peter said, “Oh, that’s the United Church, they think they’re all alone here!”

Now I have to admit that when I heard that joke, it was another denomination, but the point is that sometimes we get a little bit of an ego, we get a little puffed up thinking that our church is the best and only we really are getting it right.  Luckily, I think we know that we’re not perfect.  I hope.

Why am I sharing this? Because our gospel lesson today has been historically used in toxic ways to judge, condemn and ostracize, to determine who doesn’t belong, who is not good enough, who is out and who is in.  John 3:16 gets put on flags and posters waved at football games and on t-shirts, shouted on street corners and pounded on pulpits.

I think the United Church’s Song of Faith is spot on when it says, “The Spirit judges us critically when we abuse scripture by interpreting it narrow-mindedly, using it as a tool of oppression, exclusion, or hatred.  Or is that me thinking we’re the only ones in Heaven again?

It’s also why we Christians have such a bad reputation in North America right now.  When most folks think of church, they remember when scripture was used in destructive, hate-filled ways. 

So it’s rather fascinating to hear of the revival meetings happening in some universities down in the states.  These are going on for days in Kentucky and other places, where thousands of young millennials heard stories of testimonials, sang and prayed in large groups and spread it to other campuses across the states.  Interestingly this had happened before in 1970 at the very same school.  That also was a time of great anxiety, where young people who had grown up with drills on how to hide under desks to protect themselves from atomic bombs, who were being sent to fight in Vietnam, who heard about earthquakes in China killing 15,000 people, who had seen their popular president assassinated, and who had rioted after Martin Luther King’s death; suddenly they joined together for days of prayer and vigil and testimony.

No wonder revivals are hitting the news with so many people suffering from anxiety, stress, fear, grief and anger.  I watched a United Church workshop called United Against Hate.  It had a panel of four people including a United Church minister, a drag performer and several members of the 2sLGTBQ community.  They talked about the level of hate in public spaces and how incidents against Drag performers have escalated in the last 6 months.  There are a lot of people who were seen at anti-mask rallies and convoy protests who now are turning their attention and anger to a small group of people who like to, as one person put it, “get sparkly and have fun”.  Words like perverted, sinful and degenerate are being thrown around, and the hate is seen as protecting families and so-called ‘normal people’ from aberrant individuals in our society.  Now I must confess I have never gone to a drag show and the Vagina Monologues was a stretch for me, but hating drag queens?  There was one speaker at this event who was so scared that they didn’t use their real name or their video.    They didn’t feel safe in front of a hundred United Church people and congregations.  So many people wanting to make a stand against hatred, but this person was terrified of a hate backlash!

We have an opportunity to hear this scripture through a lens of love and tolerance instead of hate, and I think we must take this opportunity.  God loved the world so much that God sent Jesus, not to hate the world, but to love us so we can have everlasting life. John says what everlasting life in John 17: 3 - Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.

So eternal life is not about who’s in or who’s out, but who is in relationship with God and Jesus.  That relationship is to be based only and solely on Love.  Hate has no place in everlasting life.  If St. Peter does take tours around Heaven, there won’t be all these churches segregating and separating people, no buildings we have to tiptoe by because they think they are alone.  Just one big community united in love of God.  We don’t need to wait until we’re dead to have everlasting life, we can have it here and now! The invitation is clear and open to us all.

Let us pray: "God of deepest desires, we live better when we are possessed by your Spirit, devoting our hearts to you amidst our community. We confess our devotion has been in things and not on You. We have replaced the care for our communities to care only for ourselves. Help us learn again how to devote our hearts to you so that we can discover time and again how to pray, how to serve, how to love your people, our communities, the land around us and all its living beings." Prayer written by Claudio Carvalhaes pg 3 from “Good Courage: Daily Reflections on hope” c 2022, United Church Publishing House, Toronto.