It ain’t Christian to Hate

Dolly Parton once famously said, “It ain’t Christian to hate” and sometimes it seems like
Christians challenge that assumption.  Some preachers get excited about people in minority groups who they see taking away rights and freedoms and resources from those who feel entitled to privalege, without examining the actual facts, and before you know it, they’re saying things that don’t connect to today’s scripture, especially when Paul said that we are bound to love our neighbor as ourselves.  What a lofty goal.  Therefore, Christians have perfect communities that are havens for healing and caring and serving our neighbors.  Right? Well, hopefully.

Jesus wanted everyone to get along but knew it would not be easy.  Human beings have a hard time communicating their wants and needs or even knowing what their wants and needs are.  One image that is often used is the iceberg.  Our conscious selves are like the part of the iceberg that float above the water.  But that part of the iceberg is not what sank the Titanic.  It’s the part under the water, the subconscious, that causes strife and pain.    And when two big icebergs collide, it can affect things for miles.  This year, one iceberg threatened a group of islands at the south pole as it was 3500 square kilometres across!  A polar research centre had to be evacuated, and the iceberg was watched by satellite for months.  Icebergs crashing are serious things.

Jesus didn’t want us to avoid calling out iceberg crashes and conflict.  He didn’t want us to pretend that we were all sweetly cooperative.  He wanted us to protect our sacred community from oppression and manipulation.  Presbyterians have a saying that they are to “take away all occasion for tyranny”.  Church must not empower bad behavior that, like a massive iceberg, crash into everyone.

We crash together over differing values, differing opinions, differing needs, differing politics.  We crash together over control and power.  And if that power is power over, that control is control over, not power with or control with, we forget to be disciples practicing love and healing.  We crash our subconscius icebergs into one another.  We go below the line, where we make decisions based on fear and scarcity.  Fear is everywhere.  Fear is fueling our political anxieties.  Fear is being used to feed conflict leading up to the Referendum.  Fear of immigrants, fear of indigenous rights, fear of judges, fear of losing our human rights to someone far away that we don’t trust.  Fear that is subconscious, uncontrolled, and undisciplined, is a cancer that can kill communities of faith or even societies. Reverend Henri Nouwen put it this way:

Hardly a day [happens] without our experience of inner or outer fears, anxieties, apprehensions, and preoccupations. These...powers have pervaded every part of our world to such a degree that we can never fully escape them. Still it is possible not to belong to these powers, not to build our dwelling place among them, but to choose the house of love as our home. This choice is made not just once and for all but by living a spiritual life, praying at all times and thus breathing God's breath. Through the spiritual life we gradually move from the house of fear to the house of love. –(Henri J. M. Nouwen, p 24, creating change)

Fear is not Christian.  Jesus taught us to move from the house of crashing icebergs to a house of love, a way that protected the dignity of every individual in the conflict.  Talk it out, one on one, first.  If that doesn’t work, take a witness who also saw the situation.  And if that isn’t enough, encourage that individual who is frozen into patterns of fear and anger, to move on to a place where they can melt their underwater ice without hurting the Christian community.  Of course, if there is violence or sexual abuse, one on one isn’t safe, and isn’t what Jesus intended.  These guidelines are for situations where nothing illegal, immoral or life-threatening is happening.  In those situations, Jesus wanted clear consequences for people living in the house of fear, people frozen into habits of anger. If the whole community agrees, they are out.  End of story?

Not quite.

Jesus wanted folks to treat the now outsider not as someone to be shunned permanently, but someone who needed to be treated as a potential new member.  The outsider still needed to be loved and prayed over.  Because when he said, “declare these people to be like gentiles and tax collectors,” he was talking to people who had seen him preaching to gentiles, who were rubbing elbows with tax collectors, who had watched outsiders become insiders, who had seen the excluded become excited to become included.  He was talking to his disciples who had eaten with little Zacchius, and walking beside Matthew, both of which had been tax collectors.  In other words, treat them like folks that need to learn the good news.  To remind them that they no longer need to live in a frozen house of fear, they no longer need to be unconsciously crashing into anyone they feel like.  They no longer need to be addicted to anger and scarcity. That is not the Christian way of love.  It impacts conversations outside the church too.

Last Wednesday evening, we gathered as Northern Spirit Region to learn about the upcoming Referendum.  We heard that the questions are written at a university or higher reading level.  They paint a picture of scarcity, where immigrants threaten jobs, healthcare and education.  They promote distrust of voters, they tease us with having more power and less accountability.  As one United Church staff person said, “The separatist [rhetoric] is an insult to Treaty covenants. And the whole thing is a distraction from and addition to the malicious targeting of transgender and disabled Albertans, education professionals, healthcare professionals and the whole system.”

If we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, we need to love refugees and immigrants.  We need to advocate for human rights for all, including for education and healthcare.  We need to advocate for treaty rights, and trans rights andrefuse to spread racist comments about first nations and 2sLGTBQIA+.  We need to help people think these questions through, and not just vote as others tell them, don’t vote like an iceberg, frozen into an easy answer.  We need to advocate for people to take the time to read and vote, whatever their position on the referendum and separation is.  Because the loving, brave thing to do is to remind everyone that we are not alone, we live in God’s world and we trust in God’s loving abundance. Fear is not the answer to the challenges of 2026.  Compassion and love and courage and truth is.  Loving our neighbours is the answer.  It is the eternal answer.  Let us commit to being a house of love that puts compassion and equality and respect at the heart of what it means to follow Christ.  Because, as Dolly said, “It ain’t Christian to hate.”  It is Christian to love!

Flip Flop Followers

Summertime and the footwear is easy.  Flip flops are standard issue for beach days and city sidewalks alike.  They are everywhere.

In our gospel reading today (Matthew 16:21–28 for those of you reading my blog), Peter is again front and centre.  Three weeks ago, he sank like a stone in front of Jesus and all his friends.  Last week he became the foundational rock for building a new community of love.  This week he becomes a boulder attempting to trip Jesus up.  What a major flip flop Peter does.  Will the real Peter stand up?  Is he a leader in training, or is he a theological disaster?  Is he a great follower or a great temptation? Is he a good guy or a serious threat to the mission Jesus is on? 

What gives, Peter?  What’s with all the flip flopping?

Just like flip flops allow sand to irritate our feet, Peter’s comment seems to irritate Jesus to the point of name-calling.  Just like flip flops are not good for Alberta winters, Peter’s comments leave Jesus cold.  Just like flip flops are not great for ballerinas trying to swirl like tops, Peter has put his foot in his mouth and doesn’t know which way to turn.

The response, “Get behind me, Satan!” has often been interpreted as a shaming in front of the rest of the disciples.  What if it was different?  What if it is not ‘get out of my way’?  What if it is, “fall in line behind me and listen.”  That puts a completely different spin on what Jesus says, less heated annoyance and more reflection, more thoughtfulness, more invitation to self-examination and self-reflection.  Maybe even a touch of ‘mind your own business’.

The teachings that follow challenge self-centeredness and replaces it with mission.  The world is full of people who know they are right, who are the rule police for a community, a faith group, a family, a town, a culture, a whole country.  We are good at knowing who is wrong and it’s never us.  We fixate on scarcity and hoarding.  We fixate on me first.  Leadership gurus call this “Below the Line” attitudes.  Below the line thinking can be inflexible, certain, and often about controlling others.  It can a form of bullying, where one person wants to have power over others.  It can unconsciously look for ways to be the smartest person in the room.  It is natural, it’s how we survived saber-toothed tigers and stampeding bison.  In the long run, it can leave people cynical, selfish and lonely.  It is an addiction that is just as destructive in its way as illegal drugs.

All addictions are harmful, whether it’s a craving to be the leader like Peter, or gambling or drugs or shopping apps, or food or the determination to be right, or to save for a rainy day that will never come.  I think the addiction to below the line attitudes and thoughts is what Jesus is calling out.  People who put themselves first rather than God get into all kinds of troubles.  That’s why the beginning of 12 step recovery programs is to admit that we are powerless.

Would it surprise you to learn that admitting powerlessness is also the starting point for finding solutions to the world drug problem?  Drug addiction rates are terrible right now, and vary from half a percent of the population in countries like Slovakia and Portugal to 4% of the United States, the worst in the world.  Canada is sitting at about 2%.

The United Nations decided to look at the situation in ways that are above the line.  It researches constantly, does not assume it has the perfect answer for every country, and looks for tangible, measurable results that are showing repeatable significant reduction.  In other words, it keeps an open mind and asks questions.  Some of the things the UN has found is that countries like Portugal who have low addiction rates, focus on harm reduction.  Cold turkey does not work.  Abstinence, while a great goal, is not the starting point, harm reduction is.  The UN found that every individual has had a different path into addiction and will have a different path out.  It recognizes that countries that are most successful look at drug addiction as a healthcare problem.  Countries that start prevention programs in schools around the age of 12, which is when most users start, show significant impact on the number of kids staying clean, succeeding in school and having positive mental health. Family supports are crucial.  Countries that decriminalize the use of drugs and provide healthier, cheaper supplies, disrupt the profit level of organized crime and also noticeably reduce the rate of petty crimes.  That’s why countries like Portugal have had such a drop in addiction rates. The expensive constant medical emergencies and policing actions and court caseloads also drop dramatically with harm reduction programs.

The Un says that the illicit drug trade generates hundreds of billions of dollars per year, though estimates vary.  Drug cultivation, trafficking, and use also impact the environment through deforestation and other land-use change as well as air, land and water pollution.  The cost of failing to tackle drug use disorders is steep – over half a million deaths and 28 million healthy years of life lost due to disability and premature deaths in 2021. Just one in 12 people with drug use disorders received any treatment in 2023.  Our provincial government’s push to have involuntary treatment centres goes directly against the UN’s research because the number one factor for success is for the addict to choose it voluntarily and honestly.  One person told me that treatment only works if it focuses on physical, mental, spiritual and emotional recovery.  Another person said that even after 10 years of sobriety, there isn’t an hour or a day where they do not feel the temptation of escaping the hardships of their life through a needle.

Jesus points to another way.  An above-the-line way.  A way that takes seriously that we can’t escape our painful crosses in life, but neither do we have to bear them alone. Paul‘s words, don’t repay evil with evil, don’t be condescending, don’t seek revenge, are also calls to live above the line.  Feed and love our enemies. Tall order.

How does that look in real life?  I am reminded of a certain 80 year old millionaire who told her neighborhood 12-year-olds that she would give them $500 each if they and their teammate graduated from Grade 12 together.  In that school, the drop-out rate went from 33% to 6%! She gave millions of dollars of books to preschoolers.  She donated money to fund research into the Moderna Covid vaccine.  She spoke out against hatred of the 2sLGTBQIA+ community, saying “it ain’t Christian to hate, we all gotta start loving more instead of all this judging.”  Unlike some millionaire 80 year olds, she didn’t flip flop between love and hate, she didn’t pretend to be a Christian one moment while locking up children the next.  You know who I’m talking about.  She lived a very humble and loving Christian life, above the line, brave and committed and curious, open to learning what she could to help build a more resilient world.  She lived out these values that we read in our scriptures, and she did her best to live one day at a time, caring for her neighbors, and following Jesus.  We can’t have a much better role model for leaving the world a better place than Dolly. May we remember and honor her by doing the same. May we learn to follow Jesus rather than ourselves.  May we remember to ask questions, and may we learn not to flip flop over who is in control.  But to consistently remember the God of Love is the bedrock of our faith.