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!
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