Love Trumps Hate

At first, I thought about saving this post until tomorrow, but decided not to. It’s April 15th, 2017. Saturday. Yesterday was Good Friday, and tomorrow is Easter Sunday. It’s almost the end of Passover Week.

I felt like it was a good time to try to talk about this. I’ve voiced some of my thoughts here and there, but I’ve never quite dared to share them in full. I’ve come close. I’m not sure how many blog posts I actually wrote, but were too scared to publish.

I’m not a pastor. Although I’ll be attending a Christian university this upcoming year, I’ve never gone to school for the Bible. I’ve only taken a basic World Religions class (which was fascinating, I’ll add). So I’m not making any claims that what I have to say will be completely accurate. I’ll just say that it makes sense to me, from my point of view, with my admittedly limited perspective.

There is a lot of hate in this world, and I think we all know it.

How many men, women, and children starved to death today, their passing unnoticed by the world at large? How many people were murdered, their slayings unheralded by the press? How many people committed suicide today, or attempted to, unaware that their lives mattered? How many people were brutally attacked in some form or another, and how many people were robbed?  How many people are still trapped in slavery? How many people are in some form of medical care, and how many people are waiting by their bedsides–and how many of the patients have no one to sit with them? How many people don’t have a roof over their heads tonight, and how many people are estranged from their families for one reason or another? How many people have simply gone missing? How many people are addicted to drugs? How many people got called one more slur?

Their lives matter, or mattered, regardless of whether or not we knew about them, but how many are mourning them? Has it ever occurred to you that millions, billions, of people live and die each day without us ever knowing they existed in the first place? How many people suffered tragic loss and we were blissfully unaware, or too caught up in our own struggles to notice?

Here in America, the ostensible leader of the free world and the best nation in the world, in the 21st Century, we need a movement to proclaim that Black Lives Matter. Why? Because despite the lip service, and even the genuine protests, by so many people that they like and respect black people, that’s not reflected in our society, which was fundamentally built on racism, on suppressing anyone and everyone not deemed truly white. The brutal, ugly truth of America is that our society was founded with institutionalized racism, on the suppression and oppression–even the attempted annihilation–of people of color. The only time that the threat that immigrants to America would wipe out native culture was actually true was not when the African Americans were bought over on slave ships, or when Chinese and other Asian people came for work, or when the people of Mexico started cross the border, or when any other ethnic group came here; the idea that immigrants are here to steal our jobs, kill us all, wipe out our culture, and rape our women is one that has stuck around since the beginning of American history and has continually been proven false, which is why I don’t believe that Mexican immigrants, documented or otherwise, are a true threat to us. Historically speaking, that argument is invalid–it’s been around for about two centuries and has never been correct; the blame has simply shifted from one ethnic minority to another in an attempt to justify white dominance and superiority. No, the only time that an immigrant genocide against the native population has ever been attempted, the only time that immigrants have ever actually tried to wipe out the people and the culture that were here before them, was when the Europeans arrived on these shores. That’s not to say that many didn’t truly come here for religious freedom, but the only time the threat that some white Americans espouse was real was when our ancestors did it, when it was done for capitalism and colonialism, but was done in the name of God.

It’s true. Some people might claim that I’ve drunk the liberal Kool-Aid, and now I hate white people, but that’s not accurate. I just decided to pay attention to history and race relations. Race, by the way, only exists as a social construct. The concept still carries great power, but there is no “black gene” or “Asian gene”, and “black” is not synonymous with “African origin” and “Asian” is considerably vague, considering all the different cultures and ethnicities that are Asian. And “white” is not a race, anyway. When people wonder why we don’t have “White Lives Matter”, why we can’t have “White Pride” rallies, they misunderstand something crucial: white is just a skin tone, and it’s a highly relative one at that. There is no white ethnicity. There is an Irish ethnicity, so you can have “Irish Pride”, but white is just a skin color.

I didn’t mean to get into all that so deeply, but I did. Saying “Black Lives Matter” does not mean that you don’t believe that all lives matter; it just means that you’re calling specific attention to a particular group of people who have been historically mistreated, and are calling for social justice. Someone who says “Black Lives Matter” does believe that all lives matter, most likely, which is why they’re calling attention to black lives–because in order to treat them as though we do believe they matter, we need to recognize the ways in which we are systemically and institutionally discriminatory, treating them like second class citizens.

So we have “Black Lives Matter”, and other groups that petition for equal rights and freedoms for people of other ethnicities. We have Democrats vs Republicans, with everyone else more or less along for the ride. We have liberals vs conservatives, although other groups are gaining traction, for better or for worse, recognizing the growing disillusionment with bipartisan politics, which never seem to succeed at anything except hurting the people at large with their never-ending pissing contests. We have feminists against misogynists (as well as misandrists), while a lot of people are still on the fence about which side they’re actually on. We have antifascists vs fascists, with the public mostly seeming to speak out against those who are championing for freedom instead of hate. We have Christians vs the LGBTQIA+ community. We have the so-called “social justice warriors” and “special snowflakes” against the alt-right, who are essentially against anyone and everyone who isn’t a cissexual, heterosexual white male. America is against the Middle East, except for countries in which Agent Orange has business connections, as well as Israel.

It’s a mess, in short, a brutal, bloody mess in which billions of lives are at stake. Keep in mind, I was talking about American issues, since I know them the best; factor in problems in other countries, and it only gets bleaker.

Hatred is everywhere. Strife is common. I was born in 1996; for my entire life, America has been in one war or another. If my history is correct, I was born during the Gulf War; just after was the War on Terror, which we’re still fighting, right? I’m not wrong about that? It’s just been so long, with so many different factions and opponents and allies, that sometimes, I’m not even sure what war we’re fighting anymore. That’s not to mention everything I’ve heard about the war on drugs and the war on women. My entire life, I have not lived in a country at peace. There has always been a war.

There are so many others like me throughout the world, and many others who have had it worse.

I’m reminded, however, of Martin Luther King Jr’s famous quote, “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Christians say that everyone is welcome in church. In fact, I heard it just tonight, from my church’s lead pastor’s Easter sermon. He said that the first reason why Christianity is actually the fairest way to Heaven in an extremely unfair world is that everybody’s welcome. This is something that Christians, for the most part, believe, and I’d frankly have to wonder whether or not the people who claim to be Christians but don’t believe that Christianity is completely inclusive are actually Christians; they are certainly the ones giving the rest of us an extremely incorrect and negative reputation in the eyes of non-believers. For the record, not all Christians are bigots, and many bigots are not Christian. But how could a true Christian withold love from the same person or people that is loved by the God that supposed Christian believes in, worships, and strives to emulate?

“Everybody’s welcome” and “God loves everyone the same” are things that Christians say, and are what Christians believe, but are those things what Christians actually live? Not all of us, honestly, and certainly not all the time. Some may be worse than others–inclusivity might be a personal problem area for many–but all of us have had times when we’ve failed to welcome someone who was different, or reach out to someone who wasn’t like us. As human beings, we all have prejudices–that is something that I believe all people share, because I believe it’s a dark part of human nature that we’re all naturally inclined to believe we’re better than others. It’s greed and vanity and pride that makes us susceptible to such beliefs. Hopefully, though, most of us are more welcoming.

The ones that don’t have a huge impact, though, and arguably, so far they’ve had a bigger impact than the ones who do welcome people of different backgrounds. I once heard of a study done among LGBTQ+ people who grew up as Christians. They went to church on Sundays, had Christian parents, probably accepted Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior–they were no different than most other Christians. But when they eventually dared to come out as gay and/or transgender (something which took a huge amount of courage), when they chose to be honest (a virtue, last I checked), they felt mocked. They reported bullying to whoever was in charge of the survey. They said they were treated as lessor, as inferior, second class. They were not treated with the love that Jesus said to give your neighbor, but with hate, fear, prejudice, and discrimination. The reason that most of them chose to leave the church was not because they weren’t cissexual or heterosexual, implying that most of them would have been perfectly willing and comfortable to continue participating in church if they were accepted; they would have still gone every Sunday, listened to the sermons, worshiped, and prayed–they would have continued on the same as before. They were still willing to live a Christian life, other than being gay or transgender (and for any who would cry out that both of those things are sins and thus they wouldn’t be living a Christian life, I ask you to run down the list of the Ten Commandments and see just how morally you’re living–but you’re still living a Christian life, aren’t you?). No, they left because they felt like they weren’t wanted or accepted. They left because despite being willing to live a Christian life, or mostly Christian life, they felt like the other Christians didn’t want them. They didn’t feel safe.  By and large, the word they used to describe how they felt about going back to church one day was “terrified”. Terrified.

In effect, they were driven out of the church by the very people who claim that they believe that “everybody’s welcome”, the very people who condemn them for not returning to church. That’s our fault, generally, collectively, and here I’m including myself, because while I don’t consider myself a conservative, I am a Christian.

That’s just one example, of one study I heard of. I’ve read about the relationship between African Americans and the church. There’s other examples out there, if you look for them. I’m not here tonight to list them all. I just remember reading about that study in a book about Christianity and the LGBTQ+ at Evangel’s one afternoon, and it’s stuck with me ever since. They said they were terrified, people who had experienced Christianity for themselves and once considered themselves as members. And they’re terrified of stepping foot in a church ever again. Because other Christians drove them out, intentionally or otherwise, despite preaching about the love of God.

As Christians, is the message we think we’re sending to non-believers, a message of welcome and of love, the one we’re actually sending? And if non-believers aren’t getting the message, how much of that is actually our fault?

The LGBTQ+ community is angry. But I believe that anger is the outward form of fear. They are afraid, and that’s a personal, individual thing; it manifests to others as anger. Anger is the defense; fear is what’s inside. And the reason that the LGTBQ+ community is angry at us, at Christians, is because they see us as not only on the side of their oppressors, but as one of them. They don’t see love, they see hate. It’s not intentional on our part, but they see hate in the name of God.

And that is very, very wrong. We serve a God who loves everyone the same. Jesus spent time with–and made friends with– “the least of these”, the lowest people in society. The rejects, the outcasts, those who never fit in and were never accepted. He was friends with tax collectors, foreigners, the poor, the disabled, and prostitutes. While none were mentioned, some of them might have been gay, for all we know. Meanwhile, he called out the religious leaders of the time, who vaunted their own moral successes and looked down on others (“Thank God you didn’t make me like them!”). He criticized and rebuked those who flaunted their own self-righteousness and condemned those that they deemed inferior, or were different. They created rules to follow that had nothing to do with God, but praised themselves for following them, and looked down on those who didn’t or couldn’t. Jesus called them vipers and whitewashed tombs filled with dead bones.

Christians are humans. We’re not perfect. We make mistakes. I know how it feels to feel like Christians aren’t relateable, because they seem pretentious–consciously or otherwise–that you’re just a heathen in comparison. I’ve had that feeling as a Christian myself, feeling like I couldn’t measure up and they couldn’t understand me because I was too messy, too worldly. We wrestle with lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride as much as anyone else does. Our mission on Earth is to show non believers who God is by the way we live our lives; as arrogant as I once was told it sounds, we’re supposed to be ambassadors to non-believers, showing them why citizenship in Heaven is so great, why serving the King of Kings is better than they think.

And we kinda suck at it, I’ll be honest. Because we’re human, too. In order to be good ambassadors of Christ, we’d have to be as perfect as Him, and we’re not. We can’t be, because if we were perfect, why would we need Christ? It is said and believed that Christ’s strength shines through our weakness, and I believe the same of His infallibility. We don’t do a very good job all the time of giving even a semi-accurate depiction of God, but that’s one more reason why we need Him. His grace is evident in our lives, as well as His mercy and love. His justice, too.  We’re imperfect ambassadors to show that the only perfect ambassador from Heaven is Jesus Christ.

And what does any of this have to do with Good Friday and Easter?

Because Good Friday is the yearly memorial of the day that Jesus Christ, the perfect Son of God, died for us all. Despite being part of the Trinity and thus having existed since the beginning of time, we usually celebrate the start of Jesus’s story every winter, with the celebration of the birth of a baby in a manger, God Incarnate sent to Earth to save us. In that frame of mind, the story that begins with Christmas continues with Good Friday, when the baby Jesus, all grown up, goes from the manger to the cross. He was perfect. He never sinned. He didn’t know what it was like to sin. But the wages of sin is death, and a perfect God cannot abide sin in his presence.

A God who was only just, a God who was completely fair, would have left it at that, with humanity cursed and doomed to Hell. But God did something that was completely unfair, and He did it out of love. He knew the only way to save sinners was to send a person who never sinned; sinners can’t save sinners, because we’re no better than each other, as much as we’d like to believe that we’re not as bad as the next person.

He sent Jesus. And Jesus died, once for all, to save everyone who has ever lived, is living, and ever will live from every single sin they will ever commit so that they will never have to go to Hell. The only thing we have to do is believe. It seems too good to be true–we’d like to earn it–but we can’t. God’s standard to enter Heaven is “perfect”, and we can’t reach that no matter how hard we try. Only Jesus could, and he was the final and ultimate sacrifice for sin. A just God has to abide by standards, but also being a God of love, He saved us.

He who knew no sin was driven by our sin to the cross. The Prince of Peace was violently murdered by humanity. It was wholly undeserved; He’d done nothing wrong, and certainly nothing to warrant execution. Our darkest day, our worst moment, was when we killed the Son of God. It was our sin that drove Him to the cross, but it was His love for us that kept Him there. He could’ve gotten down at any time; He was powerful enough, and He knew it. But He knew if He did, we wouldn’t be saved, and so He bore our sin, our pain, our shame, even though He didn’t have to. And He stayed until it was finished.

That was Good Friday. Yesterday.

In just a little while, it’ll be Easter Sunday. Because the story doesn’t end with a tortured and executed “criminal” in a borrowed grave. The story continues.

Because the grave isn’t empty. Jesus died on the cross on Friday, two thousand years ago (give or take a few) to save us from our sins, but on Sunday, He rose from the dead to give us life, to give us hope. All the other religious leaders throughout history who claimed to have the answer to eternal life, to a good afterlife, to meaning, is still dead. You can check their graves, real or theorized.

But the Lamb of God is the King of Kings. And He conquered the grave. Death could not hold Him.

For some, “love trumps hate” is a mantra against the rising tide of hate in this country and this world. For others, it’s just a silly mantra to be scoffed at and mocked. For still others, it means nothing, something to roll your eyes at as you move on with your day and wonder why people are still saying it.

For me, though, it’s real. Love does trump hate, and political connotations and biases aside, Jesus Christ proved it, once and for all, on Good Friday. Some have said that that is the day when true love died, because Jesus died as the ultimate expression of love and sacrifice; God is love, and Jesus was the Son of God (and still is). This is the reason why I can say with confidence that love triumphs over hate, because it already has.

What I am trying to say is this, the ultimate message of this post:

Approximately 2,000 years ago, Jesus said, “Everyone’s loved, and everyone’s welcome.” While we are increasingly caught up in one division and conflict after another, while we even hurt and destroy each other, Jesus Christ did something amazing. He did something more powerful than anything we could ever do to each other, no matter how terrible that action is. He saved us all, and all He asks in return to accept that salvation is that we believe in Him.

Jesus did not come for the whites. He did not come for the straight. He did not come for the people whose gender identity aligns with their assigned sex at birth. He did not come for those whose yearly income exceeds a certain amount. He did not come for men. He did not come for the conservatives. He did not come for the occupants of a nation who are there legally. He did not come for the good citizens. He did not come for those who have it all figured out.

He came for everyone. He came for love for all, and as his ambassadors, Christians, we are called to express that sacrificial love for all people. The Greatest Commandment is to love God with everything we have, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

What I’m here to say is that love truly does trump hate. What I’m here to say is that we need to be better at showing others the love that Christ shows us. What I’m here to say is that a love far greater than anything you’ve ever experienced is available, if you haven’t already accepted it.

This is what I know. Regardless of how you identify, regardless of your political affiliations, regardless of your place of origin, regardless of if you’re here legally, regardless of how you believe, regardless of your appearance, Jesus loves you, and He’s called me to do the same, and so that is one of my most important goals. I have a lot of prejudices; I’ve been made aware of at least some of them. But it’s important to me that I conquer them, because I want everyone to know the love I’ve found in Jesus, and I can’t do that if there are barriers and walls in my heart, in my mind, that get in the way of showing that love.

You are loved. You are important. You are special. The God of the universe sent His only Son, His perfect Son, to save you. He loved you enough for that.

You may be lost, and you may be broken, but He is the God of the broken hearted. He will restore you, and He will make you better than you ever thought possible.

He is a just God. Sin exists, and He can’t have it in His presence. But He offered a way out and He promised that any and all who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved. Immediately. And you don’t have to try to clean yourself up morally first–you don’t have to go do ten good things before you pray to Him. You just come as you are; He knows who you are better than you do, and He knows everything you’ve done, good and bad, so you don’t have to hide; there’s no point. And once you cry out to Him, once you repent, you will be renewed.

I know it sounds incredible, too good or too strange to be true, or both. The concept of sin is hard to deal with, and it’s just as hard to accept that doing wrong  is a sin. It’s not easy to accept that you can’t save yourself no matter what you do. I get it. There’s a lot of questions, a lot of arguments, and it’s difficult.

But regardless of if you believe me, it’s true, it’s possible, and as long as you live, it’s right there waiting. The existence of God’s love, mercy, grace, and salvation is not dependent on your belief, but believing in the truth will set you free, including from chains you might not even see right now. God loves you.

Now, as I said in the beginning of the post, I’m not a pastor. I don’t go to school for the Bible. I’ve only taken one religion class, and it was a basic one. I may not have all of my theology right. As a result, if I said something you disagree with, something that you think is wrong, please tell me. I want to know for myself, and because I don’t want to tell anyone anything that isn’t true.

“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain. Worthy is the King who conquered the grave.”

–“This is Amazing Grace” by Phil Wickham