Love the sinner & hate the sin is a phrase I've heard from my earliest stages of following Christ. It made sense at first, mostly because I just didn't really think about it. I was recently reminded about this when I got a note from a friend telling me that he did love Gay people but because he loved them he had to take a stand & speak out. So the idea of "loving" here is taking a stand & speaking out. I love them so much I have to tell them how bad they are & how awful their actions are & how terrible their eternity is going to be. When I heard this yesterday I was like whoa. This is insane. This isn't love, its actually pretty self serving. Let me explain.
If we look at the life of Jesus lets take a few examples of his view of loving sinners.
1. Woman at the well. Acknowledged the skeletons in her closet but unashamedly met with this woman of ill repute in public, encouraged her to worship in Spirit & truth and then she became the first Samaritan evangelist as this woman who once did all she could to avoid people who thought badly of her NOW went into the town & talked to EVERYONE & told them about Jesus. This love didn't seem to include taking a stand or a sermon.
2. Centurion & his slave boy. Jesus is confronted by a non religious soldier with a plea to heal his servant who is back home. We can be almost 99.9% sure that this Centurion was gay or at least bi-sexual. That was the trend and their young lovers were often armor bearers or servants. The last thing you could imagine is a tough non religious man seeking out a Rabbi with a reputation of conjuring wine at weddings & hanging out with some pretty shady people. It would be humiliating for him. He wouldn't hear the end of it from his fellow soldiers. To take this kind of action he must have truly loved this young man, most likely as a lover. This young man meant everything to him. There is no other explanation for a guy like him to seek out Jesus. But his faith is great & he says hey Jesus you don't have to even come to my house. I know how it works. You just say the word & this boy will be healed. This love Jesus showed also didn't seem to include taking a stand or a sermon. There was not even a tinge of judgmentalness in his words or actions. To the contrary. Here is a guy that isn't even a follower of Jesus and yet Jesus turns and tells his followers he has not seen faith like this in all of Israel.
finally ....
3. The woman caught in adultery. This should be a no brainer. She was hearing all sorts of sermons as they drug her to Jesus. They needed to take a stand. They needed to speak out. They could not let this kind of sin go without punishment! Jesus simply just crouched down & started writing in the sand. I would have loved to know if he was really writing something or just drawing. They demanded that she be killed by stoning. This was justice. If we really love people they need to learn. So Jesus replies, "let him without sin cast the first stone". Amazingly they all left one by one. It was just Jesus and the woman. He simply tells her to go and learn from her mistake. Don't do that again. Second chance? Yes. But did Jesus take a stand or speak out for what was right? Yes!
Jesus showed love by listening. By understanding. Through patience. His goal wasn't to take a stand on any issue or speak up for the truth. His heart was for the broken to find healing. All of these showed tremendous faith in spite of their troubles.
We often talk about the importance of not being ashamed of Jesus. I think the great thing is that Jesus is not ashamed of us.
Loving a sinner (ie: all of us) means being unashamed of being with them.
Loving a sinner means caring about their story.
Loving a sinner means grace, not judgement.
The truth is that we love sin & hate the sinner! Even the Apostle Paul talked about this. He said that he had a war going on inside. Often doing what he did not want to do & not doing what he wanted. We like to emphatically say we hate sin but the reality is that if we really did hate it we would stop sinning.
Jesus is the only one that could really say he hated sin. He was perfect, yet he came to love & heal rather than judge. I don't think there is any way we could possibly know or understand what the Spirit of God is doing in another's life. What we think they should deal with first might not even by on God's list yet.
This is why ALL who want to follow Jesus should be able to be filled with the Holy Spirit & encourage one another along in the journey. We disqualify some sinners from being able to be a Christian before said sin is dealt with while we allow other sins to take root in the church & grow out of control.
I think ALL sinners who want to follow Jesus have something to offer the kingdom of God and to the community of believers. If we continue to segregate we'll never thrive. What if its the gay person who can really truly help the gossip/slanderer because they have dealt with that long ago. What if the Pro Choice Democrat could help the liar or thief because they are strong in that area. What if the worshipper could help the John (men who buy sex) learn to raise his hands in freedom. We NEED each other!
Segregation makes us weak. Unity could make us strong.
Its not tolerance, its called community.
I cringe when I imagine how many churches & christians would handle this today. Everything becomes an issue. We must begin to pull back the veil of issues to reach the people behind them!
I have to be honest, I love sinners but I also love sin. I'm working on some things. Definitely a work in progress. But I want to follow Christ with a community that will walk with me & help heal my brokenness. I want to be that for others too. Think of what we could learn from each other & how we could grow if ALL who wanted to follow Christ would walk together, in one community?
Together I believe wholeness through Jesus Christ is VERY possible!!!
Sacred Emergence,
ReplyDeleteDue to my lengthy response, I posted it on my blog which you can find here:
http://youthreformation.wordpress.com/2012/06/06/a-response-to-sacred-emergence/
I GUESS IF YOU WANT TO READ HIS COMMENT YOU'LL HAVE TO FOLLOW THIS LINK ABOVE :-)
ReplyDeleteI did respond on his blog but I thought I'd post it on here too.
Hi all, this is logen from sacred emergence.
Good response. We are obviously coming from different views.
Good point on my overreach on the Centurion. I’m just learning to blog so I need to be more careful. I appeared to be saying something from the bible when I was really going off my study in grad school on Roman History. Centurions were often gay. And when they were their lovers were almost always one of their slaves or armor bearers. They rarely cared for their slaves & when one died just seemed to easily replace them.
So yes its possible he wasn’t gay but from my study of roman history that is my best guess. The people he sent to talk to Jesus weren’t his colleagues or superiors though. They were under him. Of course they wouldn’t give him crap.
But the possibility remains that he was gay. To me that is the only thing that could push a high ranking roman soldier to seek out a jewish rabbi. Centurions were noted not to care for their slaves, especially high ranking ones. But this one for some reason we don’t know for sure did.
The point too is that no matter the reason Jesus points out his faith. This man seemed to have no agenda or desire to follow Jesus that we know of. But Jesus NEVER needed people to sign on the dotted line to heal them. He loved without agenda.
So even if he wasn’t gay he was still a Centurion. This no agenda love & healing is amazing. Jesus did things out of love with the right motivation. How they responded was up to them.
I’d invite you to read my new post “The Grass is always greener on the other side” & that might explain more about where I’m coming from. At least in my authenticity.
My goal for this blog too isn’t just to discuss with those who are solid in what they believe but more for those who are on the same journey as me. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to have these talks. I have loved these conversations & this blog too. Its easy to prove anyone wrong if you think the bible is black & white. But if you think the bible is fluid then its changes things. I think there is way more mystery in the bible & in our relationship with Christ and each other than we can possibly imagine. I think Jesus was way more about questions than answers. I think the OT is largely either out of date or at times I think some authors were really missing God’s intentions. I don’t think all scripture is the same. I don’t think that when Paul said all scripture is inspired by God that he was including his letters to the church. I think they were letters to churches back then. Can we learn from them yes. But we don’t follow all that stuff. Women often don’t wear head coverings. We dismiss what we want & use what we want all the time. The GOSPELS are the main scripture. If Jesus is the image of the invisible God then we can run all things thru him. And we don’t need anything else really except for Love the Lord your God & your neighbor as yourself. He said all the law & the prophets hang on these two things.
We all have a different story & different reasons for why we are where we are. For me the mix of being in a foreign prison for sharing Jesus, being in a war zone with bullets going over my head, holding orphans with AIDS while they died in my arms and recently I just become a Cancer survivor. Through all these experiences God was there but many of the things I was taught as a kid or in college just didn’t fit. All the answers I’d been fed in Bible college weren’t enough. Telling the 12 year old girl who is a slave in a brothel that just accept jesus and someday you can go to heaven just wasn’t enough.
DeleteSo I began to embrace the mystery. The questions. And accept that there were many things that we have held onto dearly that just don’t make any sense. I began to find Jesus even more. My authenticity grew. My faith grew. My love for Jesus grew. We began to see that we are all broken & need each other to walk towards wholeness. Jesus often then began to tell us to either wait, there is no answer you can understand now OR there is no answer. Questions became the precious part of our relationship.
My latest blog post is my commentary on the fact that I know the reason that many are in the emerging movement is for the wrong reasons. But I also believe that the reasons people stay in fundamentalism or legalism or stay away from the emerging movement is also often for the wrong reasons. We have ourselves and our own selfishness, our own fears, our own superstitions & our own contexts & families holding us back from really seeking Jesus. Why in the world do you think I’m using a Pseudonym
Thanks much all ……. may God bless you guys,
Logen Byrne
I think we're all firm in what we believe...
Delete...until we're not.
...until we are suddenly sitting across the table from a living, breathing embodiment of the things we are taught to fear, and that human suddenly goes from an "issue" to a "person."
That is why I no longer sit too firmly on any one denomination's interpretation of Truth. It's why I nearly left the church a year ago--i couldn't bear to see the HUMANITY thrown out because we as a congregation of believers were afraid to be sullied by the mire they were wallowing in.
It's like I mentioned on Andrew's blog--I think the church has been guilty too many times of focusing on the SIN instead of the SINNER...and, for those who cannot play the church game as well as I can, well...church can be a really hard place to be!
Some day I will go in to some of the issues I've battled in my own life--dark things that I beat back in my mind and prayed that no one would ever discover. Some day I will be brave enough for that discussion, but until then, I'll leave you with this revelation that is slowly drawing me away from the Chapel and into the crowd:
When I finally realized the hideousness of my own sin (though I hid it with near-perfect precision), I found it impossible to dismiss others who were struggling, too. I was living the WORST kind of hypocrisy...the kind that would extend grace to a great pretender, but who would deny it for those who were at least honest about their struggles.
That's why this conversation is so important to me. I need to be reassured that this Christian tradition is worth fighting for (so I appreciate Aaron & Andrew's insight), and likewise, I need to be reminded to be radical in my willingness to BE ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN that some may be saved (and in this, Logen's heart is right-on.)
I know this is far from eloquent, but it's just where I am at. Thanks for the conversation, guys. You encourage me.
(when I say "leave the church" I mean CHURCH, not Christianity. I think the community of the saints is VITALLY important, but I almost couldn't bear the politics any more. Just wanted to clarify.)
DeleteWow. Beautifully said and all true. The issue vs. the person. Then mix our own selves in.
ReplyDeleteThe church would like things to look pretty and answer all the questions but real discipleship is messy. i really feel if the world would begin to see our brokenness, our mistakes, our struggles & our sin, it would make a whole lot of difference. They would see people just like them & they would see a Savior that can do miracles of taking normal sinners into radical saints :-)
Julie you are the master theologian of the day, not the boys!
and by boys i mean me too even though i'm older :-) not a shot at you other guys haha
ReplyDeleteya'll rock.