As a pastor and as a preacher, I try to balance comfort and challenge, because you preach what you need to hear, and because I believe we all need a bit of both things in our lives. It isn’t always a 50/50 split, just depends on the scripture, the Spirit, and the context, the world in which we live, where the congregation is as a people of God journeying together. During the first eight weeks of our time as a church in diaspora, I leaned hard into comfort on my almost daily video check-ins, and challenge for many of the sermons, though some check-ins were challenging, and some sermons were comforting, or at least so I tell myself.
Last week, Bob offered a word of comfort, one many of us, me included, needed to hear. Thank you, Bob. This week? Well, let’s just say I’ve been in touch with my Baptist roots. The good news is that there are plenty of worship options out there, so if you really just need comfort today, you can find it. Because, as I write this sermon, I feel like the news anchor Howard Beale in the 1976 film “Network.” In his infamous on-screen meltdown and rant, he encourage viewers to shout out “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Well, I am as mad as hell, but mostly at myself.
The story starts some weeks ago, when I told Shirley that I was going to try to order out more, for curbside and delivery, because I still have a job, and I want to support local businesses and workers that are struggling. She directed me to a Facebook group where local restaurants are posting their offerings. I’ve followed along, ordered some of the specials.
On Monday, with many local businesses talking about re-opening, I made a post in the group. I thanked our restauranteurs for their hard work and innovation. I also reminded them that many in the community are still at-risk or might not feel safe in a public setting, so encouraged them to maintain some level of curbside and delivery service. The initial response to my post was positive, with folks saying “Yes, please keep providing this service,” and some business owners saying they were still trying to figure out how to be safe, that they would continue to do curbside and delivery for some time. Then I closed Facebook and logged onto Zoom for a meeting.
When I signed back on to Facebook, I found the thread had blown up. A woman from Egg Harbor had posted one hateful thing after another, attacking anyone who was taking Covid-19 seriously. I could name her, but choose not to do so. Let’s just say this is what she does in her spare time, attack people who do not share her radicalized views. She had been tossed out of the group by the time I got there, but her hate speech remained.
Then, someone commented that while my original post was well-intentioned, it was divisive. My post that thanked restauranteurs for their hard work and encouraged them to continue to offer curbside and delivery as an option even as they resumed in-house operations. Yeah, that one. That was too divisive.
Say what?
But not wanting to be divisive, especially since many folks in the community know who I am, since I’m seen as representing the church even when I’m just being a regular guy in the community, I deleted the whole thread.
And I was wrong. It was an act of cowardice. But this is what we always do. We blame the victim, and allow the bullies to dominate the conversation, whether they do so with military assault weapons in the State Capitol or they do it with sheep memes and name-calling on Facebook.
I am mad as hell, but at myself, for being a coward and letting someone call me divisive when all I was trying to do was make sure folks like many of you could still enjoy meals from local restaurants even if you are at-risk or feel unsafe. My act was an act of love for you, for me, for local business owners.
And there are many, some maybe watching this morning, who think the other person was right, that we should avoid conflict at all cost, that because some troll and attack anything they don’t like, we should just accept being silenced.
Jesus didn’t avoid conflict. He did what needed to be done. He healed who needed to be healed, even if it was on the wrong day and upset people. He called out the self-righteous men who were ready to murder a woman in the street. He overturned tables and took a whip to the corrupt in the Temple. He let people walk away. He stood for something and acted with conviction and courage.
They lied about him. They threatened him. But his love was so powerful, that it made people who felt broken feel whole again. And when they broke his body on a cross, God’s love made him whole again, or at least this is how his followers experienced it.
He told his followers to be his witnesses to the world. Today’s scripture is really the moment when he turns it all over to them. Ten days later, they’d receive the courage to go out into that world, and it came in the form of fire.
Scripture does not say “For God so loved the world that she gave her only begotten Son so that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but shall have a pipe organ and a potluck, forever and ever, amen.” Not that there is anything inherently wrong with a pipe organ and a potluck, but that isn’t why Christ came into the world.
They understood their mission as followers of Jesus as changing lives, changing to world, so that the misery they saw around them, the fear and grief, the cruelty and corruption, would be turned back by love, love of God, love of neighbor, and neighbor was everyone, not just their tribe.
If you keep reading in the Acts of the Apostles, you will find Stephen in the street still telling people about Jesus even as they murdered him, Paul thrown in prison again and again. I don’t know what this mumble-mouthed religion is that never wants to offend, but it has nothing to do with Moses, who led a revolution, with the Hebrew prophets, with Jesus, or with his followers.
Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam share a missionary heritage, centuries of men and women who went out into the world out of love, because they believed they could make lives better by sharing their truths. We tend to focus only on the abuses, only on the hubris, and totally ignore the good things, for there were good things, healing and education. Yes, there was bad too, for we are human, and imperfect. But if all you ever tell a child is that they are flawed, they will come to believe they are flawed. And if all you want to think about is the bad parts of Christianity, why are you even here?
I get the humility that doesn’t want to make truth claims for others. But sometimes true is true.
It is easy to say “live and let live” when you are not the target of the hate. When they are not trying to tell you who you can love and marry. When they aren’t trying to tell you which restroom to use. When they are not throwing bottles at you because you happen to be Asian-American when elements in our country are fanning the flames of racism. When you aren’t the mother of a man gunned down because of the color of his skin.
I am ashamed of myself for my cowardice, for deleting a thread that was an act of love.That woman in Egg Harbor is a danger to herself and others, radicalized by an evil every bit as terrible as any we have ever seen, an evil that is taking lives. And this isn’t even slightly abstract for me.
For I know a young man, known him all his life, and he has struggled with addiction for years. He’s in jail again, for a misdemeanor this time, and his parents had to make the agonizing choice between bailing him out, where he is likely to overdose, or leave him in, where he is at-risk of a disease tearing through prisons and jails. It is bad enough that addiction is often a death sentence, but a misdemeanor shouldn’t be.
For I have a sister who is a tech at a hospital in a small city where they have bumped along with a handful of cases. Now every single bed hospital bed is filled and then some, sixty cases alone from a single nursing home, and she is at-risk, as is her husband, and she goes to work every day, and she is the only sibling near my mother.
So this is very personal to me, not because I fear for my own life, but because I fear for those I love. Because I fear for you.
And I love my enemy, just as scripture says. But scripture does not say we should just pretend not to see when they are sinful, when they place their souls and their lives in peril, when they place the souls and lives of others in peril. In fact, scripture tells us to name, to chastise, to try to bring them back. That passage we so love to cite, “where two or three are gathered together in my name,” isn’t what so many think. It has nothing to do with table fellowship. It is about trying to correct and reconcile with a member of the community who has broken covenant.
We are to love our enemy, but we are to love the hell out of them, to call them to their better selves, to share the good news that God is love and that we are miracles, God-touched mysteries bouncing about in a world that is charged with God’s grace and glory.
We can do better. I can do better.
It is not loving to let people terrorize and bully.
It is not loving to let people repeat dangerous lies.
It is not loving to pretend I have all the answers, for I surely do not.
It is not loving to be careless with your life.
You cannot ignore hate in order to achieve peace. That never works. Anyone who has read any history knows that.
Peace is gained by love and justice and courage, the courage that storms a beach, the courage that works another shift in the ICU, the courage to say “I love you, but you are wrong.” Sometimes good people need to wrap themselves in hope and head out into the storm of life. Don’t stand around looking up at the sky, oh people of Galilee. The Spirit is coming, all fire and wind. May it burn away the lies. May it burn in our hearts.