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Because of a week spent at Birchwood Camp I had to have today’s sermon ready last week. On Friday I felt an overpowering urge to preach something different and wrote this new one yesterday. It all came to me during a three-mile run. I was so excited that I probably could have run another 3 miles. I might want to try this approach when I run my first 5K race with my son in Eagle River on July 12. Who knows what kind of sermon you’ll get on July 13. For most of us living on this planet in this day and age, we understand indifference, prejudice, and apathy. We’ve experienced all of this and we have been guilty of perpetrating such sin ourselves. But many of us do not understand hatred. Groups such as the KKK and Aryan Nation used to be dismissed as fringe elements. But now we have witnessed new levels of anger and violence. Events in the past decade have forced our country to deal seriously with individuals and groups who spread their venom of hatred. And now it has come knocking on the door of St. John United Methodist Church. A pastor of a 200-member Baptist church in Kansas will picket our church tonight from 6:00-6:30 prior to our evening worship service because we do not hate homosexual persons the way he does. I am inviting all to come at 5:45 for a meeting in the sanctuary. I am not interested in giving this group the publicity it seeks. But I am concerned about the hatred they will spew and how it might affect us and this holy ground. At 6:00 we will stand outside the sanctuary and hold a silent, prayerful vigil. We will create a magnificent wall of light and love as we ask God to protect this sacred space. At 6:30 we will worship in a quiet, contemplative style and celebrate God’s victory over hate. Matthew Fox writes, "Hatred in the Bible means a lack of compassion, an apathy, a coldness, an abstractedness that prevents love of neighbor or is indifferent to it." We need to prepare ourselves spiritually for this encounter with hatred. We are being called to act differently than those who hold their signs tonight. We are being called to have compassion and yes, even love for them. We cannot do this by ourselves in our own strength. But with the grace of God completely filling our minds and hearts and voices, we can! This is how we will respond to this event today. But it leaves us with the question, "Why?" Why are they doing this? Why are there people in our world who want to hate? Time does not permit a thorough answer to these questions. The origins of hate can be traced to poverty and the unequal sharing of resources. When people have been oppressed and brutalized for years, seeds of hate can easily be sown. There are organizations that track particular kinds of anger and hatred. One group works with rural and small town churches whose members and neighbors are feeling the pain of the transformation of rural life. As people lose family farms, as small town life becomes increasingly unable to compete with life in the cities, resentments, anger, depression, and hatred mount. Such organizations monitor the rise of hate groups that can become the seedbeds for the kind of anger that led to the Oklahoma City bombings. Seeds of hate can also be planted in the hearts of children by adults. We have seen parents with strong white supremacist views teaching their children to hate blacks, Jews, and the US government. But I am interested in examining another cause of hate – a hate that is spawned due to a certain view of God and the world. In his book, "Remove the Heart of Stone," Donal Dorr talks about religious experience and the language used to describe it to others. Everyone has what he calls "depth experiences." These are times of deep feeling. A depth experience may involve negative or positive feelings. Examples of negative depth experiences might include nearly dying, feeling humiliated, a job loss, a divorce, an illness or accident, or losing a loved one to death. Positive depth experiences might include the birth of a baby, a wedding, a funeral, or a routine moment when a feeling of God’s love breaks through. I suppose you could say that all of life’s experiences fall into a category of depth or non-depth experience. One could say that most of life is a non-depth experience. The daily moments of life lived at a stoplight or waiting in line or eating a meal are neither filled with positive or negative feelings. They just are. Let’s look at a graphic to help us understand this concept. The letter "D" represents a depth experience. The little arrows emanating from the D represent the feelings associated with the depth experience. The human mind is such that it does not dwell on the non-depth experiences. But it is interested in pondering the depth experiences of life. In other words we will spend a great deal of time thinking about our depth experiences. For some reason we want to know what they mean in the grand scheme of our lives. For example, many years ago I was driving home at night in my usual rush. The railroad tracks I crossed countless times before never had a train stop me. As I approached the tracks going fairly fast I glanced to my right and caught the sight of a bright, single light coming my way. I slammed on the brakes and fishtailed to a screeching halt just before a speeding train zipped by. This was a profound depth experience filled with emotion for me. It wasn’t just about a near miss at a train crossing. It was about my deep desire to be around for my family. It was about other times when I drove too fast just because I was in a hurry. From that moment on I was more intentional about safety on the road. It was a profound depth experience that helped to improve my life. Donal Dorr writes that there are two kinds of meanings to life’s depth experiences. Intrinsic meaning is what flows within your soul to interpret the experience. Intrinsic meaning is the meaning from the experience itself. The other kind of meaning is imposed meaning. This is a meaning that is imposed on a depth experience from the outside. Most of the time there are other people around who impose a meaning on our experiences. For example, when I was a teenager at a church revival I responded to the invitation to come to the altar. I remember a deep feeling of God’s love and forgiveness. That was my experience. But there were many others who surrounded me that night with joy in their hearts. They told me what happened. I was saved. They imposed a meaning on my experience before I had time to process anything. And that imposed meaning stayed with me for a long time. With this graphic I have drawn a dotted line to signify intrinsic meaning and a solid line for imposed meaning. The intrinsic meaning allows for some fluidity and flexibility with regards to the interpretations placed on our depth experiences. Imposed meanings do not. Often an imposed meaning will remain on a depth experience for a lifetime. We will not even consider any other meanings because original meanings were imposed by people with great authority. This is what I want to suggest as a possible origin of hate. When people have depth experiences, others have imposed a specific meaning on that experience, effectively locking it into their permanent memory. It becomes very difficult to change a rigidly imposed meaning on any depth experience. Let’s take a look at Jesus’ handling of the woman with a hemorrhage. Because Jewish law determined that she was unclean she did not even consider the possibility of an audience with this healer, Jesus. Instead, she touches his clothes and is healed. With all kinds of jostling in the crowds Jesus is aware that power went from him into this woman. He encounters the woman who is now quite fearful. People had been imposing meanings on her experiences for years and the thought of change was frightening. So she tells him everything. This woman has just had one of the most profound depth experiences of her life. What kind of meaning will it have for her? Will Jesus impose a meaning or allow her to discover the intrinsic meaning? He says to her, "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace and be healed of your disease." I suppose you could infer that intrinsic meaning is good and imposed meaning is not. The truth is that we need both kinds of meanings for our depth experiences. Notice what Jesus does NOT say. He does not go into great detail about how she needs to purify herself at the temple. He does offer her a meaning for this experience. It is a meaning about relationship. He calls her Daughter. It is a meaning about faith. It is a meaning about peace and wholeness. He will leave the details up to this woman to ponder what it will mean for the rest of her life. So what we learn from Jesus is that when we witness the depth experiences of others we need to be careful not to say too much. We may want to offer some guidance, but we want to give them time to ponder the intrinsic meaning of their depth experience. If there is a meaning to be imposed by anyone I believe it should be this: Whatever your depth experience, be it positive or negative, your Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer God is walking with you, loving you all the way. This is not the message we will hear from the protestors tonight. But their voices and signs will not drown out the silent witness of St. John United Methodist Church. For we will be there tonight as well, some in person, others in spirit. And we will gather, not so much to counter protest the actions of those on the sidewalk. We will gather to affirm the truth that God is about tolerance and acceptance and love. I leave you with an excerpt from a sermon by Martin Luther King Jr. entitled, "Love Your Enemies." "To those who hate us we shall say, we shall match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you.... Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at midnight and beat us and leave us for half-dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer." |
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06.29.03 - Origins of Hate (Mark 5:24-34)
