God Hates You!
Sometimes I want to scream out to all those that have been targeted by other Christians. I am so sorry: not all Christians believe in a God of hate.
In March, a friend of mine invited me to collaborate and organize an interfaith worship reflection time for Pride. A number of my clergy in our area got together, planned out and worked on it. What would we say?
Our Rabbi offered the local synagogue as it was close to the Pride Festival.
I want to say that I’m sorry, I told my fellow clergy. I’m sorry for all the times that LGBT people are targeted and hated by religious folk. The team agreed and I was pleased that they agreed to have me write a prayer of lament and regret.
What would I say? I prayed and thought about what I longed to hear all of us say in one way or another:
“Source of all life, Creator of compassionate love, the love that compels and holds all humanity to living life fully, was never meant to be forceful or violent, mean-spirited or exclusive and yet, in our human foibles, we stumble into fear, into ignorance, into dividing people into camps: us and them. We manufacture hate.
We stand by silently in our fear while voices for hate make demands out of ignorance and false hope that by silencing the ones deemed different, the whole will be somehow SAFER. Such actions are nothing short of evil and the only response is light cast onto such actions: courageous compassionate defiance that stands up to hate with fierce love.
How often the LGBPTTQQIIA community have been targeted by the manipulation of religion and love has been deviated into a force for perpetuating hurtful divisions and hate.
That is not the compassion of God, YHWH, Allah, Buddha Christ, the compelling way of love. That is human fear and hate no matter how sophisticated or based in tradition or sacred text, hate is hate and it is not the product of the compelling love that all faith traditions point toward.
For all those times of targeting, for all those moments of shame, for the residue of hate that lives in any bit of your soul still today, in the back of your mind, for all those times you’ve thought to yourself, maybe they are right. Maybe I’m slated for hell or exclusion or I am an abomination.
For all those awful doubts planted by the seeds of hate and shame, we, the spiritual leaders of faith communities lament and stand against such actions, such words.
(Would my fellow clergy please stand at this time and face the LGBPTTQQIIA community at this time?)
We, agents of religious establishments tell you that we are truly sorry and regret that such hate lives on in religion.
We stand opposed to such acts of hate. We stand affirming that all humanity straight and gay, transgendered, bisexual asexual and CIS was created for good and for love, created and held as holy—an image of the divine compelling love that we call God or Spirit. We affirm that all are made in the divine image. ALL.
We stand today in solidarity. We stand in love. We stand in the pain. We stand today and say, oppression has no dwelling in love. We stand in the dignity and pride of all human life. In the unity of love, in the one common air we share, in the life that is compelling and compassionate and as abundantly diverse and beautiful as a rainbow. So be it. May these Words be True. Amen.”
What would you say?
There’s a poignant expression in the gay community that points to our dilemma as a church—it arose from the dusty horror of the pink triangle that homosexuals were forced to wear during the occupation of Nazism during World War II, it became the motto for ACT UP, an activist group that arose during the Aids Crisis last century: Silence=Death.
For too long, the Episcopal Church has been silent to those that speak up in hate, we have been silent before those that are targeted, those that don’t know the church or the message of the Gospel.
We have been timid because we might offend someone that doesn’t like Christians or we might offend an Evangelical neighbor or an Atheist co-worker. Silence =Death. We have sat silent as a stone because we don’t want to appear foolish or anti-intellectual when friends assume that church and belief is irrelevant or ignorant.
Our silence implicates us in ways we can’t begin to imagine. Our silence makes us complicit with those that hold up signs about God hate, our silence reveals our smug, dispassionate tired approach to the living God that we have come to know in Jesus Christ.
When did we become so dull? Unwilling to walk out into our neighborhoods and say, how can the people of the good news be good news right here, right now?
Truly this silence will equal our death. So may its about time we stop and think:
What would you say?
It doesn’t matter if you have a gift for language. It doesn’t matter if you have a degree in theology, it doesn’t matter if you haven’t read the Bible (although I highly recommend that every Christian do this) what matters is that we not remain silent now or ever, starting the conversation, asking yourself: What will I say about/to those that say hate is a Christian value? How will I witness to the grace and love that I have come to know in Jesus Christ? What will you say?
And then start saying it.
George
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