Where There Is Hatred, Let Me Sow Love

Sermon

Perhaps some of you, like me, were told when growing up that you couldn’t use the word hate. In my family, it was a little more specific: we couldn’t say we hated a person, as in “I hate my sister” or “I hate you.” So when I declared unequivocally that I hated canned peas, I did not face any consequences (nor did I have to eat the canned peas).

I do hate canned peas. Of all the canned vegetables, they are the worst. They turn a color not found in nature, they are mushy, and they don’t taste like anything my grandpa used to grow in his backyard garden in Tacoma. In my opinion, canned peas are an offense to the entire vegetable family. And I hate them.

Hate is a strong word and a heavy verdict and a true reality—when Jesus lived, when we live, and all the years in between.

Now remember that Jesus lived and ministered in a particular social context. He practiced the Jewish faith in the pagan Roman Empire. The land of ancient Palestine, where he lived, had been colonized by Rome, which means that the people native to that area were not in charge of their own governance. The ruling Caesar was considered divine. The colonized people may have hated the Romans. People who worshipped the one God may have hated those who worshipped Caesar.

Remember too that Jesus was of the peasant class, and even worse, he was an itinerant preacher and teacher, meaning the social bonds that usually gave someone their identity and worth weren’t there for Jesus. In his time, the social bond was everything—who were your people, what village is home, who is your father? You were part of a group, and that meant there were groups you weren’t part of.

The world that Jesus lived in was given to feuding, and one had enemies. As some of my favorite scholars put it, “…enemies are all those who try to get what is rightfully [someone else’s]. They are those who destroy [another’s] honor, take [another’s] land, undermine [another’s] family and threaten [another’s] women.” (Malina and Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, p. 47) And what do we do with our enemies? We hate them. And we may hurt them. And we may kill them.

We see that all the time in our postmodern, 21st century world. Hate is everywhere. Read the headlines; notice what’s trending on social media; look at the graffiti everywhere in our city.

We might not notice it at first, hate. We do notice people who are different from us—it’s in our DNA to do that, our genes carrying a primordial memory of not trusting the Other. We notice that someone is younger than we are, or older; we notice if they are taller or thinner than we are; we notice the way they talk. We notice what they wear.

And then we notice if they’re clean, and we judge if they’re trustworthy; we notice if they’re in shape, and we judge if they have self-respect; we notice an accent, and we judge them to be a foreigner, someone not from around here; we notice a yarmulke or a hijab and make assumptions about them based on their religion. And then maybe, depending what’s going on in our lives or in the world, our noticing moves to judgment, and our judgment moves to disgust or fear, and our disgust or fear moves to hate.

Because hate feeds on those other things—fear, disgust, anger. Fearmongers know exactly how to use those emotions to rile people up into a miasma of hatred. They tap into peoples’ grievances, their wounds; they explain that the loss a person feels isn’t their fault but is the fault of this other person who is wrong, who is not trustworthy, who is out to get their job or their land or their spouse or their country or their soul.

If any of us were feeling brave enough to look very honestly at ourselves, we might find hatred making a little nest in our heart. Whom do you hate? Not what do you hate, because honestly, I’m going to hate canned peas and you will not change my mind.

But whom do you hate? And who taught you to hate?

In his extraordinary book Exclusion and Embrace, contemporary theologian Miroslav Volf tells the story of a woman who survived the war in what was then Yugoslavia. If you remember, the Yugoslav wars, which took place only thirty-something years ago, were horrific. I suppose all wars are horrific. But this war involved ethnic cleansing, genocide, mass rape, and crimes against humanity. Dr. Volf tells the story of a Muslim woman who had been a teacher before the war and was then savaged by former students and a colleague who were Orthodox Christians. When her second son was born, she named him Jihad, and she vowed to teach her child to hate and to make war against the enemy. (Zeljko Vukovic, The Killing of Sarajevo, p. 134, and quoted in Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, pp. 109-110)

The author continues. “‘How many mothers in Bosnia have sworn to teach their children hate and revenge! How many little Muslims, Serbs, and Croats will grow up listening to such stories and learning such lessons!’ How many children around the globe… are growing up with ‘jihad,’ ‘war,’ ‘crusade,’ ‘revenge,’ ‘hatred’ not only inscribed in their names but woven into the very fabric of their lives!”

Whom do you hate? And who taught you to hate?

Hate can be as lusty as love, and the flames of hate are fanned these days by a terrifying storm of violent response, social media, and willful ignorance. Why should I learn about my enemy, or even have compassion for them, when I can just hate them or hurt them or shame them or kill them? Then I don’t have to deal with them at all. Wars happen when hate marries power. And here we are, with conflicts in Ukraine, in Palestine and Israel, in Ethiopia, in Sudan, in my heart, in your heart.

Jesus knew a thing or two about hate. He was reviled by some of those in power who feared what he was doing. He was killed by hate when the fear of those in power, and the disgust by the religious elite, and the Roman course of action of crucifixion met on a hill outside Jerusalem and executed him on a cross.

Jesus knew how unrelentingly destructive hate was, and he knew that would not be his way because it was not God’s way. God is love. God is not hate. In familiar words from the sermon on the mount, Jesus says, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” I imagine that went over like a lead balloon or a tin of canned peas. But Jesus knew that love would be the only way out of it.
Which sounds simplistic, doesn’t it? The stuff of pop songs—love is the answer, let your love flow, all you need is love. It’s hard to talk about love without going straight to trite. So let me frame this a little differently. What if in the face of someone we are tempted to hate, or do hate, we chose instead one of these things: compassion, or repentance, or embrace?

We might understand why the Muslim woman in the former Yugoslavia chose hate after what the enemy did to her. We might have compassion for her and set aside our own judgment in light of the trauma she has endured.

In Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Volf writes a fair amount about repentance—the need for both the hater and the hated to repent. He says, “To repent means to make a turnabout of a profound moral and religious import. Repentance implies not merely a recognition that one has made a bad mistake but that one has sinned.” (Volf, 113) In other words, to eradicate hate we can’t just feel bad about it, and confess it, and receive the assurance of forgiveness. We must repent, turn away from the things that allowed us to hate in the first place, and step with courage and hope and humility into a new way of living.

Can we even consider embracing the person we hate, including them and not shunning them? In some ways I think we learn so much from our middle-school cafeteria experience, which for some of us was kind of awful—carrying that plastic tray with the sloppy Joe and carrot sticks and looking for a place to sit and to hear the snickers or see the eye roll and know we don’t belong. Or we don’t let others sit with us.

To have compassion for the enemy, to repent of our own practice of hating, and to embrace the Other is very, very hard. Dr. Volf wrote a 350-page book about it and never got around to telling his readers how to love in the face of hate.

And honestly, I don’t know how to either, but I think we have to try, and in order to try, we have to remember what Jesus said. So let’s start with this, and maybe these are sometimes questions and statements that you might want to write down as you figure out how to love in the face of hate.

Whom do you love? Who taught you to love?

That’s a fun thing to consider, isn’t it? Remembering not so much lessons but actions that people took that showed us, rather than told us, what love is like. So that’s one thing.

Another idea is from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” or from his letter to the Galatians, where he writes, “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” It’s sort of like when we are baptized, we become part of the Christian family, and it’s as though Christ’s DNA intermingles with ours. Christ is within us, and so to choose to love in the face of hate requires that we don’t rely on ourselves but reach out to the Christ who is within us.

To get really practical, let me suggest this. Sometimes if I’m struggling with someone, or if there’s someone I say I hate (which I hard because I was taught I couldn’t say I hated anyone), I picture that person sitting next to me as we pray the Lord’s Prayer together. Do that on a daily basis and see what happens. That person might become human.

And finally, we could live out the words of the Francis prayer. Where there is hatred, let us sow love. That’s a curious verb, sow. It implies planting and waiting. When I hear this verb, my mind’s eye goes to Vincent Van Gogh’s painting of the sower, walking in the bright sun with a bag of seeds slung across his shoulder, throwing out seeds onto the furrowed field.

When we sow seeds, we don’t get immediate results. Within half an hour we don’t see little shoots sprouting up. The next day we don’t see the corn stalk rising. The next week we don’t enjoy some corn on the cob. We have to wait and let the sun and the water and the fertile earth do their work.

So it is with sowing love. We are not going to see immediate results. We may not even seen results in our lifetime. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. For the sake of the world, for the sake of our children’s children’s children, we must take up now the work of choosing love over hate.

Dr. King once famously said, “I have decided to stick to love…Hate is too great a burden to bear.” A follower of St. Francis said, “Where there is hatred, let me sow love.” What will you say today, and more importantly, what will you do?