Love and Hate in Orlando

My holiday bubble is being threatened by reality despite the great pains I have taken to preserve it. While the Internet was roiling itself into a frenzy, I got to sit in church and be flayed open by the word of God. And while the Internet began to frantically devour itself, I sat around a big round table with all my kiddos tasting the delights of the sea. Much later in the evening, after I had hidden massive portions of my Facebook feed, I watched CNN for a few minutes where I learned that, most strangely, the killing of so many of the LGBTQ Community* was the fault of conservative Christianity for “creating a climate of fear”. And, keeping my own counsel, I found it interesting that not only I, but everybody in America, seems to be fed up, battle weary, and ready for the other side to go away.

Nevertheless, I don’t really want to go away, even though I understand that all terrorism, whether Islamic or otherwise, is my fault. I would like to point out some obvious home truths.

First, love is not just a feeling. Love involves feelings but it cannot be limited to them. If love is only about how you feel, then you can’t function as a rational person. And that’s what we’re seeing–untenable, hysterical, contradictory positions being breathed out in simultaneous breaths. If we, in the west, really loved the LGBTQ Community*, we wouldn’t have let that night club be a gun free zone, and we wouldn’t try to make peace with an ideology that acts violently towards that life style.

Second, Christianity and Islam are not the same. I know it is hateful of me to point this out, but saying you disagree with someone is not the same as taking out a gun and shooting them. Speech and actual Violence have been so confused that there’s no way for an entity like CNN to make sense of anything.

Third, even if we get rid of all the guns, we still have people. The first big sin, after Adam and Eve ate the fruit whereof they had been commanded not to eat, was murder. Cain lifted up his hand against his brother to kill him. Murder, and hate, have been around a long time. The guns aren’t really the problem, no matter how many times we try to make believe they are. But neither is a special category of hate against one group of people the problem. All people everywhere are the problem. We all have sinned and fallen short, that means we tried to come up to the mark and failed, of the glory of God.

And, being in the shadows, looking over there at the glory of God and being graspingly angry that we can’t take and have that glory, we turn around and kill each other, both in thought, word, and deed. Everyone. Without exception.

But, because God the Father, in his glory, does not desire the death of the wicked, but desires that we should turn and be saved, he sent God the Son to earth. Jesus did not count equality with God something to be grasped, but taking on the form of a slave he came to earth, not to lift up his hand against us, as we had lifted up our hand against him, but to be lifted up himself, to absorb the totality of God’s just wrath in himself so that we might go free, no longer enslaved to death, and fear, and hatred, and murder.

Love demands that this news be spread. Consider, O Christian, everyone hates you already. Everything is already your fault. Therefore, let the immensity of the forgiveness of God drive you forward into a world that is utterly perishing, a world that can’t think straight, a world torn asunder by the power of darkness. It may be that God will yet have mercy and save some.

*I am not giving way to the premise that sexual preferences are the measure and definer of the person. We don’t get to self identify as whatever we want. God gives life, and he saves some from sin, and all are made in his image. ‘LGBTQ’ is not something you can take with you into the kingdom of God. What you do get is better–to be called a child of God, a brother or sister of our Lord, a member of the Bride prepared from the foundation of the world for the Son.