Love The Sinner Hate The Sin Transcript

Would you pray with me? Heavenly Father, we thank you that your spirit is already moving among us, that whether we are singing praises to your name, hearing your word read, or even now proclaimed that your spirit would move us, that would open our ears and soften our hearts so that, whether through me or in spite of me, we might encounter you in a new way, be transformed in your presence and, in that transformation, have our lives and how we live in our world transformed in the process. We ask this all in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Amen.

Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin Complexity

We're almost wrapping up our bumper sticker theology series that we've been doing all summer. We have one more week, and next week is Labor Day weekend, so you may not make it. I hope you tune in online if you can't come, or you'll watch it later. All these messages and sermons are available on our website, so I hope you'll use them if you can't make it this week. We're talking about a saying often used for a particular topic, and we're going to get there eventually, but right now, we're going to stay broad: Love the sinner, hate the sin.

This saying, this bumper sticker slogan, this pithy statement that sounds good, has been used to do a lot of harm. It sounds right, it sounds good, and it sounds good because we don't like the idea of hating someone. We are taught at an early age, as children, that it's wrong to hate, that it's wrong to hate someone else. We've also got this understanding of God, that this challenge to us that we often wrestle with here in this community, in this church, wrestle with this same question of how do we reconcile the God of the Old Testament, which doesn't seem to have any trouble with hating people and hating things, with this God of the New Testament that doesn't seem to hate people and things and wants to invite all people to himself. The church has wrestled with this. The church has struggled to try to answer this.

That's where this saying comes from. It's this understanding that we don't want to believe in a God who hates and doesn't want to hate people. So, instead, we say we love the person but hate the sin. We love the person but hate what they've done. Most of the time, this is okay. Most of the time, this works out. Suppose somebody is a murderer, has committed adultery, has done something detestable, has broken a covenant, and has broken our community. In that case, we do want to hate what they have done, and we want to love them. But the problem is we need help separating the person and the action. More often than not, we have a hard time separating the two, and I argue that this saying itself is not biblical, of loving the sinner, hating the sin, not actually biblical.

Now, I want to preface this. I want to give you a warning in the form of a Snoopy cartoon. I don't know if you can read that, but Charlie is telling Snoopy I hear you're writing a book on theology. I hope you have a good title. Mooby says I have the perfect title. Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong? And so I show that now, and I say that now with the full understanding that what I'm going to say today, I may be wrong, I may have a misunderstanding, but what it comes from is a desire to understand God fully. It comes from wrestling with the scripture, and it comes from wrestling with the scripture in a community of believers, so I may be wrong and stand judgment for it, but it's the best that I can do with this.

This saying love the sinner, hate the sin, more often than not, is almost always when talking about somebody who is gay, lesbian, or transgender. It is almost always used in that regard. Whenever it's talked about, used, passed on, or somebody feels the need to say well, I don't hate them, I love the sinner, but I hate them. And it comes out of that desire, or that need to realize and to say that we don't hate anybody. We just hate their action. Now, in this particular topic, in this particular understanding, in this particular, I don't like to use word issues. Still, it's the shortest word that I can use at this particular moment to say the problem that we run into is that those who are gay, those who are lesbian, LGBT, whatever you want to call it, it's a part of their identity, part of who they are, just as me, being straight and being married to my wife is a part of who I am. It's not something I chose. It's not something I consciously decided to do, just loving my wife and marrying her. I did make that decision since I threw that in there at the last minute. But that same idea, I did not choose the part of my identity and who I am. The same can be said for those who are gay, at which point when we say love the sinner, hate the sin, or when somebody says that they're not making that distinction, they're making a distinction that those who are gay do not. They can't separate, and they don't separate their identity of who they are as a person from their queerness, a part of a whole. When we say love the sinner, hate the sin, they're saying, well, this isn't my sin, you can't separate this out, I don't separate this. So we're left with the choice. We're left with the idea of what do we need to do? How do we reconcile the fact that there are clear passages in the Bible that, read at face value and read on their own, would suggest that homosexuality and queerness are a sin? We have to wrestle with that. We can't deny that those passages are there. We have to figure out how to read them. We have to figure out how to understand them to move forward.

Understanding the Bible

This is where I raided my son's Lego collection On the screen, and I will hold it up here, but you can see it just in case you can't see it this far. The box is a little small. It's a three-in-one set. I really like this one because I like parrots. I've always wanted one as a pet, but I'm at the point now where it will live twice as long as the rest of my lifespan, so it's not a good idea. There are 253 Lego pieces in this box, and there are instructions in this box to assemble this set as a parrot, frog, or fish. You can do one of those things. You can't do all three. There aren't enough pieces to do all the trees, but you can choose which one you will make: the parrot, the frog, or the fish out of 253 pieces.

In the Bible, there are 66 books. There are 39 in the Old Testament. There are 27 in the New Testament. In the Bible, there are 1,189 chapters. If we want to break it down even further, 229 in the Old Testament and 260 in the New Testament. There are 31,102 verses in the Bible, 3,145 in the Old Testament, and 7,957 in the New Testament. If I can take 253 pieces of a Lego set and build a parrot, I can build a parrot, a frog, or a fish.

If we approach the Bible as a collection of broken-down verses, we pick and choose, and I like this verse, and I like this verse. We put them together, and we take them out of context, and we rip them out of the cultural context that they were given in, and they were understood, and we take them out of the context that we even read them today, and we take this verse from here and that verse from there and put it together. What is it that we're forming? Leonard Sweet talks about reading the Bible. The way we read the Bible today as Christians is often called verses. We spent so long memorizing individual Bible verses. We spent so long ripping the Bible verses and dealing with them verse-by-verse. We need to gain a sense of the whole. We need to gain a sense of the bigger picture. We need to find out where those verses fit in.

Our Bible study tactics fall into the same category where we talk about concordances and topics of what we're looking at for a particular topic in the Bible. So we go to a concordance, which is a list of topics that tells us which verses tell us to talk about those topics. That resource that can be used for good does the same thing we often do. We say, Okay, we need a verse; we need this topic. These two things come together, and then I can read this verse to you, I can rely on it, put it into the picture I'm trying to make, and then I have a biblical worldview. I have a biblical understanding because I've pulled the pieces out of the Bible. The challenge is if we do this on our own, if we try to do this on our own, and we only look at the verses. We have to figure out what picture we're building.

Just because a verse is pulled out of the Bible, just because a collection of verses spread throughout the Bible are pulled out of the Bible and assembled, doesn't mean what we have is a valid biblical understanding. The question is, are we pulling our veses out? Are we making a picture of Jesus, or are we making a picture of something else? Are we making a picture of Jesus, or are we making a picture, ultimately, of ourselves? This is what we wrestle with. This is why we study the scriptures to ether. This is why we do this as a community. This is why we gather on Sunday mornings; we read the scriptures together and try to dive into it and figure it out. Because we don't, we absolutely do not want to make the Bible in our own image. We do not want to pull verses and make it so that these are the things we believe when we've ripped everything out of the context in the greater story.

Love, Hate, and Your Sins

Chapters and verses have helped us gather and study the scripture together. You can stand up on Sunday morning and say we're going to go to Matthew, and we're going to go to chapter 18, and we're going to read verses one to nine. Without those verses, peers, and books, we would have no way of communally gathering together and arriving at the same place in any real sense of the word. In those ways, it has helped. When we say, we will only read his verse to this verse. We never get the stuff before it, we never get it after it, and we never get the whole. That's the trade-off, and we need to be careful of that.

When I look at biblical passages being used as a bludgeon, as a sword, I see this idea of using biblical verses as a weapon while we continue to proclaim Oh, we just love the sinner, but hate the sin. Some fundamental issues to get through as a community are to get to that point and make sure that that's where we want to be and, if that's what, who God wants us to be. We saw in today's passage, in this Matthew 18 passage, this idea of creating stumbling blocks. It's incredible how Christians are good at saying you must believe this, this, this, and this to be a Christian, and that list changes. If you spend any time on Twitter and don't recommend it for the most part, this list grows more prominent.

Right now, there is a push among some evangelical circles to say you have to like Pilgrim's Progress, the book, and if you don't like it, then your Christianity is somehow in question. If you don't like the atonement, if you don't like the evangelism in it, and you somehow don't like it, then something's wrong with you. That's not the best example, but it's the most recent example of saying, well, we put all of these roadblocks up, all of these checkpoints that you need to reach, all of these things to say that you have to believe this, and this and this and this. If you have all of those, then you're a Christian, and if you don't, if you're missing one, maybe we'll let you slide, depending on what that one may be, but if it's a big one, then surely you're not a Christian. The issue of human sexuality is one of those statements, one of those things that if you believe differently, or many, then you can't be. You've gotten it wrong.

But this past age, from the second reading, Matthew, chapter 7, verses 1 through 5, and verse 8, teaches us the term love the sinner, hate the sin on its head. Now, I'll admit someone else came up with this. When I first heard about this, it was from a preacher named Tony Campolo. He's an evangelical preacher. He used to teach at Eastern Seminary or Eastern College in the St David's area. I'm sure you've been there or passed it if you've done any back-row driving to get to King of Prussia. In high school, I first encountered him at Creation Festival, a giant music festival with speakers and everything else in the mountains of Pennsylvania. 40 to 50,000 people converged on the mountains of Pennsylvania, setting up a temporary stage, living in tents, worshiping God, listening to pretty good Christian music at the time, and hearing speakers. Now, this saying that I'm about to say this way of rewording this, saying I did not hear back in high school. It was a later video that I heard from him as he wrestled with his son's revelation of his own sexuality. He said if we read this passage if we read this passage in Matthew and this other one in Matthew 18, what we see from Jesus is not love the sinner and hate the sin. It's love the sinner, hate your own sin. Again, it's not love the sinner, hate their sin. It's love the sinner, hate your own.

  I don't know how many pastors I'm sure a couple in this room have probably heard somebody ask them when they will preach on such a sin? When are you going to spend time protesting against the sin of homosexuality, to name it specifically? But usually, there's some other sin in there as well, and the question that often comes to mind is, are you struggling with that sin? Is that why you want me to preach on it now. The answer is always no.

It is far easier to preach against and ask somebody to preach against and to rail against somebody else's sin than it is your own or to have somebody preach against your own. It is far easier to deal with sin outside of the community you're dealing with than it is to have to wrestle with your own, and that's the exact opposite of what Jesus wants us to do. Jesus is so intent on ensuring we're taking care of our sins. He uses hyperbole, but he says it's far better to chop off your leg or remove your eye if it's causing you to sin than it would be to go to hell with both legs or both eyes. This is how seriously Jesus takes your sin and wants you to take your own sin. Then, in the second Matthew passage, the second one, we read about how you can remove the speck from your neighbor's eye when you have a plank, a log, and your own?

The truth, the absolute truth, is we have no control over somebody else's actions. We have no control over what they choose to do and not do. We have absolutely no say. And if you're a parent, you know this to be true, especially as you witness them making bad decisions. You wish you could control them; you wish you could tell them not to do it. You wish you could have some sort of s y, some sort of sway when you know they're making bad choices and you feel powerless against it. Know this to be absolutely true: the only actions that you control, the only person that you have control over, is yourself. You have free will. You have free choice. You can decide whether you will live after God in this moment or you won't. Too often, we make bad choices, but the choices are.

We absolutely need to give up this idea that we can control someone else, that we can sway them and force them. Then we have to give up this idea that anything they believe, what they do, or how they think about a particular issue makes them a Christian or not, where we are given in the scripture what it is that makes us Christians, and that is faith in Christ, trusting in him and relying on him for our salvation. Then he will teach us; he will guide us. We look after him to achieve our salvation, but it rests entirely on Christ. We cannot place ourselves on the judgment seat. We cannot make that decision for someone else. What we can do is say this: who Christ is. As you may have noticed, if you've looked ahead at the hymns about the sing and the ones that we've already sung, they're centered around this idea of grace, centered around this idea that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. While we were lost in sin, Christ loved us so much that he willingly died for us. While we were wretched and lost, the goodness of God's mercy still covered us, still invited us in.

Inclusion in the Church for All

Now you have heard me say, and I'm guessing you've guessed by now, that I actually am for inclusion in the church of all those, no matter their sexuality. But I may be wrong; it could be, and I have made that decision. With the wrestling that I've done with other Christians, with other leaders, with the scripture, I have come to that choice. I don't expect everyone to agree with me, I don't expect everyone to follow me down that path, but that's where I work, from, where I do my ministry, from where I believe that we as a church call out to a world that is hurting. I go back to that disclaimer I started with. I could very well, and this is where we work together as a church.

This is where we struggle and wrestle with the scriptures and wrestle with each other out of love and a desire to do better tomorrow.

And my prayer is that we do that just Sunday morning, in worship, at Bible studies, at books, in the narthex, over a cup of coffee, or in the parlor, wherever we may be, wherever we may gather.

Let's seek to do better tomorrow. I did the day before. May we seek to love God more tomorrow than we did before, and may we seek to control and conquer our own sin so that we have something to do so that we can help heal, bring healing to the sins of the world, where, if God's grace is enough to cover me and all of the mistakes that I have made over my life, then God's grace is indeed enough to cover up. If I want to claim God's grace for myself, I have no right to withhold it from someone. This is my hope, and this is my prayer. These are the conversations that I want to push you out of after today's service around the table: talk about what I've talked about, wrestle with it, talk about how maybe I'm off my rocker and I'm entirely wrong. Talk about how you agree with me, and I'm right. Wrestle with this, saying this understanding of challenging, changing, and transforming our own sin and then relying on God's grace when we fail.