“Love the sinner, hate the sin.”
Probably a phrase you’ve heard before.
I’ve been thinking about that phrase as I digest the news of the past week. ICE raids. War with Iran. A government willing to spend tens of millions of dollars on a military parade while claiming to combat waste, fraud, and abuse by making cuts to Medicaid and giving tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. Two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses shot, one pair of them killed, in their homes.
To strip health care from the most vulnerable, terrorize the immigrant, instigate war, senselessly murder people… these are certainly sins I hate, and I find it difficult to love those who commit them. Especially because many of these people claim to be Christian. This is the same branch of Christianity that insists on posting the 10 commandments in public schools – commandments which include “you shall not murder.”
This isn’t only about Christian nationalism and partisan ideology. This isn’t only about terrorism or the way we talk about religious extremism. It is about all those things, and it is about something more.
Enter the phrase, “love the sinner, hate the sin.” Growing up in a more conservative church, I heard it a lot. It was supposedly a compassionate, gentle-hearted response to the question of whether something – usually a hot-button social topic like homosexuality or abortion – is a sin. As I understood it growing up, it was the church’s way of saying, “we teach that this is a sin, but you should never treat the person committing this sin badly.” The problem is, this still puts us in a relational conundrum. How can I truly love someone if I’m told to hate something about that person?
Religion in all its forms has taught many variations of “love the sinner, hate the sin” throughout human history. The problem with “love the sinner, hate the sin” is that it still teaches hate. More than that, it teaches a special kind of hate. It isn’t just one person hating another person’s actions. It isn’t one person condemning or passing judgment on another. “Love the sinner, hate the sin” teaches hatred that is God’s. It teaches condemnation and judgment of another person that come from on high; It opens the door for the perverted understanding that it is God’s condemnation that has been showered upon a sinner, and you are simply the vessel through which it comes. It opens the door to the belief that you are divinely sanctioned to feel so outraged by another person’s political persuasion that you could buy a gun meant to tear human bodies apart and march right up to their front door and murder them in their own home. “Love the sinner, hate the sin” makes your hatred holy.
In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus is confronted by a man possessed by demons. We are told that this man had been naked for a long time, and that he was living in tombs. He is disturbed, to be certain; but this man was also living among the dead, symbolic of his own state in life. This is demon possession: to be dead while you are still alive.
This man possessed by demons, who is mentally ill, unpredictable, and violent, is unclean in every way: not only because he lives in tombs, but because he is a Gentile. He’s a different race and class than the Jews – he’s a different race and class than Jesus. Yet in this gospel story, Jesus has crossed the Sea of Galilee and deliberately gone into Gentile territory. It’s almost as if Jesus sought him out. Jesus’ actions say in no uncertain terms, “I’m going to make it very clear that my grace and healing are for everyone, no matter who they are.”
In the portion of Paul’s letter to the Galatians we read today, Paul also makes this point very clear: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” In Christ, God has done something new: God has broken through the barriers of race, class, social position, and gender and sexuality – partitions that ordinarily foster inequality, injustice, and hatred. While the events of the past week remind us that these divisions are still very much alive, our faith points to the truth that our main identity marker, the category under which we fall, the distinction we use to describe ourselves, is found in Jesus Christ and not in any of the human distinctions we create and foster.
The man in today’s Gospel story was possessed by the demons of mental illness, but there are demons that possess us all which hinder the will of God for us to live in peace and wholeness: demons such as Homophobia, Islamophobia, Antisemitism, Classism, Racism, Sexism, and, perhaps most insidious of all, apathy and silence in the face of injustice. The demons that possess us are the demons of distinction: the insistence that we divide ourselves along lines that are irrelevant to God. The categories that divide us today may be different from the categories in Paul’s time, but divisions along racial, ethnic, religious, socio-economic, class, sexuality, and gender lines are still very much alive.
Religion is guilty in not only naming these divisions, but perpetuating them. Leaders and faithful of all religions must have the courage to take an honest look at themselves and ask how they have contributed to the strengthening of divisions among people and hatred along those lines. All religions need to repent of the ways they have helped create the demons of hatred and fear of others, the way our discourse about sin has led legions of people toward violence against others because they have been taught to hate their sin.
When the man possessed by demons met Jesus, he shouted for Jesus to leave him alone, and in a somewhat strange conversation between Jesus and the demons, they beg to not be thrown into the abyss, negotiating to be able to possess a nearby herd of swine instead. It’s an odd conversation, Jesus talking to demons, but here’s the thing we can’t afford to miss: the demons are afraid of Jesus. The demons had finally come up against a real threat, and they cower in fear and beg for mercy. My friends, the demons of all forms of human divisions that still possess us today are no different from the demons that possessed the man in today’s Gospel. Demons cower in the face of Jesus, because they are no match for the Prince of Peace. The demons of this world are no match for the God of love. Every single one of you as a follower of Jesus has the power to make the demons of hatred cower. As Paul says in his letter to the Galatians, in Jesus all our divisions are obliterated. The demons of racism, sexism, and classism have no power over Jesus Christ.
When Jesus drives the demons out of the man in today’s gospel and unshackles him from his bondage, the man returns to Jesus and asks to be with him, to follow him wherever he goes. But Jesus’ response is no. The free man is instead told to stay where he is, to be a prophet and a witness to his community – to people who are afraid of him, who aren’t sure they can trust him, who know him as nothing other than a person to avoid, to declare how much God has done for him.
You and I, like him, who are in Christ Jesus, are called to a world that isn’t sure they can trust the gospel, a world who knows people of faith as people to be avoided, to break the shackles of the evil that ensnares us and declare all that God has done for us. The demons of this world shout at us to leave them alone; but we will look them in the eye – all that hatred of “the other,” and the insidious temptation to remain silent in the face of evil – we will look at them with the love of Jesus, the gaze of the Prince of Peace, and they will be cast out. You, and I, will not hate. We will not be imprisoned by the divisions we create. We will pray, we will love, we will act, and we have faith that one day, peace will reign and love will win. Amen.
