We Hate Each Other Because We Hate God: How to Stop the Violence

In these days of political turmoil and violence in the United States its more than easy for opponents to hitch their opinion and positions, if not also prejudices and disregard, to some higher power, to some Divine. Yesterday I drove, on State Route 50 in Winter Garden (Florida) near my home, behind a car with these multiple bumper stickers: “I love Trump Because He Pisses Off the People I Hate,” then one with something about loving America with Guns and God, then this: “Jesus is Lord,” and then another identifying a local Christian church in our area.

Jesus does seem to be Lord of a lot of hate-mongering and divisiveness these days. I will not come to Jesus’ defense in all of that. He is, quite clearly, defenseless. His strong declarations of loving enemies and forgiving the lawless don’t change us, they go unheeded, and then there is his loud silence in never quite stepping in to do the Right’s bidding (or the Left’s for that matter) when in everything from enacting public policy or civic morals to intervening on behalf of children dying young of cancer (or measles!) or communities being leveled by fire or flood he does not show up. Jesus can handle all of this on his own, and he does. But we will not have it. We want Jesus to do what we want him to do but he doesn’t and he won’t. And so, we hate him for it.

What’s that? The ones professing love of Jesus actually hate him?

I’m thinking that the real reason people who love Jesus hate others so much who don’t agree with their values and issue positions is that they actually hate Jesus (ahem, God) for not fulfilling their dreams by giving and getting for them their aspirations of everything from safety and security to wealth and prosperity. They are projecting their hatred of God (ahem, Jesus) on to their neighbors.

We hate God?

Of course we do. Why else do you think we invent centuries of religious worship practices and ethical mandates to get the relationship right so that if favors us? The relationship does not favor us and we know it. We just will not admit it. And don’t be thinking it is just the Theists who do this and the Atheists are above board. No, non-belief in God and investment in human potential is as much of a protection against the yawning Abyss as an infrastructure of spiritual disciplines. It is a spiritual discipline, in fact.

Hating other people, and doing them harm as a projection of our hate for God (the Divine, or Fate, or call it what you will) for doing us harm by simply disallowing our agency and ability to do anything about the Darkness, is universal and ubiquitous.

Why does hating God make us then hate each other? I can’t battle with God, but I can see the person in front of me and take my anger, and my penchant for dividing up and claiming my own space, out on them. I want first place, determining place, decision power, but cannot have it. But wait, maybe I can! I can control you!

So, if I did not hate God would I also not hate others? Is that all its going to take to clean up the violence of the world? Love God, then, please!

But alas, we have plenty of commands to do that, but it doesn’t work by command. It’s not just that we cannot love God, but that we will not. It just takes too much out of us. It takes the me out of me. How can I stand for that? I will not. And so it goes. Only God can love God and so God must do that to me and in me.

Martin Luther’s little catechism has one little line that is the powerhouse of it all. In the Explanation to the Third Article of the Apostles’ Creed, Luther writes, “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ my Lord, or come to Him; but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith.” How about that?! We cannot, and I would add will not, love God, but God can and does it for me.

So then, is it possible for us to love God? Only when God does it for us. And when God does, my scrambling in this world (and the next) for position and place is over and I have no need to take out my neighbor in order to secure my safety and serenity.

And so it is not that “all we need is love.” We have been trying that since Day One and look where we are. As I said above, we have plenty of commands to love.

The healing and rehabilitation of an alcoholic requires one fundamental thing before anything more will help. An alcoholic must admit powerlessness over alcohol. The same thing applies to all persons addicted to Theism or Atheism (if you are counting, that would be all of us). We must admit we are powerless over what will become of us after we die.  We must admit we have no impact on our eternal destiny.

This, by the way, is where most Christians, if they do any confessing at all, get Confession wrong. They confess they have done bad or wrong things, made bad choices, but say nothing, confess nothing, about their belief, a false belief, that confessing wrongs helps them by putting them in a better relationship with God. Confession gets you nowhere with God. Doing right gets you nowhere with God. Believing in God gets you nowhere with God. All of this is so because it’s all living and operating within a legal structure that requires and calls for reciprocation.

But what if God is not the Law? What if God gives laws (of which we know many, and if we are paying attention and obeying rather than simply posting a list of them on our walls and admiring, they can do a lot of good) but God is not the Law.

What if, in other words, any good news that saves us from the Abyss is not a stopgap that keeps us on the Edge and not falling but is rather that the falling will not and cannot harm us because the abyss of a lawless world lives, how shall I say it, within the embrace of a world of mercy? What if mercy reigns?

Luther in the 16th century came to identify how God gives the Law but is not the Law. He called it Law and Gospel. The Gospel is not that God fixes things, or us, within the Law so that Law reigns supreme. The Gospel is that living by and in the Law does nothing to help us or harm us in our relationship with God. Only God does the helping or the harming. And we know God’s business is the helping, not harming, because of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Mercy. Sheer Mercy. God is not the Law. God is unadulterated Mercy.

What to do with all the hate we have for each other? Admit that we all hate God for being sheer mercy and taking us out of the game of salvation. Giving us nothing in the Law that makes us right with God. Admit that we hate God and will kill God any chance we get. Christians, when we get the story right, claim that this is exactly what happened to Jesus. We killed him. And what happened next? What happened was sheer mercy. Not “you sons of bitches, I’ll get you yet!,” but rather, “Peace be with you, as the Father has sent me, so I send you.” (John 20).

What’s that you say? Forgiveness? Unlawful, outside anything close to being reciprocation by the rules, and the only thing that creates instead of destroys.

It’s our hating of God that makes us hate each other. Yet “I Forgive You” is spoken by God daily.

What’s that you say? Forgiven? Something just happened to me. And now I see everything and everyone, even my enemies, differently.

An Opening.

A New World.