OK, so I’m browsing some news sites this evening (I’m a news junkie) and two things catch my eye. The first is Paris. The story that is most consistent across all the news sites is that of the riots in France right now. Apparently (at least according to CNN), the riots started in response to the deaths of two Muslim teens who were hiding from police. I think it was the New York Times that said these riots have forced the French government to confront their inability to assimilate minorities. In any case, cars are being torched, two cops have been shot, and another has been burned in the face from a firebomb. Life isn’t good in France right now.
The second is the controversy over the Vatican’s announcement against permitting gay priests to enter the priesthood, and the myriad of complaints that have resulted from that (it’s in the LA Times, if you’re interested).
This is gonna seem disconnected, but I swear it’s not a butterfly…
One of my youth group students came up to me Wednesday night ’cause he was concerned about the lyrics of a song he had been listening to, and asked me what some of the words meant. One of the words was “minority.” We got into a lengthy discussion about the meaning of that word. One of the definitions he agreed on was, “the people who are less popular.”
That, at least in popular opinion, is what sparked the French riots. And people are going to accuse the Catholic Church of ostracizing minorities now because it’s made a (Scriptural) decision against permitting homosexuals into the priesthood (well, they’re compromising a little on that one). Christians catch it all the time. People are always down on us as being the intolerant bigots because we don’t endorse things, and therefore are accused of being racist, sexist, or, at worst, enciting hate speech. That’s a sad commentary on two things: how the lost view us, for certain, but also on what we’ve done to lead them to that view.
There are things we should never compromise on. Sin is sin. Let’s be honest, and call it what it is. But that doesn’t mean that we hate on the people that commit sin. Jesus loved them enough to die for them the same as He died for us. We’re no better than they are…the best case scenario for any human is to be forgiven. How dare we have the audacity to stand on our religious high ground and look down on, or refuse to associate with, people who look different from us, who commit the same sins in action that we do in thought, who have done something that we have decided is unpardonable, even though God never identified it as such?
The thing you say you’ll never do is something you’ve already done when no one was looking.
So it comes down to this: you’re forgiven, or you’re not. Because you’re not good, and neither am I. I’m just forgiven. And if we enounter someone who’s not, then what we’re supposed to do (instead of judging them), is tell them about the One who can forgive them.
Hate starts riots. Hate takes a lot of forms: racism, classicism, sexism, derogatory speech, refusing to associate with someone different…funny, isn’t it, that hate can look a lot like religion?
Love takes one form: God. It looks a lot like Jesus. He hung out with the people that we shy away from in order to show them love. That’s what the world is looking for. Love. Not melodrama. They have enough of that. Love. We have the one love that really matters and can really change their lives.
So let’s get over ourselves and show it to them.
Sounds like a plan.