Dear Saints in Santa Fe, and other far-off places:
Greetings in the name and spirit of Jesus Christ!
There is some confusion of late (2,000 years or so) of what it means to be Christian.
Let’s start with the basics, and a familiar adage: “When Jesus told us to love our enemies he didn’t mean for us to kill them.” Or hurt, berate, belittle, threaten, oppress, frighten, or imprison them.
When Paul wrote in Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ” he meant it and we should stop making edits or excuses.
Our culture has trouble with the “other.” Jesus didn’t.
We have denigrated the immigrant. Leviticus 19:34 tells us we should love them as ourselves.
Jesus lived and preached a life of peace and nonviolence in a violent world. His early followers even refused to be conscripted into the Roman army. Anyone who says Jesus and violence in the same sentence is not speaking about the Jesus of the Gospels.
Compassion, love and mercy are the very fabric of the Christian life.
Rodney Stark, in his book The Rise of Christianity (1996) perhaps best describes what this Christian life looks like as he describes the early church: “To cities filled with hopelessness and impoverished people, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities faced with epidemics, fires and earthquakes, Christianity offered effective nursing services. To cities torn by violent ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity . . . Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with urgent urban problems.”
He ends with this: “Christians effectively promulgated a moral vision utterly incompatible with the casual cruelty of pagan custom. What Christianity gave its converts was nothing less than their humanity.”
There is so much more. Books upon books, sermons upon sermons, debates upon debates have sought to understand Jesus and his message and how we are to respond to it, and we still don’t know it all.
But I do know this: Jesus chose love over hate, community over division, mercy over cruelty.
There should be nothing confusing about that.
Grace and peace,
Harry