Sunday, February 26, 2023
What is love?
Over the course of my life as a professing Christian, I've struggled with the idea what it means to love others, even our enemies.
What I've run into from people in authority, over and over, is the idea that sometimes loving someone means insisting that they change, or shunning them if they don't comply with the way a sect believes they should think or act. Even writing that, I feel myself getting mad-- how many times have I been told that love sometimes means rejecting or ostracizing others?
I don't buy it. I never have, and I never will. "Love your neighbor as you love yourself" (the Second Great Commandment) should never lead us to thinking that excluding others is a form of love.
Don't get me wrong... I understand that some people are making bad choices. I was a prosecutor, after all, and I spend a lot of my time these days working with prosecutors and training people who will be prosecutors. I don't pretend, though, that locking someone up is some perverse form of love for the person imprisoned. That certainly is not how I would choose to be loved!
But the exclusion of others urged by religious authorities rarely has to do with serious crimes (Paul and Moses were both murderers, after all). It usually has to do with LGBT people, or those who are suffering from addictions, or those who don't believe in the Trinity or the literal interpretation of the Bible.
Loving those who love us is easy-- it's reciprocal, after all, and we get something from it. Almost always, what Christ requires sacrifice, and that means loving those who don't love us back, or who refuse to.... well, be like we are.
Are we ready for that?
