Lent: Give Up Animosity

Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.

- Ephesians 4:31-32

For a while, every time one of our children said that they hated something or someone, my wife and I corrected them by saying, “you greatly dislike that thing or person. We don’t hate, we dislike.” I’m not entirely sure where that idea of correction came from, but I know for me there was an “icky-ness” about a three year old already having hate in his heart. These days, with three running around, the corrections don’t happen quite as often. Hate for the taste of bananas or disliking a toy is one thing, but hating or disliking a person is another thing altogether.

To hate a person usually has to do with what this person or group of individuals has done at one moment or another: to hate what early Americans did to Native American tribes in the developing U.S., to hate what slave owners did to the ancestors of many African Americans, or to hate the driver of the car who killed your loved one. Our hate rarely originates in the entire being of a person, and yet, depending on what happened as a result of an action or incident, we so often will bring our animosity to the entire person - entire wars have been fought over particular moments.

I’m not saying that the actions of human beings shouldn’t be hated - enslavement, ethnic cleansing, rape, violence…etc. While we have been capable of hate and have reflected this capability in so many times of our history, these people, all of us, have also been made in the image of our creator and have been imbued with the person of Christ. To hate the person or people, is to hate the one reflected in that creation. To hate the person, to bring our full animosity to the other, is to ignore all the other moments that make this person a beloved child of God.

Christ came to save us all from our sin. God formed and continues to reform us as beloved children. In the moments of resisting evil actions and detestable behaviors, we should also be seeking the whole created being of one another. God does not reduce us to our most hateful of moments. God embraces us in spite of ourselves. No, we don't have to ignore the pains and sufferings we may produce in one another; in fact we should be seeking forgiveness in those moments - God’s love enacted through reconciliation. But we can also open our eyes to seek the broken beings we truly are and if not embrace, at the very least see, the reflection of our creator that connects us to each other.


- Pastor Tim

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