October 16, 2016WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S NOT IN THE BIBLE?

Matthew 7:1-55. Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin

Preface to the Word

Like all the other half-truths we’ve been considering the last four weeks, many believe that the pithy bit of wisdom we’re highlighting today – “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” is found in Scripture and is even a quote from Jesus. But Jesus never uttered these words, nor does the sentiment behind them reflect the kinds of things Jesus did say.

The phrase, “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” seems to have come from some advice given by St. Augustine, a bishop of North Africa who lived in the late 4th and early 5th centuries. In a letter he wrote to some nuns, Augustine asked them to remain chaste. He called them to have a “love for mankind and hatred of sins.” But many question if Augustine himself would agree with the half-true phrase that seems to have evolved from his quote.

To get some sense of the sort of things Jesus did say on the subject of being sinners and passing judgment, we are going to hear a quote from his Sermon on the Mount as recorded in Matthew, chapter 7…

Scripture Reading: Matthew 7:1-5

SermonI.

  1. Love the sinner, hate the sin. Its zeroes in on something called “sin,” so we should take a few moments to think about what sin is. It’s a concept that receives a lot of attention in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and the church over the centuries. The Hebrew word for sin most frequently found in the Old Testament is chata. (The “ch” is pronounced in the German way, a guttural hard “h” sound). In the New Testament, the most common Greek word used for sin is hamartia.

Chata and hamartia. Both the Hebrew and the Greek word have similar meaning – which essentially is “to stray from the path” or “to miss the mark”… where “the path” or “the mark” is God’s intention or God’s will for us. So, whenever we use the word “sin” we basically are referring to any thought, word, or action that is contrary to God’s intention or will. It can apply to both doing/saying/thinking something we should not have, or not doing/saying/thinking something we should have, like seeing someone in need and not stopping to help. As they say, there are sins of commission and omission. Either way, we deviate from God’s will.

And we all sin. None of us lives a perfect life. As Paul claims in Romans 3:23: “All have sinned and fall short of God’s glory.”

  1. It’s the first part of this saying that carries some truth – “Love the sinner.” Of course we are to love sinners, otherwise who among us would there be to love? This is especially apparent in the New Testament where Jesus spent most of his time with sinners. He was called a friend of sinners. If Jesus did not love sinners, then he doesn’t love us!
  2. The problem is, you see, that “love the sinner” is true as far as it goes, but this is not what Jesus commanded his followers to do, and labelingsomeone as a “sinner,” and claiming to love them anyway can actually violate something Jesus did tell his disciples to do. Although it is abundantly clear this was something Jesus did all the time, Jesus never actually said “love the sinner.”
  3. Can you remember who Jesus did command us to love?

He commanded us to “love your neighbor,” and that is an important distinction. Our neighbor is everyone we meet and even those we haven’t met. Our neighbor includes anyone who needs our help, whether it’s the person next door, or the people in Florida swamped by hurricane Matthew, or the citizens of Allepo being bombed into oblivion. To love them as neighbors does not mean we have warm fuzzy feelings for them. It doesn’t even mean that we like them personally. No. It’s the kind of love we choose to have. It means doing good to them, seeking to bless and encourage them. It means showing kindness to them, though they have no right to claim it from us.

Jesus instructs us even to love our enemy. Ourenemy is a neighbor who has wronged us or dislikes us or actively wishes to harm us. As with all our neighbors, we are to seek good for our enemies. In fact, we are to love our enemies especially because, as Jesus teaches, when we do that the world changes. “Do not return evil for evil or take an eye for an eye,” he taught. Rather, we are to show love for our enemies, for when we return blessings for evil, we create holy possibilities for transformed situations and relationships.

  1. So why would Jesus tell us to love our neighbors and our enemies and not to “love the sinner?” One reason is that it’s redundant, after all. Since all of us are sinners, telling us to love neighbor and enemy pretty much covers everyone.

But the bigger reason, I believe, is that if Jesus commanded his followers to “love the sinner,” he knew that we would start looking at other people more as “sinners” than as “neighbors.” And that, of course, leads to judgment. If I love you more as a sinner than as my neighbor, than I can’t help but focus on your sin. I will start taking inventory of all the things wrong with you and I will say to myself, “You are a sinner, but I graciously love you anyway.”

And if that sounds a bit self-righteous, holier-than-thou, puffed up and prideful, then you can see why this could be a problem.

  1. The Christ was well aware of the human tendency to judge others and focus on their sin, and this is why in the Gospels he taught that we should avoid it. We should, instead, focus simply on loving our neighbors, including our neighbors who are enemies.

Remember his story about the Pharisee and the tax collector who went to the temple to pray? The tax collector was on his knees begging God for forgiveness while the holy Pharisee was standing off to the side thanking God that he wasn’t a sinner like that tax collector over there and all the others like him. Remember which of them left the temple justified with God?

  1. As Adam Hamilton astutely points out in his book Half Truths:

When “Love the sinner” is our mantra, we’ve put ourselves in a position of seeing others as sinners rather than neighbors, and though we may emphasize that we are also sinners… our focus on the other as sinner rather than neighbor defines our relationship: “I love you despite the fact that you are a sinner.”

  1. The reading from Matthew 7 this morning reports how Jesus spoke not only to the multitudes, but more importantly to his own disciples, saying: Don’t judge so that you won’t be judged. Using the graphic and memorable metaphor of the splinter in your brother’s and sister’s eye compared to the log in your own, Jesus made a very serious point. Judging others is not something his followers do.
  2. Jesus didn’t and doesn’t and wouldn’t say “love the sinner.” His message is more like this: “Love your neighbor despite the fact that you are a sinner.”

As a follower of Jesus, I will love you because you are a person who needs love. And even though I’m a sinner, I am able to love you because God first loved me. I will love you because Jesus said love is the way his disciples are meant to live. I will love you because I believe love has the sacred power to change the world.

II.

  1. It’s actually the “hate the sin,” part of the saying that creates the real problems. When you read the Gospel stories of Jesus, you see Jesus hanging out with all sorts of “sinners” in his day. He ate with them, healed them, and even called them to follow him.Never once did he say to them, “I love you, but I hate your sin.” He mostly talks about God’s forgiveness. The only moments when Jesus seems to lose it and express a hatred of sin is when it’s the sin committed by religious leaders toward the poor, weak, and vulnerable.
  2. A survey done of young adults a few years back revealed that one of the main reasons they are turned off by organized religion is because church people are hypocrites. Now, hypocrites can be found everywhere, but it is a real turn-off when religious people point out the sins of others and act as if they have no sins of their own. Something of Jesus gets lost in that reality.
  3. There’s this cartoon of St. Peter standing at the pearly gates. A person who has just died is standing in front of Peter hoping to be admitted into heaven. As Peter looks at the Book of Life, he says, “You were a believer, yes. But you skipped the ‘not being a jerk about it’ part.”

I want to be a Christian without being a jerk about it. And I’d like you to be Christians without being jerks about it, too. So let’s be careful of pointing out the splinter in another person’s eye while having a log in our own.

  1. Does this mean we should be quiet about the problem of sin? Of course not. There are sins we must hate and denounce, as Methodist Christianity has been doing since its inception. We have to say something about sins that harm, oppress, or do evil to others such as domestic abuse, racism, injustice, and indifference to others. Jesus is not telling us to ignore or make our peace with situations where children are dying of starvation in a world of plenty, or people are victimized by human trafficking, or the powerless are taken advantage of. Jesus himself demonstrates a righteous indignation over sins such as these. The full liturgy of our church for the sacrament of baptism include vows to repent of our sin and “to accept the freedom and power God gives… to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.”
  2. There is sin in this world, and when that sin is inflicted upon others, bringing harm to them, we must, in the word of Proverbs, “Speak out on behalf of the voiceless, and for the rights of all who are vulnerable.” (Proverbs 31:8). And we’re to be painfully aware of our own sin and regularly ask God to transform us, heal us, and forgive us. We also need to recognize that we simply may not see clearly how God sees, nor fully understand how God understands.

What we can see clearly, and what is unmistakable regarding God’s will as revealed by Jesus, is that we are to love – love God, love one another, and love our neighbors… including those neighbors who are our enemies.

  1. The full truth behind that phrase “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” stops at the very first word: love. Friends, let us love one another and strive to lay aside our own sin, all the while demonstrating Christ’s humility and grace towards others.

III.

  1. Before I close todays’ sermon and this sermon series with a prayer, let’s quickly review the whole truths we’ve discovered over the last few weeks that rest behind the half-truths we’ve rejected.
  • We reject the idea that “everythinghappens for a reason;” that is, everything that happens is God’s will. We say instead that whatever happens, God is able to work through it to redeem it and to bring good from it.
  • We reject the idea that “God only helps those who help themselves.” We believe God expects us to do what we can to help ourselves, but ultimately the very definition of grace, the essence of mercy, is that God helps those who cannot help themselves.
  • We reject the idea that “God won’t give us more than we can handle.” What we do believe is that God will help us handle all the adversity life may throw at us.
  • We reject the idea that “God said it, I believe it and that settles it;” meaning that every verse of Scripture should be read, out of context, as the literal words of God. Instead, we recognize that the Bible authors were people influenced by God, but like us were people shaped by and responding to the historical circumstances in which they lived. Therefore, when they are rightly interpreted, God speaks through the words of Scripture in order to teach, guide, shape, and encourage us.
  • Finally, we reject this notion that God calls upon Christians to “love the sinner, hate the sin,” because when we choose to focus on the sins of others and speak of hating their sin, we violate the words and spirit of Jesus. Paul calls us to hate our sins and Jesus calls us to love our neighbors. When we demonstrate love and not judgment, we draw people to Christ rather than repel them from him.
  1. Hamilton sums it all up in this way:

Let’s set aside these half truths, eliminating them from our theological vocabulary and, in their place, let’s share and live the whole truth that God doesn’t cause evil but redeems it. Let’s share that God helps those who cannot help themselves. Let’s seek to be the people through whom God works to help people handle all that life gives them. Let’s read Scripture not as divine dictation, but as the witness and reflections of God’s people, influenced by the Spirit yet leaving room for questions. And let’s be the people whose lives and faith are defined by our willingness to love.

Let’s pray:

Lord Jesus, how grateful we are that you came not to show judgment to sinners, but to offer forgiveness to us; not to point out all our sins, but to show the way, the truth, and the life. How grateful we are that you continue to save us from our sins, that you forgive us and show us mercy, and that you have called us who have received mercy to give mercy. Help us to be the kind of followers who welcome people and love them in your name. Help us to live that life of love not just in church but in our lives every day. In your holy name we pray. Amen.