Love Trumps Hate

             We live in a time of great anxiety.  There is a lot of anger in this world and it is directed toward people who sometimes seem not to have much power.  I am not much impressed with the people who arm themselves and want to riot and make so many people uncomfortable.  I remember the Civil Rights movement in the sixties and how marches were organized, particularly the march across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma without weapons on the part of the marchers that changed the minds of many people. Pettus had been a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.  That was a very significant thing that the marchers did.

           

            One of the great heroes of that time was a young man named Jonathan Daniels.  He was from New Hampshire, was a seminarian in the Episcopal church.  He watched with horror what was going on in the south.  He heard Dr. King’s call for people to come south to help those who were rising up in the struggle for civil rights.  He went to Selma, spent some time tutoring children and helping with voter registration.  Eventually, he was arrested with several others.  After he was released, he was confronted by a deputy with a shotgun who wanted to kill one of his African-American companions. He stepped in front of his friend just as the man pulled the trigger.  Jonathan died in that moment as has become one of the church’s great martyrs.  We celebrate his memory on August 14 in Lesser Feasts and Fasts.

            What we are seeing now is different.  These are armed instigators trying to assert their majority status by demonstrating power.  It worries me to see this going on in our neighborhoods.  Some of it is caused by the overwhelming presence of guns all over the place.  This is certainly something that we should be able to do something about, but it never seems to happen.  The other problem is the rising of hatred in this country.  Hatred is harder to comprehend.  Our Lord taught us to love one another as we have been loved.  That is the key to peace and to hope in this world.  When hatred rises up it destroys hope and love.  We are left with misery and destruction.  Hatred is something that the church has been created to counter.

            The stories that we have in scripture that talk about the power of God to take care of God’s people.  After Joseph was sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt because they hated him, he went down there and obtained the favor of the pharaoh, who put him in charge of keeping the stores of the country.  There came seven years of feast and seven years of famine and Joseph during the years of plenty put a lot of it aside to wait for the years of famine.  In the meantime, his brothers and his father stayed back in Israel doing without. In the Old Testament lesson today, we hear that a new pharaoh has come into power in Egypt, a man who as it says; knew not Joseph.  This new leader hated and oppressed the Israelites who had come into Egypt and made them to be slaves.  This was the beginning of the time of oppression in Egypt that was so notable in the history of the Hebrew people.  In the lesson today, there is hope created. 

            The Hebrew women were having children and the Egyptians were trying to get rid of them to continue the hatred.  One Levite woman had a child whom she put in a basket and hid in the reeds of the river.  Pharaoh’s daughter found the basket and took the child for her own.  She named him Moses because she found him in the water.  So, begins the story of Moses who would later so wonderfully liberate the Hebrew people from their slavery in Egypt that grew out of pure hatred. 

            In the Gospel, Jesus is talking to his disciples and he asks them who people say that he is.  His followers reply that some say that he is John the Baptist, others say Elijah, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.  Jesus asks them, but who do you say that I am?  Peter says, you are the Messiah, the son of the living God.  Jesus blesses Peter for this statement and tells him that flesh and blood didn’t reveal this to him, but God in Heaven.  He goes on to say that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. Here again is God coming into the world with all of the power of Heaven to take care of the people who have been created and to do something about all of the hatred that exists. 

            This is the work that you and I have before us as members of the Church that was created by our Lord.  We are the means to counter hatred by our love for each other and the love that we can offer to our society.  Love can indeed conquer hatred.  People who hate are isolated and alone.  Those who love have companions and resource.  That is the lesson that we are here to teach the world.  God blesses us in this work.