Bible Passage: Luke 6:27-38
Transcript
There’s an episode of The Golden Girls, and my favorite—you know it’s my favorite TV show—and there’s a character, Rose, that’s played by Betty White. And, it’s called a Comedy of Errors. So, Rose has a coworker, and he does not like her at all—not one bit—which drives Rose nuts because she’s someone who wants everyone to love her. Well, she has learned that this man’s dog has died, so she thinks that a good thing to do would be to get him a cat, to go to the pound and get him a new pet. So, she must… she must have gotten the pet because the next scene we see is him coming to her house with the cat in the cat crate, and he says—and this cat mauled him—bit him. And he said, “Rose you really didn’t need to get me a new pet. I already had a parekeet… well, I had a parakeet, but the cat ate my parakeet.”
So, then she—he says to him—she… said he says to her, “Don’t say good morning. Don’t leave me cheery little notes, and please do not put on those little puppet shows above the partition.” Of course, that didn’t satisfy her. She has this desire to be well-loved and well-liked, so a little while later, she makes a St. Olaf friendship cake, and she says, “It’s filled with milk, sugar, honey, and a whole lot of love, and just a drop of sunshine.” So, she takes this cake to his place, and she knocks on his door. He opens the door, and, of course, he’s annoyed, and he asks her, “What is your idea of a friend?” And she says, “Well, it’s someone who likes you and respects you and is willing to do things for you.”
So, he says, “If I was your friend, you’d be willing to do things for me and respect my wishes.” She says, “Of course, I’d have to.” He said, “Well, I have asked you to leave me alone, and you haven’t. What kind of friend would that be?” She says this to him. “Well, then you’d be my friend who did these things.” And he said, “Then we’re friends.” So, now’s off the elevator to the elevator, and she says, “You mean it for real?” He says, “Just don’t forget to leave me alone.” And she says, “Well, that’s what friends are for.” And he says, “See, pal, don’t you know it?” She says, “Don’t you know what it means for me to hear you say that?” He says, “See you, buddy.”
“Do to others as you would have others do to you.”
See, here, the guy clearly dislikes and hates Rose, and in a strange humorous way, as you can do in a sitcom, he convinces Rose that she needs to leave him alone—that’s what a true friend, in his definition, is. But, you know, that is the lesson of the story. It’s humorous, but you know, we live in a world where there is strong dislike and even, as far as going and saying the word “hate,” we see it all around us. And so what we see here is that Rose, even despite him not liking her. She follows do good for others. She’s just a little misguided in doing good for others this time around.
See, we here as well, we struggle with the idea of enemies. We want to be well-loved, and we should be well-loved. We have a difficult time wrestling with those who hurt us intentionally. We have a difficulty understanding hatred, and how other people can hate others. We wonder how a person could choose to hate or to promote ideologies of hatred. They work against human dignity and acknowledge that every person has an inherent worth. That’s what hatred does; it tries to deny another person’s dignity and worth. What they are doing, in a theological sense, is they’re denying… They’re ignoring the Imago Dei which is found in the early parts of Genesis during the creation story… And Imago Deie stands for, “in the image of God.” We are made in the image of God, from the very beginning of time… and since we are created and born from that, the basis then of our response to the world is to be merciful, as God is merciful. Or, as it says in—or as we can translate it—is this. In other words, we have love and grace towards others, with grace and love towards others. We recognize that others have this inherent dignity and worth; that is our response and responsibility.
But for those who have hatred in their hearts, for those who have somehow come about in their lives… We are to have love and grace. We are to seek understanding, to understand from where their hatred comes from, to love our enemies, to do good to those who… hate… The Imago Dei says that we are inherently good, but somewhere, at some point in time, we learn to hate. I don’t know of any toddlers that all of a sudden start saying anti-Semitic or homophobic things. I rarely see that unless it’s happening in the home. But that’s the truth. There is… we learn how to hate. It’s taught to us. We see it, maybe, perhaps in our friends or our family or in the society around us because we’re not born to hate Muslim people, LGBTQ people, we’re not born to hate women, we’re not born to be anti-Semitic. We’re just not born that way, and yet it does exist.
One of the things that we’re aware of, of course, are white nationalist groups filled with hate. We can call them hate mongers, hate mongers, deploy multiple ways to teach hate. They offer a place of belonging because each one of us has a core need to be, to feel like we belong, to have a community that sees us and cares for us. And so when there are hate groups, they look for people who are insecure. They look for those who are looking for a place of belonging. Perhaps they had an unhealthy life situation, a home situation. Maybe they experience alcoholism, and that creates this anger within them and increases their anxieties and their insecurities about who they are.
One of the things that happens that hate mongers do is they give people what I’m calling “masks of hate,” a mask of, uh, a mask of hate…. These mask hide the insecurities. They hide the vulnerabilities that a person is feeling. And as more people are recruited to wear these masks, it becomes a community of hate.
You might remember last October that I’m a part of a cross-cultural exchange with clergy and non-clergy leaders from Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Germany. And we pray for the Germans today. In October, we were on a retreat, and we talked about white Christian nationalism from a theological and Christian ethic point of view. In April, I will go to Germany, and we will continue to have our conversation. We’ll learn more about national socialism, the Nazis. One of the places we’re going to go to, which I’m quite nervous to go to, is the National Socialism Documentation Center. From what I understand, it’s a place where the Nazis—the Gestapo—had tortured people.
But on our retreat back in October, we went to the Black Holocaust Museum. I highly encourage you to go sometime. After the tour, we met with Arno, a former white nationalist who, after the Sikh Temple shooting, said to himself, “It’s time from him to tell his story,” because the man who killed those people, he was connected to a white supremacist group that Arno helped found. He then reached out to Pardeep whose father was killed in the mass shooting? They’ve since written a book and have speaking engagements, and he has written a book as well. Pardeep wasn’t able to join us at this time because he was working for the Department of Justice… but Arno spoke to us about his experience of growing up in an unhealthy household surrounded by alcoholism. This filled a sense of anger within him and insecurity, and somehow he got involved with a white nationalist group because those groups feed on young people. And, if we’re honest quite… especially on white boys. They feed on people who are lost and broken. And They give them a sense of identity by blaming others—blaming women, and people of color, and Jewish people, and Muslims, and LGBTQ people.
What they do is they give that mask, as I was speaking about, because it is a place where they have commonality, and they hide, and some of them… you see these masks in the outfits that they wear—skinheads or robes that covering their faces. But Arno talks about how he came out of that movement. It wasn’t one final break… but he was in multiple small moments. He would work and have jobs, and these jobs would be amongst people who were women, or LGBTQ people, people of color, who knew what he stood for. And just by being themselves and being compassionate, loving people and holding him accountable, that mask of hate he was wearing started to break and shatter…. and now he’s able to go around and talk about it coming out of that movement of hate.
And we see the KKK and white nationalists who shave their heads, and we think that’s what hatred is, is we see those groups, we know those groups. But with the internet today, with social media, there is a plethora of ways for white nationalist groups, in very subtle ways, to spread their message of hate. There is a writer, her name is Joanna Shroeder, and she wrote in the New York Times a handful of years ago now, and she was talking about her experience with her son. She has two sons. At the time, they were 11 and 14 years old, and she’s a person who tracks their social media usage. From what I understand, there are apps, there are websites that you can subscribe to that will keep you up to date on what your children are looking at. Well, one day, she noticed that her son had a picture— a picture she saw her son had liked a picture, a picture of Adolf Hitler. And she writes in this… that this… meme… shows a man in contemporary clothing tipping off the Nazis to the invasion of Normandy.. A man tipping off the Nazis to the… Le… leaders to the invasion of Normandy. And she says that my son said he hadn’t even read it. When she talked to him, he just assumed that the time traveler was to kill Hitler, not to help him. And so, he was shocked and embarrassed when she pointed out the actual message is this, that it would have been better for the Holocaust continuing.
He says, “Of course, I’m not stupid enough to like Hitler meme on purpose.” And anyway, I’m sure my friend shared it to be ironic. See, friend to friend sharing it to be ironic, to be somewhat humorous. And, of course, she couldn’t understand the irony, couldn’t understand the explanation. So, she talked to him about the Holocaust, the trauma and violence that Jewish people all over the world still experience, and she spoke of her friend Edith whose delicate arm displayed a tattoo. “That stops my heart,” she says. “Every time I saw it, he knew this already. But I worried that he was forgetting. I worried that he was being pulled toward a worldview that would see this painful story as fodder for jokes or worse as something to celebrate.”
She writes in this article that in conversation with a called Dr. Katz, he’s an author of a book called Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help. It is said here, that it seems to her that these groups prey upon the natural awkwardness of adolescence. Many kids feel out of place, frustrated, and misunderstood and are vulnerable to the idea that someone else is responsible for their discontent. When they’re white and male, they’re spoon-fed a list of scapegoats—people of color, feminists, immigrants, LGBT people—you can list it. They really embrace this; it’s not hard to convince them that if they buy into this ideology, these views, it doesn’t take much to convince them that white genocide is a thing or that the great replacement is real. They begin to blame other people, and their anger and hatred will grow.
It’s likewise as we’ve seen in Arnold’s example of how he was recruited that way. There’s more continuation about how that recruitment happens online. She writes this time, Dr. Duffy, author of Parenting the New Teen in The Anxiety—she says here that a favorite activity for her boys is to watch games, playing video games on YouTube.
I’ve watched some; I’ve done this before. You know, I’m trying to figure out how a game works, how to solve a particular part of a game, and then I look up the video to see how it’s done. You know, it’s a good way to cheat and get past a particular time. And what what happens is as you’re watching these videos, there will be ads—ads that have been paid for by these types of groups to promote these types of hatred and ideas.
See, the problem then is that when they click on it and they watch it, YouTube offers another suggestion and another suggestion, and so the algorithm offers these videos more and more, and they become more and more extreme over time. Dr. Duffy says that there is a psychology, a sophisticated psychology, at play. He warns that today’s teenagers have been using smartphones and tablets their whole lives, and there’s nothing wrong with that, inherently, of course. See, they like to dive deeper into topics that peak their curiosity, which is a great thing. He says the problem is they often turn to the internet before they turn to their parents for answers, before they turn to their teachers. Recommended videos and comments left on YouTube can lead them to threads full of racism and conspiracy theories on forums like 4chan. Google may lead them to white nationalist outlets like The Daily Stormer, where hate and harassment are normalized. Often, they have no idea which sources to trust.
In an interview with Alan Elda, she writes this article. He had an interview with a former white nationalist, a Nazi, and this white nationalist Nazi explains that modern white supremacists create friendships and build trust in online spaces, such as autism chat rooms and gaming-related forums. They go to these places and promises them paradise
Paradise, say inevitably, kids who encounter these messages will mimic extremist talking points. Promising a paradise of belonging and care that anyone who stands in their perceived and imaginary enemies. They can move them out of the way.
Our responsibility, though, is this: of course, to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate. But our responsibility as well is to prevent hate from even taking hold in the lives of our youth, our children, and teenagers and adults. We get to be creative people in this moment. When you see somebody who is engaging with these things, unconsciously, mindlessly don’t yell at them. Yelling is not the solution, but to pause and to have understanding, to ask questions: Why do you think this? Where did you read this? Talk about your family’s values. Talk about the values of inclusion, fairness, kindness, and justice. Talk about valuing people for who they are. Talk about your faith theology of recognizing that each one of us is a reflection in the image of God. It’s our responsibility as Christians to do so. I encourage you to do it with love, compassion, and understanding. This is your mission. Amen.