Have you been following the news? The tiny group calling itself a church (71 members as of 2008) made up mostly of the pastor’s extended family, has made it all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. Of America. That would be the same America the “church,” claims God hates. Not only do they have the audacity to claim to be a church, they have even taken that noble name, Baptist, and by their outrageous hate-filled behavior, brought shame upon it.
Jim White
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For nearly 20 years, pastor Fred Phelps has led his group to proclaim that God hates homosexuals. More recently the group has moved into the national spotlight by harassing the families of fallen warriors by picketing funerals with posters thanking God for their deaths. At a time when families are already wounded by their grief, to have such incomprehensible insensitivity applied to the death of the loved one they mourn is mind-numbing and gut-wrenching.
For years the group has argued that God is visiting upon America the wrath of his judgment because the sin of homosexuality is tolerated. Apparently, they believe they are in a position to know God’s mind with respect to judgment dispensed, to whom it is pronounced and for what specific sins it is unleashed.
As recorded by Mark in the Gospel that bears his name, the leper who came to Jesus apparently expected his plea for cleansing might be rejected. “If you will, you can make me clean,” he uttered in a pitiable prayer. According to most modern translations, Jesus looked at the man, crushed by the insensitivity of a religious system that presumed to speak for God, and had compassion on him. Curiously, in the oldest Greek manuscripts, Mark records that Jesus was filled with anger. Anger?
Certainly his anger would not have been aimed at this poor wretch kneeling before him in Mark 1:40-42, but at the religious leaders whose values were so convoluted that they prized religious law above human life. They taught that God had zapped this man with leprosy because he had offended the Almighty in some major way. These religious pietists could only see the offenses of others—not their own. That’s part of what made Jesus angry. Jesus didn’t seem to have a high tolerance for hypocrisy.
You remember what happened? Jesus touched the man and healed him.
One of the troubles with “religion” is that it almost inevitably appeals to its rules to put down other people. They are the offenders. We are the righteous.
Throughout church history one finds records of ecclesiastical arrogance. Although the inquisition and the crusades are examples, the abuses reached their zenith when the church condemned sinful practices, on one hand, while selling indulgences covering those sins, on the other. Some of the finest cathedrals in Europe were built with money raised by the sale of indulgences.
On our side of the Atlantic, Puritans condemned everybody who didn’t live up to their own understanding of right and wrong. All this is to say that the attitudes of the Westboro group is nothing new. Some “religious” people have always upheld rules they believe are inviolate and abused people whom they judged as the transgressors. All they while, they were blind to the overwhelming biblical truth: people, even sinful people, are the real objects of God’s love.
Westboro quotes a Bible verse they believe mandates their position: “…. [T]herefore I abhorred them” (Lev. 20:23), referring to the practices of the Canaanites whom Israel was to drive out of the land. The problem with proof-texting is that the Bible can’t speak in its entirety. I know a woman who knows so many Bible verses by heart, she can quote a Scripture to justify almost anything she does. And she has done some bizarre things.
This is the problem with a rule-bound religion. God is bigger than any rule we can cite or even a verse we can quote. We must allow the God of the whole Bible to take center stage and speak to us — particularly though the lips of our Lord.
The Westboro folks think they have it all figured out. They are quite comfortable (even eager) in pronouncing judgment and condemnation. But they have missed the singular biblical message proclaiming God’s unfathomable love and have seized as their mantra a portion of a verse in a book filled with injunctions that no longer have application in the age of the New Covenant.
But, I’d like to push beyond the callous arrogance of Westboro’s self-righteous claims and ask to what degree we, also, arrogantly contend that we are in positions to judge others based on our understanding of biblical teaching.
In my first pastorate during my freshman year of college, a woman in our church came to her 18-year-old pastor (me!) detailing the abuses she suffered at the hands of her unsaved husband. She asked me if the Bible permitted divorce in such circumstances. I knew the rules. Except in the case of adultery, divorce was not permitted. I told her so. It wasn’t that I had no sympathy for her — I did! But the law was the law and could not be violated.
What I failed to see was that her marriage had been broken for years. If it had ever been on target in God’s eyes, it was certainly missing the mark now. In her case, divorce could not have been any further from God’s intent than what she encountered day-by-day. I couldn’t see truth for the rules.
As religious people, we believe certain things firmly. Every evidence of our own experience teaches us to believe we are right. But can we also be humble enough to admit that we cannot see into hearts and, therefore, lack the knowledge necessary to pronounce judgment on others? If we could somehow be content to do the loving and let God do the judging, religion would have a better reputation. It couldn’t hurt Baptists any either.