Love, and Reject Hate

This is an article I wrote for a local newspaper for a column by local pastors.


I feel that I must address the protest by white nationalists, white supremacists and Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia this past weekend.
They began on Friday night by surrounding a church where clergy and community leaders gathered in prayer before preparing to be a counter-protest the next day. Outside of the church, the crowd chanted Nazi slogans and threatened violence.
On Saturday, clergy and members of their church gathered in the park where the protest was to go, and sang hymns. The protesters came because a statue of a Confederate general was being removed. The community had decided that it was a symbol of hate and division, and should come down.
After their rally, many of the white supremacists used the clubs and shields they brought with them to beat on those who came out to speak against their protest. One extremist drove his car into a group of other cars, killing at least one person, and injuring dozens of others.
I salute my fellow members of the clergy who put themselves in harm’s way to protest hate.
My tradition and denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, approved a social statement on racism several years ago. It defines racism as: “a mix of power, privilege, and prejudice. (It) is sin, a violation of God’s intention for humanity. The resulting racial, ethnic, or cultural barriers deny the truth that all people are God’s creatures and, therefore, persons of dignity. Racism fractures and fragments both church and society.
To be in Christ, to be a member of the body of Christ, to follow what Christ has commanded means that we are to love. Scripture, time after time, calls us to love; to love the Lord our God, to love God with all of our heart, mind, soul and strength, to love our neighbor, to love one another, to love the foreigner or stranger (Leviticus 19:33-34), to love our enemies.
The command to love trumps all other commands.
God wants us, calls us, commands us to love all of what God has created for our benefit. To not love, to hate is to reject the will of God. And to not point out and condemn that hate only feeds the fuel of that hatred.
By the will and command of God, love trumps hate.
When that hate takes the form of using the defeated and disgraced flags, slogans, mottos and actions of the confederacy and Nazi Germany, it is easy to reject and refute. Or it should be. When it takes the form of subtle prejudices, comments, and biases, it should be just as easy to reject and refute, especially if it is being done by those close to you.
None of us would hesitate to warn someone that the oven is hot. None of us would hesitate to warn someone of danger.
Then why do most of us refuse to speak up when people are sowing the seeds of hatred?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran Pastor, who died fighting the Nazi movement in his country wrote, “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel of injustice. We are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”
Following Christ means doing what he did, doing what he told us to do. He told us to love. He told us to reject hate.
Will you reject racism? Or will you reject God?

Pastor Brian Robert Campbell
ONE in Christ Lutheran Parish
Our Savior’s + Greenwood; Nazareth + Withee, Emmanuel + Longwood

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