Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin!

Over the millenia, Christians have said things that caused tremendous offense, then let themselves off the hook, retreating into martyrdom as though we shared in the suffering of Christ by provoking the world into indignation. The prevailing sentiment seems to be that we're not doing our jobs right if the secular world doesn't hate us. After all, they hated Jesus, right? In our ridiculous pride, and in an irony that should not be missed, we align ourselves with Jesus, who was hated because he INCLUDED everyone the religious community hated. Jesus spent his time with the poor, the hookers, drug dealers and pimps of his day, and that's why he was rejected.

Of all the abominable things that Christians say, this is the one I hate the most:

"God loves the sinner, but hates the sin."

It's a cyanide pill coated with just enough sugar to make it palatable. There's enough truth to make the lie believable, but like all lies, you can't live it. The thing is, as Christians we're used to creating false dichotomies: body and spirit, science and faith, earthly and heavenly, secular and Christian, God's sovereignty and our free will. This one fits right in with the rest, like a needle in a stack of needles.

You know what I experienced when I heard that phrase as a new Christian?

"God hates me."

I couldn't make the distinction between my sin and myself. I still can't most of the time. It's a silly mental trick, this idea of somehow separating who I am from what I do. It was just another thing that made me think of God as a bad magician, holding the truth behind his back with one hand while distracting me with the other. What I heard was that God hated huge parts of me, parts that I hated every day too and seemed helpless to control. I am the little Dutch boy of sin, plugging holes in the dam with all ten fingers while desperately trying to ignore the leaks springing up all around me. What I heard was the thing I'd been hearing all my life, that I wasn't what God wanted, but that he was willing to tolerate me if I behaved myself and was quiet. That equals big pain for an adopted child like me.

The fact is, sin isn't the problem...it's the symptom of the problem. Sin is the thing we do because we're hurting and because we have broken coping skills. Sin is the way we act out because we're in pain. Sin happens when we live out poor role modeling or try to apply inadequate experience to overwhelming trauma. Sin is us pedalling as fast as we can on a bike without a chain, getting nowhere while we slowly die of exhaustion.

So, I'm never going to use that phrase again. You will never hear in used in this church. Instead, I offer a revision:

"God loves me and he hates the brokenness that causes me pain."

Hating sin is like dispassionately spanking a child for every misbehavior while never giving a care for WHY the child is acting out. Maybe your parents or another authority figure did that do you, but God doesn't. When we say that God forgives sin, we mean that he has perfect perspective on it; he sees beneath it and around it, above it and below it. He sees the sickness underneath and acts on that. He sees the stone hearts that kept us safe for a while and wants to soften them.

God doesn't hate sin! He hates the things that keep you stuck in destructive, painful behavior. He hates the things that have happened to you that leave you confined to narrow, dark emotional places. God hates the cage you live in because people prefer to stand outside and offer cliches rather than getting in there with you to experience your world. God hates the abuse you endure because it's better than being alone. God hates the cheap price you sold your life for because nobody ever told you how much you were worth. God hates the limits you put on his love because nothing in your life ever prepared for radical, irrational, illogical, life-making passion that doesn't require goodness, but CREATES it.

The fact is, God is not concerned with being seen as "soft on sin", and neither am I. Christians tend to be terribly concerned about that issue, but only because we're afraid other Christians won't like us. God is infamously, unfairly tender-hearted. He doesn't hate any part of us.

Quia amasti me, fecisti me amabilem.