Pay attention to the period

 It’s been said that a preacher really only has one sermon.  Assuming that to be the case, one way or the other, to some greater or lesser degree, mine I think typically has a threefold basis:

1. The word “gospel” literally translates as “good news”.  If it’s not good news (say it with me, now)...it’s not gospel!  I know of no one who takes being made afraid or shamed or dehumanized as good news, so if that’s what you hear coming out of pulpits and radio speakers, I don’t know what is being preached, but I do know it is not the gospel!
2. The single most important word in the Christian faith is “love” (lots of scripture to back that up).
3. The basis of every single atrocity across human history - the institution of chattel slavery, Native American genocide, the European holocaust, on and on - is dehumanization, the failure or even refusal to see the image of God in another person, thus devaluing, thus making it much easier to exploit and harm or worse.

So, you cannot dehumanize someone and claim Christlike love at the same time.  Those two things are incompatible, mutually exclusive.
 
The single most important word in the Christian faith is love, based in the self-sacrificing love of Jesus on the cross, God’s love more powerful even than death.  That is our singular job, underlying all else that we do.  Notice that there is a period at the end of that sentence.  There is nothing that follows, no love if...  Just love, period.  No idolatrous judgmentalism (idolatrous because anything put in God’s place is an idol, including our own willingness to usurp God’s place by making a judgement about another person’s value.)  Just love, period.  No dehumanizing another by presuming to decide for another person who they understand themselves to be.  Just love, period.  No devaluing another person (who is also made in the image of God no less than anyone else) because they don’t look like what you see - gender, skin tone, ethnicity, etc. - when you look in the mirror.  Just love, period.
 
Anne mentioned in a sermon on Oct 27 the unprecedented level of “unadulterated hatred” and “life-sapping vitriol” that we too often experience in our culture.  Point to all the reasons you want, but that doesn’t change our singular purpose.  In fact, that only heightens the urgency for the way those who would claim to follow Jesus should respond: love, period.  There’s an awful lot of love if out there, as if love is qualified somehow, as if there is something that follows the period at the end of that sentence, but that is not our way.  Our way is love, period.  Maybe (but not maybe!) we should make sure we pay attention to that period.
 
- Marc Vance