Faith and Values: When love should be intolerant
My massage therapist/friend finally let up on the very sore muscle in my neck. I could actually move my neck better. “So how do I keep my neck working better like this?”
“Keep moving,” he said. Then Marc gave me a mini-lecture on how stiff muscles have little tolerance for movement. But they can be trained to move better by, well, moving them regularly.
Before I got off that massage table, I had the beginnings of a new column about tolerance and intolerance. The night before, I had sat through a difficult Sandpoint City Council public hearing on a “non-discrimination resolution,” and my muscles were tight.
The resolution intended to symbolically welcome Muslim immigrants into our community. In reality, there is such a remote chance of that happening. But the city council wanted to signal that Sandpoint was a more open community to strangers than perceived by many other people.
A large group of citizens from Sandpoint and Bonner County nearly overwhelmed the hearing with their anger, fear, and assumptions that Muslims would emigrate to Sandpoint in the near future. The resolution was postponed so council members could effectively recover their balance after some people tried to intimidate the democratic process.
My report of this meeting is not neutral. I did not feel intimidated for giving my pro-resolution testimony, but I know some people did. One non-white woman even asked friends if someone might throw rocks at her. The fear felt by some there is unacceptable!
Regular readers of this column know I don’t anger easily. You know I speak often about God’s “radical hospitality.” Well, here is something I’ve not written about that incredible hospitality.
Radical hospitality is not a carte blanche invitation to come into a home and act disrespectfully and rude to the host or other guests. There are times when even the deepest love needs to be intolerant of behaviors that seek to bully other people they see as threats.
I won’t hazard a guess why so many people at that meeting were intolerant of any expressed view but the one they expressed. But I did see and hear some people who portrayed themselves as victims of some life-force they can’t control. It’s like they needed someone to be their scapegoats, their victims.
I have no idea which of the excessively angry, fearful people at the City Council meeting were Christians, or even religious in some other way. But let me remind us all that Jesus turned the whole idea of victimhood on its head.
He didn’t lash out at his executioners or any of the people who orchestrated his arrest, humiliation and crucifixion. He didn’t excuse them. But he didn’t tolerate their bully tactics either.
He cried out his anguish, but in the end he knew what he would say: “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.” This wasn’t a cheap, little pious moment by a wimpy man.
He said what he did because his love for even his executioners couldn’t tolerate their fears, their hate anymore. Astounding to think about, isn’t it?
We are so not like Jesus. Our unhealthy fears and angers usually just repeat a cycle of unhealthy fear and anger. The cycle began long ago. We just give it another spin.
We rarely think that our love can refuse to put up with (tolerate) with fear, anger, even hate. We rarely think our love can forgive.
Yet that is how Jesus lived. His love didn’t put up with others’ fears. It challenged them to change. I’m so trying to live that way. How about you?
The Rev. Paul Graves, a Sandpoint resident and retired United Methodist minister, is the founder of Elder Advocates. He can be contacted at welhouse@nctv.com.