One of the few advantages of commuting into the city, which I have been doing all week, is that it gives me lots of vaguely-spinning-in-the-breeze thinking time--about 40 minutes each way of fairly quiet four-lane highway, during which things sometimes go "ping!" I was just crossing the river yesterday morning when I had one of those "ping!" moments. Abruptly, it popped into my mind how much I dislike the phrase, "hate the sin and love the sinner."

What's particularly maddening about some notions/ phrases/ cliches (whatever!) is that they are technically true, at the same time as they feel profoundly WRONG. And this is one such. Yes, it's true that we aren't supposed to love people blindly, without recognizing their very real imperfections; that's a form of idolatry and self-deception and an offence against realism and honesty. The same should go for ourselves--that we should love ourselves, but with honesty and clarity, not a blind regard for our own egos.

But that's not how people use the phrase. In practice, "hate the sin and love the sinner" always works out to "focus on what we see as wrong and forget that the sinner is a real person" or even "identify the 'sin' with the sinner and hate them both like poison," cf. Fred Phelps and his gang. And when I thought about it some, I realized that I'd never heard anyone say the phrase about an *individual*, although that's the only way it can be properly used. It's always said in justification of our condemnation of some faceless group, usually homosexuals. It's always used to justify or excuse the fact that, in hating the (abstract) sin, we're refusing to consider the (real, live, warm) individual person.

I've never, ever heard someone use the phrase who clearly LOVED the sinner, except maybe on some sort of abstract level. And love is never abstract. It is always concrete, individual. Hatred, on the other hand, goes off into abstraction very, very easily. Hatred makes it okay to forget the individual; it justifies our self-righteous rage and forgets what that rage does to souls beloved by God..

By the time I'd gotten this far, I was downtown, and stopped at a long traffic light. Just to my left,. a workman was tossing shovels and sledgehammers into the back of a truck: a lean, plain middle-aged man in grotty work clothes, much worn, with an ugly-ish hatchet face; the sort of person you'd probably walk right past as though he were a fire hydrant. As he turned to talk to another member of the work crew, I saw that he had the most beautiful hair I've ever seen on a guy: thick bright gold, curling gracefully into the nape of his neck. And I thought:

God sees us exactly as we are, as broken and imperfect people, and reaches right past all that to reach our individual beauty. God sees the rough face, the ugliness of us, and twines God's fingers deeply, lovingly into our beauty. God's love for us is never, ever abstract: he is passionate for each and every soul of us, the you-ness of you, the me-ness of me. "God knows our downsittings and uprisings and is about our path and our ways. And it's very much a personal business.

God's sorrow over our brokenness and imperfection is never abstract, either. He hates not us, but what has been done to us to break and scar us. His anger at what we do to each other, to break and scar--our massive constant failure to love, and what that failure does to others--goes hand in hand with his understanding of why we fail. In that sense, I suppose, God does hate the sin and love the sinner.

But we're not God.

We think we can "hate the sin and love the sinner" because that's what God does, and Jesus being God could manage it too. But I don't know too many people who get it right. It's normal, fallen human nature to move from the tough, particular, individual business of love to the easy, abstract business of condemning and dismissing others without giving a hoot about them as people --without caring about what our failure to love them does to them. Everyone does it. Me included.

But I promise you, God: next time I think of condemning any group, even the Thoughtless Materialistic Self-Centred Rich (who really get up my particular nose!) I am going to call to mind that man, the plainness of his face and the glory of his hair. And I will remember that each and every member of that group is as startlingly real and beloved to you as, for a moment, that man was to me. And I will remember that it's my business to deal with my sins and failings, not theirs. Yes, it's not as much fun as railing on about them or damning them as a group, but they are your children too, and judgment is between them and you, as you hold them firm in the warm wrap of your love.

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