These are pondering days, the late winter days. We’ve had a taste of spring. It was good. But now the snow is falling and I’ve got time to think. So I’m thinking a lot these days about this widening rift in our society. The one we can clearly see in each party and between our political parties this election year. This battle of ideas has made any grace or conversation with the “other” side impossible. No Democrat could even be tolerated if they expressed any type of approval in word about President Trump’s policies. No liberal can be liberal to this hated man. Unfortunately the same thing was true about Republicans for President Obama just a short 4 or 5 years ago. For those who opposed him they believed the sky would fall if he were reelected. When he was reelected to a second term and the world didn’t end you would think it would have modified all this extremist language. But no.
We are in some age where everyone has bigoted opinions and they’re treated as common and normal. Other, and I mean contrary, opinions just aren’t agreeably discussed as part of our public debate, no instead they’re trashed and the person denigrated. It’s a brittle time. This is true of politics in this presidential election year, also true of Christians about worship and it’s really that way about every other subject too.
You see it’s my fellow Christians that really interest me. Those who I would specifically call my brothers and sisters in Jesus. Jesus taught us the world would know we belong to Him by our love for each other. What if we mirror the world when it comes to the way we treat our fellow Christians when we disagree. How can the world know if we don’t love each other? If we despise another believer it seems that we make it harder for anyone to know Jesus. Here’s how we blind people to Jesus’ presence. We make anyone who fails to measure up to our standards as never being spiritual enough anyways or more often they are seen as sinners. They thus become someone to get rid of or to avoid and never see again except by accident in the grocery store. It’s the “you go your way” and “I’ll go my way” form of love. It seems that this view evaluates holy by who and what we exclude instead of persistently loving everyone which never fails anyone. Those who believe have to become advocates for a particular set of acceptable religious values where those who agree are saved and befriended. While everyone who does not, doesn’t fit in and is excluded. It’s like we entered through a back door into a new age of legalism.
So we keep a list of wrongs committed against us to justify the wrongs we do to them. So we find the best way to show those wrongheaded dunderheads that they are dunderheads.
You see it’s a brittle world.
We know the other side is wrong. There’s a wish that they would see the light and agree with us. Unfortunately there’s little hope of that so onward Christian soldiers marching as to war head into a fight, the good fight. Jesus who wept over Jerusalem when He lived on earth is weeping over our Jerusalem now.