Hey, brother, let me pull that splinter out of your eye

If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. 1 John 3:20

I think that’s why this election process was so very gut-wrenching. Millions, nay, even billions of dollars were spent trying to create hatred against our neighbor, our brother.  This undisclosed and seemingly unending and certainly unmonitored flow of cash was craftily honed and scientifically manipulated to paint one another with the blackest of brushes.  Tempting us to judge on the most superficial outward appearances, the sketchiest of demographics, the most twisted of stories taken out of context, and to cling to these fiery dart soundbites as truth that could somehow set us free.  

And these unnamed PACs, wolf packs really, were not only free to wreck this destruction for their own purposes, but to do so free from the saving grace of the Spirit at work within. The Son was not sent as the propitiation for their sins, and there is no hope of His redeeming grace to be manifest because they have no soul.  

And yet we invited this spirit of the antichrist into our airwaves and into our mailboxes and scattered across every street corner with their lies.  And pretended it was for the greater good but the line is clear: anyone who does not love, does not know God.  

Yesterday was Community Sunday at the Vineyard, which is really the best of the best, the Joshua Stone pilgrimage to the mic to articulate the revealed love of God, even in the valley of the shadow of death.  A lot of the stories described this love being revealed in the phone calls, and the pressed-into-the-hand twenty dollar bills, and raked yards and that sort of thing being perfected in the body, because although no one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us.

There was one particular tender story told.  A brother found himself unloving.  Actually he used the word “hating.” Those slouchy teenagers tagging his walls, grinding their cigarette butts on his gravel, and dropping their sticky trash on his sidewalk.  And one day, as he glared out the window and spun webs constructed of barbed wire, the Spirit pierced his soul.  And rather than draw lines of Them and Us, he entered the world of Them.  Every day.  He sorta hung around, and maybe cracked a not-so-good joke or two, and offered a lift when a ride fell through, and learned names.  And by naming Them, we truly see Them and we become like Jesus, because He knows the number of hairs on each head.  

And likewise each one of us need to fall on our knees in repentance, and ask the Spirit to likewise cleanse this country, and more particularly His Church, and even more particularly my heart from this filth which now shadows each conversation and headline glance.  And may the fog clear, and may we understand that our salvation does not come from horses and chariots and swords, but from the lifted up arms of a Savior who so loved the world, each and every named one.  And this commandment we have from Him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.