On The Bizarre Intimacy of Hatred

SERMON   “The Bizarre Intimacy of Hatred” Rev. Dr. Victoria Weinstein

I got a message through social media from someone I knew in childhood. He lived on my street and we took the same bus to school. The message said something like “Hey Vicki, how are you, great to see that you seem to be doing well…”

My first thought was to type back, “Why are you contacting me? I hate you!”

I did hate Andy. He was a vicious child who bullied me, calling me the worst anti-Semitic names that I won’t repeat here, putting a swastika on my locker, throwing a sharpened pencil through a bouquet of balloons I got for my birthday, spitting on construction crew that we passed by. He practices law in Quincy now.

Just seeing his name made my face burn. So I took to my prayer chair and checked in with myself. What is this emotion? do I need something, if so, what? I decided that I needed a few minutes off and a walk. So I did that. As I walked I checked in on the health of my reaction. Was it fair, was it true, and did I need to do anything about it? 

I decided that my reaction was fair, that it was kind of true (because I don’t think I have a strong enough bond to Andy to hate him anymore), and I decided that I didn’t need to do anything, because crafting a response to would take emotional bandwidth and time that I didn’t feel obliged to give.  Just coming to that conclusion was somewhat demanding, and reminded me of how strong a bond hatred is between people; it is a cage. Sometimes love and understanding opens the cage, sometimes time opens the door, sometimes part of us remains locked away in it. If Andy was getting in touch to apologize, he should have stated that right away. Because he didn’t, I couldn’t trust that he even remembered his behavior (how could he not!, but many people have a talent for blocking out their viciousness or blaming others for it). I would not be the one to start the conversation on an honest footing. 

When the subject of hatred comes up, well-behaved people – who have learned what they are supposed to say to the extent that they often do not know how they honestly feel or believe – will say, “Hate is a very strong word.” We start saying this to our children very young: “We don’t say hate in this family.”

I have no argument with either of those statements:  hatred is a strong word, and it is up to every parent and guardian to set language boundaries in the household. But hatred is not easily waved away and should not be avoided. It is a reality, and children need to know that and adults to face it. 

We wish it wasn’t so, but it is, and the inclination is within all of us. The Father of American Unitarianism, William Ellery Channing, said that our “true religion consists in a growing likeness to the Supreme Being,” whose divine nature was argued to be loving, benevolent and akin to the best version of parental love ever enacted upon the earth, but in heaven. 

So Unitarians and Universalists both have focused for centuries on the goodness and loving nature of God, and on the potential for goodness among God’s people, in whose moral image they believe humanity to have been created. This has led to some measure of denial, avoidance or excuses for hatred, and has left us and other religious liberals on shaky legs in acknowledging and confronting it. 

Hatred is having a big moment right now, it is almost a winter fashion. Watching its emergence and bold expression I am left fairly dumbstruck although not surprised. 

Here is one example, and this was big news:  Bishop Mariann Budde, Episcopal bishop in Washington DC, gave a very lovely and straightforward gospel message at the National Prayer Service. In that sermon, she addressed top officials and asked them to have mercy on their constituents. 

Every word out of Bishop Budde’s mouth was directly from Jesus’ teachings, delivered in the mildest of tones to supposedly Christian leaders. The House of Representatives promptly drafted a resolution condemning Bishop Budde, calling her sermon a “display of political activism, and condemning its distorted message.” The conservative news outlets called her gentle sermon a “rant” and subjected her to a barrage of insults and name-calling. 

Getting right to the subject at hand, a man named Ben Garrett, a deacon in his church, posted, “Do not commit the sin of empathy. This snake is God’s enemy and yours too. She hates God and His people. You need to properly hate in response.”

“You need to properly hate in response.” Let’s look at that, since it is advice given in explicitly religious terms and deserves a considered religious response.

Is there a way to properly hate? 

No. No, there’s really not.

And not because hatred is never justified, but because our respected prophets have instructed us that to hate is like setting your own house on fire and expecting someone else’s to burn to the ground. This guy’s version of Christianity is unrecognizable to Jesus, but that doesn’t stop him and those like him from claiming to be the righteous ones among I don’t know, blasphemers. Whether or not those they accuse of destroying our godly nation are religious or not isn’t the point, it is simply important for all of us on the receiving end of their spittle-strewn condemnations to know that they think their worldview is grounded in a legitimate religious position. For a thousand reasons, they are not. You know that, and I don’t think there is much need to argue it with anyone, as those who agree are lost to zealotry. Leave them where Jesus flang them* and save your energy. 

Hatred is powerful, it is intense, and its fire may illuminate important truths. But it undeniably dangerous and does equal harm to the one hating as to the object of their hatred. Hence Martin Luther King’s comment,“I have decided to stick to love…Hate is too great a burden to bear.” 

I wish us to develop strength to see hatred, to face it, and to not try to explain it or excuse it, because we do not have time for that, and every effort to analyze or investigate hatred directed at us is a theft of our time and mental energy. James Baldwin said,
“We are capable of bearing a great burden once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.”

It can be demoralizing or frightening to know that we are being spoken of with contempt and attacked, perhaps as individuals, perhaps as UUs, perhaps as Americans, perhaps as people of a certain race, nationality or sexual orientation or gender.  It is important in those moments and seasons to gather support around, to keep good company, to nourish one another with food, song, laughter, rebellion, beauty, creativity, the solace of nature, and to bar the door of the soul against incursions of those vile sentiments and ideas being lobbed at the window and door of our psyches.  In the name of God, the angels and the ancestors, the guardians of earth, air, fire and water,  this hatred shall not have purchase on your spirit. 

The energy that hatred generates is exceedingly dangerous when organized, but if we are to survive, and resist, and advocate for ourselves or others, we must invoke that prayer of protection around us so that the hatred cannot erode our hearts, which is exactly what the opponent wishes. Their hearts are eroded, they operate on fear and shadow, and they want company in their tormented condition.  We will not provide it.
“When love prevails on heav’n and earth, how can I keep from singing?”

I have a few practices and teachings that I hope will help you in standing with grace, pride and self-regard in the face of hatred:

First, remember that we are all capable of hating and that it is likely we all harbor warm and active hatreds deep within ourselves. Any monster whom I behold expressing hatred toward me and mine, I must acknowledge that I can be that monster as well. I do not want be, and make efforts to avoid becoming so, as I find hateful people pathetic and boring. Perhaps you can find within yourself an equally dismissive attitude that helps you brush off animosity.

Second: hatred is a form of intimacy. You may have noticed that when you have hated someone, they have taken up residence in your thoughts, sleeping dreams and waking fantasies. That is how it is for the ones hating you or me, too. We live rent-free in their heads, they are obsessed with what they think we are, what we do, and how we supposedly threaten their perfect world. 

That’s bizarre, and sad. There are many psychological and developmental and sociological reasons for it, but you don’t have to spend a moment thinking about it, nor should you bother. Know that the relationship is one-sided and pray that the universe will use that fiery energy for other purposes. Redirect it, like Xena the Warrior Princess. 

There is plenty to do focusing on those you love and care about, and those with whom you share common values.  Beyond that may be, we hope, opportunities to build relationships between those who have significant differences in opinion, belief and priorities, but who are not entirely lost to pure hatred. We want our energy for things like that.

Those who are deeply invested in hate as their primary unifying and bonding principle are lost and may eventually experience a conversion.  I hope that for them. I pray that God will work in their hearts through human beings to lead them out of the hell they have made for themselves and others. But that is their path, and that is in God’s hands, not mine. 

We arrive at reality. We arrive and see it, and assess it and we can also shape it. We will continue to shape it, together. And finally, we remember this: where hostility is present, so ever is there the love and regard of friends and allies, not only here and yet to be met, but also in the ancestors whose very hope you may be the culmination of. Together, past and present, here and at a distance, we also generate a fire that warms and does not burn.

AI And Sermon Prep

My co-worker asked me today about using A.I. as a resource in preaching. Great question.

I did this once, and I don’t see myself doing it again, and here’s why:

When I entered a bunch of my writing into ChatGPT in April 2023 and asked it to generate a sermon about stewardship of the earth, it spewed back a nicely organized set of sentences and paragraphs that kind of sounded like me. It was certainly readable prose. But was it deliverable prose? Was it sermonic? No. Nope.

That is because Artificial Intelligence is not alive, and a sermon must come from the life force: the preacher’s living connection to their body, their life in relationship to the Holy Spirit, the ruach hakodesh, the cosmos, creation. I cannot deliver something that was not born but generated. Jesus said that thing about not feeding our children stones when they ask for bread. Stones actually have a lot more life force in them than does AI.

What do you believe about the transmission of life, hope, love and wisdom-giving energy through the generations, through the natural world, the sacred realm and through and among human beings? The way you answer that question will inform your decision to use or not use AI as a resource in your preaching. For myself, I do not want to begin with something dead and inert and have that enter my brain and creative process. It felt to me like gulping a meal of concrete. After reviewing my ChapGPT-generated sermon, it took considerable time and intention after that consumption of cement to get a sense of the blood flowing through my veins and the creative channels opening. Such a strange sensation, to feel a sense that I need to recover from ingesting inert reproduction of my own syntax and ideas.

I want to explore the fantastic potential of AI but I will not be using it as a resource for sermon preparation.

Palm Sunday Sermon: Anointing Woman

READING The Anointing Woman  

Mark 14 + Matthew 26: 6-13

SERMON “The Anointing” Rev. Dr. Victoria Weinstein 2002

The global Christian community enters Holy Week today, the drama of the final days of Jesus of Nazareth’s life, his last meal with his closest community of disciples, his betrayal and arrest, his sham trial, his crucifixion. Today is Palm Sunday, the day that commemorates Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem, the Holy City that had been occupied by Rome since 63 AD, so for about 90 years by the time this happened.

 Arriving by colt, or donkey, depending on which account you read, he is nevertheless consistently reported to have been cheered by hundreds of ardent fans and  followers. If you have ever seen “Jesus Christ Superstar” which treats Jesus like a rock star, that isn’t  inaccurate. He was a messianic celebrity to his people (the Jews living under Roman occupation) whose lives were very hard, with very few rights under the law, taxed into poverty, expendable, and murdered en masse when they dared to rise up against Rome. There was nothing unique about Jesus’ method of execution; Rome had been using this public form of torture and execution for a long time. The historical accounts are dreadful and the victims unknown and unnamed.

This is a very dramatic, crowded, busy moment in the gospel narrative. Think of protests you have been to, the noise, the clamor, the anger, the hope, the intensity.  Think of marches, people upset about injustice, coming together at a gathering spot after a trek with their families, friends and children to hear admired leaders. These are all appropriate analogies since Jesus’ message, although mystical, theological and religious, was always grounded in justice, in the demolishing of hierarchies of domination. He is beloved not just because of what he says and the vision he promotes of the kin-dom of equals, but for the miracles he has performed: he has healed the disabled, the chronically ill, he has raised the dead. And to his crowd of supporters, he has kicked the right hornet’s nests.

I was quoted this week [2022] in the Boston Globe as saying that Easter had deeper meaning for me as I learn more about systemic racism, the state-sanctioned brutality that is part of the unfortunate fabric of American society –  that has protected the privileged at the cost of a segment of society that has been enslaved, demonized and victim-blamed for centuries. There are too many parallels between  Jesus’ community’s predicament and that of colonized and enslaved peoples throughout all of history –  and although Jesus’ life, death and resurrection have different meanings for people depending on their religious, ethnic and cultural identity, he is for us an avatar of prophetic witness and radical, revolutionary love. 

He is the opposite of an emperor; he is a servant-healer, an advocate. He is the opposite of the project of empire; he is the project of empathy, which in Unitarian and Universalist theological tradition, is God’s own project, God’s own longing.

Empathy is the ability to put oneself in the experience of another being: to allow the body, mind, spirit to exist with that other being, opening oneself to to feel what they feel.  Some people come by this quality naturally, and being natural empaths can go hard for them. ( I have a form of empathy that causes me to feel physical aching when I see even images of injuries. It’s not a convenient quality: I have fainted during hospital pastoral visits, no matter how much I mentally prepare.)

Too much empathy can make one feel like a sponge for all the sorrows of the world, but little or no empathy is not a workable alternative. We see that today, we see it in savage, barbaric examples in Ukraine, what is being done to the people, animals and land there… we see it also in our own country, most recently in mind in legislative violence that dehumanizes women, and transgender youth. The world is never short of case studies in empathic absence and failure: All indecency and cruelty begin when the perpetrators of it fail or refuse to imagine the impact of their behavior on others, or on their environment, which also has its own consciousness. 

So I want to look at a moment in the gospels where God’s project of empathy was lived out not by the main character, Jesus, but by an unknown woman we know only as The Anointing Woman. 

Jesus has stopped for dinner close to Jerusalem, in Bethany on the West Bank.  His confrontation with the powers and principalities is going to come to a head very soon. But for now, dinner with his disciples at the house of Simon the Leper. 

It was the custom in those times to recline at the table and to be have the meal served by women or servants. I mention this because when Jesus presides at what we call the Last Supper, he takes on the role of servant, upending social expectations and subverting gender roles.

In the house of Simon, Jesus is in the midst of a crowded social situation, we can imagine that he and the twelve disciples are tired, as it has been a busy and highly charged time being who they are and doing what they do. Not only are the eyes of the adoring crowds upon them, so are the eyes of the political authorities. There are spies and informers around.

Out of nowhere, with no introduction, enters the Anointing Woman :one gospel account identifies her as Mary of Bethany, the three others do not give her a name. She has a jar of precious perfumed oil (today it would be essential oil) worth about a year’s wages, and she pours it out and anoints Jesus’s head – or his feet, depending on which version you read. This is a symbol of messianic recognition, as kings were so anointed at their crowning. But anointing a body with oil is also a ritual at the time of death, in preparation for burial, which was also the role of women in Jesus’ time and cultural context. That’s why the women were the first at the tomb on Easter morning.

But let’s go back to the dinner. I imagine a sense of hubbub. People talking over each other. Passing of dishes. Food, drink, people in and out. 

The woman comes into this scene and walks up to Jesus. To get the oil out of an alabaster jar, the jar has to be broken, so she can’t save any of the oil, it’s all flowing onto Jesus. One of the Scripture passages describing this encounter mentions that powerful fragrance. 

Again, depending on which version we are reading, she is either touching Jesus on his head, or she is at his feet, and in two reports, she is crying onto his feet and drying her tears with her hair. 

Tears, and oil. She does not say anything, or if she does, it was not remembered. The Anointing Woman breaks into the ( mostly male) center of activity and does this incredibly intimate, immediate thing with Jesus. 

No one really knows what it means. There is no consensus whatsoever on the identity of the anointing woman or the meaning of what she does. 

But I don’t think we need scholars and theologians to interpret what it means. We can simply watch the moment unfold in our imaginations: She enters. She is poor and yet she carries precious oil, worth a lot of denarii. She sees this man, the savior, the promised one foretold by the prophets, eating dinner in the next room. Maybe what she saw in him is the Messiah.  Or maybe what you saw was a tired man who has walked many many miles stopping to give teachings and to heal the sick in body and in heart; a man whose feet are dusty who is hungry, a man who is grateful for food.

Whatever she saw in him, whether or not she had seen him up close before, she saw him with profound empathy. And that is why I cry whenever I read this passage. Alone of all the characters who meet  Jesus along the way of the gospel journey, the Anointing Woman doesn’t ask him for anything, doesn’t ask him to heal her, doesn’t ask him questions about how to attain eternal life, doesn’t touch him clandestinely so that he can heal her of a medical condition… all of which are fine things to ask of a prophet and healer and teacher!! They are poignant requests! But she alone, she sees Jesus as the vulnerable one. She sees what is ahead for him. She recognizes that he is in danger, she knows the outcome, she enters the room like truth itself, with love, with empathy, she pours out this beautiful ointment on him. Alone in the room, both she and Jesus understand the poignancy of what she is doing.

The disciples don’t get it. They start in immediately with petty attack, why did you do that, we could sell that oil and take care of more people, what are you doing, what a waste!

She has no response. I picture her in this intimate closeness with Jesus, bringing this act of beauty and care to him that transcends words and argument. Sometimes it is not time to debate, strategize, argue and compete. The poet Jeni Coyzyn wrote, “The way towards each other is through our bodies. Words are the longest distance you can travel/so complex and hazardous you/lose your direction.”

The woman with the oil walked right to him, to the center of everything, to the center of attention, not to make a point, not to present an argument, not to get something for herself but to give, to recognize, to bring the moment from chatter to stillness, from dinner time to the inevitability of death. She infuriated everyone there who thought they knew better than her how to spend the richness of that fragranced oil but she knew exactly where it belonged: not as an item for sale, but as a blessing to be bestowed, out of her poverty a spirit of abundance. 

History has not known how to interpret her, how to identify her… or how to emulate her. We still tend to miss or distance ourselves from the inbreaking of the holy with chatter, debate, and critique. But Jesus himself is reported to have spoken in her defense, chastised the petty and critical reaction to her gesture and said, “wherever the story of my life is told in the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”

I thought, therefore, that you should also know about her.

The Anointing of Christ, Julia Stankova 2009