MLK Sunday | "Thou Shall Not Hate" 6PM 01/18/26 | Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III

59:51 Another translation, perfect love gives fear an eviction notice. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because God loved us. Those who say, I love God, and hate a brother or sister are liars. Another translation, those who say, I love God, and hate their brother or sister, straight up lying.

1:00:26 Those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen cannot love God. Whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from God is this. Those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also. May the Lord add a blessing to the reading and hearing of God's holy word. You may be seated in the presence of the Most High God. Now, we want to place a tag on this text, for it constitutes what we attempt to teach and preach on this day. For us to focus on this idea, we are closing out a series, a series that we started several weeks ago at the beginning of this year.

1:01:36 The series is entitled Separation of Church and Hate, borrowed from the book by John Fuglesong, or Sang, I think it's Sang or Song, I'm not sure, Separation of Church and Hate. And all of these messages go together. And the subheading for today is Thou Shall Not Hate. thou shall not hate. If you could turn to your neighbor at this time.

1:02:12 I didn't say anything. Just wave at your neighbor. Just wave at him. and just say, neighbor, oh neighbor, God is love, and those who abide,

1:02:33 love abides in them. Amen. Now turn to your neighbor and look at your neighbor, smile at him again, show them your teeth or the doctor's teeth one or the other one or the other smile at them and simply say neighbor oh neighbor we are called to love Amen.

1:03:10 Separation of church and hate is final in our three-part series. Thou shall not hate. Thou shall not hate. Yolanda Adams, one of the great not just gospel singers, but singers, period, was recently on a podcast produced by a wonderful couple, the Smith family. A podcast entitled Holy Smokes, where Reverend Christian Smith, Georgia, raises questions about harmful theology.

1:04:04 Yolanda Adams said something that arrested me and had me thinking from the moment that I heard these words. She said, and I quote, I can tell how much your God loves by the people you hate. I can tell how much your God loves by the people you hate. There is an ease to hate. It's easy to hate. It's a quiet ease. There is a seductive, immoral romance that hate seeks to ignite somewhere between the soul and the spirit. Hate never fully exposes itself, but will come to your door wearing the scent of suspicion.

1:05:18 The garments of concern weave together with the threads of fear. Hate does not reveal itself as hate, but speaks with a rational and golden tongue. Writers call it tribalism. Scholars call it sectarianism. And political pundits call it partisanship. And it is ethicist Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr who says he calls it predatory self-interest. Hate never shows up as hate. It seduces and lulls you to sleep and whispers in your ear, you should be afraid of them. Aren't you concerned about them?

1:06:23 They are not like you. Hate will even alter your vocabulary, change your grammar. Everything becomes they and never we. It is you or you people, never us. Hate, I said, seduces. Hate seduces, then pimps us after the seduction.

1:06:55 You become, you become, we become a trick for its purpose, standing on corners, selling its lies to anyone who passes by. Can you hear the evangelists of ones who've been pimped out by hate, who now walk the streets of this nation claiming they are patriots? Can you hear their language? They say things like, he does not speak English. Let me see your ID. They are taking our jobs. Just give them your papers. If you are here legally, you have nothing to worry about. Speak English. Go back to where you came from.

1:07:51 That's right. You know they hate us. What are you doing in this neighborhood? You don't belong here. I know everyone who's in this neighborhood, and you don't look like you come from around here. And my name is Karen, by the way.

1:08:20 Are you a Muslim? What kind of name is that? What are those funny clothes you got on? What's that on your head? Are you Palestinian? Are you Haitian? What kind of black are you? Go back to your own country. And as one priest stated in Minneapolis, after an arrest taken by ICE officers and placed in a detention center, an officer looked him in the face to this priest and said, you are lucky you are white.

1:09:00 Hate never shows up first as hate. The prologue and the preface of hate is always fear. Fear is always the valet for hate. Opening the door and carrying the luggage, whatever is mandated by hate. Fear is the valet of hate. For hate never entered a soul unless fear opened the door. Hate is seductive. Theologian Paul Tillich, when speaking about hate, shared that hate is sin, but further he said that sin is not just simple action, not what you just think or do. That's too simple and reductionist and misses the point of the language. If sin is just a practice or action, it makes it easy to point your finger at somebody else and say, look at you and look what you did. Paul Tillich goes deeper and says that it's manifestation of a deeper struggle that he calls separation, a distance created by humanity from all things that are holy. It is not the act or the action. That's only the veneer. It is the manifestation that is rooted in a separation from all things holy and sacred. This separation swims in fear and is distant from God.

1:10:34 And in order to cover itself and lie to itself, this separation and manifestation, swimming in fear and in insecurity and anxiety, must create a system, a system, to hide from the truth of what it actually is. Separation, according to Tillich, is sin, to use theological language, But sin is not an action but a manifestation connected to separation that swims in human fear, insecurity, vanity, and anxiety. This separation from all that is sacred creates a system to hide the inadequacy, fears of insecurity, vanity, and anxiety of human beings that cannot face themselves nor face what the sacred is calling us to. When we separate ourselves from what is sacred and swim in the waters of fear and insecurity, swim in the waters of vanity and anxiety, we breathe the air of this manifestation that theologians called sin.

1:11:39 As a result, systems are designed to diminish human dignity, are then created. These systems are lies masquerading as truth. Let me say it this way. Lies love plain dress up. A liar's favorite suit to wear is a suit that it can't fit.

1:12:12 An ill-fitting suit called the truth. A liar will try to put it on, but it never seems to fit. If I may say this, that what is called white supremacy is a lie masquerading as truth. Maybe we should stop saying supremacy and call it narcissism. As Ashley B. the blogger states, or call it just simply fear. because if you think you're supreme, you don't have to spend so much time trying to dim somebody else's light. If you think you're supreme, you don't have to spend so much time trying to hide from history and take certain books out of the library.

1:13:13 If you are so supreme, why are you so scared? You see, I know it is a special Sunday for some. The Bears do not need to create a misinformation campaign about the LA Rams. They just need to focus on being good, better, and best.

1:13:34 If you are confident in who you are, you don't need to rig the system. If you are confident in who you are, you don't need someone to give you a Nobel Peace Prize. If you are confident in who you are, you don't have to spend so much time trying to convince yourself and other people that you are so great. I call this name Renee Nicole Good lived, past tense, in the same city where a man named George Floyd once lived, past tense. Renee Nicole Good was killed, murdered by a system masquerading as truth A system based on fear And this fear opens the door to hate And this hate shaped a system that was formed by separation from all things sacred And has left us swimming in all of its ugly manifestations This system was shaped by America's original sin, the othering, the dehumanization of people made in the image of God.

1:15:07 Thou shall not hate A simple term But a complex problem For a nation unable to speak truth And face the totality of its history And reconcile with its foundings And yet, scripture with its beautiful prose From the early church challenges us And offers an antidote to our proclivity to be infected and affected by America's oldest viral agent of COVID-16-19, America's original sin. This early community of Gentiles and Jews, attempting to hammer out a practice for those who knew Torah and those who didn't know Torah, The same writing community of the Gospel of John places these words on ancient parchment.

1:16:12 Beloved, let us love one another because love is from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God. For God is love. God's love was revealed among us in this way. God sent God's only Son into the world so that we might live through him. This is love. Not that we loved God, but that God loved us and sent God's Son so that the atoning sacrifice would be for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God. If we love each other, God abides in us, and God's love is perfected in us.

1:17:12 God is love. And those who abide in love abides in God, and God abides in them. love has been perfected among us in this, that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he said, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love. Perfect love casts out fear. it's interesting that you haven't seen God but you say you love God but your brother and your sister who you see every day you got issues with them the repetition to love the claim God is love and loving is a sacred act holy mandate where God is present in this idea of love.

1:18:17 And I say this, that our faith is designed to be a practice and a movement to elevate love. Here we are to learn the dimensions of love, that love is being lifted up in this scripture. And in the American context, we have difficulty even expressing the idea of love because we only have one word for it. In Greek, there are a variety of words for love. See, in the American context, you've got to say it right so that people can figure out what you're saying. You may say, oh, I love you, or it could be, I love you. It all is different depending upon how you say it. But within the Greek, there were different words for this idea of love. There was, if you had familiar love, there was the word phila, which means familiar love. That's why when you go to the city of Philadelphia, it means the city of brotherly love and sisterly affection.

1:19:16 Then there is the word for love that, you know, when you see somebody and you can't stop thinking about them and your knees get weak and everything else. That's a different kind of love. They had a different word for that. That was called eros, where we get the word erotic from. But then there was another kind of love. The love that God has for God's people. The love that God functions with. And this is the word that is being used in this scripture. It is called agape. God's love. Love that is so expansive that we could spend the rest of our lives talking about this kind of love and we would only scratch the surface. And theologians have always tried to give some definition for understanding this kind of love. One theologian says that agape love is sacrificial love.

1:20:11 Means I set aside my needs for your needs. It's sacrificial love. That's a good definition. But another theologian said, hold up now. That's a good definition. But something needs to be added to that. Because sacrificial love that in the human context, that sometimes we end up becoming codependent, wanting to do everything for someone else, but not attending to our own needs. He said that we've got to add sacrificial to mutual love, meaning that you've got to put some boundaries to understand that there are some things that you will not accept. And so that theologian said sacrificial love is right, but you've got to connect it to mutual love. Otherwise, it becomes codependency. But then James Cone added to that. He said sacrificial is correct, mutual love is right, but you got to have some self-love.

1:21:06 That if you don't love who you are, if you don't love who God made you to be, it's not possible for you to have sacrificial love and mutual love because you have a colonized type of love. A love that doesn't see yourself as fully human so that you need sacrificial, mutual, and self-love. But then another theologian said, that's good, but we got to add something else to that, that love that is of equal regard. That means that you don't have love that sits in a camp, love that sits in your peer group. It means you've got love, equal regard, even for people that you have issues with, that you understand that they are made within the image of God, and they are deserving of dignity and respect no matter even if you disagree with them so that it must be sacrificial and mutual and self-love and equal regard but then a final one was delivering love delivering love is simply this says that if you see somebody who is suffering and in pain someone who is oppressed and hurt and marginalized. It is your responsibility if you are trying to carry out agape love that you have to stand with them. In the words of Howard Thurman, for those who have their backs against the wall, you must stand against the wall with them and stand with and stand for them. That agape love is sacrificial, mutual, self-love, equal regard, and delivering love. And in our spiritual practice, we must sacrifice, learn mutual love, self-love, develop equal regard, and delivering love. And when we practice this kind of love, something begins to emanate from our very souls that ends up touching other people. We say in our tradition that the Holy Spirit begins to shine.

1:23:19 Some within the Pentecostal tradition will say that the anointing shows up. But the best way I can explain it is through a story. A story of a child who was in the NICU unit, who was in this intensive care after the child was born and was only told that this child would live a few months because of all of the issues with this child. And the grandmother had made a commitment. when this child gets out of the incubator, then I'm going to hold that child. I'm going to sing to that child. I'm going to pray over that child, and I'm going to pray for that child. There was not an expectation that the child would survive. There were challenges with the mother, challenges with the father. And when the child got out of that incubation unit, they placed that little tiny baby in the arms of grandma. Grandma just held on to the baby.

1:24:23 And grandma just sang to the baby. Grandma just prayed over the baby. And grandma whispered in the baby's ear, you're going to be great. You're going to be amazing. Great things are going to happen in your life. Every single day for a year, grandma held that baby for hours at a time. And they did an examination. The baby wasn't supposed to last but a few months. A year had passed by, and the doctors came in, and they were blown away that the issues the baby had somehow disappeared. and the baby was now growing. The doctors were trying to figure out what happened. Nobody wanted to talk to grandma, so they brought in quote-unquote experts. The experts couldn't figure out what happened to the baby. They brought in researchers to find out, and they concluded that the baby did better because there was somebody to hold the baby and talk to the baby. So they They hired a bunch of nurses to hold babies that got out of the NICU unit and talked to the baby.

1:25:39 But when they did the research, it didn't have the same result as grandma. And the baby, several years later, had been doing well, and grandma was visiting the NICU unit, and somebody decided to ask, we can't get the same results that you had. And grandma said, well, you don't have the same doctor that I have. See, while I was holding the baby, I was talking to the doctor. While I was praying for the baby, I was talking to the doctor. And there was a conversation that was happening as I was speaking life into the child that certain things were being removed and other things were being replaced. You've got to have some power in your prayers. I love this child and my love was placed in the child.

1:26:36 And as a result of my love, my love strengthened the child. Let me help you out. All of us who gather here, there's been somebody who put you in their arms. There's been somebody who sang songs to you. There was somebody who prayed and you didn't even know what prayer was about. But when you look back over your life and all that you've been through, somebody needs to thank God for the one who kept you in thereof. Is there anyone in here? Sacrificial love and mutual love, self-love and equal regard and delivering love. But the other thing is, is that I love within this text that speaks to us, is that love casts out fear.

1:27:40 Love sends an eviction notice to fear. See, love and fear don't like being roommates. When love shows up, fear has to find another place to live. So love casts out fear. And in this moment in time, we must recognize and have love so that that love can cast out fear. Someone the other day, we were visiting Arizona, and this person I was sitting next to simply said, I said, I'm fearful about what happened, is what's going on in our nation. And I had to tell the person next to me because they didn't realize that as they were talking to me that my wheels were turning in my mind and I was thinking about how can you say that? With all of the privileges you have, how can you say this? And so on today, this MLK Sunday, we honor, yes, MLK, but we also honor someone else by the name of Claudette Colvin.

1:28:48 Many people do not know who Claudette Colvin was. Claudette Colvin, before there was a Rosa Parks, there was a Claudette Colvin. down in Alabama in Montgomery. She made the decision at the age of 15 to say, I'm not getting out of my seat. I refuse in any way to be dehumanized by someone else. And she was arrested and she was jailed. And they did not use her as the primary case in reference to the Montgomery bus boycott because she was 15, but she also had a child. They didn't think that she would be a good example as they made their way through the court system. But Claudette Colvin is the one who sat down before Rosa Parks sat down.

1:29:48 Claudette Colvin is the one who made a way for everybody else. Claudette Colvin passed this week, But we thank God that she said because she knew that she was loved by God, that love chased out fear from her spirit. And when those officers stood over her, she said, you're not that tall. My God is bigger than you.

1:30:15 Love casts out fear. and as our brothers and sisters in Minneapolis are dealing with this idea of fear they also are understanding how to take hold of love they did something that it blessed me so if I may share the story of how love casts out fear from our brothers and sisters in Minneapolis there is something in Minneapolis known as the Minneapolis Brass Band. It started during the protests of George Floyd. Somebody, don't know who it was, at one of the protests, showed up with a trumpet and just started playing songs at the protest. The next day at the protest, the trumpet player came, but then a trombone player came.

1:31:14 So it was a trumpet player and a trombone player. But then the next day, the trumpet player showed up, the trombone player showed up, but then somebody showed up with a tuba. Had a tuba, trumpet player, and a trombone player. After several weeks, they had a whole earth, wind, and fire brass section. And they were doing second line, just making noise, and officers didn't know what to do. Do you arrest the trombone player? Is it illegal to play a tuba in front of an officer? But I found out that the band is still together. That in Minneapolis, they now, the band has expanded from 15 to there's 30 or 40 folks who show up at every protest. And when they show up to the protest, they just start playing some gospel tunes with the horns that they have, with a New Orleans vibe.

1:32:18 And there was a brother who didn't have a horn or anything. He just decided he was going to be the lead singer. Didn't have an amazing voice, but everybody joined in. He just took the song that they were playing and he just said, ain't gonna let no ICE officers turn me around. Turn me around. Turn me around. Ain't gonna let no ICE officers turn me around. Gonna keep on walking, keep on talking, marching up to freedom's way. That's what they did. And as a result, the officers didn't know what to do. They didn't know, do I rest the tuba or the trombone? Because the sonic sound was going out and love was casting out fear. And I stopped by here to let you know that you have to make sure that you've got a song in your heart.

1:33:18 If you can't carry a tune like me, still have a song in your heart. And that song will chase out fear in the process. Because God loved us first. God loved me first. And God is not through with you and not through with me. And I'm so glad that our God loves us always. We have an always God. There's a poet that I know. He wrote a poem, if I may recite the poem. A few of you may know the poem, but I love this poem by this brother from Michigan. I think he used to live in Detroit. The poem goes this way. As around the sun, the earth knows she's revolving. And the rosebud knows to bloom in early May.

1:34:12 Just as hate knows love's the cure, you can rest your mind assured that I'll be loving you. As now can't reveal the mystery of tomorrow. But in passing we'll grow older every day Just as all is born is new Do you know what I say is true? That I'll be loving you Until the rainbow burns the stars out of the sky Until the ocean covers every mountain high Until the dolphin flies and parrots live at sea Until we dream of life and life becomes a dream Did you know that true love has for nothing? Her acceptance is the way we pay. Did you know that life has given love a guarantee to last forever, another day?

1:35:11 Just as time knew to move on since the beginning. And the seasons know exactly when to change. Just as kindness knows no shame, no through all