FRIDAY, JULY 9, 2021 LOVE WINS!!!

 FRIDAY, JULY 9, 2021 LOVE WINS!!!

On Fridays I write something loosely about love wins.  

Today - non-violence.  I’m not sure if I’m any kind of an expert on this, but I’ll try.  (Thinking of the adage “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread!!!”)

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Sometimes they confront me.  I’m a lover not a fighter.  I will back down when somebody gets in my face.  

From Matthew 5

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.

From Matthew 27

“Then the governor’s soldiers took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole company of soldiers around him.  They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand. Then they knelt in front of him and mocked him. “Hail, king of the Jews!” they said. They spit on him, and took the staff and struck him on the head again and again. 

And, Luke 23

Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”.

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The concept of non-violence has been around since Jesus’ time (or before).  In modern times, maybe the most famous was Mahatma Gandhi in India. 

People would spit on Gandhi as an expression of racial hate (Indian as compared to British rulers).  He was kicked out of a Christian Church in South Africa as a ‘non-white’ person.  (Love one another?) 

In 1930, protesting the law that Indians could only buy British salt, Gandhi organized a 241-mile-long protest march to the west coast of Gujarat, where he and his acolytes harvested salt on the shores of the Arabian Sea.  Britain imprisoned over 60,000 peaceful protesters and inadvertently generated even more support for home rule.  

Huge demonstrations ensued, and despite the arrests of 100,000 home rule advocates by British authorities, the balance finally tipped toward Indian independence. 

Gandhi didn’t directly fight the British.  He organized boycotts, sit-ins, peaceful demonstrations and marches.  (Can you imagine arresting 100,000 people or 60,000 at one time?  What jail could the authorities use?  How do you feed 100,000 in jail?)  

Turn the other cheek.  Yes, Gandhi, like Jesus, got spit on.  He was arrested, beaten, abused.  

Martin Luther King also recognized Gandhi’s non-violence stance. “Gandhi, King later wrote, was the first person to transform Christian love into a powerful force for social change. Gandhi’s stress on love and nonviolence gave King “the method for social reform that I had been seeking”.  “Christian Love” - with a Hindu Indian person, and a Black American.  That Jesus was a radical!!

I’m not sure I would like to be spit on (or flogged, beaten, struck). But, that concept of peaceful protests and non-violence seems to be in the spirit of Jesus as he said  “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”.

And, a Proverb for good measure:

Proverbs 15:1 “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”  Don’t answer hatred with hatred, give a gentle answer (or no answer) when confronted.  

No, I haven’t been marching in protest events, no, I didn’t take part in Black Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter.  I see racism seemingly still continuing.I am not a very verbal person in this discussion.  Yes, something has happened to me, but I’m not ready to “go to the streets” in protest.  I think my views go something like this:  I am a human being, all people are made “in the image and likeness of God”, I’m not looking for special treatment - but equal treatment.  

In a similar vein to discrimation against Blacks, Women, Hispanics, Muslims, Asians, LGBTQ folks, and others, I sense that Jesus’ comment to turn the other cheek, to let them spit on him, and still say “Father forgive them '' has been forgotten.  

So on this LOVE WINS Friday, I still am a voice crying in the wilderness “LOVE WINS”, violence does not win, hatred does not win.  

And, when LOVE WINS - we all win.   "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

(From the New Colossus poem by Emma Lazarus - which is inscribed on the table of Lady Liberty at the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor!!)

LOVE WINS!!!

HUGS!!

Karen