by April Terry (personal blog http://faithwarming.blogspot.com)

Whenever someone goes on Jury duty at my office, the same old conversation crops up and we all start telling our jury duty horror stories.  Nearly all of us have that one story of getting into the jury room after sitting patiently through the trial, thinking that conviction is going to be easy, but when the poll is taken one person is a holdout—not because they believe that the person didn’t do it, but because they think cops are racist, or lawyers are crooks, or judges are part of the establishment.  Whatever the reason, these holdouts in the jury room are filtering their view of the situation through the narrowest of lenses.  Sometimes, it happens because of a personal experience and other times, it is because of a bias that they have allowed to develop.

We all do it to some extent.  We see life through a lens of our own making and use that lens to interpret our understanding of people we meet and situations we encounter.  Sometimes, though, our filter is too narrow and we limit ourselves or overprotect ourselves.  It is then that our filter gets clogged and we stop learning and growing.  We become unable to understand the other side when we don’t allow ourselves the latitude to even hear the other side. 

I believe that hearing the other side is important, healthy, and loving.  I believe that if we don’t listen to the other side, we are limiting the broadness of the word of God by trying to filter it through a narrow lens–a narrow lens that may turn into a clogged filter.  Sometimes, I am more than a little horrified at the graceless rhetoric that is passed around among my fellow Christians and I fear that many of us are like the holdouts in the jury room.  We hold onto to what we know, not necessarily because there is depth of belief there, but because it is what we know.  It isn’t loving.  You know what it sounds a lot like?  It sounds to me like fear.   

John 4:11 says, “There is no fear in love.  But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.  The one who fears is not made perfect in love.”  I think this statement is trying to caution us against letting our filters get clogged.  If we are truly confident in our faith then there is no need to fear.  If our faith is strong, we are made complete in love.  God resides in us and we in Him.  Yet, I hear the resonance of fear in the ranks of Christianity.  Many believe that we should engage in war against other philosophies and ideologies, but they are approaching the battle in fear, not in faith.  Strong faith comes out of God’s perfect love. 

One of the reasons so many people died in the Salem witch trials was because there was a philosophy that anyone who disagreed with the religious establishment must therefore be a heretic.  Therefore, anyone who stood up against those who were in control opened themselves up to being called a heretic and a witch.  In the beginning, some stood up against the establishment, but they were put on trial along with those they had tried to defend.   Sometimes, the establishment is wrong.  We only need point to the crusades, the inquisitions, and the salem witch trials to prove that.  Healthy questioning is important.  When I hear rhetoric by brothers in Christ that social justice Christians are heretics, I am deeply saddened.   I wonder where the message of perfect love got lost.

Either we will be an example of God’s perfect love, or we will wage a war of philosophy against those we choose to filter out.   I believe that it is a war that we will lose—and we will lose badly, if we decide to take up arms against rogue philosophies.  Instead, we must face our fears and have the courage to seek out the meaning of perfect love.  We should engage in it, explore it, practice it, wrap our minds around it, and become it.  It is our legacy, our privilege, and God’s gift to us that we must spread perfect love throughout the world.

“We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.  And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”   John 4:19-21