There Is No Proper Christian Hate

August 16, 2026

Matthew 15:10-28; Romans 11:1-2a 29-32

            This section of Matthew begins with a complaint from the scribes and Pharisees… “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders?  For they do not wash their hands before they eat.”  The first part of our reading is Jesus’ response to that complaint… a response that then opens up the complaint so that the spirit behind the complaint is exposed in the story of the Canaanite woman… the second half of the reading.  Continue to listen as God speaks to you.

            READ

            We’re going to focus this morning on some recent headlines concerning a sermon given at the Elkhart First Baptist Church by Indiana Lt. Governor Micah Beckwith.  I watched the full service on the official FBC Elkhart YouTube channel because I didn’t want to theologically misrepresent what was said in the sermon by only relying on secondhand accounts and certain choice soundbite videos. 

            Elkhart First Baptist worships in the style of many evangelical non-denominational, theologically Baptist, churches.  This is not a small fringe church in northern Indiana; it is very mainstream with all the trappings of the well-lit stage and the large professional sounding band who started the service by playing and emoting their way through thirty minutes of Christian pop songs.  Pastor Phil then took the stage to welcome the congregation and run through some church announcements.  He introduced the Lt. Governor as a godly man who has spoken at this church before.  The Lt. Governor then took the stage and went on to speak for almost an hour with applause from the congregation smattered throughout.  That’s pretty much the whole service.

            The Lt. Governor’s sermon is titled, “How to Hate Properly”.  And what’s interesting is that at the beginning of the sermon, he says it was Pastor Phil who asked him to speak on this topic because he had heard him speak on this before and liked what he had to say.  So… you need to understand that this is not some one-shot talk that took the congregation and their pastor by surprise.  The theology within this talk is given full-throated support… and is a theology supported by many churches just like this throughout the country.  The Lt. Governor says at the beginning… this is not opinion… not his opinion… not the pastor’s opinion… this is God’s word.  I, of course, disagree that this bad theology is God’s word.  The sermon that followed sounded more like the theology of the scribes and Pharisees than of Christ.

            “Love what God loves and hate what God hates.”  That is his opening sentence… that is the theological thesis upon which this sermon is built.  “We’ve only been taught for too many years the first half of that… but it’s not enough,” he says.  “Christians need to learn how to hate again.”  And… “Every time hatred is the consequence of love.”  These are all his words as he builds out that idea of loving what God loves and hating what God hates. 

            Now listening to him… the point he is trying to make is that in loving God… loving the goodness of what God is and what God teaches… means that we will then hate the opposite.  He uses a Psalm reference… and really we could find many scripture references… telling us to love God and hate what is evil.  Nothing really terrible there as a basic idea.  It makes sense… right… and is a point where we could agree.  There is good and there is evil.  Christians are to embrace one and reject the other.  Paul has his fruit of the Spirit… love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Paul also has his works of the flesh… fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing and things like these.  Discipleship as a personal discipline is to lead us toward the one and away from the other.  As disciples, we are to aspire to be more Christ-like in our outward actions and our inward being.  I would hope that on this most Christians can agree.  The problem isn’t with the basic principle… it’s… let’s call it… methodology… it’s the path or the means of discipleship where hate is lifted up as a virtue… as a means of becoming more Christ-like if done properly.  There is something off about that.

             “Do I hate what God hates for the reasons God hates it, while loving the people God commands me to love.  Do you hate how God hates?  Do you love how God loves?”  These are his questions that we are supposed to answer… or be challenged by… in this sermon. 

            And this is where I want to bring in our reading from Matthew today… because I found it interesting that he said “how” instead of “what”.  How God hates.  How God loves.  Much of his talk is really about what God’s hates and why we ought to actively hate those things as well.  The examples he gives of what God hates are nothing new or different from what you might expect from a conservative American evangelical theology.  Homosexuality and transgenderism.  Forms of American patriotism that do not uphold conservative Christian theology or espouse conservative Christian cultural domination.  He throws in some talk of demonic possessions as the reason some people disagree and stand opposed to the current evangelical list of evils.  If those people could be freed from their possession they would surely come around to the right kind of hate… I guess.  At one point, where he wants to justify the value of hating… he talks about how Jesus as the Lamb of God… well, that part of the story is over… and it is now Jesus the Warrior King that will return and judge the world with violence and death.  Up to his knees in the blood of his enemies.  These are his words.  It is Jesus the Warrior King as the model of Christ we are to follow… and our proper hate will help us understand and do just this.  Sadly, this is the usual stuff nowadays for what is mainstream American evangelical Christianity.  Again… he isn’t saying anything new that that church hasn’t already embraced.

            Of course, in the naming of all the evils we are to properly hate… I couldn’t help but notice how every evil named existed outside of the church with someone else.  They themselves… I suppose… were free of the all the real evils that God hates… they were holy and righteous with maybe evils too small for God to be concerned about.  That also seems to be the understanding of the scribes and Pharisees about themselves… an understanding that Jesus keeps exposing and embarrassing them with… their own sense of perfect holiness… of being greater and lording over.  Quite the opposite from the servant position Jesus taught his followers.  The humility.  The understanding of themselves first as sinners who have no place to judge others.

            In their day, the scribes and Pharisees also wanted you to hate what God hates… just like they did so well.  Not following the tradition of the elders.  God hated that.  God hated it when people did not follow the rules of the Law the way the Pharisees taught.  “How to Hate Properly” could have been a synagogue talk given by a very godly Pharisee.  Isn’t that what is behind what Jesus first says to the Canaanite woman?  “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  That’s the proper Pharisaic hate response.  The tradition of scripture taught how God hated the Canaanites.  Let’s go to Leviticus… the book that reliably tells us what God hates.  Leviticus 20 starting with verse 22… “You shall keep all my statutes and all my ordinances, and observe them, so that the land to which I bring you to settle in may not vomit you out.  You shall not follow the practices of the nation that I am driving out before you.  Because they did all these things, I abhorred them.  But I have said to you; You shall inherit their land, and I will give it to you to possess, a land flowing with milk and honey.  I am the Lord your God; I have separated you from the peoples.”  That passage is all about the hated Canaanites.  Deuteronomy 20 starting with verse 16 makes it clear… “You shall annihilate them – the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites – just as the Lord your God commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God.”  There… I have quoted the scripture that gives me interpretive justification.  The Lt. Governor says that sometimes… in some cases… violence is a necessity in properly hating evil.  The holiness of Christian violence.  It might come down to it if I am to keep my nation pure and Christian.  If I am to stand with the apocalyptic Jesus, warrior king… soaked in the blood of our enemies up to our knees.  Our theological words are important.  Our theological words create real world actions and consequences.

            So… is this how the God revealed through the Christ of the cross hates?  Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to replace the radical challenge of the Lamb of God for the false idol of the warrior king crafted in our own image.  The Jesus story of gospels are not over… not irrelevant.  

            Jesus explains that it is what comes out of the heart that defiles.  The question for me is… how does hate in my heart keep me away from defiling actions?  Anger.  Dissension.  Quarrels.  All these works of the flesh come from a heart of hate.  The Lt. Governor’s sermon tried to explain to me that it is a loving hate.  It is hate as an expression of love.  I hate the sin.  I love the sinner.  In the times of the gospel stories, I would hate the sin of adultery by lovingly stoning the sinner to death.  Is that how God, through Christ, hated?  Because remember… it’s not what… it’s how.  How does God, through Christ, hate?  How does Jesus stand apart from the Pharisees who would have stoned the woman caught in adultery to uphold God’s righteousness?  How does Jesus stand apart in going to the district of Tyre and Sidon and daring to speak of the faith of a Canaanite woman who did not share his religious heritage… did not follow the tenets and practices of his Judaism?  She knew the hate… she had received and experienced the hate for being a Canaanite.  “Even the dogs eat the crumbs from the masters’ table.”  That statement is dripping in the hate she had experienced.  She is defiant to such hateful dismissiveness.  The mercy Christ shows her… I don’t think it comes from a place of hate.  Can mercy come from a heart filled with hate?  Yet, somehow… someway this hated woman… there is something in her heart… there is a faith within her that God loves.  A proper hate will never get us to the point of seeing her as Christ sees her in that moment.  She doesn’t do enough to satisfy the conditions of the hate in order to receive the love… the mercy… the grace… she receives.

            I’m not sure there is such a thing as a proper Christian hate.  Hate is a defect of our discipleship no matter how you try to twist that.  God does not hate the way we hate. In Christ, God hates by overwhelming evil with good. God hates by loving so deeply, so relentlessly, so transformatively that evil has no room left to root itself in us. Grace is how God hates. Grace is God’s refusal to let evil have the last word. Grace is God pushing us so far into love… into mercy, into patience, into generosity, into the fruit of the Spirit… that hatred simply cannot survive. If the Lt. Governor says Christians need to learn how to hate again, Jesus teaches the opposite: Christians need to be drawn so fully into the life of God that hate has nowhere to live. Evil is not defeated by mirroring it. Evil is defeated when goodness crowds it out. That is the shape of God’s judgment… mercy overwhelming evil… that makes the gospel of Christ so unique in all of scripture. That is the work of grace. And that is the discipleship Christ calls us into… not hatred baptized as holiness, but love so stubborn and so Spirit‑driven that it leaves no space for hate at all.  Amen.