Newspaper Columns by The Rev. Canon Bill Lewellis
What are they Telling us about God?
Bill Lewellis
December, 2002, The Express-Times, Easton
[This column, scheduled for publication in the Express-Times on Friday, 12/6/02, will be on the street as Westboro Baptist Church comes to town. Do you think my house -- or Diocesan House -- may be added to the picketing schedule? Thanks. --Bill]
From Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, Fred Phelps is bringing his gospel of hate to Allentown and Bethlehem. It promises to be a good weekend for residents of Topeka.
Among ten sites targeted for picketing are two Episcopal churches, Trinity Church and the Cathedral Church of the Nativity, both in Bethlehem.
Bishop Paul Marshall of the Diocese of Bethlehem recalled seeing the Phelps folks at an Episcopal convention. "Mr. Phelps had among his pickets a nine-year-old girl carrying a sign that said, 'God hates fags.' Can anyone command respect or be taken seriously who teaches little children to hate -- and does so in the name of God?"
"This kind of hatred is evil," Laura Howell said recently in a sermon. Associate rector at Trinity, she said she rarely uses the word evil. "But hatred is a tool and source of great evil in our world. It is an expression of evil to say 'God hates you' when God has told us over and over that God is love."
As communication minister for the Diocese of Bethlehem, I'm disappointed that Phelps has targeted only two of our churches. The last time I checked, some 65 others in the 14 counties of our diocese welcome persons whom Phelps says God hates.
"I have been meditating recently on my own feeling of disjunction from both godless orthodoxy and godless liberalism," Bishop Marshall said. "What offends me -- in the deepest sense of that word -- in either case is that people put causes or their own rhetoric in the place of God.
"Whether one is on the side of the angels or rooting for the other team, giving in to that temptation makes community impossible. The church is healed not by rhetoric which is incapable of humility but by incarnational encounter where words are given power because they emerge from living encounter."
The Phelps folks count on people getting angry at their large signs bearing dark and hateful anti-gay slogans.
"The more light there is in a place, the more darkness is drawn to it," Howell said. "You defeat darkness, not by fighting it -- which only gives it more power -- but by increasing the light."
So don't get angry at the Phelps folks and their incendiary rhetoric. Do something much more effective. Help to make your church truly safe for those they hate. Rather than turning on the heat, turn up the light.
"I hope that in all our churches we can be thoroughly welcoming to all who come seeking Christ and God's people," Bishop Marshall said.
Many of us know gay and lesbian persons who have experienced hatred simply because of who they are. They believe God hates them. That is what they have been told -- and they are scared of God. Try to imagine how that feels. To kill someone's spirit in that way takes a long time, and a lot of help from the culture and the church.
Some have died with that fear. Some teenagers have killed themselves because they were taught that God hates them. Some have been killed by others who were taught to hate gays and lesbians.
"They have gone to be with God," we sometimes hear at their funerals. That's frightening. What are they telling God about us, that we told them God hates them?
[The Rev. Canon Bill Lewellis is communication minister for the Diocese of Bethlehem, the Episcopal Church in 14 counties of eastern and northeastern Pennsylvania.]
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