We’d all be fat, but happier maybe…
Anyway, that was what Seattle pastor Mark Driscoll offered the Westboro Baptist Church when he found out they’d be picketing at Mars Hill Church’s Federal Way campus in Auburn, Washington. USA Today quotes Driscoll’s invitation to them:
Westboro Baptist Church, This False Prophet and His Blind Lemmings Welcome You to our Whore House for God’s Grace and Free Donuts…
The proposed sermon for Sunday will be parable from Luke, explaining:
how God saved a really bad man named Zacchaeus and how the self-righteous, holier-than-thou religious folks who saw Jesus lovingly befriend him stood around complaining and grumbling — or basically picketing the love of God.
Is Driscoll suggesting he aims to play Jesus in this scenario, willing to befriend “the bad man named” Phelps and tut-tut his own “self-righteous, holier-than-thou religious folks” if they get uppity about the Westboro protest? Nope. He won’t be at that service, according to the Christian Post.
Regarding the planned sermon’s content, he’s quoted by USA Today as stating, “In the providence of God, we call that a funny coincidence.” Copies of Doctrine, the book he wrote, will be there, though, to be passed out to every protester. They “can learn what the Bible says about who God actually is” while they outwardly sneer yet secretly enjoy their free caffeine and sugar high.
I know people always want to claim that “turning the other cheek” is “the Christian thing to do” but I’d like to argue here that what it really is is the human thing to do. Retaliating with the same hateful venom tends to make things worse and by doing so those people help them justify their mindset about how everyone but them deserves to be damned. That said, the more their beliefs can be mocked and made to look silly and inconsequential, the less power they’ll have over people in the long run. Fair assessment?
One Minion's Opinion 