LA Times columnist Virginia Heffernan received some pushback.  She wrote about her neighbors shoveling snow from her driveway without her asking.  She labeled what they did “aggressive kindness.”

She apparently despises her neighbors because of their politics.  She compared their act of neighborliness to Hezbollah favors and Nazi politeness. That over-the-top comparison is why pundits hit her.  She also stated the obvious: “Loving your neighbor is evidently much easier when your neighborhood is full of people just like you.”

Her struggle is actually with loving her “enemy,” a startling ethic stated by Jesus. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.”  He included that in his call to perfection, a very high bar indeed (Matt. 5:44ff).  How are we to do that?

It helps to realize God loved you before you were ever aware of him, and while you were a spiritual orphan.  “How great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God” (1 Jn. 3:1).  God’s love is empowering. “We love, because He first loved us” (1 Jn. 4:19).  C. S. Lewis explains that the Divine gift to man “enables him to love what is not naturally loveable; lepers, criminals, enemies, morons, the sulky, the superior and the sneering.”

That empowering love not is not a feeling or speaking, it’s a doing.  “Let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth” (1 Jn. 3:18) and that includes enemies.  Who is your enemy, anyway?  Maybe someone despises you for your politics or religion.  Maybe your intersectionality score is low.  Jesus didn’t directly address that question, but he did answer this: “Who is my neighbor?”

Jesus told the story of a man who did what the religious people wouldn’t.  This man of a despised race helped the victim of a highway robbery.  He did it at a sacrifice to himself.  This Good Samaritan story illustrates Jesus’ charge to love your neighbor. He showed that your neighbor may be a stranger or an enemy who despises you.  Either way, to love is to be like God who loved you first.

Heffernan’s neighbor may have heard Sen. Ben Sasse calling for an end to political feuding.  Sasse said, “You can’t hate someone who shovels your driveway.”  The corollary is that it’s easier to love someone when you are shoveling their driveway.  It’s sacrificial.  It’s in their interest. And that’s why it is God-like.

To love like God loves you is to sacrifice on behalf of others, putting their interests before yours.  Know when to be generous, and allow yourself to be inconvenienced.  Listen more than you speak. Do not let disagreements about religion or politics stop you from being kind.  And maybe you shovel your neighbor’s driveway.

On a recent episode of “Real Time,” Bill Maher repeated his charge that religion is “mass delusion.”  He has suggested before that science and thinking are opposed to faith.  By framing faith as ignorant, he would convert you to his irreligion.

Here’s the full quote.  “The inconvenient truth here is that if you accord religious faith the kind of exalted respect we do here in America, you’ve already lost the argument that mass delusion is bad.”  He was criticizing delusional conspiracy theories and found a way to disparage Christians in the same breath.  It’s true that outlandish conclusions drawn from random facts and innuendo are not harmless.  But that’s not Christianity.

One of the foundational beliefs of Christianity is that God exists.  Is that ignorant? To answer that, let’s call British professor and philosopher Anthony Flew to the witness stand.  As a longtime atheist he wrote, “It is impossible to establish the existence of God, or even to show that it is more or less probable.”  But in 2004, he courageously announced a change.  He concluded the evidence of modern science indeed establishes the existence of God.

As a new Deist he wrote, “Science spotlights three dimensions of nature that point to God. The first is the fact that nature obeys laws. The second is the dimension of life, of intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings, which arose from matter. The third is the very existence of nature.”  He also pointed to the DNA genome, saying “that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together.”

Thank you, Dr. Flew for recognizing the evidence for design and the logical inference that God exists.  We don’t have space to call witnesses to explore other evidence, such as the logic of the material universe requiring an immaterial first cause and the impossible odds of the unguided appearance of the precise parameters necessary to sustain life.  Nor can we explore the questions, how is it we all have an innate sense of morality (how could a material universe that “is” place within us a sense of what “ought” to be?) and why ignore the evidence of the Resurrection of Christ?

The Bible anticipates discussions like this.  It says, “For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe” (1 Cor. 1:21).  Vocal and influential people may claim to be wise and knowledgeable, while canceling God talk as foolish.  Yet that “foolishness” contains the keys to answering the ultimate questions of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.  One wonders who is delusional, Mr. Maher.