On Tuesday morning, I decided to preach about hate today. Which, some would say, is not a typical topic for the Sunday of Jesus’s baptism. But, in my morning devotions, I’d been reading from Jesus and the Disinherited, a slender but remarkable book by Howard Thurman, published in 1949. And the chapter I read from Tuesday morning was titled “Hate.” You see, Howard Thurman says we can’t comprehend Jesus’s costly way of redeeming love until we’ve dealt truthfully about what needs redeeming in this world and in our lives. Specifically, we must deal truthfully with fear, deception, and hate. And Christians have been pretty sentimental in our considerations of hatred in human life. We’ve hoped to get rid of it “by preachments, by moralizing, by platitudinous judgments,” as Thurman puts it, but we have not been willing to examine where it comes from and how it affects us when we’re possessed by it.