On Loving Our Enemies; a sermon for the Seventh Sunday of Epiphany

Matthew 5:38-48

“You have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. 39 But I say to you that you must not oppose those who want to hurt you. If people slap you on your right cheek, you must turn the left cheek to them as well. 40 When they wish to haul you to court and take your shirt, let them have your coat too. 41 When they force you to go one mile, go with them two. 42 Give to those who ask, and don’t refuse those who wish to borrow from you.

43 “You have heard that it was said, You must love your neighbor and hate your enemy. 44 But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who harass you 45 so that you will be acting as children of your Father who is in heaven. He makes the sun rise on both the evil and the good and sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love only those who love you, what reward do you have? Don’t even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing? Don’t even the Gentiles do the same? 48 Therefore, just as your heavenly Father is complete in showing love to everyone, so also you must be complete.

Let the words of my mouth
    and the meditations of my heart
    be pleasing to you,
    Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

I have rejoiced at a man’s death.

I say this as a matter of confession. As a matter of confession because I believe that it is a central tenet of the Good News of Jesus Christ that every single life is precious, is of sacred worth, is a creation of such beauty that nothing any human being can do would ever make that life anything but beautiful.

But there are people who have done such harm to other people that the temptation to celebrate their passing rather than mourn with their families, their friends, with my own friends who love and respect these murderous, closed-minded, callous ideologues…

The temptation is great.

I have rejoiced at a man’s death.

I have enemies.

Sometimes that’s my own doing. Sometimes I pit myself against other people, sometimes as a matter of contrast, sometimes because I so heartily disagree with something they are doing or something they have done. Sometimes I declare, “This person is against me!”

Sometimes someone does the same thing to me. Or they place me in a box with other people they deem outside of their ideology or theology. Other heretics, allies, socialists, nerds, tree-huggers, gem-x, new evangelicals. Whatever. Whatever labels, false or true, make someone feel superior over another.

I have enemies.

They will rejoice at my death.

Unless.

Unless we can change the conversation.

Unless, with no exception, none at all, we can stop pitting ourselves against each other and declare that we are one body, united in Christ.

I can’t declare the rule any better than Jesus does. I can’t declare the logic any better:

If you love only those who love you, what reward do you have?

What I can do is dream of something better, imagine the possibility of a world with no enemies.

Or at least, imagine the possibility of my life with no enemies.

I have rejoiced at a man’s death.

But I don’t have to. I can fight that compulsion. I can declare, “No more!”

Rachel Held Evans is a popular author living just down the road from us who occasionally bridges the gap that is, contrary to the rest of our culture, actually shrinking between evangelicals and progressives. This past week, she reflected on the cost of pitting ourselves against each other:

I have made assumptions about my brothers and sisters in the faith, only to learn that they too have struggled through big questions, they've just arrived at different answers. I’ve spoken with twenty-somethings whose families ridiculed them when they came to Christianity and with women whose professors sneered at them when they challenged feminist teachings. Once, after I told someone he must certainly have never met a gay person in his life, he responded that his ex-wife was a lesbian and he struggles with how to raise his children with her in a gracious and loving way.

How little I know of other people’s stories. How swift I am to judge based on where we met in the path without bothering to ask where they've come from.

I’ve been thinking….

We fight like brothers and sister because we are. We've all been adopted into God’s family. 

Maybe we don’t have to change each other’s minds to lighten one another’s load by not assuming motives, by giving each other the benefit of the doubt that we arrived at our beliefs through honest searching.  

There’s a cost to every conviction.  

What mine have cost me may be different than what yours have cost you, but the sense of loss is the same.  And so is the hope that comes with breaking bread together in spite of our theological and political differences and settling into the sweet certainty that following Jesus doesn’t have to cost this.  It doesn’t have to cost our love for one another.

Not if we don't want it to.

What is it we want? What do we want for our enemies? Do we want their destruction? That’s certainly not Christlike. It’s a relic of a theology from a bygone era to which Jesus has declared, No More. Do we want their conversion? Don’t you think they want ours, too? Don’t you think that they feel just as justified by good sense and by scripture as we do?

It doesn’t matter if we think we’re right. It doesn’t matter if we know we’re right. In fact, that only makes us far more dangerous. It pits us more firmly against our enemies with no firmer footing than they have.

Now, here’s the problem with this sermon: When you leave here, those of you who think this “love your enemy” thing is a bunch of malarky, or just won’t work in the real world, will still leave here thinking that way.

That’s the problem with the sermon. Any sermon. I can’t convince you if you’re not willing to listen in the first place.

And that, friends, is exactly the problem with our world today. We aren’t willing to listen. When we find ourselves in the company of those who agree with us, we congratulate each other on being right, on being convinced by each other; we affirm our mutual belief and remind each other of the evils that surround us that seek to convert us, to soften our hardened hearts, to open our closed minds.

I’ll never convince you.

Neither will Jesus.

God help you.

If, on the other hand, you don’t think this “love your enemy” thing is a bunch of malarky, then I think Jesus is offering you room to grow. What will you do with it?

You have an opportunity to shape the conversations you share. You can not only reject words and attitudes that are hateful and grown from fear of what’s different; you can also help shape other people’s vocabulary and ideas. Refuse to have ugly speech around you. Stand up for people, even if you don’t know them. 

The danger in doing that is that it might lose you friends. But if your friends are hateful and reactionary, and if your friends will abandon you because you stand up for someone else, are they really the kind of friends you want?

You can shape conversations around you.

You can also put yourself directly into communities of folk who are not like you. That is the best way to understand what their experience is. And, oddly enough, if you spend enough time with someone, you’ll probably find that you have a lot more in common than what separates you.

Now, I am not suggesting that you go and be in ministry to people who are not like you. That still sets up a hierarchical system that puts walls up and keeps us from being in relationship with each other. It sets up one group of givers and one group of receivers, and the two cannot develop community.

We are not clients and providers. We are people.

Our best relationships happen when we share more experiences. The more you have in common with someone, the deeper your potential relationship can be.

The deeper your relationship, the more you can understand each other. The more we understand each other, the more we stand up for each other. The more we stand up for each other, the fewer enemies we have.

The fewer enemies we have, the closer the Kingdom of God comes.

Will you be a Kingdom-bringer?

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

On Being Salty and Lit; a sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Epiphany

Matthew 5:13-20

“You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its saltiness, how will it become salty again? It’s good for nothing except to be thrown away and trampled under people’s feet. 14 You are the light of the world. A city on top of a hill can’t be hidden. 15 Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a basket. Instead, they put it on top of a lampstand, and it shines on all who are in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before people, so they can see the good things you do and praise your Father who is in heaven.

17 “Don’t even begin to think that I have come to do away with the Law and the Prophets. I haven’t come to do away with them but to fulfill them. 18 I say to you very seriously that as long as heaven and earth exist, neither the smallest letter nor even the smallest stroke of a pen will be erased from the Law until everything there becomes a reality. 19 Therefore, whoever ignores one of the least of these commands and teaches others to do the same will be called the lowest in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever keeps these commands and teaches people to keep them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 I say to you that unless your righteousness is greater than the righteousness of the legal experts and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Let the words of my mouth
    and the meditations of my heart
    be pleasing to you,
    Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

What is the point of law?

See, it’s my job to occasionally ask philosophical questions.

What’s the point of law? Not a specific law, just law in general.

That depends on who you ask, I suppose.

Ask Aristotle and you come up with the idea that law’s function is to define the purpose of the state. Often, we see law as overbearing, as constricting our liberties, but Aristotle points out that the law, in fact, reflects who we are as a society.

Want to understand more about the character of a family? Look at their household rules and economics. What standards to they value and invest in?

Want to understand more about a society? Look at the laws by which they govern themselves and the priorities their legislation defines regarding their national and international economy.

Aristotle is interested in forms, in ideals, in seeing all of history and all of creation in magnificent, sweeping strokes. Other scholars, contemporary scholars, tend to seek more pragmatic, immediate definitions.

Law is designed and implemented to set guidelines for conduct and behavior within a society.

Keep us organized. Keep us safe. Keep us protected.

It’s a very practical approach to life together, unlike Aristotle’s. Also unlike a lot of our Biblical opinion.

Now, if you want it quite beautifully put, spend some time meditating on Psalm 119. It’s an acrostic meditation on Torah, a word of praise and wonder about the way the Hebrew people encountered the Divine.

On the other hand, Paul speaks about the purpose of the law, referring specifically to Torah:

Before faith came, we were guarded under the Law, locked up until faith that was coming would be revealed, so that the Law became our custodian until Christ so that we might be made righteous by faith.

But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian.

The Law kept us locked away, “confined” being a safe translation of the word, like a child in a playpen.

But now the law has been fulfilled. Another one of those words that means something different to everyone you might ask, especially in this context.

The law, after all, isn’t a cup about which we can argue whether half-full or half-empty is a more appropriate description. It’s more than a contract between two parties that could either be completed or neglected. It’s a covenant, or the mark of a covenant between God and the children of Israel.

More specifically, it’s a conditional covenant. 

Is that familiar?

There are conditional covenants and unconditional covenants. The most famous covenant is the covenant with Noah. Noah gets off the ark, unloads all the animals who trudge through the mud and populate the world, sees a rainbow and hears God say, “I am NOT doing this again!” and promptly gets himself smashingly drunk.

God doesn’t say, “I won’t do this again IF people can behave themselves.” God says, “I won’t do this again. Period.”

Unconditional covenant.

Unlike the law.

God tells the people:

So now, if you faithfully obey me and stay true to my covenant, you will be my most precious possession out of all the peoples, since the whole earth belongs to me. You will be a kingdom of priests for me and a holy nation. 

That “if” makes all the difference.

That “if” shows us what kind of a God we have.

The people certainly don’t keep their end of the covenant, which means God has every reason to reneg on the Divine end of the covenant, too. That is the expected response. One covenant party defaulting on the covenant frees the other party from holding true to their end.

But instead of walking out, God commits even more deeply.

God becomes human to fully commit to the covenant.

Because the covenant isn’t about right and wrong. It isn’t about following rules. The covenant, even the covenant of the Law, the covenant of Moses, is about God fully loving people.

That doesn’t sound like law, does it? That’s not about just keeping an orderly society. It’s not just about implementing guidelines for conduct and behavior.

It’s something a lot more like Aristotle. Rather, I think Aristotle’s understanding of law may enlighten what Jesus is doing to fulfill the law.

If the function of the law is to define the purpose of the state, then God becoming incarnate because God loves us enough to ignore our unfaithfulness, our neglect of the covenant, tells us that the kind of state, the kind of people of God we are called to be is a family of people who love each other and all God’s creation enough to forgive… and forgive… and forgive… until we’ve forgiven as much as God has.

We’re called to be people who share that forgiveness everywhere. We’re called to be people who rethink law, who rethink the purpose of law, because God has turned the law on its head.

We’re called to be a people who understand what God speaks through Isaiah:

You quarrel and brawl, and then you fast;
    you hit each other violently with your fists.
You shouldn’t fast as you are doing today
    if you want to make your voice heard on high.
Is this the kind of fast I choose,
    a day of self-affliction,
    of bending one’s head like a reed
    and of lying down in mourning clothing and ashes?
    Is this what you call a fast,
        a day acceptable to the Lord?

Isn’t this the fast I choose:
    releasing wicked restraints, untying the ropes of a yoke,
    setting free the mistreated,
    and breaking every yoke?
Isn’t it sharing your bread with the hungry
    and bringing the homeless poor into your house,
    covering the naked when you see them,
    and not hiding from your own family?

That’s what it means to be the salt of the earth. We are what make life worth living. We are what give life meaning, flavor, intensity of experience in the same way that salt intensifies taste.

That’s what it means to be the light of the world. We’re called not to reveal all that the world has done wrong. That’s not what God’s light does. We’re called to shine love into those dark places, to warm the hearts that are cold, to dispel the shadows that are the stuff of nightmares, dancing trees in the moonlight scraping long claws onto the cold walls of our midnight rooms. God’s light burns through the nightmares, melts our frozen hearts, shows us each what God has created us to be.

Salt and light. That’s what God has created us to be.

People who free each other, untie the yokes of slavery, share our bread, shelter the homeless, cover the naked, bring relationships into wholeness.

Will you do that for Jesus today? Will you be salty and lit with God’s love?

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.