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.