Epiphany 7C
February 24, 2019
Luke 6:27-38
INTRODUCTION
Last week I
asked you to define for me what blessings and woes were. I was so interested in
your answers, that I decided to do the same thing this week, with of course a
different question. This week, I wondered about enemies. I’m not going to ask you to tell me examples
of enemies, but did wonder if we could start by trying to define enemy. What is an enemy? What makes someone an
enemy? [wait for answers]
The reason I
ask, is that two of today’s texts will give us good reason to reflect on this
question today. First, our reading from Genesis is the end of the Joseph story.
You remember that story? Joseph, the favored son of Jacob who is hated by his
brothers, is sold into slavery by those brothers, and brought to Egypt. Through
a series of ups and downs, Joseph ends up the second most powerful person in
Egypt, which puts him in a position to save his brothers from famine several
years later by bringing them to Egypt. Today, when Joseph has every reason to
get revenge on his brothers, he doesn’t treat them as enemies – instead, he
offers forgiveness. And then of course in our Gospel reading, Jesus will
continue with his sermon on the level place, preaching about loving enemies,
turning the other cheek, and the Golden Rule. Both are stories about mercy,
love, and forgiveness – not always easy things to live out! So as you listen,
try to think of a relationship in your life in which mercy and forgiveness might
be something to strive for, and whether these stories might help you get there.
Let’s listen.
[READ]
Grace to you and peace from God our
Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
I was a very
clever and somewhat sassy teenager, who was always on a quest to outsmart my
older brother. I remember once when I smacked him back after he had hit me, and
my defense was, “Well, if he was following the Golden Rule, which of course I assume he was, and he was doing unto me
what he would have me do unto him, then he clearly wanted me to hit him. So I’m
just following his wishes.” I’m not sure I ever saw such a look on my mother’s
face! (I thought she would at least be impressed by the clever logic. She was
not.)
Ah, the Golden
Rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Some version of it
appears in every major world religion, and today we hear one of the times it comes
out of Jesus’ mouth, right along with the equally famous mandate to “love your
enemies.”
We know them so well, but even still,
we sure find justification not to follow them. Like 13-year-old Johanna, we
find all kinds of logical reasons not to love certain people – their
background, their family, their ethnicity, their sexuality, or their economic situation
might all play a role, but probably most often we find people difficult to love
because of their history of behavior. That is, we have either deemed them not
to be worth the energy it takes to love, or they have hurt us or someone we
love too badly, or they have not appreciated our love in the past so why keep
trying, or they bring something up in us that makes it very difficult for us to
love them.
But would we call these
difficult-to-love people “enemies”? For me, that word, “enemy,” is another hold
up to following Jesus’ mandate. It’s not so much that I’m not willing to love
my enemies, I tell myself, as it is that I don’t think I have any enemies.
Because “enemy” brings with it a connotation of hatred, and even a desire to do
violence or harm to another – and I don’t have such strong negative feelings as
that toward anyone!
So maybe the first thing we need to
do, before we can even think about following Jesus’ commandment to love our
enemies, is to figure out what exactly an enemy is, or who it is, so we can
then figure out what is required to love them.
Theologically speaking, the Enemy is
sin, the sinful human condition, which causes us to turn away from God and act
in ways that bring about brokenness in our relationships with God and others,
rather than the healing and wholeness God desires. With that in mind, someone
might be seen as an enemy if something about our relationship with or
perception of that person stands in the way of us living out the gospel, living
in the way God calls us to live. Let me say that again: someone might be seen
as an “enemy” if something about our relationship with or perception of that
person keeps us from living in the way God calls us to live.
Can you think
of people like that? They are the ones about whom we have developed some
assumptions and expectations that they will
act a certain way. Then whenever we interact with them, we assume they will act
that way again, and so we go into our interactions with them with loins girded,
ready for battle. They are the ones who “are always that way, not matter what I
say or do,” and so then it is no surprise when, in our interactions, they
behave just exactly as we expected them to.
I worked with
someone like that once. Shortly after we began working together, we had a big,
hurtful blow up that left me physically shaking. We could not truly hear one
another, and I felt like he did not even care that he had hurt me (and he
probably felt the same about me), and that he had no interest in improving the
situation, despite my efforts. After that initial blow-up, every single time I
received an email from him, I could feel my anxiety go up, and my heart would
start pounding. “He’s mad about something,” I would think. “I’ve done something
to make him mad.” Even if the correspondence was completely mundane in nature,
I still assumed there was some edge to it. Because my anxiety was up with every
interaction, and I expected anger from one or both of us, I did not always
respond to him in the kindest or most charitable way. I seldom assumed the
best. No surprise, our relationship never improved; in fact, it ended in tears
and anger.
Can you think
of a relationship in your life like this? Someone who you assume will act a
certain way, and so they always fulfill your expectations? Someone who seems to
bring out the worst in you, rather than the best? Someone who, when you interact
with them, you find it difficult to practice more loving, gospel-like
behaviors, like compassion, or empathy, or simply sitting with another in their
pain and listening, or even seeking forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation?
We all have
triggers – those buttons that someone just really knows how to push to raise
our anxiety and get us worked up. You may not call these people enemies (I
would not call the person I mentioned an enemy, for example)… but I do think
these are the people Jesus wants us to try to love, treat with the compassion
we’d want to be treated with, and even, forgive. These are the interactions
Jesus wants us to rise above, so that we do not get derailed in our efforts to
live out the gospel of life, love, healing, forgiveness, grace, and
reconciliation – even with people we’d rather not have to interact with at all.
It’s a pretty tall order! (Most of
Jesus’ teachings are!) The Lutheran tradition has a very helpful resource to
help us with this. It’s right in the Small Catechism that many of us studied or
even memorized in confirmation class. It is Luther’s explanation of the 8th
commandment, “you shall not bear false witness.” With Luther’s explanations,
you may remember, there is not only a “you shall not,” section, but also a
“what you should do instead.” So regarding bearing false witness, Luther
suggests that, “We are to come to our neighbor’s defense, speak well of them,
and [now this is the kicker] interpret
everything they do in the best possible light.” In other words, rather than
presupposing malice or selfishness in their words or actions, presuppose the
best intentions. Assume they are doing the best they can under the
circumstances. Assume that if they are acting hurtfully, they are probably
doing so because they are, themselves, hurting.
Like think of this: you’re in
Wegmans, reaching for a bunch of bananas, and you accidentally bump the person
next to you, knocking her bananas out of her hand and onto the floor – and she
immediately begins screaming at you for being so inconsiderate! What might your
first reaction be? You might yell back. You might be stunned into silence. You
might take it personally. You might find yourself thinking, “Geez, lady, calm
down! Man, what a jerk. She is so tightly wound, she must have no friends!”
But now, try to interpret the same
situation “in the best possible light.” She starts yelling, and you think, “Hm,
she seems really stressed. She must be having a really bad day, or have
something big going on in her life. Maybe she’s recently lost someone, or lost
her job, or her kid just got expelled. Whatever the case, she must really be
hurting, and this was the final straw.” What sorts of different emotions do you
have toward the banana woman with that assumption, rather than the assumption
of malice? Do you find it easier to have compassion for her? Not pity, but
compassion – like, can you recall some time when you, too, felt the weight and
stress of the world and were short tempered as a result? Do you feel her pain
with her? Do you find it a little easier… to love that high-strung banana lady?
Now, apply that to that person you work
with, or your annoying neighbor, or Donald Trump, or Chuck Schumer, or your spouse…
This is the sort of love that changes
the world. Jesus is right – it is easy to love the people who love you. It’s
easy to love people who think and believe like you do. It is easy to be kind to
people who are kind to you. But being a disciple of Christ requires more. Being
a disciple of Christ means that you do what is needed to bring healing to the
brokenness of the world, and love into the hatred, and light into the darkness
– not just because it’s a nice thing to do, but because that is what Christ did. Being a disciple of Christ means figuring
out how to cultivate life where death threatened to win, because that’s what Christ did. Being a disciple of Jesus means
loving our enemies, and doing unto others as we already had Jesus do unto us.
That is what will heal the world.
It is a daily discipline. Loving our
enemies must be practiced in the most mundane interactions at Wegmans, and when
we’re watching or reading the news, and in our relationships at work, and in
our families, and in our churches. It is a practice, and one at which we have
failed and we will continue to fail. Yet for all the times we fall short, God
never does. As many times as we assume the worst in our neighbor, and fail to
love them, we still come here each week with hands outstretched, asking for
forgiveness, and being given a morsel of bread with those words, “My body
broken, and given for you.” My grace, given for you – to heal your own
brokenness, so that you, too, might go forth to love and heal the world.
Let us pray… Loving God, you showed us how to love our enemies by your son, who forgave
his accusers and adversaries right from the very cross on which he died. Give
us the insight we need to view people and their actions in the best possible
light, so that we might be compelled not toward judgment, but toward
compassion. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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