July 24 Sermon: The Ally and the Enemy
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Holy Covenant UMC
Rev. Matthew Johnson, preaching
Matthew 5:43-48
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In March, when Emily and I first visited the parsonage here, we were excited about city living … and what the prospect of downsizing was going to require of us. We were thinking we could simplify our life a bit. You know, some large, bulky things were going to have to go. Some of the things we’d hung onto for a while (only because we had the space) were now up for consideration. Even some of the things we loved may not make it on the truck. You’ve all moved, so you’ve been there … I’m sure many of you have been forced to make similar decisions.
What I didn’t consider initially was how challenging being responsible about the things we wanted to be rid of was going to be. I mean it started easy enough … we found takers among friends for many things we didn’t need. But as the move grew closer, and the number of items we wanted to be rid of grew larger, I got anxious. Ads on Craigslist went without response. People who claimed items never came to get them. The weeks continued to fly by, counting down to move day, but the pile didn’t seem to go anywhere. I kept thinking “how easy would it be just to drag all this out to the curb, put garbage stickers on it and be rid of it?”
Every time I would think that, though, I’d get a twinge of guilt … and instead think about what my grandmother, who grew up in depression era, and still practices much of what she learned then now, would say to me in nasal-toned disappointment. “Wasteful” … I kept hearing her say. Wasteful. And I’d know she was right.
It is interesting to see what habits a trash day reveals about us. Cans and boxes full of stuff that was once valuable enough that we waited in line for it, or paid to ship it next day. Some of it is still valuable enough that others will pick through it before the truck even comes by to carry it to its date with the landfill. Take a trip to one of those landfills and you’ll see clearly how much we discard. And we do it because it is easy. It is much easier to get rid of that one thing than it is to fix it, upgrade it, or slow down our life to match. It is cheaper. It takes less time. A lifetime of planned obsolescence has taught us that lesson.
But there is a dark, shadowy side of this worldview. A culture that is trained to get rid of stuff instead of fixing it when it is broken can also carry that value over into other parts of life. The way we treat things can easily become the way we treat people. The way we treat costly repairs can easily become the way we approach costly relationships. And life becomes a commodity. Relationships become issues. This should be problematic for Christians everywhere, considering Jesus spent a great deal of time working to build and redeem costly relationships … to love all people.
Yet I am just as guilty as any other in thinking relationships are disposable. Especially relationships with people I can’t understand … with people who can’t understand me … with people who disgust me … with people who I disgust. I’d rather cut myself off from the world than have to do the hard work of loving all people. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read or heard the words of Jesus in the gospel we just shared and wanted to tear the page from my Bible. And after a few bouts with friends who treated me as an enemy, I sent Andrew a half-joking note in which I considered mounting an effort to remove “love all people” from our mission statement.
They are risky commitments that leave me carrying a burden. They leave me vulnerable. They ask too much ask so much of me. I’d dare even say I sometimes think they are impossible.
Love my enemies? Love the people who have injured me? Love the people who have stolen my faith in humanity? Really, Jesus, you want me to set myself apart from the world by loving everyone the way I love those who love me? You want me to be perfect as God my parent is perfect? I sometimes think that is impossible.
The frightening violence and hurtful rhetoric centered a few blocks north from here … do I really have to love the people involved in all that? The terrorist who — in some twisted version of our faith — committed the atrocious acts of mass murder in Norway … do I have to love him? My own cousin, who earlier this week spewed poisonous venom about “gays destroying this country” on his Facebook wall … do I have to love him?
Sometimes I think Jesus is asking the impossible. And I would just assume take this out of scripture all together. Like the religious in Jesus’ day, I could just practice loving those who I define as my neighbors … those who are part of my community of friends and immediate family. Because that’s hard enough. Because, for a person who practices a faith based in peace and love, I sure do I have a lot of enemies.
I’m guessing you do, too. And I bet many of the wounds are still fresh. There are enemies of our way of life; of our bank accounts; of our status; of our love; of our dreams; and our ambitions. There are enemies of our faith. There are enemies of our politics and economics. There are enemies of our justice and our hope.
But the kicker … my great struggle with the love I am asked to live and give … is that Jesus himself faced these kind of enemies; enemies who would try and inhibit him from acting with justice; enemies who would rather have him arrested and killed than change in the ways he was teaching. So why does he ask us to love this way?
I can come to no answer apart from one that has Jesus seeing each and every person as his sister and brother … one in which he sees every life as something that is precious to God … one by which he values every relationship (even ones founded in hate and brokenness) as a conduit through which grace can be shared.
The law, as it was written, respected this. But along the way it had been reduced. It was re-interpreted to match one the religious could fundamentally follow. And in the process, the religious began doing perfectly acceptable things that broke people and threw away relationships … encouraged a disposable humanity … all under the guise of them being “enemies.”
Jesus saw this both as an abuse of the law and the relationships of community which the law was supposed to uphold and protect. For Jesus, the law was established so that the descendants of Abraham would have adequate practice in embodying the New Earth when it arrived in full. In that New Earth, every relationship is important, because our God is a relational God, and God’s creation is to be a relational place. It is a place where love pours out on all people … not only those with whom we choose to share. In the New Earth, there is no room for the rugged individual — the one who takes care of self while denying others, Jesus says.
We are to no longer make trash of each other, because we are all valuable to God. If you are going to dispose of anything, Jesus says, it is to be the things that get in the way of us living in right relationship with God and humanity. If we are going to discard anything, we are to throw out our excuses for not living in the same kind of love God has for us.
In much the same way that we struggle with Jesus’ words today, the people to whom he was speaking were bound to be flabbergasted by them. Among them were the uber-religious who had defined the very rules he was trashing. And, even those who weren’t were at least schooled enough to know what those leaders taught and practiced. Much of the pharisees’ interpretation of the law and their practice of it was built around the hope that, if they could live pious and holy lives, God would act by giving them a decisive victory over the Romans so they could be a people again. If they purged themselves of the enemies of their morality, they would restore their nation to its former glory. But Jesus says it was a lack of love that had them lost and losing. It was their practice of making enemies that was putting God’s beloved children in the gutters at an alarming rate. The Romans didn’t have to work terribly hard at repressing Israel’s population, because the religious were doing a good job of it themselves.
While our excuse may be a culture built around planned obsolescence, the words of Jesus beckon us to return to God’s way of life and community in the same way they did for those who heard his sermon the first time. As both our strong prophet and good leader, Jesus desires for us to live in a love that wastes nothing of the precious gifts we have in each other. In our togetherness, we form the image of God and become a beacon of hope for a world captured by fear and selfishness. Grace and hope are found in the completeness of who we are with each other … on who the broken pieces are when they are unified like that of a mosaic.
But to do that, the hate must end. And it must end with us … both the hate that leads us to violent words and deeds, and the hate that leads us to apathy. As a people who have been embraced by a love unmatched, should we not embrace the world just the same? As a people who have been received in grace, should we not share of the abundance we have been given?
Responding to hate with hate only intensifies its existence and power in us. Why does evil continue? Because we perpetuate it. Why do wars continue to happen? Because we choose to fight them. Gone are the days of blaming evil on a legion of demons and angels. The powers and principalities no longer fight our battles. We fight them, we start them and we continue them. If we are to be a community that practices love for all people, we have to stop believing in the law of humanity that says we must fight. We have to be strong enough to say this is not reality. This is not God’s reality. There is no invisible force pushing us in perpetuity. It is us and by the Spirit of God we are liberated to end it.
If we live in this reality … if we live like love is the only way … what is evil will be exposed. What is wicked will separate from the person in whom it lived. It will lay there in a pile on the ground … leaving us all wondering “Why did that control us so much? Why did that turn us against each other? Why did it define us and break us apart?”
If what Jesus says is true … if what Ghandi and Dr. King practiced is true … there is nothing more powerful than love to reshape us; there is nothing greater than love to transform our relationships and our persons. If we love our enemies, redemption becomes possible when it was once impossible.
Deep in the soil of grace, love grows and tangles us up in a kind of reconciliation that resurrects us to the humanity that we’ve each had all along. Of course, we are not going to change the culture of discarded relationships and throw-away people overnight. But the strange collection of people who follow Jesus called the church can – and should – work at making little dents in that culture through each and every congregation, group and individual.
So, for as much as I struggle with it, I must keep at it. And I am counting on everyone here to love me enough to help. I am counting on everyone who hears this to help each other in the endeavor of love. By grace, it is possible. We can start in Boystown. We can live it in Uptown. We can take it to downtown. It is possible. We can transform our language so the only sides are North, South and West … not right or wrong … villains or victors. It is possible.
We can embody a life where parties don’t refer to politics, but rather the times when we celebrate the great gift we have in each other. I say it aloud so I will hear it. It is possible. If we love, the promise of God will come. Swords will become plows. Warships will become lifeboats. Missile silos will become grain stores. If we love, the promise of God will come. The gold will adorn the streets, not appendages. Stomachs will grumble from satisfaction, not hunger. Equity will be an experience, not a retirement fund. If we love, the promise of God will come. Pronouns of gender will lose their power, color will no longer define class, and sexuality will finally be seen as a good gift.
If we love, the promise of God will come. So let’s love all people, church. Let’s love up those who want to define themselves by being our enemies. Let’s love up those people who see the world through the distortion of evil. Let’s love ‘em up until the hate dries up, and all we have is one another. Because of God, I trust that is possible. Amen.
Tags: Matthew
