This is Jesus’ standup comedy bit here in Luke 6. “Love your enemies” that’s a good one, Jesus. How can we do that when we don’t even like ourselves?

I guess it starts there. A healthy sense of self is assumed.

“Love your enemies” sure, Jesus. Have you heard how we talk about our friends?! The gossip. The unkind words. And these are people we claim to like! And choose to hang out with!

This teaching is hard. The hardest Jesus gives us. Accord to Amy Jill Levine, a Jewish Scholar of the New Testament, she points out that other religions have said things similar to Jesus.  Leviticus 19:18 says to “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” The great rabbi and contemporary of Jesus, Hillel stated, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”

And yet this teaching… Love your enemies… Jesus is the only teacher in antiquity to say this, according to Amy Jill Levine.[1]

We love to run to extremes. Especially in light of a teaching that makes us think. Instead of thinking about it, we run to extremes so to dismiss it.

Maybe you were doing that when we read today’s scripture: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those you abuse you.” I know I was. Oh yeah, Jesus, we think; what about the Nazis, huh? What about my ex? What about Jeffery Dahmer? What about my bully? My boss? Fill in the blank with the name you’re bringing to mind right now.

There is no name that we can put in front of Jesus that is going to change this teaching. Let us, for a moment, resist running to extremes, and meditate on just the first two verses.

Author George Saunders states that the problem with life is that we all see ourselves as if we’re the center of the universe. We think rather highly of ourselves. We try to communicate from this place at the center of the universe to another person who also thinks they are the center of the universe, but we’re not very good at it. We slightly misunderstand everything we hear, and hilarity ensues.[2]

Hilarity like most sitcoms are based on, like I Love Lucy or Seinfeld. A little misunderstanding that results in comic situations, and it’s all wrapped up in 30 minutes or less. Yet our hilarity is not wrapped up in 30 minutes, sometimes it takes 30 years if ever. The misunderstandings result less in hilarity and more in gossip, then escalates to slander, then to violence, vengeance, retaliation, and a retaliation for the retaliation. You know… all our favorite hobbies.

Vengeance and retaliation are so natural to us. We even do preemptive retaliation. We don’t like something; we take it as a personal affront.

My friends aren’t calling me, it’s because they secretly hate me. Well, I’ll show them! And hilarity ensues.

I was in the hospital for a few days and didn’t want anyone to know, and now I’m mad because no one visited or called. And hilarity ensues.

I’m feeling insecure and anxious, so I’ll act over-confident and steamroll everyone as a result. And hilarity ensues.

I suppose it’s not really funny though, is it.

It’s not that Jesus didn’t know what all this was like. It’s not like he’s an idealist, untethered to our reality, floating through life 5 feet above the earth. Jesus lived his life as an oppressed religious minority under a brutal empire. Rome was no joke. Jesus died, nailed to the business end of the cross, for saying controversial things like “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Hanging out with all the wrong people. Saying that God’s love is far wider than we suspect with our doctrines and traditions. He wasn’t killed for being too much of a nice guy. He was a threat to the religious and political powers of his day.

He still is.

This is my 231^st sermon. That’s a lot. I still haven’t run out of things to say because I’m trying to articulate some big concepts and what I think Jesus means then and now for our day. I think you know the feeling, maybe of trying to talk about big concepts.

Like for those of you who are happily married. I hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day. There are so many couples here who I just love your love. I bet you regularly talk about the highlights in your relationship. You still, after all these years, are still trying to articulate the big concept of your love.

Or you who are divorced. Maybe you’re still trying to articulate how big of a jerk your ex was. How you’re still trying to talk about what was lost and what was gained.

Or you who are in mourning are still talking about your loved one because you’re still trying to articulate the size of the loss. How you changed.

We’re doing these things because words fail.

Words fails all the time. To me, the surprising thing is not that words often fail, but that they ever succeed. That’s grace.

We bumble around, trying to perceive, trying to put things into words. We get it wrong a lot of the time… There’s no good way to estimate how much of the time we’re getting it wrong; in the end we just have to trust in grace. And extend grace.

 

We can do that with people we trust. Could we extend that to everybody? Ask clarifying questions and try to find meaning?

 

Life makes a whole lot more sense once you realize everyone you meet is the hero in their own story. Life makes a whole lot more sense once you realize that practically everyone you meet is engaged in a decades-long dispute with someone who is not present. Ian McLaren gave us the quote, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle,” now widely misattributed to Plato or Philo of Alexandria. We can listen. Seek to understand. We might just find some mutuality. In the kingdom, there is love. However, we might seek to understand and still be in conflict. That’s when things get tricky about what to do, but one thing that should never be done is violence or retaliation.

I want salvation for my enemies, and retaliation isn’t going to get them there. Sometimes the most loving thing is to love from afar.

My grandpa became an enemy. It was unexpected. A betrayal. It hurt and it took a long time to come to terms with. As I dug into the family history, I saw that of course he would act like he did based on how he was raised. That didn’t make his actions and abuse go away or any less awful. Nor did I hang out with him and become buddy-buddy.

He died in December 2019. His funeral was in January 2020. In his last few years, dementia had set in. He thought Eisenhower was president. He thought my uncle was his brother, and he seemed very happy. He died with a peace that eluded him the previous 95 years. And I’m happy for him. I am glad he finally found peace. I know he’s at rest.

Words fail to capture what I’m trying to say, and I pray that you are thinking of a similar situation. If you can’t relate at all, and you’re thinking this whole time, “What is Pastor talking about?!” Then I need you to give a sermon on how you have gone through life. Maybe I should not assume we all have enemies, but I haven’t met anyone yet without one. Even the Dalai Lama has enemies. Like… all of China. Yet he is a peaceful man who loves his enemies who are actively trying to erase Tibetan culture. I don’t know how he manages, but if he can do it, maybe I can try it.

When words fail, I turn to the artists and poets. Amanda Gorman wrote a wonderful poem entitled, “& So.”

It is easy to harp,
Harder to hope.

This truth, like the white-blown sky,
can only be felt in its entirety or not at all.
The glorious was not made to be piecemeal.

Despite being drenched with dread,
This dark girl still dreams.
We smile like a sun that is never shunted.

Grief, when it goes, does so softly,
Like the exit of breath
We just realized we clutched.

Since the world is round,
there is no way to walk away from each other, for even then
we are coming back together.

Some distances, if allowed to grow,
Are merely the greatest proximities.[3]

It is easy to harp… meaning it’s easier to complain about what’s wrong than it is to hope and articulate what one is for and work for it. Like how many people will triangulate and never talk to the person they need to. Social media is full of this. If you really want things to get better, be doers, not merely posters and complainers.

This truth you either get or you don’t. No middle ground here.

Despite being drenched with dread… The dread is unnamed. It could be the existential dread of being a future-dead person. The dread of the next variant and peak of a pandemic that seems never-ending. The dread of bumbling around and miscommunicating and misunderstanding your neighbors. The dread of current events and political division and a warming planet. The dread of the poet, a young, black woman in a culture that is refusing to reckon with race. This dark girl… dark being in skin and also, possibly, a sadness of the state of things… still dreams.

We hold onto our grief and nurse our grudges. What if we just let them go, like a breath we realized we clutched for too long?

Since the world is round, we can’t walk away from one another. This is the truth Jesus is saying when he teaches us to love our enemies. We can walk away from ourselves, so let’s do like the punk band the Idles say rather forcefully: “If someone spoke to you, the way you do to you, I’d put their teeth through. Love yourself.” Loving yourself is a good place to start.

Love your friends and family. Uplift them. Support them. Encourage them when they are feeling low. The love of family, whether biological or chosen and friends, makes living so sweet and brings so much light into our lives. Yet what credit is it to only love those who do good for us and help us love ourselves? We need to go the extra mile.

Love your enemies… do good. Pray for them. Return their curses with blessing. And if you can’t do that, silence is a great option. Forgive your enemies for the sake of your salvation, not theirs. We hope that they find the peace they are so desperately searching for. Jesus isn’t saying hang out with them or be a doormat.

Jesus is tasking us to wage peace instead of war. For the world is round, and there is no way to walk away from one another, for even then we are coming back together. Amen.

Works Cited

^[1][1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PDyISl7TGc

^[2][2] A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders. I love this book. This section is around page 274, but I recommend the entire book to you as this is like the 4^th sermon or so where I quote it.

^[3][3] Call Us What We Carry, page 25.