One big life

Luke 6: 27-38
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
February 23, 2025

Photo of the scripture passage from Luke with purple, blue, orange-yellow, and hot pink colors on the page and the words "Love your enemies" highlighted in white.

Wow. This lectionary just keeps playing the hits, doesn’t it? Whenever I describe who is Jesus is to me, I usually say he’s my guru, my pain-in-the-you-know-what, a thorn in my side. Because when I get too comfy with Jesus, he tends to lose his edginess and then I lose my edginess. And the edge, the shadow places, the margins is where Jesus hung out and where he calls us to be. And that’s how he saves us. He saves us from the comfortable middle, the bubble, the place where we can be lulled into forgetting who and whose we are, where we can’t tell the difference between truth and lies.



And for most of my life, I have lived in the privileged comfortable middle. Think about this with your own life. I don’t know if I have really ever had an enemy. I’ve had people who I’ve been in conflict with, who’ve gotten my ire up, who I’ve distanced myself from, but I’ve never really had someone or a bunch of someone’s who hated me, cursed me, abused me. Some of you have. Me, not really. Not in any way that had a detrimental effect on my life, that made me a victim or a survivor or affected my ability to be employed. As a pastor I’ve been yelled at numerous times, accused of being shrill, even told to apologize to a man who excoriated me in the third person right in front of me.



To be sure I have experienced mostly gentle slaps of sexism. The senior minister at the church where I was a seminarian twenty years later attended the ordination of a young woman in the church where I was a member. I was asked to read scripture in the service, and afterwards, as we were talking, he stroked my cheek with his knuckles and said, “Good job”, like I was his daughter rather than his colleague. I wish I had the presence of mind to offer him the other cheek, along with a raised eyebrow, but alas, such thoughts usually do not occur in the moment.



So, when I hear Jesus say “love your enemy”, I know I am not who he is speaking to. In fact, for the most part it is people who look like me—straight, White, cisgender, privileged—who have historically done the hating, cursing, abusing, and slapping or ignored it, turned away from it, denied it. Jesus is speaking to, one, those who would listen, and two, to those who are hated, cursed, and abused on a regular basis. So, for those of us to whom this does not apply, let’s put aside the enemy we were thinking about before the sermon began, and focus on those to whom these words address.



Who are the vulnerable ones in our society who are hated, cursed, and abused on a regular basis? Let’s name them, recognizing there’s also a lot of intersection amongst all these people.



Children.
Elders, especially those who depend on someone else to care for them.
Women.
LGBTQ+ folx, especially youth and people of color.
Non-Whites.
Immigrants.
Working class people.
Neurodivergent people.
Homeless and unhoused people.
Disabled people.
People who live with mental illness.



Jesus is instructing the vulnerable people of his day—the poor, widows, orphans, sex workers, enslaved people, those possessed by unclean spirits—to love those who abuse them and to forgive them, but he doesn’t mean letting the haters off the hook or allowing the abuser to have access to them. Rather it’s a forgiveness that puts oneself first, that protects the vulnerable from hardening their heart and instead refusing to hate. Poet Hana Malik wrote, “Forgiveness is taking the knife out of your own back and not using it to hurt any one else no matter how they hurt you.”



Which is what God’s unconditional love helps us do. When we are loved wholeheartedly, when we are ready, we are able to heal and to set ourselves free from hate, especially the hate that harms us.



Hate comes from self-interest, which is the real enemy in this world. People will believe and do evil and cruel things if it serves a raw self-interest. Author Ibram Kendi said that the actual foundation of racism is not ignorance and hate, but self-interest—economic, political, and cultural—that is, power over others. Self-interest uses racism to explain the inequity between people, and when people consume racist ideas, this in turn sparks ignorance, fear, and hate, which leads to violence. And whether we admit or not, violence feels good, especially when we feel powerless.



All the isms, all the social, cultural phobias of this world are tools of fascism, which is the endgame of policies and government based on self-interest. Self-interest’s antithesis is self-gift, agape. And so when Jesus says to us, today, to love our enemy, we are to fight injustice with self-gift, with love. Which is why the gospel is anti-fascist. Love and be generous with those who cannot repay us. Give preferential treatment to those whom the world despises and rejects. Practice mutual care and support. Resist the urge to hate with the disposition to at least pity those whose unchecked self-interest makes for a hollow, joyless, truly miserable existence. Fill the poor with the good things stolen from them through exploitation. Send the rich away empty because they already are.

One of the most radical things we can do these days is to keep our hearts soft and to not hate. Get angry? You bet. If you aren’t scared, you aren’t paying attention. But don’t let anyone steal your joy or your ability to love freely and wholeheartedly. It’s all connected. It’s all one big life. My fate, yours, even our enemies, they’re all connected. We can pray that one day those who seek only after their own greed and aggrandizement at the expense of others will one day repent and realize they have cut themselves off from what makes life worth living. Until then, we resist, with love and with joy. Because light is stronger than darkness. Truth is stronger than lies. Goodness is stronger than evil. Love is stronger than hate. Amen.

Benediction


Go forth into the world in peace.
Be of good courage.
Hold fast to that which is good
and render to no one evil for evil.
Strengthen the faint-hearted;
support the weak; help the afflicted.
Honor all people.
Love and serve God,
rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.
The grace of our Savior Jesus Christ be with us all. Amen.