Love Your Enemies – Luke 6 (2/20/2022)
A guy was out in a remote area of the Grand Canyon hiking alone along one of the trails. His footing gave way and he fell over the cliff. Luckily he caught hold of the branch of a tree and found himself hanging precariously – with the bottom of the canyon being a loooong way down. He decided to pray.
He yelled out to the sky, “God if you are up there, help me!”
The man hears a booming voice reply, “I am here, Kevin, and I hear you!”
The man says, “Thank You!! Can you help me?”
God says, “Yes I can. Kevin, do you trust me?
Kevin says, “Yes, Lord, I trust you!”
God says, “Then let go of the branch….and I will save you.”
Kevin looks down at the canyon floor and thinks for a minute. He then yells back, “Is there anyone else up there?”
When I read something like today’s gospel, I find myself wanting to yell, “Is there anyone else up there?” and this reading from Luke would very much fit into a small volume I’d like to write titled, “Things I wish Jesus had never said…” Historically I think this passage has been one of the most difficult for his followers to take up or even take seriously.
We hear Jesus say, “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you and pray for those who mistreat you.” Perhaps we wonder, “He can’t be serious, right?” Is Jesus really asking us to sit back and passively accept mistreatment and injustice? Is he suggesting we let people step all over us and do whatever they want to us? Should we pretend like nothing happened and just ignore those who hurt us?
Hardly.
Jesus is fully aware of the harm that people do to each other. He personally knew the pain of oppression and betrayal. He walked among those who had been marginalized and abused.
And he wanted it all to stop.
But Jesus – like other prophets throughout the history of humanity – knew that you cannot fight harm with more harm.
He wanted healing for the world – which even included healing for the people who harmed others. And he tried to show his followers how to do this by giving us a path that addresses harm and violence without causing more harm.
And so he says to us, “Don’t do back to them what they are doing to you.”
At this point in the conversation, I would want to say, “But, Jesus, slapping them would make me feel so much better!”
And he would reiterate, “Don’t do back to them what they are doing to you.”
Now it probably goes without saying that the counsel of Jesus rubs up against something very deep inside of us. When we get hurt by somebody, we want to do something about it. We want to react, and “loving someone” isn’t, generally, what we are interested in doing!
Furthermore, we live in a culture that tells us that violence is an acceptable response when we get hurt and that punishment equals accountability. Violent and punitive responses have become so normalized that they simply appear to be the nature of things and are considered “what works” to address conflict and harm.
So when we hear Jesus say to love our enemies and do good to those who hurt us we think it can seem so impractical and out-of-touch. That’s just not how the world works, Jesus.
I also have to say that when Jesus uses the word “enemy,” he means it literally – like the Roman army that occupied Palestine where he lived. But he also used it to mean the people who insult us, try to exert power over us, demean us, gaslight us and trigger us. It might be the people we think are stupid or judge to be beneath us. And it can be the people who have hurt us – physically or emotionally. So while you may not have enemies in the literal sense, but I’m guessing that you have people in those other categories.
And we’re supposed to love these folks?
Kazu Haga – a modern prophetic voice for nonviolence in the tradition of Martin Luther King – says that whether we recognize it or not – “violence has an impact – on those who experience it, those who perpetuate it and those who witness it…” When we respond to violence or intimidation or harm with more violence, intimidation or harm, it does something to us, and what it does is not, ultimately, good for us.
Now the reality is that few of us have had much practice with something other than violence and models of retribution. We rarely study it and seldom see it modeled for us.
In his book, Healing Resistance, Kazu reflects that something like Army basic training is about 10 weeks followed by weeks or months of other specific forms of training after that. He wonders how much “basic training” we have had in nonviolence and learning to love those who hurt us?
And I think about people like James Lawson – one of the architects of the lunch counter sit-ins of the 1960’s civil rights movement. He required the sit-in participants go through WEEKS of preparation in the theory and philosophy of nonviolence. Then they would practice getting punched, spit on and yelled at so when they got to the actual lunch counter it would not be the first time that they encountered that treatment.
Imagine if we all committed ourselves to weeks of practice and study on how to respond to harm when it happens?
Now Kazu – who I mentioned earlier – believes that “there is always a nonviolent response that is at least as effective as a violent response” – but because violence is so familiar we’re generally not creative enough to think about alternatives.
He is also careful not to get on a high horse and judge people who might “use violence or retribution as a form of resistance, self-defense or self-preservation…” He reminds us that we all contribute to systems of violence each and every day, whether it’s the wars we fund with our tax dollars, the violence embedded in the food we eat, the wars fought over petroleum products…or the suffering built into the [metals] inside our computers and cell phones…”
He goes on to say, however, that while the use of violence and retribution might be able to do some things, they are “limited in one very important way…[they] can never create, restore or strengthen relationships.” So if our goal is to end the cycles of harm and stay in right relationship with each other (which was the goal of Jesus), then hurting someone back or using violence will never get us what we, ultimately, hope for.
I saw a meme this past week that said, “I’m nonviolent in action…But I beat up eleventeen people a day in my thoughts!”
Which is why Jesus then goes on to talk about our thoughts and judgments!
Jesus was a great student of the human heart. He knew that our thoughts and judgments form the basis of our actions. When we judge people, we change how we view them.
So he offers 2 practices. Bless and pray. Again, I think we need to work at these because they do not automatically happen, and like we hear in the reading from Corinthians – we start with the human level and move towards the spiritual. But the bottom line of the practices of bless and pray is that they begin to shift how we think about the other. Instead of rehearsing thoughts that cut us off from them, Jesus encourages us to lean in and connect with their humanity.
Many of you have probably seen the Emmy award winning series called Ted Lasso. For those who haven’t seen it, Ted Lasso is about a college football coach who gets hired by the spiteful owner of a British soccer team to come and coach a sport that he knows nothing about, in a town that despises him, on a team that has no confidence in him and with a press corps that eats him alive. But Ted does not see enemies in other people. He is relentlessly kind and loving to the people around him – even the people who work against him and betray him – and he tries to hold space for them to think and act differently. At times, he seems naïve and out of touch, yet he is purposeful in not giving up on people and trying to connect with their goodness.
Ted Lasso’s approach to life reminds me a lot of people in the Transformative Justice movement. Transformative Justice is a movement to not only address an incident of violence but also to address the conditions that lead to violence. Furthermore the Transformative Justice folks work to do this without relying on violent and punitive institutions like prisons and police.
People like Patrisse Cullors – a Black queer woman and one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter recently put out a marvelous book called An Abolitionist’s Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World. Now Patrisse is someone who knows firsthand the damaging effects of interpersonal and state harm and yet some of her “12 Steps” include “Forgive Actively, Not Passively”; “Commit to Not Harming or Abusing Others” and “Practice Accountability.”
She names these steps because she wants to develop a world where we can all stay connected to each other and create the conditions and social mechanisms that say “I believe you can transform” to people who do harm – which at some level – is all of us.
Martin Luther King Jr – perhaps our country’s greatest proponent of loving your enemy and doing good to those who hate you – said in a sermon called “Loving Your Enemies” – “Now first let us deal with this question, which is the practical question: How do you go about loving your enemies? I think the first thing is this: In order to love your enemies, you must begin by analyzing self.”
This is the starting place for us today – ourselves, our lives.
Do we believe that those who have hurt us can be transformed?
Do we believe that we can be transformed?
What do we do when we get hurt and angry, betrayed and mistreated?
What do we do with our desires to punish, retaliate and get even?
How do we engage the hard work of forgiveness and release?
What do we need to study, practice and reflect on to move further on this journey?
This path that we are invited to follow today has been criticized by many throughout the years as being impractical and encouraging passivity. People might quickly say, “Nonviolence doesn’t work…” and we see this playing out around the world today. So we revert to what we know. We threaten violence to try to stop violence and the cycle continues.
I don’t know what Jesus would say about what’s happening in a place like Ukraine. What I do know, however, is that if we had been devoting as much time and energy into nonviolent pursuits as we have been devoting to violence and military buildup for the last 50 years, we would live in a different world. But this is our decision to make – individually and collectively.
Some of you may know my friend, Peter Veitch, who shared with me an article about Ari Mahler. Ari was a nurse working in the emergency room in Pittsburgh, PA the night of October 27, 2018. Ari, who is Jewish, was in the ER when they brought in Robert Bowers – the shooter in the Tree of Life synagogue massacre who himself was shot during a shoot out with police after Bowers had killed 11 worshippers at the synagogue. Bowers even spewed anti-Semitic hate as he entered the hospital. Putting aside his feelings in the moment, Ari attended to Bowers as he would any patient. “I wanted to show him empathy,” he said. Ari would later reflect, “Love as an action is more powerful than words, and love in the face of evil gives others hope. It demonstrates humanity [and] is the ultimate force that connects all living beings.”
People like Ari hold out hope for us that there is territory beyond our hurt that offers our world a new form of healing. May we have the courage to put this kind of love into motion this week – in our lives and in the world.
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