Love Your Enemies

This is the sermon that I gave on Sunday, May 12, which was Mothers' Day in the US.

Love Your Enemies.  Really?

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

May 12, 2013

Scripture:  Matthew 5:43-48

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

I was going to start this sermon by saying that no one ever said that being a Christian was easy, but as soon as I thought that I realized that I couldn’t say it.  It’s not true.  A great many people think that being a Christian is very easy.  A great many pastors and preachers present Christianity as being very easy.  They say:  Realize you’re a sinner.  Repent.  Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior.  Done.  Problem solved.  You’re saved, and now you can relax.  Easy.  So I can’t start this sermon by saying that no one ever said being a Christian was easy.  People make being a Christian—of sorts at least—easy all the time.

Which absolutely does not change the fact that being a Christian, a real Christian, a truly faithful Christian, isn’t easy.  It just isn’t.  It isn’t because being a Christian means more than anything else following Jesus.  Not believing the right things about him, but following him.  Believing in Jesus is easy.  Listening to him and living the way he taught and showed us is hard.  It’s really hard.  It’s really hard because the life that he taught us and showed us turns everything we understand about the world on its head.  Do you know what a revolutionary is?  A revolutionary is someone who wants the world to revolve, to turn.  To turn upside down.  Jesus was a revolutionary.  That kind of revolutionary.  His teaching turns the world upside down.  He wants us to turn our world upside down, and that’s not easy.  It’s really, really hard.

Many of the things Jesus tells us to do are hard, but today I want to talk to you about what may be hardest of Jesus’ teachings of all.  We just heard it.  “Love your enemies.”  I don’t know what your reaction to that teaching is, but mine is:  Really?  You’re telling me to love my enemies?  Really?  You’re telling me to love people who hate me?  Really?  You’re telling me to love people who want to kill me?  Really?  I don’t want it to be true.  I don’t want Jesus to have said it.  It makes no sense.  I don’t love people who hate me.  Almost no one loves people who hate them.  We hate those people.  That’s the only sensible thing for us to do, to return hatred for hatred, isn’t it?  People have always done it.  We can’t not do it.  Really?  You want me to love my enemies?  Really?

“Really?” has pretty much been the reaction of virtually all of Christendom since very early in the history of our faith.  At least since Christianity became the established religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE Christians have asked Really? about Jesus’ commandment to love our enemies.  For the most part Christians have answered their Really? with a no, not really.  Jesus’ love your enemies commandment is one of his most widely ignored and disregarded sayings.  Christians on the whole have not loved their enemies any more than any other people have.  O yes, sometimes we convinced that we were loving our enemies even as we have tortured and killed them.  We did it because we love them, we’ve said.  We did it for their own good, we’ve said.  We did it to save their souls, we’ve said.  Or we say we love the sinner and hate the sin as we have condemned and excluded people different from us.  Mostly, however, we don’t even bother with such pretenses.  We just hate our enemies as much as anyone else does.  We certainly don’t love them.  We ask Jesus Really?  We’ve got to love our enemies?  We answer for him no, not Really. 

Yet there his commandment of love is.  Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you he says.  We don’t like it.  We ignore it.  But today I ask:  What if we were to stop ignoring Jesus’ command to love our enemies and lived into that command instead?  What would that look like?  What would we have to do?  How could we start?  In one short sermon I can’t do more than suggest a starting place, and here I think is a good one.  The Church of the Brethren, one of the historic peace churches that has not turned its back on Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence the way most of Christianity has, puts out a bumper sticker that reads:  “When Jesus said ‘Love your enemies,’ I think he probably meant don’t kill them.”  Yeah, probably.  Don’t you think?  Don’t you think that love means at least don’t kill? 

There is no doubt that Jesus preached and lived radical nonviolence.  His directive to us to love our enemies is part of that teaching.  Christianity has mostly forgotten that teaching.  At least since establishment in the Roman Empire of the fourth century CE Christians have been at least as violent as any other people.  In our country today most of the gun nuts who run the NRA probably think of themselves as Christians and see no disparity between their dystopian world in which everyone carries an assault weapon and Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God, so thoroughly has Christianity turned its back on Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence.  Yet surely love your enemies means at least don’t inflict violence upon them. 

Today is Mother’s Day, and many of you may be unaware that the roots of Mother’s Day in this country lie in the anti-war movement.  In 1870 Julia Ward Howe, one of great witnesses for peace and for justice in our country’s history, wrote and issued her Mother’s Day Proclamation.  Hallmark would not have approved.  It isn’t sweet.  It isn’t sentimental.  It isn’t about giving cards and flowers and chocolates and going out to dinner, as nice and as appropriate as those things may be.  It is about peace.  In that Declaration Howe said:

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or tears!

Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, ‘Disarm, Disarm!’

Howe went on to  call for an international women’s congress to be held to “to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”  Mother’s Day wasn’t officially established in this country until 1914, ironically (and tragically) the year World War I began in Europe, and it had by then already lost its connection to the peace movement.  But that’s where its roots lie.  It’s about time we rediscovered them.

Today we honor the love and care that, we pray, all mothers will have for their children.  We know that not all do, and we stand with the victims of abuse and neglect in the cause of justice.  We pray for them healing and wholeness of life.  But all people have mothers.  Our enemies have mothers.  We’ve all see the heartrending pictures of mothers in inconsolable grief over the deaths of their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons killed by acts of violence, killed most of all in war.  Perhaps if war is ever to cease in this world it will be the mothers who stop it.  Mothers who know that no cause is worth the death of a beloved son or daughter.  Mothers who know that violence never brings peace.  Violence never brings justice.  Violence brings death and dismemberment and pain and emotional suffering and grief.  Perhaps it’s the mothers who know that most of all.  Maybe they will lead the way to a recovery of Jesus’ difficult commandment:  Love your enemies.  Today we can say:  Love your enemies, for they too have mothers. 

Of course it’s not easy.  No one ever said loving your enemies was easy.  No one who knew anything about it ever said that nonviolence was easy or safe.  The world teaches us to hate our enemies.  It teaches us to kill as many of them as we can.  Jesus teaches us the opposite of that worldly wisdom.  He teaches us the wisdom of our nonviolent God.  He said to those he knew in life and he says to us now:  Love your enemies.  He didn’t say it was easy.  He just said do it.  Will we?  Amen.