Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Please pray with me.
Prepare our hearts, O God, to accept your word. Silence in us any voice but your own, that hearing we may also obey your will through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
And now a reading from Matthew 5, verses 38 through 48.
You have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, do not resist an evil doer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, give your coat as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to the one who asks of you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you. You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven. For he makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.
For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same.
Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. This is the word of the Lord.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Good morning.
It's a joy to be with you all this morning. And I bring greetings from my community of faith in Fayetteville, Georgia. And I will try to hold back the y' alls as much as humanly possible.
There are some teachings of Jesus that I think we would rather not be in Scripture.
And this is one of those that is tricky.
And it's tricky because some people who are in the position that I am in right now that preach this text have used it to hurt other people.
And it would be wrong to not acknowledge that text about turning the other cheek and putting up with abuse have not been used particularly with women, but also with minorities and other people in oppressed groups to keep them down. And to say, you can't stand up for yourselves, that is not what Jesus is talking about in this text.
What is Jesus talking about?
Who are our enemies?
I think maybe the last few years have brought that into a sharper relief for me than I thought about previously.
We had an incident right after the fires when our house burned down, where somebody became an enemy that we weren't expecting.
And I really had to wrestle with what to do, how to respond, especially how to Respond at a distance when I wasn't in the room with this person.
And all of my great training and interim pastor work around conflict resolution just wasn't possible.
Not to mention it was me and my house and my family that was at threat.
Who are your enemies?
Who are the people that you have developed a deep hatred for?
And maybe it's not a hatred that you even know that you have, just something that eats away at you.
Maybe you're thinking, well, Allie, I don't have enemies. Well, the sermon might not be for you, but I think Jesus has a way to see into our lives and into who we are and into the struggles of humanity that even on first reading, we don't notice ourselves.
When I was in Tommy and Kim Givens small group, I was introduced to Wendell Berry. He's a poet and a short novel or he writes novels too, but a short story writer from Kentucky. He's also somebody that spends a lot of time farming.
He wrote this called the Hidden Wound, and he's talking about racism and his experience as a white man living in Kentucky.
He says if the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself.
And later, he continues, but the wound is there, and it is a profound disorder.
As great as the damage in his mind as it is also in society.
This wound is in me as complex and deep in my flesh as blood and nerves.
Living back in Georgia, where I grew up, and ministering in a community where our neighbors are increasingly more diverse, I see the sin of racism. I see the woundedness of racism not. Not in myself only, but in the society.
And it's given me a lot of pause to think about what this idea of hatred and enmity is.
It's small things, almost.
You don't even see them happening.
And all of a sudden you start to feel like something isn't right in the relationship.
And then when larger things happen, when people are excluded from a community, when people's homes are not taken care of and other people's homes are taken care of, where even in the town that I live in, up until the 1990s, black people weren't allowed to buy homes in the town, This kind of woundedness that Wendell Berry talks about, it's pervasive and it's as deeply embedded as our nerves and our blood systems, which those of you that are in the medical field, in the room, you know how profound the connection is.
It's not something that you can take out with A scalpel when Jesus is speaking the Sermon on the Mount, when he's got this crowd gathered before him.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew is trying to draw parallels to Moses, Moses presenting the word of the Lord, the law, the gift of the law to the people of God.
In the same way Jesus is gathering people to receive this gift of the law.
And Jesus has his share of enemies in the story.
The Pharisees and the Sadducees are constantly following Jesus around, saying, why are you healing on the Sabbath?
Why are you teaching things that we don't teach?
Why are you calling yourself the Son of God?
And time and time again we see Jesus engaging with the Pharisees, asking questions, being veiled in his responses to them.
But he never just walks away, he never says, I'm done with you Pharisees.
And he keeps engaging with them and stays in that community up until we come to the story of the trail in the garden.
And Jesus takes this idea of not having an enemy, of not allowing hatred to develop in his heart and pushes it really far forward to a place that I wouldn't feel comfortable with because Jesus is now willing to take on this non violence all the way to the cross because there's something that he loves about his enemy, there's something that he sees in the person that persecutes him, that still says that person is in the image of God.
Jesus is willing to walk the hill of Golgotha bearing physical beating marks from his enemies, loving them to the end, saying on the cross, father, forgive them, for they know not what we do. They do.
Man, that's a hard story.
And isn't it good news because that woundedness that we all bear because we carry the sin of hatred in our hearts from different things that have happened in our lives, from different hurts from the community that we live in, we aren't perfect.
We need to be complete.
And somehow in the act of love, in the act of love, particularly of our enemies, we are being healed and made whole.
John Lewis, the congressman and civil rights worker, he grew up in Troy, Alabama.
And we used to have this book, and I don't know if it's still in the bookcase that Jonathan, you made, but it's called Preaching to the Chickens.
It's a children's book.
It tells the story of John Lewis when he was a little boy who was growing up in the black church and his grandfather was the preacher and he had this to preach in him from a very young age. I know we've seen our kids have that Same kind of passion that develops really early on.
And so John Lewis, he would go outside and his chore was feeding the chickens and he would preach to them.
And his whole family knew that John was having church.
Well, John, at an early age he was inspired by Rosa Parks and he started attending non violence training classes.
He started learning strategies for what to do when you were at a sit in counter and somebody got right in your face yelling at you how to not respond violently.
John Lewis started preaching to other people and encouraging them and leading them.
He wrote to Dr. King and Dr. King sent him a ticket to go up to Montgomery to participate in the bus boycott that he was leading there.
John Lewis eventually became the leader at a very young age of sncc, organizing Committee for Non violence in the Civil rights movement.
And then John Lewis was the leader of a group of 600 that walked in Selma on their march to Montgomery.
And he led them across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a bridge named for a Civil War general and a clan leader later.
And when he got to the other side of the bridge, there were police officers with clubs and one of them beat his head in.
And John Lewis was unconscious.
And after that, in his 20s, John Lewis recovered, and he kept at it.
You may have seen John Lewis dancing to a Pharrell song, Happy.
As a congressman, he was famous for saying he wanted to get in some good trouble.
But he understood so profoundly that by loving his enemies, he was healing not only himself, but the community that he loved so much.
John Lewis was willing to put himself on the line because he believed that much in this command of Jesus, a command that he picked up when he was practicing preaching the Sermon on the Mount to some chickens.
He held onto that.
You know, Dr. King once said to John, you have to love your enemies. You have to love the hell out of them.
Now on first reading, you think you just have to love them a lot. But I actually think Dr. King is saying you need to love the hatred out of them.
You need to love them so well that they are healed.
Because how Jesus ends this passage, he says, be perfect.
While Pam King can give you a dissertation on being perfect, it actually means being complete, being whole, being healed.
So Jesus isn't saying, go do this perfectly, go love your enemies perfectly. No, he's saying, practice it, do the work to continue to make it happen day after day, interaction after interaction, because that brings healing and wholeness.
Karl Barth, also familiar with enemies, writing against Hitler and trying to disentangle a church that had become so wrapped up in the power of government that it no longer could maintain its prophetic witness of speaking the truth of the gospel to those in power.
He wrote about this passage of love of enemies. And he said, the love of enemies destroys the whole idea of a friend, foe relationship.
Because when we love our enemy, he ceases to be our enemy.
Because we know them, we know something about them.
They might drive us crazy. They might do things that we find despicable. Despicable. But we start to see that just like us, they contain multitudes.
They bear the image of God.
In loving our enemy and reconciling with them piece by piece, we are enacting what Jesus taught us to do.
So, friends, this morning I encourage you to follow the example of John Lewis, to follow the words of Jesus, to make some good trouble.
Good trouble for yourselves. Good trouble to heal this woundedness in ourselves. That hatred just eats away at who we are.
Good trouble to love and follow in this command and way of Jesus that is difficult and hard.
And good trouble to love the work of peace.
For, as Jesus said, blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
