"Lovers in a Dangerous Time" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge

Sunday February 20, 2022

Scripture Reading:  Luke 6:27-38

 

 

I need to confess that I struggled with this week’s bible reading.  The setting is Jesus’s sermon on the plain – this follows immediately after last week’s reading, and part of Jesus’s teaching the crowds about the great levelling of society.  And it begins with Jesus telling everyone who is listening to him:  “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”

 

Love your enemy.  We are to want the best for people who don’t want the best for us.  But what if my enemy is blocking an international border?  What if my enemy is occupying the streets of the capital city?  What if my enemy wants to end all mandatory masking rules putting me or my child at risk?  What if my enemy is saying hate-filled things and waving racist flags?

 

I can also flip the narrative.  What if my enemy wants to inject my child with a vaccine that I’m not certain about?  What if my enemy is enforcing another Covid lockdown and my mental health isn’t going to survive yet another one.  What if my enemy seems to have had everything handed to them on a silver platter while I have to work my behind off just to keep my head above water?

 

Our world is so divided today, and the divisions are so deeply entrenched.  Neighbour is pitted against neighbour.  Families have been torn apart.  And into this, Jesus says that we are to love our enemies.

 

Surely Jesus didn’t mean this literally, not in the world that we are living in today?

 

If we were to love our enemies today, we would be putting ourselves at risk.  My enemy might be carrying a weapon.  The people with whom I agree might ostracize me for talking to those people.  What might this look like on a practical level?  Does this look like bringing meals to those blocking the border and praying for the people occupying the streets in Ottawa?

 

The stakes are high.  On one hand, loving my enemies is risky; on the other hand, Jesus tells me that I must love my enemies, do good to anyone who hates me, bless anyone who curses me, and pray for anyone who mistreats me.  What would be the consequences if I were to do this?  Deep love is deeply risky.

 

I’ve had a couple of songs running through my brain this week as I’ve pondered this commandment.  The first one is “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” by Bruce Cockburn (click here to hear a fabulous cover version by T. Thomason).  Loving someone is always a dangerous thing to do; loving someone is always a vulnerable thing to do.  In the words of the song, “When you’re lovers in a dangerous time / sometimes you’re made to feel as if your love’s a crime.”

 

And love is what Jesus tells us to do.

 

As I thought about Jesus telling us to love our enemies, I thought about how many times the gospels tell us that Jesus ate a meal with tax collectors.  To the ordinary person living in the time and place of Jesus, tax collectors were the most reviled enemy of all.  Not only were they in the pocket of empire, collecting taxes on behalf of Rome, but they also earned their living by extortion – any money that they could collect above and beyond the regular tax rate would go straight into their pockets.

 

And instead of hating the tax collectors, instead of refusing to have anything to do with them, Jesus went to their houses and shared a meal with them.  He accepted their hospitality, food that was purchased with money extorted from their neighbours.  Jesus joined them at their table and ate their food and conversed with them.  And even worse, some of these tax collectors joined the group of his followers – people like Levi and Matthew and Zacchaeus.

 

“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”

 

This is hard, especially because I think that part of our calling as followers of Jesus is to point out and end injustice and oppression in the world.  How can we balance this prophetic call with the call to also love our enemies?

 

This is so hard, but it is what Jesus calls us to do.  If we hate those on the other side of the divides in our world, nothing will ever change.  The divisions will only become deeper.  Cycles of violence will continue.  It is only when someone steps up and is willing to be vulnerable, is willing to love instead of hate, that the cycle of violence can be broken.  Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., preaching on this commandment to love our enemies, once said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”  Bruce Cockburn, writing “Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” phrased it a bit differently:  “you gotta kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.”

 

It’s not easy, loving our enemies.  It’s easy to love the people we like.  It’s harder to love the people we feel neutral towards.  And it’s nearing impossible to love our enemies.  It would be a lot easier to hate those who hate us, and much more in keeping with the way that the world usually works; but Jesus calls us to a different path than the one the world offers.  We are to love our enemies and do good to everyone who hates us.

 

And Jesus did this right to the end of his own life.  Jesus died by crucifixion – by being nailed to a cross and left there to die through a combination of exposure and heart and lung failure, the breath literally squeezed out of him.  It is a horrible way to die.  By all rights, Jesus should have hated the people who did this to him.  But as he was being nailed to the cross, Jesus forgave the people who were doing this to him.  With his dying breath, he chose a path of love instead of a path of hatred.

 

I don’t have a nice and tidy conclusion to this sermon.  I can’t present you with an easy 5-step plan for loving our enemies then wrap it up and tie a bow around it.  Loving our enemies is hard, verging on the impossible.

 

There is a glimmer of good news though.  We don’t have to do it alone and solely by our own efforts.  The Holy Spirit, God working in the world, is working in each one of us, closer to us than our very breath.  And the Holy Spirit is also dwelling in those whom we name as our enemies.  That divine spark in us can recognize the divine spark in others, if we open ourselves up to allow that recognition to happen.  And when we collaborate with the Holy Spirit, the thing that seemed impossible can become possible.  And we will be able to love our enemies, do good to those who hate us, bless those who curse us, and pray for those who mistreat us.  We will be able to break the cycle of violence, we will be able to shift the narrative a little bit towards love, and we will maybe, just maybe, be able to lessen the divisions in the world today.

 

I mentioned earlier that I had a couple of songs running through my brain this week.  The first one was “Lovers in a Dangerous Time.”  Let me end this reflection with the other half of my brain’s soundtrack, this time coming from The Beatles.

 

“And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

 

May it be so.  Amen.

 

 

“Evan Solomon of CTV broadcasts from Ottawa on the Convoy Protest”

Photograph by Ross Dunn on Flickr

CC BY-SA 2.0

(A bit of the context for what is going on in Canada this weekend.)