To begin each of my sermons I say, “Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.”
I’m quoting the beginning of many of Paul’s letters to the various churches around the Roman Empire. It’s a greeting he uses among his friends in ministry. He shares these words, most often, with those whom he loves.
It’s easy for me stand in the pulpit each Sunday and share those words of greeting with a group of my beloved friends in the ministry. And yet, in Luke chapter 6, Jesus tells me, “if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you?”
Ouch!
February 23rd is the penultimate Sunday of the many Sundays after Epiphany, and this text from Luke’s Gospel explores a not so comfortable portion of what’s called “Jesus’s Sermon on the Plain.” In this part of his sermon, Jesus says that we are to love our enemies. We seem to have come a long way from the beautiful images of baptism, wine for a wedding party, and the abundance of miracles that Jesus performs in the other stories we’ve read during the Epiphany season.
I had the privilege of preaching during worship on the Feast of the Epiphany, six Sundays ago. I shared with my congregation that the season after Epiphany focuses on God’s glory shining through the life and ministry of Jesus. I said that we’ll see God’s glory shine through in some very unexpected things but this…? Love our Enemies? Where’s God’s glory in this hard instruction? Like I said, quite unexpected.
I know that my ears at first, hear this part of Jesus’s sermon as a “should” statement. We “should” love our enemies. And I wonder if you also think a little like me? Does your mind immediately think something like: “How in the world could I ever have the same feelings for my enemy as I do for my grandma, or my child, or my spouse? No way! My enemy is rude, mean, thinks the opposite from and can be violent! I have absolutely no love for that whatsoever. My resolution for 2025 is to get toxic people outta my life, not kindle love for them! What are you talking about Jesus?”
As I contemplated this text, I started to think of this passage a little like the salad bar at the boarding school for high school kids where I live. (Yep, you heard that right, I live at a boarding school. My spouse is a teacher and so we live on campus because of residential responsibilities).
This text from Luke reminds me of the salad bar at the school because it’s abandoned! Vacant of visitors! Passed over for the pizza bar instead! Nobody wants anything to do with spinach, chopped carrots and olives. No way! Not when there’s pepperoni, garlicy red sauce and cheese all topping delicious baked flat bread!
Of course, all of us at the school do know that the salad bar is full of good things - fresh unprocessed vegetables, healthy fats, vitamins and minerals – Even teenagers know that eating from the salad bar is more nutritious.
But the pizza bar… mmmm… fresh baked pizza smells so good.
So, if this text is like the salad bar, we know there must be good nutrients somewhere in it and yet… the smell of pizza is in the distance… Can’t we just read about Jesus feeding the 5,000 or something a little happier? A little easier to understand? A little easier even to emulate?
Friends, I’m afraid we’re going to try a few veggies.
Hearing Jesus say, “love your enemies” is really hard for us to stomach in this day and age. We can all probably easily think of an enemy or two – just think about the state of our nation’s (the United States) political and policy conversations, or really, the lack of conversations.
I know I don’t have a hard time thinking of a few folks I’d struggle to love… and I’m a pastor - it’s literally my job to love. It’s hard!
Our world has become so divided and our cultural response to those with whom we disagree is to shut them out and exclude them from our lives. We’ve been steeped in a pattern that villainizes those whom we disagree at best and at worst, we dehumanize them.
So, to stand in a church pulpit and say: “Jesus says, love your enemies!” …It feels like I’m yelling into the wind or maybe even rubbing salt into some wounds.
This feeling of despair might be linked to our understanding of this passage as a “should” text. So, I wonder how might we stop “shoulding” ourselves (see what I did there?) and instead think of this text as kale, but roasted with bacon! Because bacon makes everything better!
In more theological terms than kale-with-bacon, how might this text reveal God’s glory rather than purely convict us and make us feel like we should do something that we know we’ll never be able to do very well?
The late Glen Stassen, an author and former ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary wrote, the Sermon on the Mount (what Matthew’s Gospel calls this same sermon from Luke), “is not first of all about what we should do. It is… about what God is already doing. It’s about God’s presence, the breakthrough of God’s kingdom in the person of Jesus. It’s about God’s grace, God’s loving deliverance from various kinds of bondage in the vicious cycles that we get stuck in, and deliverance into community with God and others.”1
Let’s break that dense quote down a little bit.
When Jesus tells us to love our enemies, he’s telling us about something God is already doing. It’s a description of God’s action and God’s continued intention for all of creation.
What we learn from Jesus is that God’s truth is that God has already covered the enemy with grace and forgiveness.
God’s truth is that nobody, not even the most reviled, is beyond the reach of God’s loving embrace.
God’s truth is that God has already done the inbreaking into creation in the person of Jesus Christ and that inbreaking has the capability of destroying the cycle we fall into of creating enemies of our neighbors.
God is disrupting our human cycles of hatred and retribution by having Jesus slam this truth down about who God is: that God loves our enemies.
Hatred stops at the cross.
And as followers of the one who was nailed to the cross, we are called to bear witness to this work of God. We are called to be imperfect people, who still harbor our hatreds, but who confidently see and proclaim that we experience God at work in our lives knowing that God’s truth is breaking cycles of hatred in which we get stuck. We are living witnesses to God’s work of love. And when we bear witness, when we acknowledge God’s truth in our lives, we take a step toward breaking our cycle of hatred of our enemies.
It's ok to acknowledge that we are stuck! It’s ok to acknowledge that we don’t know how to love our enemies. When we acknowledge this ‘stuckness,’ it’s what we churchy people call confession! And God hears our confession and Jesus promises us that God is at work with us in our confession.
We are asked by Jesus this week to put our trust in God and to witness the truth that nobody, not even the world’s most reviled, is beyond the reach of God’s loving embrace of Christ’s forgiveness and mercy on the Cross.
When we bear witnesses to this message found in Luke 6, we let God start to do the work of crushing our cycles of hatred toward our enemies because we lay our hatreds at the foot of the cross, we confess, and then we let that hate be crucified so we can rise together with God in love.
These are the vitamins and minerals at the salad bar this week my friends! These are the vitamins and minerals our world needs. Let’s acknowledge our imperfect ability to love our enemies, leaving that confession at the foot of cross as we go out and proclaim from the mountain-tops that we know God is out there loving.
Let’s put our trust in this loving God who we know through Jesus Christ, and let’s see how the Holy Spirit works in us when we do - I hope we’ll have fewer enemies
+Rev. Ryan
1Living the Sermon on the Mount: A Practical Hope for Grace and Deliverance by Glen Stassen. Published by JoseyBass, 2006. - Stassen’s book is about Matthew 5, the Sermon on the Mount, which has it’s differences (and many similarities!) from the text in Luke on which this sermon is based. However, I think Stassen’s idea that Jesus describes what God is doing and not what we should do, does apply well to Luke’s text.
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