"Pour Yourself Out in Love"

Luke 6:27-38

A sermon preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley

February 15, 2004

University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

The sermon on the mount is Jesus at his radical best. This is where the beatitudes are located. This is where Jesus blesses and curses the people of God. This is where Jesus takes the words of the acceptable laws of the Hebrew Bible and the Hebrew Culture and tells the people that they are no longer to be followed in the new order. Rather, God’s law needs re-working.

Matthew 5 records Jesus preaching: "You have heard it said, ‘you shall not kill’, but I say to you everyone who is angry with their brother or sister shall be liable to judgement…You have heard it said, ‘you shall not commit adultery’, but I say to you, everyone who has looked with lust has committed adultery in their hearts…You have heard it said, ‘you shall not swear falsely’, but I say to you don’t swear at all…You have heard it said ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’, but I say to you do not resist the evil one...You have heard it said, ‘love your friends and hate your enemies’, but I say to you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."

Now that’s a tall order to which Jesus calls us. It’s easy to love our friends, but it’s radical to love our enemies. And it’s easier said than done.

That is what this sermon is about: our own struggle to love the enemies which encamp around us. If we can move toward loving our enemies, then we have overcome the world and we experience God is a new and powerful way.

Who are your enemies?

The Bible is full of words which are used to foment hatred of the outsider. The Hebrew Bible in particular speaks of conquering our enemies, not worshipping their gods, not doing as they do and keeping pure by not defiling ourselves by contact with a ritually impure person. It was common to hate you enemies. It was the way of the world to hate your enemies. It was expected that you hate your enemies. It was how you defined yourself as good.

Our world and our leaders are good at making enemies and keeping them. We need only look at the war on Iraq or the axis of Evil of North Korea and Syria, or to remember the old axes of evil, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba and so on. Oddly, the axes of evil never mentioned South Africa or Rwandan or East Timor where huge atrocities were played out to an unlistening world.

We are good at making enemies. Think of who the enemies might be these days: The Neocons, the Liberals, the Greens, the Family Resource Council, the ACLU, the feminazis, anyone named Clinton or Bush, even the brave people who demand the civil right to marry who they love. The list can go on and on.

Many of us are good at counting the enemies.

Who are some of yours?

If we choose to, we can get very angry, we can get so enraged, but then are we any better than the object of our rage?

Sections of the Hebrew Bible called for welcoming the stranger, "For one you were a sojourner in a foreign land." The Apostle Paul in Romans 12:20 actually quotes a verse from Proverbs when he says, "If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." And then Paul adds his own admonition, as if to soften then literalness of these words, "Don not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good."

George Bush once said Jesus was his favorite philosopher. If he had taken Jesus’ advice, how would the Iraq situation have looked. If we had chosen to deal with terrorism by feeding the hungry of the world, I think we would have gained more prestige and secured more peace than our rush to military action which feels so much like putting oil on a fire.

Juren Multmann once said, "Love of our enemies is not recompensing love, that returns what is received. It is creating love. Anyone who repays evil with good has stopped just reacting. (that person) is creating something new."

I like the way Luke tells the story of the sermon on the mount. Actually the sermon takes place on the plain in Luke. Whereas Matthew gets around to talking about loving your enemies almost halfway through the sermon, Luke has Jesus put it right up front.

For Luke, loving you enemies is key to the sermon on the plain.

For Luke, loving your enemies is central to everything that Jesus teaches.

It is in Luke’s Gospel alone that the concept of neighbors and enemies are totally realigned.

Luke tells the story of the good Samaritan who loves his enemy, defiles himself by binding his wounds, comforts him and pays his hospital bills. Jesus says that this person is now your neighbor, not your enemy. Love you enemies.

Luke alone tells the story of Jesus’ lunchtime visit to the home of tax-collecting Zaccheus. Zaccheus was hated by almost everyone and filled himself with self-hatred. But Jesus loved Zaccheus. Love your enemies.

Jesus violates purity laws and acceptable social mores about who could be considered friends and who should be considered enemies. And it was his very defilement with these people that made him such a threat.

The powers that be were not ready for one who would call us to love our enemies. For to do that would be to reconfigure the power balance as we know it in our world today.

And people know this. This radical hospitality of loving the enemy threatens the very fabric of our society. And that is just what Jesus wants to threaten. Jesus wants us to get beyond all of the warfare and hatred and ignorance of our enemies, to say nothing about the ignorance of our neighbors.

Gandhi wept when he first read the Sermon on the Mount. He was once asked about the difference between him and most Christians. Gandhi said he thought Jesus meant it.

Jesus meant it when he said "judge not lest you be judged."

Jesus meant it when he said "blessed are you when people hate and persecute and exclude you."

He meant it when he said "love you enemies and pray for those who persecute you." And here’s the clincher, "expect nothing in return" (Luke 6:35). Jesus says if you live life like this, your reward will be great. You will have a new lease on life. Your priorities will line up. Hallelujah. There is a big difference between giving to get and giving to set yourself free. The latter is giving out of gratitude and expect nothing but the unexpected.

This kind of love is different than the sentimental love that we exchange on Valentine’s day. It’s a mature love grounded in transformation. It’s a love that tries to go the extra mile. It’s a love that expects nothing in return.

M. Scott Peck in his book The Road Less Traveled says that there is a difference between the chemical, exciting erotic in love feeling that is often present at the beginning of a relationship. That eventually fades and needs to be replaced or enhanced with a more mature love. That mature love is defined as your commitment to your partner’s spiritual growth. This is the practical application of Luke’s discussion about love. Our love needs to be selfless if it is to be real and lasting.

"For if we love our enemies," as he says in Luke 6:35, "we will be called children of the Most High; for God is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. Be merciful, even as God is merciful."

You see, God is merciful to both the good and the evil. Not just to those of us who seek to be good.

The message of Luke’s Sermon on the Plain is not simply the golden rule of "do unto others as you would want them to do unto you." But it is expanded. Love your enemies. Therefore do unto others as God has done and is doing to you and to them."

Jesus rejects the holiness code of Leviticus 19 which says, "Be holy for I YHWH your God am holy." He replaces it with "be merciful, just as God is merciful."

All that having been said, though, How do we love our enemies?

Let’s assume first of all that we want to love our enemies. Or that we at least want to try to love them. For some of us that’s too much of a leap.

How do we do this? Well, there is no real easy way.

Christianity is not easy.

It is easy to hate our enemies.

It is hard work to love our enemies.

It is especially hard when they don’t want to love us—when they want to kill us.

That’s why I say it’s hard. But if we are to be followers of Jesus, we ought to be looking for ways to love our enemies.

We can’t love what we do not know. We also cannot know what we will not confront. Let me say that again. We can’t love what we don’t know. We also can’t know what we will not confront.

Loving our enemies means having dialogue with them.

Loving our enemies means eating a meal with them. Psalm 23 says thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies."

Loving our enemies means seeing them for what they are, victims of a sin-filled world just like you and I. Lost, forsaken and forgiven by God.

Stan Dotson is a campus minister in Mars Hill, North Carolina who is a good southern radical in the vein of Will Campbell, complete with all of his homespun humor. A few years ago, the Baptist Peace Fellowship had its summer gathering in Granville, Ohio. It was reported during one of the evening sessions that the Ku Klux Klan was having a rally in Columbus, OH just as the conference was ending. A bunch of folks decided it would be the Baptist Peace Fellowship kind of thing to do to organize a counter-demonstration. A bunch of us got pretty riled up about it. And then Stan, reminiscent of Will Campbell, suggested that we should go meet the Klansfolk and have lunch with them. This idea met with hot resistance from all of the peaceniks, but I think that he was on to something. It is so much easier to hold a demonstration than it is to actually get to know your enemies. You cannot love what you do not know and you can’t know what you will not confront.

Gandhi once said, "It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business."

How do we love our enemies.

Paul Tillich said, "the weakness of the fanatic is that those whom he fights have a secret hold on him."

When we come to have lunch or to enter into a relationship with an enemy, might we find out that they are a bit like us? perhaps a bit too much like us for comfort?

Psychologists say that what we hate in our enemies is often actually what we hate in ourselves—which raises the question, who is the REAL enemy?

What if we project onto others what we cannot deal with?

In this sense, we need our enemies in order to project our own inadequacies and imperfections.

Take for example Jesus’ admonition not to look at the splinter in someone else’s eye while ignoring the log in our own. It is no accident that this comes right after the passage about loving our enemies.

Could the speck in someone else’s eye be a splinter from the log in our own? We can see only the splinter because we are blinded by the log in our own eye. We can’t see ourselves.

We need to look at our own propensity toward judgementalism, our own propensity to hatred. We cannot often see that in ourselves. We need an enemy on which to project it.

Walter Wink, in his book Engaging the Powers says, "As we begin to acknowledge our own inner shadow, we become more tolerant of the shadow in others."(p.267)

Perhaps we might have the humility to say to an enemy, "Could you give me a hand with this log sticking out of my eye?" Perhaps this is what Jesus was getting at.

The radical message of Jesus in the Sermon on the Plain is that God loves us all—even our enemies, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

What God is counting on is that we can love them too. But loving the enemy entails loving ourselves. "We have seen the enemy and the enemy is us."

The challenge is in exploring how we can love that part of us that is judgemental, condemning, impatient, short-sighted, fast to anger and abiding in steadfast hatred.

Perhaps we need to be so radical that we try to love ourselves—that we embrace the enemy within.

It means knowing ourselves.

It means recognizing our blind spots.

It means taking control of our lives

It means completely changing the power-dynamic with our enemies our world and ourselves.

It will take introspection.

It will take work.

It will take our whole lives. And God is with us through it all.

That is what Jesus is calling us to.

That is the radical place of welcome that God has in store.

It is us seen for who we are and who we can become.

It is also the way of the cross, and the way toward resurrection.

Let us put off the crosses which crucify ourselves and let us embrace the resurrection which loves enemies and prays for those who persecute us, knowing that we pray even for ourselves.

Jesus said: "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?…If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you?…But love your enemies, do good, lend, and expect nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, for God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as God is merciful."(Luke 6:32-36)