“Love: No Exceptions”
A Sermon for Feb 20, 2022
The Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan
I think many of us would be hard-pressed to admit that we have enemies. We’re good people, open-minded and accepting, trying to be instruments of peace and grace. The repeated references in today’s readings to enemies and evildoers might strike us as a remnant from another time, a less enlightened culture. And yet…
And yet our world today, including in the church and in Davis and maybe even in our own homes, is as mired in conflict as it has ever been. The need for healing and reconciliation is as urgent and necessary as it has ever been. While dividing the world into friends and enemies might sound “primitive” or beneath us, it’s pretty much what we’re hard-wired to do, which is why the advice to turn the other cheek, to practice mercy and forgiveness rather than retribution or revenge, is as countercultural and challenging as it has ever been.
Speaking from a biological perspective, treating our enemies like friends can be dangerous and even deadly. Our nervous systems evolved to focus on threats, to train our attention and memory on any plant or animal or person who tried to harm us, because remembering and avoiding those threats in the future was how we kept ourselves safe. Survival depended on it, once upon a time. Knowing that this plant is toxic and that snake is venomous and that certain animals are predators was the difference between life and death. You had to obsess a little, be on the lookout, shoot first (or maybe run first) and ask questions later. People who kept an open mind, who chose to wait and see, who believed in the potential for kindness and cuddles in every lion they happened across—well, those people probably did not live long enough to pass on their genes to the next generation.
Many of the instincts that got our species to the point of planetary dominance we enjoy today no longer serve us so well. We are still hard-wired to see dangers lurking in every shadow, to shoot first and ask questions later, to obsess over every slight and nurse every grudge as if our survival depended on it. We call people with whom we disagree toxic. We classify whole groups of human beings as predators. When things get really bad and heated, every perceived threat—from someone cutting us off in traffic to a neighbor’s lawn boasting a sign with the wrong political affiliation to the guy in the airport who refuses to wear a mask—every offense against our sensibilities becomes a trigger and leads to a cascading response of fear, rage, and aggression. Too much of the time, we are really not okay.
Even before the time of Jesus, people understood that for us to continue to succeed as a species we were going to need to change some of that hair-trigger reactivity. Certainly Jesus understood all this. Jesus was steeped in the psalms, the prophets, and the wisdom literature of his faith, the Jewish faith. He also knew his history, knew that over and over again people had oppressed and even enslaved his people. And, he knew conflict within his own community, conflict that was becoming squarely centered on him. According to Luke’s Gospel, by the time he preached this sermon he had already been driven out of the synagogue at least once and an angry mob tried to get rid of him by throwing him off a cliff.
And yet. And yet Jesus returned to the wisdom that had been handed on to him, the ethic that prioritizes love and non-violence above all else. As usual, he may have gone a little further with this idea than people thought reasonable. Don’t just love your enemies and do good to those who hate you; don’t just bless those who curse you, and pray for those who abuse you. That’s great, but it’s only a start. Go above and beyond. Forgive so completely that you’re offering your shirt to the person who stole your coat.
I love the way Eugene Peterson paraphrases the last part of this passage: “Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults—unless, of course, you want the same treatment. Be easy on people; you’ll find life a lot easier. Give away your life; you’ll find life given back, but not merely given back—given back with bonus and blessing.”
It can be easy to dismiss all of this as hyperbole, or idealistic behavior that can’t be expected of ordinary people, or maybe even as a very clever ploy to keep oppressed people down. And yet. And yet no less an authority than Howard Thurman, the great theologian and civil rights leader, wrote entire books on how important it is for even those who are oppressed to practice this ethic. His theology of radical nonviolence was taken directly from his understanding of what Jesus was teaching in passages like the one we just heard, and it influenced a whole generation of leaders around the world, including Martin Luther King, Jr. In Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman does not mince words about the evils of racism and white supremacy. And yet he argues that responding to hatred with hatred, or any form of resistance that is not centered on love and forgiveness, is unacceptable for the Christian. We really are called to be merciful, just as our God is merciful; we really are called to forgive every bit as much as we hope to be forgiven. Thurman wisely reminds us that this is not as selfless as it sounds; in the end, we ourselves are better off when we stick to love. He writes,
“Jesus rejected hatred. It was not because he lacked the vitality or the strength. It was not because he lacked the incentive. Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father. He affirmed life, and hatred was the great denial.”
Choose life, as the Bible reminds us. Choose love. Be generous. Let go of judgment and self-righteousness and the need for retribution and you will find life given back “with bonus and blessing.”
And, by the way, there are no exceptions to this command to love. Forgiveness and mercy are required of us at the personal level, yes, but also at the social and political levels. In any context, from the kitchen table to the international negotiating table, an ethic of love and non-violence is revolutionary. At any level, this ethic will upset the status quo and work against empire and domination. This ethic radically refuses to cooperate with the powers that want to keep us in conflict, pull us in different directions, keep us from coming together and changing the world.
None of this is easy, but it’s not meant to be easy. Like Jesus himself, it is meant to be liberating and life-giving—which, if you think about it, is so much better than easy.
The writer of Psalm 37 was not blind to the reality of evildoers, of people who behave badly and seem to be rewarded for it. And yet. And yet we are advised not to fret ourselves, not to obsess, not to focus our energies in that direction. Instead, seek refuge in God. Dwell in the land and feed on its riches. I hear in this psalm the wisdom of an elder, reminding us that our lives are fleeting, that what we think about and pay attention to is what grows. I also hear echoes of my daughter when she was a very young child, who once stood before me while I was freaking out, frantically looking for my lost keys and, putting her hand on her chest said, “Mama, take a deep breath.” In that breath, that pause, we reconfigure our wiring, just a little bit. “Be still before God,” the psalmist says gently. “Wait patiently.” Sometimes a single deep breath is all the refuge we need. Sometimes looking up at the sky, or stopping to feel the ground beneath our feet, is the best way to take delight in God, to dwell in the land and feed on its riches, to receive the onus and blessing God desires for all of us. Amen.
