The Glory of Jesus in Learning to Love our Enemies

Transcription

Well, good morning, my friends. It is good to see you this morning. I'm Father Morgan Reed. I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church.

And today it is a joy to be with you. I love Sundays where we celebrate baptisms together. One of the joys of celebrating baptisms is it reminds us of what God calls us into in our own baptism. And so this morning is we make vows and promises together and support Joshua and Grace in their vows and promises. Take a moment to remind yourself that this is God's call on your life as well this morning. We are in the season of Epiphany together, which is a season that focuses our attention on the glory of Jesus as it goes out to the nations.

And today's gospel passage is from what's commonly called the Sermon on the Mount. And today I actually did something that I've never done before and I've heard of other people doing it, which is I actually prepared a sermon on the verses after the ones we read today. So I'm gonna talk about how this Sermon on the Mount goes into where we didn't yet get to in the passage, which is verses 27 through 38, where Jesus is going to make this claim about, you know, love those who hate you and pray for those who persecute you or who mistreat you and to forgive those who mistreat you and who hate you.

And this radical love that we're gonna find in the Sermon on the Mount is part of the glory of Jesus going out into the nations. And in Jesus one of the things that the Sermon on the Mount calls us to is to reflect the mercy and the love and the grace of God. And the radical showing of that mercy, grace, and love are to be done because what we're actually doing in that and what the Holy Spirit has empowered us to do is to show the very nature and character of God himself.

And this is what we do, that what God empowers us to do when we're baptized and given the Holy Spirit. And this happens through loving our enemies, through blessing those who curse us, for praying for those who mistreat us. And so this call in the Sermon on the Mount is to continue the the ministry of Jesus by putting God's glory on display to the nations through a radical love, a love which shows the very nature of the mercy and character and grace of God himself.

Loving our Enemies

In a world that has been broken by sin, by disordered attachments and loves, this is our call to proclaim the glory of Jesus through this radical kind of love. The first thing Jesus calls us to, in verse 27, if you have your Bibles, this is Luke chapter 6, Jesus calls us to love our enemies. These commands are written in the context of religious persecution.

These are people who are being called into the way of Jesus, into living in the kingdom, and they're going to experience opposition as a result of living life following Jesus. And so they're called to carry on the good news of Jesus in their lives, and they're going to encounter people who are going to set themselves as enemies against them. This isn't referring to people who undergo natural consequences for doing what's unethical or wrong.

This is about people whose conduct is honorable, it's Christ-like, and then as a result of that, they suffer. And if we're to love our enemies, one of the challenging things is to pinpoint what an enemy actually is. I know sometimes we're like, well, we shouldn't have enemies, but the reality is, if you've lived any time on the earth, you know enemies present themselves, right? And so, I remember back when I was, before I was ordained, probably over 10 years ago at this point, we lived in Chicago, and I was working at a coffee shop, and I had a manager who was fantastic.

We really gelled, we clicked, he used to give me stuff to do that would help benefit the coffee shop, and just trusted me. And as a manager, it was great, because I, you know, it was, if there ever were room for improvement, and there was, of course, but he would couch it in gratitude. He says, I'm grateful for these things.

There's this area that we need to work on, but also, I'm so grateful for the ways that you pour yourself out into this. Well, he left, and then somebody else came in. There was a new manager who came in, and she had been, she had had managerial experience elsewhere, but not in this industry, and that made it challenging.

So I was often met by her with criticism, not gratitude, and if I'm honest, I didn't take it that well. I didn't look forward to seeing her. I tried to avoid her, and I really kept our conversations short.

I didn't want to give her anything, and one day when she was there working with me, her boyfriend had come in, and she took a break and sat at a table with her boyfriend, and I overheard their conversation as I was cleaning, and she was starting to tell her boyfriend all of her frustrations and her insecurities, some of which were related to work, some of which weren't, and it kind of broke my heart a little bit because I realized, oh, she's actually a human being, and so as I listened to those insecurities flowing out, I realized all the bravado, all the posturing that I was experiencing were all ways of her masking her deep sense of insecurity, and that gave me a lot of compassion, and so what I did as a result, as I worked with her, I started to actually name for her the things that she was doing well. You did this well, just reminding her, right, because if she's feeling insecure, it's helpful to remind her that there are things that she does well, and what's neat is it really improved the working relationship. By the time we left Chicago, we actually were friends, and she knew that I was a Christian, and so my prayer is that that relationship was something that marks her story in some way, that she understands the love of God more because of having known me.

Now, not everything goes that well. I shared sort of a nice story. I could have shared ones that don't go as well because there's some times where we just can't break through somebody's insecurities, and the animosity towards us and the contempt just won't go away.

Now, was she my enemy? Well, in one sense, yes, and in another sense, no. She made my life miserable. I didn't want to go to work, but this passage in the Sermon on the Mount would exhort me to stay sensitive to what causes somebody to become my enemy. 

It's more interesting to ask what makes her inimical to me, not is she an enemy or not, and the reason why is St. Paul says that our enemy is not flesh and blood. He talks about spiritual forces, principalities, and powers that are spiritual and real, but they're not flesh and blood, and so because of that, people, you know, when they're not fully themselves because of their sin and their brokenness, we will experience them as our enemies, but it's up to Christ's followers to love people and things for what they truly are and what they can truly become while simultaneously praying for the healing for the ways that people have become distorted by the enemy that is actually the enemy. St. Augustine says it this way. He says, “Therefore we're both prohibited from loving in this command what the world itself loves, and we're commanded to love it in what the world hates. Namely, the handiwork of God and the various comforts of his goodness. We are prohibited from loving the fault in it and are commanded to love its nature. The world loves the fault in itself and hates its nature. So we rightly love and hate it, although it perversely loves and hates itself.” Now, it's a little confusing. What he means by that is that people in their very nature are image bearers of God, and so we are called to love them for who they are and what God wants to make them into, what he is bringing them into in their salvation in Christ. Not for the ways that they are broken. We recognize that this is not their nature, to obscure the divine image in themselves.

And so this is the way that we love our enemies, to love what is truly them. And so when people lash out at you, when they make your life harder, which is going to happen when they activate something deep in you and you're feeling a response because of something in your past, we can recognize in our bodies the discomfort of experiencing something in that moment of the kingdom of darkness and not just of them. And so we can ascribe the harm then to spiritual forces of wickedness that are warring against us and they're warring against the person that we're perceiving as our enemy.

That's trying to cause us harm. And in doing that, in recognizing that, we set ourselves up to love the image of God in somebody while at the same time hating the very things that are not part of their God given nature and what God's making them into. And so it could be a friend.

It could be a relative, a family member, could be your spouse at times. It could be a child. It could be a co-worker.

All of these can present themselves at any point as your enemy. But ontologically, in all reality, they are just distorted image bearers of God in that moment. And so the command is to love your enemy because, and what's at stake? Because that's the very thing that God does. And so we're showing this radical love as we are sharing what the nature of God is like.

Do Good to those who Hate You

So second, Jesus calls us to do good to those who hate us. Doing good is the extension of love. It's this conscious choice not to take vengeance into our own hands, but to relinquish vengeance into God's hands while taking the initiative to actually do good for somebody when they are absolutely undeserving or unaware of what's actually good. Now, I do want to give a caveat, though, as I was thinking about this passage. Sometimes doing good to others will result in them being angry at you.

This is not people pleasing. For example, if you've escaped an abusive situation, doing good to somebody does not mean going back to an abusive situation or allowing somebody to overstep appropriate boundaries when they've been abusive or unhealthy. That is not good.

It's not doing good to them. It's not doing good to yourself. Sometimes doing good to somebody involves setting and holding firm boundaries that you've established even when they don't want them.

And that's OK. Remember that by doing good, we're extending love. What we're aiming for is the restoring of God's image in that person through the work of Jesus Christ.

So good boundaries can allow us to have space to love that person well without getting caught in systems that run healthy of sin and abuse. And it's good for that other person, whether or not they're realizing it in that moment. And so with that caveat, Jesus calls us to do good to those who hate us.

And part of doing good is to remain sensitive and vulnerable. It's really hard to do because sometimes we can feel like things are going so well. I don't want to feel vulnerable.

That's scary. And I get that. I remember early on in pastoral ministry, somebody giving me the advice to grow thick skin as a pastor. People are going to come at you with this, that, or the other thing. You just need to learn to grow a thick skin. But the reality is, the more I read scripture, I actually don't think that's the way of Jesus.

I don't think growing a thick skin is the answer. And because when you grow a thick skin, whether or not you're a pastor, this is for all of us. Growing a thick skin, it keeps us from being tender, keeps us from being vulnerable, keeps us from empathy and seeing the hurt and the need that others have. Many of us are going to be the objects of scorn. We're going to be the objects of other people's transference as they're working through their issues. We're going to be the objects of their projection.

 And they don't understand why they're so mad at us. And it's something that we can't fix. Perhaps like a spouse is feeling out of control. And then the other partner comes in and doesn't tune in well to what their spouse is doing. But they make a bunch of demands about how the house should look or whatever. And that spouse is going to be met likely with and become the receptacle of a litany of frustrations from the other spouse.

And if somebody is discontent with parts of their life and then you say the wrong thing, it doesn't matter if you're married, if you're co-workers, just roommates, whatever. If something is going wrong and you come in at the wrong time and you say the wrong thing, you may have just triggered something. They're getting activated.

They don't understand what's going on in their body. And they lash out and you become the object of their contempt and scorn in that moment. You know, it happens with sermons, too. I hate to say that, but it just happens. Right? There's going to be moments where you become the object of somebody else's contempt.

Now, the answer is not to ignore it. The answer is not to grow a thick skin and let it roll off and ignore it. But the answer is to stay grounded in the confidence of who you are in Jesus. 

What has God made you to be? And as you come with that confidence, then coming to that other person with sensitivity to their experience, you can then re-engage with curiosity and kindness for that other person because of the confidence of who you are in Christ. And that is to do good to others who hate you, to engage them with this curiosity and kindness, to actually seek for the image of God in that person. To seek for the face of God when they themselves have forgotten that they actually bear in themselves something, the image of their creator, and then to show up with kindness and the kindness of God in the face of their contempt. This is to do good to those who hate you.

Bless those who Curse You and Pray for those who Mistreat You

So loving our enemies, doing good to those who hate us. And finally, I want to look at blessing those who curse us and praying for those who mistreat us. Now, the ESV that we read today, I think, well, we didn't read it because I told you we read the passage before where I was thinking we were going. But the passage in the ESV, if you were to read it, it has the word “abuse”. I don't think that's really helpful as a translation.

And they got it from the old NRSV, the old RSV. The better translation here is “mistreat”. Bless those who mistreat you. And that's what the new NRSV has. And it's costly and it's courageous to bless people who curse you. And following Jesus as Lord means that no earthly authority, no political party, no governmental structure, no institution is going to 100 percent follow the kingdom of God into these systems that we're called, whether it's your family, government, work, church, any human institution in which you are called into.

We're called to be truth tellers as we follow Jesus in the kingdom way. With Jesus as Lord, we tell the truth. And now this is bound up, bound to make us the object of contempt with somebody, to be truth tellers amidst institutions.

You're going to become the object of contempt and cursing for other people because of breaking norms that are there, because of exposing evils within institutions, shining light on unhealthy systems. Whatever it is, some of you in your 20s and 30s are finally discovering the unhealthy systems of family as you shine a light on it. It's common for you to become the object of your family's scorn as you get healthy.

And it is so easy, then, to want to revile in return. But this passage calls us to bless and to pray. Ridding ourselves of contempt as we begin to pray for the salvation of others begins the process of our own internal healing salvation and our own internal rightly ordering of our internal life.

And that involves rightly naming the wrongs of other people. It involves accurately describing the impacts of other people's wrongdoing and then praying for God to deliver those people from the bonds of the kingdom of darkness. The things that have made them become contemptuous of you.

And this is where forgiveness begins. We're relinquishing the right to take vengeance into our own hands. We recognize that this person is made in the image of God and that God actually loves this person despite their sin and their brokenness.

And that begins our prayers for them. And it allows us to bless who God has made them to be and the good desires that God has put in their hearts while also recognizing and naming the brokenness that all of their distorted affections and desires have caused. And so don't dismiss somebody's wickedness.

On the one hand, that is not forgiveness. Do not dismiss their wickedness. But at the same time, don't let somebody else's contempt breed contempt in you.

Conclusion

Jesus has called us to share his glory to the nations. This is what the season of Epiphany is all about. And we do so here in a radical love, which he calls us to in the Sermon on the Mount, through loving our enemies, through doing good to those who hate us, through blessing those who curse us, and for praying for those who mistreat us.

 And so we are those as Christians who risk, who pray, who bless, who name the truth and who forgive other people while at the same time holding good boundaries. We love other people in the face of their brokenness because this this is the kind of love that God shows to each one of us. And for those of us who have died and risen with Christ, those of us who have been baptized into him and his death and his resurrection, this is the radical love that shows God's love to the world, the world that that longs to see the glory in the face of Jesus Christ.

Let me pray for us. Almighty God, you sent your son, Jesus Christ, to reconcile the world to yourself. We praise and bless you for those whom you have sent in the power of the spirit to preach the gospel to all nations.

We thank you that in all parts of the earth, a community of love has been gathered together by their prayers and labors and that in every place your servants call upon your name for the kingdom and the power and the glory are yours forever and ever. Amen.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the author.