Love like God's

Leviticus 19:1-2,9-18
1 Corinthians 3:10-11,16-23
Matthew 5:38-48
Psalm 119:33-40

When Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of Heaven, he was saying that, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, God is alive.  He was saying that God’s revealed vision of a community shaped by the laws of God to be like God, a community of justice, generosity, compassion, integrity, and love, was his vision, and that he was acting to realize it decisively.  He called anyone who would listen to embark on the journey to a new life of God-likeness.  And he gave them a way to follow that would lead them to that life, when he summed up the whole of the Jewish law and the prophets in a simple statement: “Love the Lord your God will all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and all your strength; and love your neighbor as yourself.”  But the way of Jesus went further.  In his teaching, and in all he did up to and, especially, his death, he urged us to the greatest love of all, the love that is ardent as the sun and indiscriminate as the rain, the love that is perfect like the love of God.  Jesus said, “love your enemies.”

In this teaching, Jesus confirms the message of the great Hebrew prophets who said that God is patient, merciful, and kind not just to Israel but to every nation, that every human being is a child of God, with the promise of a place at the table in God’s Kingdom.  And Jesus insists that this commandment is not for some future day.  It is not a utopian ideal, waiting for the world to change so it can go into effect.  The world begins to change now, says Jesus, because we, in our present circumstances, begin to love as God loves.

And what were the present circumstances of Jesus’ audience when he said to them, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”?  They were the daily realities of foreign occupation and colonization, of economic globalization, of mounting inequality and social control enforced by military rule.  It was a world where your superiors would strike you across the cheek with the back of the hand to humiliate and put you in their place; where crushing taxation and exorbitant rates of interest were pushing you into destitution, and a creditor could bring a poor man to court and demand his coat as security for repayment of a loan.  It was a world where a Roman soldier had the right to impress anyone on the road into service, to carry his 85 pounds of gear the distance of one mile.

And what did Jesus advise them to do under these circumstances?  Well, he told them not to have any illusions, but to recognize evil when they saw it.  But he also told them not to oppose this evil with violence.  When Jesus says “do not resist an evildoer” the word translated “resist” is a military term, meaning to form ranks for battle opposite the enemies’ line.  Jesus wanted his listeners to remember that the persons who carried out the daily rituals of their oppression were also beloved children of God, and not to repay one evil with another. 

So if he strikes you with the backhand, offer the other cheek; if he wants to strike you again, he’ll have to use his forehand, like he would with an equal.  Or if he stands in court demanding your coat, give him your undergarment as well; he’ll see you naked, a source of shame for him and a vivid demonstration of where your debt is leading you.  Or if he makes you carry his pack one mile, carry it for two, an act of voluntary friendliness that might just make him wonder if you really are a beast of burden.*   Jesus does not teach the crowd to passively accept abuse, but to disrupt the smooth operation of the machinery of evil with creative non-violent action.  Acting to reclaim the image of God in oneself, even while suffering evil, offers the doer of evil the chance to rediscover that image in himself.

When Jesus said to love your enemies, he wasn’t being sentimental.  He was speaking to people on the verge of erupting into revolutionary violence, of slipping over the edge into suicidal despair.  And he said there is a way back from the brink.  It won’t be easy.  It will involve risk, and require great courage, and patience, and willingness to suffer.  It will demand unshakeable faith in God’s love,  and its power to break down the most stoutly defended walls between people.   It calls for invincible hope in the coming of God’s Kingdom, hope even when it seems that the rule of violence will never end, even when it is clear that the struggle to break it will cost you your life.

 

On the night that Barack Obama was re-elected I listened to his victory speech.  And as he addressed a large and enthusiastic crowd of supporters in Chicago, he returned to the theme of “hope” that got him elected the first time.  He began to lay out his vision of hope for America’s future, and even though I hadn’t voted for him this time, I felt just a little moved.  There even came a point when he appeared to suggest that he might do something about the real problems facing the nation: “We want our children to live in an America that isn't burdened by debt,” he said, “that isn't weakened by inequality, that isn't threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.”  And then he went on, in the very next sentence, to say: “We want to pass on a nation that is defended by the strongest military on Earth—but also a country that moves with confidence beyond this time of war to shape a peace that is built on the promise of freedom and dignity for every human being.”

And I remember thinking, “there it was.  That was the moment where the hope died.”   Because global military domination, even by America, will never move us to the time of peace, let alone the promise of freedom and dignity.  It’s a practical impossibility, for a whole host of reasons, economic, historical, social and political.   But the reason it concerns me, as a preacher of the Gospel, is that it’s hopeless.  Jesus knew this.  He knew the Roman imperial propaganda, with its claim to be the divine instrument of world peace, and he saw what the new world order looked like where the boots met the ground.  And he perceived that the entire project masked a deep despair.  Because the premise at the heart of all such endeavors is that there is no hope—no hope that we will ever learn to love our enemies, or that loving them will do any good; it’s hopeless, so it isn’t worth the risk or the effort.

It’s uncomfortable for me to say this.  It may be uncomfortable for you to hear it.  I may even seem to be your enemy, or worse, to be rallying you for battle.  But I’m willing to take that risk, because this year you are supposed to whether to call me as your rector, so it’s important that you know what I really think.  What’s more, if you do call me, it will be for the purpose of renewing the church.   And that is going to require love, and I don’t mean the love that is the tacit agreement not to talk about certain subjects.  I don’t mean love for our friends, or our families, or our neighbors.  I don’t mean love for our country, or even love for undocumented immigrants or the homeless people in our streets.  People can find those without this [gesture around at the church building]. 

What will renew the church is that people find a kind of love here they can’t find anywhere else, love that is perfect, like God’s--the love of our enemies.  They are going to come here because here they find the way that leads the whole world back from the brink, towards health and salvation.  If I’m elected Rector I’m going to do what I can to find that way.  Just in case you’re worried, that doesn’t mean that every Sunday sermon will be like this one.  This is only one plank of my platform.  But we will work on loving each other enough to say what we think and feel about the things that really matter, and where we have real disagreements, like foreign policy and what hymns we like to sing on Sunday morning.  We will work on loving each other enough to listen.  Not all the time—that would be exhausting.  But steadily, patiently, with faith, and hope, and love—most of all, with love.

---

*This exegesis of Matthew 5:38-41 is dependent on the groundbreaking work of Walter Wink.  Cf. The Powers that Be (New York: Doubleday/Galilee, 1998), pp. 101-111.

Pluck and throw

Deuteronomy 30:15-20
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Matthew 5:21-37
Psalm 119:1-8

 

Every weekday morning I drive my daughter to school before coming to my office.  We’re supposed to leave the house at 8 o’clock, but it’s usually closer to 8:10 before we finally get breakfast eaten and shoes on, and the backpack and the lunches, the laptop (mine, not hers), the clarinet and the music stand, and whatever else we need for the day ahead into the car, and pull out of the driveway.  Then we have to make our way through the streets of Petaluma, crowded with other people in their cars, buses, motorcycles, trucks, and even trains, all of them in just as much of a hurry as we are to get where they are going.  Finally, we have to find a place in the crowded drop-off zone in front of Risa’s school, to pull over and safely let her out onto the sidewalk.

The thing that makes it possible for us and everyone else to make that journey every morning is that there are rules.  There are the ones that are codified into state and local ordinance, the traffic laws and the rules of the road.  And then there are the unwritten rules that each person makes for him or herself about how far above or below the posted speed limit it is okay to travel, or how long one should wait at a four-way stop when the driver you thought had the right-of-way isn’t going ahead.

 I wish I could stand here and tell you that I make that drive every day in a state of perfect composure, and that I have nothing but patience and respect for those people who don’t interpret the rules exactly the same way I do.  I’d like to say I have a generous tolerance for drivers who are more cautious and conservative, or more bold and aggressive, than I would be.  But the truth is that Risa gets to see a side of me on our morning drive to school that she might never see otherwise.  She gets to hear words come out of my mouth that she might otherwise not have known were in my vocabulary.

I’m not proud of this, and Risa likes to point out, when I lose my temper with another driver, that it is for doing something I might have done myself, and probably have.  As a person who is supposed to stand for peace, love, and understanding, I’m well aware that my own morning commute is a daily betrayal those ideals.  I can’t really claim that if everyone drove to work the way I do, we would all find ourselves in the Kingdom of God.

And this is true even though, on the face of it, I’m not breaking the law.  Which brings us to the point I’ve been getting to, which is that the rules by themselves are not enough.  Not if we want more out of life than the bare minimum standard of getting to school in one piece, and close enough to on-time.  Not breaking the law is not going to be enough if we want a world where we live together in real harmony and contentment.  That will require something more, something that goes beyond what we do on the outside to how we are on the inside.

In the reading from Deuteronomy this morning, we can see the emergence of this kind of understanding of the law.  It is not something arbitrary set up by God to test his people’s obedience.  The law’s real purpose is to change them.  It is to convert them into a people who live together in a way that really is worth living.  The law is the constitution of a different kind of nation, where human existence is more than a miserable brutish struggle that leads directly to the grave.  Keeping the commandments of God, Israel will achieve a kind of greatness not measured by the extent of her territory, or the wealth of her rulers.  Their own little slice of land will be enough for them, because of the greatness of the life they will live there, in unity, prosperity, justice, longevity and peace.

Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of heaven is radically new, but is built squarely on Israel’s vision of the best way to live.  It is a call to conversion, to receive the abundant life envisioned in Deuteronomy, only present and active now in the person and teaching of Jesus.  Today’s passage from Matthew is really a commentary on last week’s gospel where Jesus says that he has not come to abolish the commandments, but to fulfill them. 

Now it might seem from what he says next that this fulfillment means adding new and even more demanding and restrictive rules to the ones already in force.  But I think this reading misses the point.  I think what Jesus is really saying is that the kinds of behavior that cause so much needless suffering in the world, and tear apart the fabric of community, do not come about because people decide to break the rules.  They are really more pervasive and insidious than that, and the difference between truly egregious sins and the seemingly harmless little foibles that we secretly indulge in the privacy of our hearts, our homes, or our automobiles, is a difference of degree, but not of kind.

Because both involve a denial of our real interrelatedness, for all of us are equally, utterly dependent on God.   And God has made each one of us equally worthy of honor, equally deserving of love.  This denial is not something we choose to do—but it is planted very close to the center of our very sense of self, and the whole structure of our personality has grown up around it.  And as Jesus tells us in the gospel today, the more power it has over our lives, the closer we get to hell.

But we can choose to admit this, to stop pretending that we’re better than we are.  We can start to pay more attention to how it works in our own lives.  We can stop blaming other people for our habitual self-inflicted wounds.  And we can stop blaming our bodies.  All my life I’ve struggled with this passage about how if your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away.  Clearly it’s rhetorical, but for a long time I misunderstood what kind of rhetoric it is.  I used to think it was hyperbole—that Jesus was exaggerating to impress on us the severity of sin, and our responsibility for it.  But now I think it’s also irony.  It’s a joke, pointing out the absurdity of self-mortification.  Because who in the world ever really stumbled because of his eye, or her hand? 

No, what we really need to pluck out and throw away are our thoughts, all that endless cascade of mean little thoughts we have about ourselves and other people.  The ones that tell us what a raw deal we’re getting, and how much better off the neighbors are.  The ones that are always ready to fasten on what is less than perfect, and so slow to give thanks for the miracle of sharing this existence.  What we need to tear off and throw away are our self-pity, and envy, our prejudices and power trips, and fantasies of domination and revenge.  These are the members that get us thrown into hell.

So we throw them away, knowing they’ll be back.  But we throw them away again, because repentance is not a one-and-done catharsis, but a life-long conversion.  And the more we pluck them out and throw them away, the less power they have to define us.  At the same time, we start to find ourselves strangely attracted to thoughts of an entirely different kind, thoughts like “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.  Blessed are the merciful, for they will obtain mercy.  Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” 

And we start to wonder what it would be like to go through the world with that kind of trust, that combination of confidence and tenderness.  And maybe in time we start to see that at the very beginning another seed was planted in our hearts, one that’s not off center at all.  The shoot that sprouted from that seed has been growing in secret all the time, and is completely intertwined with that anxious, grasping, craven self we thought we really were.  Its roots go down deep into the goodness of life together on the earth.  Its leaves spread high and wide above, to receive the grace that streams from heaven.  And the Christ-life sways and dances in all of us together, not because we follow the same rules, but because we move to the breath of the same Spirit of love.

Find your perfection in God

Leviticus 19:1-2,9-18
1 Corinthians 3:10-11,16-23
Matthew 5:38-48
Psalm 119:33-40

The only time I can remember taking a blow delivered in anger came when I was in college.  I was with my roommates at Colonial Pizza, our favorite late-night hang-out, when an argument broke out between a couple of young men in the restaurant.  They were “townies,” a little older than us.  I didn’t take it all that seriously, even when their voices rose and they jumped to their feet.  One of them shoved the other backward into the wall and started toward the door, a path that would take him right past where I was sitting.  I must still have been more amused than alarmed, because he growled “what are you laughing at?” and belted me in the mouth, knocking me and my chair over backwards, before storming out of the restaurant.

I was scarcely upright again before the police arrived.  The pizza lady had called them in a state of high excitement, and she described the incident in dramatic terms to a cop from Central Casting.  “Look at him!” she cried, gesturing at where I sat dabbing the blood from my swollen lip with a paper napkin.  The second townie, who it turned out was my assailant’s cousin, sat sullenly with his arms crossed, refusing to cooperate. The policeman said “Don’t go anywhere!” to everyone in general and he and his partner disappeared.  A few minutes later, he was back.  His partner stood on the sidewalk outside with a man in handcuffs, where I could see them through the window.  “Is this the guy?” the policeman asked me.

“I guess so,” I said hesitantly.  I wasn’t at all certain—as with a lot of things that happened during my college days, I hadn’t really been focusing.  I looked around for help.  The manager and a couple of the other students seemed sure that it was.  The cousin remained stony-faced in his chair, his eyes downcast.  “Do you wanna press charges?” asked the cop.  I looked up and saw him staring at me.  Suddenly it became clear that even though I hadn’t called the police, or asked them to go hunt the man down, this true crime drama had been for my benefit.  The eyes of everyone in the restaurant were on me.  I looked at the miserable fellow standing in the pallid light of the Colonial Pizza sign outside.  “No, not really,” I mumbled. 

The policeman stiffened.  “You know I’m going to have to let him go unless you file a criminal complaint?”  I thought about taking the bus to the courthouse in North Adams to testify.  I thought about undergoing cross-examination about events that were hazy in my recollection.  I thought about the townie and his limited prospects and what he probably felt when he saw us college boys.  “No thanks”, I shrugged.  The cop snorted in disgust and left and I walked back to the dorm with my friends.

As I recall this incident I am aware of how privileged my life has been.  Countless millions of my brothers, and especially my sisters, live with systematic violence, oppression, and abuse as a daily reality.  My story is amusing because I was never in serious danger.  My basic human dignity, and even my privilege, was respected, and so I could afford to be magnanimous.  But how might the story have been different if I’d had no recourse to the lawful authorities, or if it had been the cops who attacked me? 

The gospel teaching of Jesus was given in such a context.  When he talks about being struck on the face, or sued for one’s cloak, or forced to carry a Roman soldier’s 70 pound pack for a mile, he is describing things that his audience would have known from personal experience.  For us these sayings about loving our enemies are good for parlor debates about just wars and capital punishment.  But for the first Christians they would have gone to the heart of the rawest personal emotions.  Maybe that is why we find them at the climax of Jesus’ restatement of the Jewish law.

It is a popular theory among New Testament scholars that the Gospel of Matthew came out of a Jewish-Christian community that had suffered persecution and forcible expulsion from the synagogue.  This community would have identified with Jesus’ own experience that even people who are morally upright and religiously scrupulous can embrace violence.  They can use the will and conviction that enables them to keep God’s commandments as weapons against those who don’t share their beliefs.  Wrestling with the aftermath of trauma, Matthew’s community would have found in the life and death of Jesus the key to understanding what further is needed to perfect the law.  They would have treasured his sayings about principled nonviolence and the love of enemies, for helping them discern a truth higher than the unmistakable reality of their hurt and betrayal.

That higher truth was the one with which Jesus began his teaching—“Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the ones who mourn, blessed are the meek and the peacemakers, and blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.” It is not that the suffering produces the blessedness, but that in Christ God’s blessing is revealed as unconditional.  It is poured out for everyone—like the sun it rises on the evil and the good, like the rain it falls on the just and the unjust.  When we think that our blessedness depends on how well we meet some minimum standard--of getting it right, not missing the mark, being in control--our righteousness will always be missing something. 

In fact our moral discipline and good deeds will become a trap for us, sucking us deeper into the swamp of unease and futility. Our driving force will be that anxious, guilty, fragmented self which can never be healed by its own works and contrivances.  As long as our self-worth depends on having a spotless record we walk on a knife-edge, and will never be at peace. And as long our knowing ourselves as worthy of love is fragile, as long as we need to prove that we are deserving of respect--as long as we believe that someone else can rob us of our own dignity—we will always be susceptible to fighting evil with evil.  The knife-edge of self-righteousness cuts us in pieces, severing those actions, thoughts, and feelings that we find unworthy of us.  And cutting into others just naturally follows.

Jesus urges us instead to find our perfection in God.  It is only when we acknowledge our common lot with others, when we accept our share of the pain that is the consequence of human sin and folly, that we also open to receive the gift of our wholeness.  “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”, for God has no fragile honor to defend, no deficiency that needs to be made up by being right or wielding power.  God’s love does not come with strings attached and does not ask for anything in return, so it cannot be defeated by hate or opposition. 

The experience of non-violent struggles like the U.S. Civil Rights movement, or the recent revolution in Egypt, is that there is a critical point of no return.  It is the point when it becomes clear that a people’s capacity to suffer for the sake of love is greater than their fear of violence.  Once that point is reached, all further violence is self-defeating.  It manifests the moral failure of the powers-that-be—their weakness, rather than their strength.    

So when Jesus counsels the people to turn the other cheek he is not recommending passive submission to the one who strikes. But to retaliate in kind, or to flee in fear, is to let the broken self at the root of violence continue to dictate the terms of power.  There is still a choice we can make in such moments, still a free action to take, even if it is only the choice of suffering over fear.  But this is suffering that is transfigured by love: love for the person perpetrating the self-inflicted wound of injustice, love for the future and the irresistible hope of the Kingdom that surges in every awakened heart, and love for God whose power, and judgment, and truth, and perfection are love.