But I Say...Love!

SCRIPTURE TEXT:  Matthew 5:43-48
PREACHER:  Rev. Monte Marshall

How Do I Love Thee?  A Letter to My Enemies, is an essay written by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre.  She begins her essay by writing: “You know who you are.  You may think—because you’re not holding me at gunpoint or blowing up my bus or seducing my husband or kidnapping my children—that I’m out gathering rosebuds for my suburban dinner table under the happy delusion that I have no enemies… But I do have enemies, and I know who are.”

McEntyre then names her enemies: “You are the ones who hurt the people I love.  You subject my children to propaganda and soul-sucking media manipulation.  You try to make my husband and sons believe that masculinity is measured by a willingness to kill and to make money.  You drive my daughters toward self-destructive behaviors in the name of desirability.  You poison the air, the soil, the water, the spirit, shorten their lives and damage their health for profit.

“You are the ones who hurt the people I’ve been commanded to and taught to care about.  You drop bombs on innocent people.  You vilify whole populations.  Sometimes you torture them… You insulate yourselves from their pain, hide your atrocities behind political banners, and call that ‘virtue.’  You cover deceit with rhetoric, and exploitation with terms like ‘economic health.’

“You are the ones who set me at war with myself.  You target my weaknesses and sins—my greed, my pride, my gluttony, my fear—and tempt me to measure my own worth by the satisfaction of my basest desires.  So I eat too much, I work for public recognition, I buy what I do not need, I take my part in the racism and paranoia of our time.

“You are the one who takes in vain the name of the Lord I love.  You make a commodity of sacred words and images and a mockery of worship. 

“You lure and you lie and you threaten.  You live in Washington and in the Middle East and Hollywood and in middle America and in my household and in my heart.  And as the psalmist says, you seek to take my life; you oppress me, surround me, and exult over me.”[1]

These are Marilyn Chandler McEntyre’s enemies.  Who are our enemies?  Do we know who they are?  Can we name them?

As our enemies come to mind, what do we feel?  Fear?  Anger?  Dislike?  Disgust?  Aversion?  Hostility?  The dictionary uses these words along with adjectives like “intense” and “extreme” to define another word: “hate.”[2]  We also use the word “hate” to describe actions that emerge from these feelings, like “hate crimes.”  

In this morning’s text from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus connects the word “hate” with the word enemy”: “’You have heard it said, ‘Love your neighbor—but hate your enemy.’” 

When it comes to loving the neighbor, Jesus draws from the Torah of the Hebrew Bible.  The Torah commands love of neighbor, but the neighbor was understood to be a member of one’s own clan or tribe or people or nation.

Now there is no specific language in the Torah that encourages hatred of the enemy, although there are texts that imply an acceptance of hatred as an appropriate response to those outside the clan or tribe or people or nation.

Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, hatred of the enemy is explicitly embraced by at least some in Israel.  For example, Psalm 139 reads: “Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?  And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?  I hate them with perfect hatred; count them my enemies.”

And, of course, hatred has been a commonly accepted response to the enemy among many peoples and cultures down to and including the present day.  The persistence of war in human history is but one indication of hatred’s pernicious power to inflict violence, death and destruction upon the enemy from generation to generation.

In this morning’s text, it is this pernicious power that Jesus challenges as he expands love’s reach: “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for your persecutors.”  Now please notice that Jesus does not deny the existence of enemies.  Enemies are a given—a fact of life.  Jesus acknowledges the reality of “persecutors.”  Jesus is dealing with the world as it is!  What matters, is our response to these undeniable realities.  “’But I tell you,’” Jesus says, “’love.’” 

Now this kind of love is not dependent on having warm and fuzzy feelings for those who would hurt us.  On the contrary, the kind of love recommended by Jesus is focused on how we act toward our enemies—not how we feel about our enemies.  Praying for our persecutors, for example, is an action.  Having said this, it’s also true that practicing love toward the enemy, despite how we feel, opens the door to a change of heart toward the enemy.

Now is this kind of love difficult to practice?  Of course, it is!  It’s so much easier to love those who love us back, to pray for those who are praying for us, to be kind to those who are kind to us, to greet the people we already know.  This is a more natural kind of love.  In fact, Jesus’ teaching about loving the enemy, says Barbara Brown Taylor, “sounds like advice for angels, not humans.”  She even calls the expectation to love like this “unrealistic…Yet there it is,”[3] she writes.

When we get down to it, Jesus is calling us to love like God: “’For God makes the sun to rise on bad and good alike; God’s rain falls on the just and the unjust… Therefore be perfect— [not flawless, not a neurotic perfectionist, but mature and complete in love]—as Abba God in heaven is perfect.’”

Jesus is calling us to claim our identity as “children of God.”  For when we love the enemy, we give expression to our “true selves,” our “God-created selves.”  On the other hand, to hate is to deny who we are and to resist the reign of God at work within us.

So who are our enemies?  Do we know who they are?  Can we name them?  But here’s the most important question:  How shall we love them?  This is how Marilyn Chambers McEntyre envisions loving her enemies:

“I love you by embracing as fully as my imagination will allow the metaphor—and the fact—that we are brothers and sisters…imagined and willed into being by the same loving Creator.

“I love you by identifying the evils in which we find ourselves mired—the injustices, the brutalities, the deceptions, the greed—and holding them in the light.  I love you by telling the truth as carefully and caringly as I can… I love you by holding you and myself accountable.  I love you by not lying.

‘I love you by means of protest…by speaking and acting, against the evil you represent, for the life we are called to envision and live with one another.

“I love you by learning to inhabit gray areas, by forfeiting the satisfactions of easy judgment and finding ways to sit down with you and find out what it is like to be you.  I love you by studying your credo or your Koran or your party platform, your economic theories, your ideas of duty.  And I love you by praying for the words and the wisdom to enter into the conversation that might redirect our energies into a path of mutual understanding.

“I love you by praying for you, especially and precisely because you are those I experienced as ‘persecutors,’… And in the process, perhaps I will come to understand myself more humbly and fully.

“I love you by turning the other cheek, and in doing that hard thing, learning also to discern the difference between self-destructive capitulation to evil and willingness to bear its cost for the sake of love.  I love you best when I can follow Jesus’ example in not returning evil for evil.  Every time I resist the temptation to retaliate, I help prepare for the Kingdom in which I must hope that you are included, and that we will all be transformed.

“So how do I love you now?  Badly.  Intermittently.  Sometimes grudgingly.  But I know that we, you and I, are here to help one another work out our salvation, perhaps with fear and trembling.  And so I must be grateful for you—not for the evil that you do, which is not mine to judge—but for the ways in which you, my enemies, are an occasion for grace.”[4] 

To love like this, is to live within the reign of God and to taste the divine gift of perfection that is love itself.  May it be so for us.  Thanks be to God!