One of the problems I think we often have with this teaching is that we want to start talking about what it means on the global level where loving our enemies simply doesn’t seem to make any sense. How do we love Osama Bin Laden? How do we love a terrorist whose only goal may be to blow themselves up and take as many people with them as they can? What does love look like when we consider some of the incredible violence we see taking place on our southern border that is fueled by gangs and drugs? When we take this teaching of Jesus and try to apply to national security issues or global political and economic struggles, it gets complicated and overwhelming and so we want give up on it all together, but we can’t give up on it because this teaching of Jesus doesn’t go away and it doesn’t change. Jesus said, love your enemy and so we have to wrestle with what this means and what it looks like in our lives, but to do this, let’s not start with using this teaching to solve global problems, let’s start a little smaller. If loving our enemy is the goal, what is the first step in getting there? Maybe the first step is to learn how to love our neighbor with the understanding that our neighbor isn’t just the person who lives next door, in fact, according to Jesus, our neighbor is someone who may be very different from us and even someone who makes us feel uncomfortable.
Jesus answers the question who is my neighbor when he tells the story of the Good Samaritan. In that story a Jewish man is travelling along a road when he is beaten up and left to die. When the Jewish priest, someone who is very much like the injured man, comes down the road, he doesn’t stop to help, and when a Jewish Rabbi comes by, again, someone who would have felt very comfortable helping his Jewish brother in need, he also doesn’t stop but keeps on going. Now when the Samaritan comes along and finds the injured Jewish man along the side of the road, he stops to help. When Jesus asked his listeners who the real neighbor was, they answered the one who showed mercy, the Samaritan.
Now what’s important to know here is that Samaritans and Jews did not like each other. There were long standing and deep hostilities that existed between these two groups of people so when Jesus tells this story he is saying that our neighbor isn’t defined as someone who looks like us, acts like us and someone we feel comfortable with, our neighbor isn’t someone we necessarily would want to spend time with, our neighbor is often that person who makes us feel uncomfortable. Our neighbor is someone we may not like, and someone we might not choose to be around. We may not consider them an enemy but we certainly don’t count them as a friend, but they are our neighbor and we are called by Jesus to know them, serve them, help them and love them and so as we seek to love our enemy, maybe the place to start is to learn how to love our neighbor.
What will it look like for us to love our neighbor? What will it take for us to just get to know our neighbor? When I look at my own life and my own circle of friends and acquaintances I have to be honest and say that most of them in some way look like me, act like me and they are people I am comfortable with. I don’t interact with a lot of people who Jesus would say are my neighbor, so how do I begin to build and establish those relationships? Can we reach out and build relationships with people who are not like us?
The author Dave Gibbons says in the world we now live, the single best thing a church can be doing is to rally behind kingdom values and vision rather than skin color and socio-economic status, and that means we need to intentionally include people in our lives that make us uncomfortable. If we can’t do that, if we can’t take the time and expend the energy to get to know people who are different than we are, then let’s be honest and say that we will then never be able to love our enemy. So can we venture into those places we don’t like to go and do those things we don’t like to do and be with people who make us uncomfortable so that we can get to know them, serve them, help them and love them? I would say this is the first step toward learning how to love our enemy.
The second step is to learn how to let go of our anger. If we go back and look at Jesus sermon on the mount, we find that this call to love our enemy doesn’t come out of the blue, in many ways Jesus has been building up to this moment with other teachings and one of those teachings says that we need to let go of our anger, look at Matthew 5:21-22. We will never be able to love our enemy if we can’t first get our heart right toward them and getting our heart right means letting go of the anger and hurt and bitterness that we often hold on to. Now again, let’s not worry about how to do this with international terrorists until we have first learned how to do this with our family and friends. The sad truth about our world today is that there is a lot of anger that people hold on to. Many people are afraid and unhappy and are just looking for someone to blame and so we get angry at the people around us. It could be a boss who takes advantage of us at work, a spouse who doesn’t understand us, a friend who has let us down or maybe even someone in the church who has disappointed us. It can also be the person who cuts us off in traffic, the clerk who is too slow in the check out line or the waitress who got our order wrong. There is a lot of anger out there today and my guess is that many of us are walking around angry and frustrated and upset with someone about something and the question we have to ask ourselves today is this: are we willing to begin to let go of the anger?
Letting go of anger and hurt and disappointment doesn’t happen instantly just because we decide to do it, but nothing will change in our hearts and lives until we first decide to do it, to let it go. God can not bring healing and God can not bring the blessing of his peace until we are first willing to let go of our anger and pain. Think about it this way, as long as our fists are clenched in anger, frustration and rage – we can not receive God’s grace and if we can not receive God’s grace we will never be able to love others and if we can’t love others there is no hope of loving our enemies. So while things won’t instantly change when we decide to let go of our anger, can we at least make the decision right here and now to let it go and then ask God to help us not pick it up again so that our hands and hearts will be empty and open to receive God’s grace and love.
In many ways what we are talking about here is the process of forgiveness. Can we forgive those who have hurt us? Forgiveness doesn’t mean we act as if nothing happened and it doesn’t mean we allow ourselves to get hurt over and over again, but forgiveness is making the decision to let go of our anger towards others and then asking God to help us learn how to really love those who have sinned against us. This process of letting go and asking God for his grace is what we pray for each and every week, isn’t it? In the Lord’s Prayer we ask God to forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who have sinned against us. Forgiving those who have sinned against us - letting go of the anger we hold on to – is not just one of the steps in learning how to love our enemy, but it is essential if we are going to receive the forgiveness of God. Again from his sermon on the mount Jesus says, (Matthew 6:15) if you will not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive you. We need to make the decision today to let go of our anger and start learning to forgive so that God will forgive us and then give to us the love we need for others.
The third step in learning how to love our enemy also comes from Jesus Sermon on the Mount. Look at what Jesus says right before the command to love your enemy, Matthew 5:38-42. What Jesus says here is that love for our neighbor and love for our enemy can’t just be feelings or emotions, love has to be lived out. Love always has to be lived out Jesus gives here three examples of what love for an enemy might look like: he says if someone strikes us on the right cheek we should turn to them the left. Now this has less to do with physically being hit and more to do with learning how to not retaliate when we are insulted, and then the next two examples both talk about how we should be willing to give more and do more when we are asked for anything.
What I’d like to do is give a few more examples of what love for our enemy might look like today. In 1987 Walt Everett’s 24 year old son, Scott, was shot and killed. For almost a year afterwards, Walt’s emotional state moved from rage to depression. He found it difficult to even go through the motions of his work as pastor of a United Methodist Church in Hartford, CT. It was at the sentencing of Mike Carlucci, the man who murdered Scott that Walt heard Mike express remorse for what he had done, and in that moment Walt felt God nudging him towards forgiveness. Walt describes his journey as the most difficult thing he has ever had to do.
Walt wrote to Mike on the first anniversary of Scott’s death and that letter began a series of correspondences, which led to visits and finally to Walt’s testifying on Mike’s behalf at his parole hearing. Based on Walt’s testimony, Mike obtained an early release and went to work for a trucking firm where his boss described him as one of the best employees he ever had. Walt and Mike have grown in their relationship and often speak together at universities, churches and community groups about the healing power of forgiveness for both the one forgiven and the one forgiving. Walt is now a retired minister who lives in Lewisburg and I have heard his story and am amazed at the power there is when someone is willing to reach out and learn what it means today to love their enemy.
The second story is the one we see in the picture this morning. For those of you that may not remember this moment it was when Pope John Paul II met with Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who tried to kill him in 1981. This picture was taken 2 years after the assassination attempt and it shows Pope John Paul II meeting with Ali Agca in prison and the two men began a friendship that lasted for many years. In fact the pope met with his family and when the Pope became ill near the end of his life, Ali Agca and his family sent him a letter saying that they were grieving and that the Pope had become a great friend to their family.
Another amazing example of loving our enemies came not long ago from the Amish in Lancaster County after the school shooting. Charles Roberts killed five Amish school girls and then himself and it was the Amish community that went to Roberts family to offer them forgiveness and comfort. When I hear stories like these or see pictures like this, I realize that only thing enables us to live this way, or to love this way, and that’s God. Honestly, we can’t do this on our own, but we can do this with God’s help, which is maybe why Jesus doesn’t just say, love your enemies. He doesn’t give them command and end it there, Jesus goes on and says, and pray for those who persecute you. It is only prayer and the strength and power of God that can calm us down when we are attacked, that can motivate us to give when we are being taken advantage of and forgive even when all we have or all we love has been taken away. The only power that makes these kinds of scenes possible is the power of God and so we need to pray for those who persecute us and we need to pray for our enemy because prayer is the forerunner of mercy. Prayer will lead us to God’s love and it is God’s love for us and God’s love flowing through us which can help us love our enemies. So as we think about loving our neighbor, letting go of our anger and turning our love into action – let us pray.
