Love your enemies. (Seriously... no loopholes...)

 I delivered this tonight (February 23, 2025) at Springmoor Retirement Village. The text is part of Jesus' Sermon on the Plain, found in Luke 6:27-38. Tonight the text is part of the sermon.

It isn't in the text below but at the end of the message I mentioned that Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, and other proponents of nonviolence are examples of what "love your enemies" might look like in practical terms. 

Luke 6:27-38

Love your enemies 

6:27   "But I say to you who are listening: Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you;

6:28   bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you.

6:29   If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.

6:30   Give to everyone who ask of you, and if anyone takes away what is yours, do not ask for it back again.

6:31   Do to others as you would have them do to you.

6:32   "If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.

6:33   If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.

6:34   If you lend to those from whom you expect to receive payment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again.

6:35   Instead, love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.

6:36   Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

6:37   "Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven;

6:38   give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap, for the measure you give will be the measure you get back."

 

 

Here's the thing… this text really does not require a sermon. This is not one of those passages with weird stuff, or stuff that doesn’t match what we know based on the discoveries of scientists. This is not one of those passages that needs a lot of background based on how the culture worked back when the text was written.

 

This passage is from Jesus’s Sermon on the Plain and it reflects the exact same values and priorities as the Sermon on the Mount because Jesus was very, VERY consistent in his behavior and message.

 

These are the words of Jesus, and they are very plain and clear. Simple. Not easy… but simple.

 

They occur in Luke shortly after the naming of the twelve disciples from the larger group of people who followed Jesus… the Twelve who would become the Apostles that spread this way of Jesus far and wide. The Twelve who then argued with Paul when Paul spread the Way of Jesus even further and wider.

 

We could say, then, that this was sort of a disciple orientation.  These days they call it “onboarding” – telling people what they need to know to do a job, to work with the policies and procedures of a particular place. 

 

Before I retired I had the opportunity to onboard the people who were going to take over running the food hub. I had written up a bunch of procedural things and I told them I would answer questions. I told them stories and explained different things. But the MOST IMPORTANT thing was the repeated refrain:  “this is a People First place. People always have to come first.” That’s all I could figure out to communicate the core values of the organization that I had formed (with the help of numerous others.)

 

And what I was talking about was embraced enthusiastically!  Well, until someone said “we should not work with them because they are too conservative.” I was out of the picture by then, and they did work through it as a group so all is well, but when I first heard about it I grieved. Because “People First” does not mean “people who agree with me” or “people who share my political and social beliefs.”  

 

People First is, in fact, as behavioral as our passage today. It meant (and means) that when someone is in front of us we meet them where they are. If they get mad and yell, we do not respond in kind. If they are worried and stressed, putting People First meant (and means) accepting what they say and providing what we could.

 

Harder to accept is “if they are helping get food to people who need it, we do not ask how they feel about all the other issues going on in the world.”  Does it matter if we disagree on who should marry whom or what role church plays in someone’s life?  It truly does not. If we can agree on helping those who need help, then we can work together on that even if we vehemently disagree on many, many other things. We do not have to give up one iota of what we disagree about but we can prioritize what we agree on.

 

And that’s where loving our enemies comes in. Enemies are people with whom we vehemently disagree AND whom we have decided to put on the other side of some kind of fence. They are those other people, out there, the ones who are not on my side.

 

And here is Jesus, telling us that nobody should be not-on-my-side. Instead, the people who were not on our side should be invited into a relationship with us. We should respond with love. It is very realistic that Jesus talks about getting slapped, mistreated, and robbed because that’s what happens when we are enemies. We become completely convinced that THEY. ARE. BAD. And of course, being on an opposite side, WE. ARE. GOOD.

 

But… it is not so.

 

I really wanted to just read this passage three times and sit down. To say “think about this.” That’s Bible study stuff, that is not sermon stuff but the message is SO CLEAR!  Love everybody!

 

It doesn’t say to JUST love our enemies. In fact, it assumes that we will love the people who agree with us, who follow the rules, who do not make trouble.  In this passage, Jesus throws it all wide open.  That’s where I get jumbled up in this passage… the part where it says so clearly “I am not talking about loving people who are not challenging… I am talking about loving the people who make you SO MAD, the ones who get under your skin, the ones who turn you off and hurt you and deny or make fun of your existence. The ones who use their money and power differently than I think they should. The ones who will spin a story so tight it becomes a lie but claim it’s truth. THAT’S who we are supposed to love.

 

Here… listen to it again, this time from the Bible paraphrase called The Message. See if you can pick out who Jesus might be calling enemies:

 

The Message

^27-30 “To you who are ready for the truth, I say this: Love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the supple moves of prayer for that person. If someone slaps you in the face, stand there and take it. If someone grabs your shirt, giftwrap your best coat and make a present of it. If someone takes unfair advantage of you, use the occasion to practice the servant life. No more payback. Live generously.

^31-34 “Here is a simple rule of thumb for behavior: Ask yourself what you want people to do for you; then grab the initiative and do it for them! If you only love the lovable, do you expect a pat on the back? Run-of-the-mill sinners do that. If you only help those who help you, do you expect a medal? Garden-variety sinners do that. If you only give for what you hope to get out of it, do you think that’s charity? The stingiest of pawnbrokers does that.

^35-36 “I tell you, love your enemies. Help and give without expecting a return. You’ll never—I promise—regret it. Live out this God-created identity the way our Father lives toward us, generously and graciously, even when we’re at our worst. Our Father is kind; you be kind.

^37-38 “Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults—unless, of course, you want the same treatment. Don’t condemn those who are down; that hardness can boomerang. 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. Giving, not getting, is the way. Generosity begets generosity.” (***end of passage***)

 

Don’t pick on others unless you want them to pick on you.

Don’t criticize the faults of others unless you are ready to be criticized in return.

 

Generosity 

begets 

generosity.

 

It doesn’t mean agreeing, or giving in, or condoning actions yo disagree with but it does precisely mean loving the person doing those things. Keeping our mouths shut when the criticism bubbles up and loving completely. This it not “hate the sin, love the sinner.” This is more like “don’t let the sin stop you from loving the sinner.”  Because remember… it will not be long before you are the sinner and are going to long to be loved.

 

I have several friends who are struggling HARD right now, all in response to the Executive Orders and general disdain for procedure going on in Washington, but not just in Washington. One friend is afraid her child will be harmed. Another friend was badly hurt by the church and is struggling with the pain of that – and it is a deep, deep pain indeed – and simply cannot accept that love is enough. Another friend is worried about losing his job, another friend is on the team trying to keep people employed in an organization that just laid off 300 employees due to federal budget cuts. My friend who runs the nonprofit supporting families in Ethiopia cries on a daily basis as they try to figure out how to navigate this chaos being wrought, because little children – and adults – are going to die because of this wholly unnecessary chaos.

 

All of them are people I love and it is so tempting to think of those who have brought them such grief and harm as their enemies – and mine. You probably have similar situations, people who feel like your enemies for whatever reason.

 

In these moments it feels like iff ever there was a reason to be mad, to designate people as enemies, to put up fences and walls and strike out at one another, this surely is that time. Those examples are examples in my life but for every person I am tempted to call my enemy, there are people who want to call me and my friends enemies. My grief is not yours, and my enemies might be your friends. But the walls are the same. We all have someone or something that we desperately want to call an enemy, and we want our individual enemies to be punished.

 

But according to Jesus, in today’s passage, those who cause each of us our own personal grief?

 

THOSE ARE PRECISELY THE PEOPLE WE ARE TO LOVE.

 

I will be honest, I have no idea how to do that, and more often than not I don’t even want to do that.

 

But I read this passage and I see that there are no loopholes. There is no “unless they…” It is “love your enemies and do good to those who harm you.”

 

At one point in my life I decided that I would not lie. The background to that decision is rather long and evolved over a long period of time but at some point I realized that I was unwilling to lie to anyone about anything. That decision presented me with a choice:  I could just blurt out whatever I thought was the truth and not worry about who was hurt… OR… I could pay closer attention and find ways to tell the truth that were more likely to be heard and less likely to hurt. To speak truth when asked, but beyond that, to avoid spinning stories or making things up or just plain lying – saying things that are simply not true.

 

I think that’s what today’s passage requires of us. The love that we offer to our enemies is different than the love we offer the people closest to us. Jesus alludes to that when he says that loving our neighbors is something even “ordinary sinners” do. I think he was telling the people “you do not have to be ordinary.”  If ordinary people love when it’s easy, that’s great! Do that!  But you are not ordinary.  You can love even those who hate you and do not make things better for you.

 

And that is where deepening of faith comes in. That is where studying and listening and learning and thinking come in. Not just listening to what someone else says (even if that someone is me!) but thinking about the truth for yourself.

 

And so, in parting today, I will read the words of Jesus one more time. Take these words with you today. Ponder them. Identify who you have named as enemies and how to love them. Figure out what it means to love everyone.

 

You can do it. I know you can because you are a human being and that human being named Jesus showed us how it works. You will not be perfect, of course. But you can follow a better path, the path of Jesus.  The path laid out in these words of Jesus:

 

Luke 6:27-38

Love your enemies 

6:27   "But I say to you who are listening: Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you;

6:28   bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you.

6:29   If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.

6:30   Give to everyone who ask of you, and if anyone takes away what is yours, do not ask for it back again.

6:31   Do to others as you would have them do to you.

6:32   "If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.

6:33   If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.

6:34   If you lend to those from whom you expect to receive payment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again.

6:35   Instead, love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.

6:36   Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

6:37   "Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven;

6:38   give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap, for the measure you give will be the measure you get back."

Amen and Amen, may it be so.

Love is...

 I set up this blog before I became a pastor. I would write a sermon every week, just because. A friend said I should do something with them "even if it's just parking them in a blog somewhere" so I did that. Then I became a pastor and was actually delivering sermons and I would post them here. Then I became immersed in running the Parktown Food Hub and preaching wasn't as big of a deal and I quit posting the sermons.

But now I have retired from the Parktown Food Hub, and although I still preach occasionally it seems like a good time to be sharing more broadly, and maybe more often.  So I'm s

tarting off February with the message I gave to my friends at Springmoor Retirement Village on Sunday, February 2, 2025. The text is 1 Corinthians 13 (aka The Love Chapter). 

And here is the word map, to give you a preview of what words are used a lot (the bigger ones in the picture).

When delivering this in person I started by singing the chorus of this song by The Beatles, and went from there.

All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need

 

I was at an exercise class on Friday morning and we did our thing to this song and I thought… oh… wait… that’s what I believe.  My bottom-line theology is that God is enough and so love is enough.  All we need is God, and therefore all we need is love.

 

Since then I have pondered how The Beatles – a boy band that was insanely and wildly popular and wrote and performed some excellent music – could write a song that names my theology so succinctly.

 

I don’t think they meant to do that, but here we are.

 

As I pondered I remembered a time, about 30 years ago now (doesn’t time fly?) when I was living alone in an apartment in Pittsburgh, PA, my first time away from home in central Texas. I was reading devotional booklets and library books and taking classes and doing whatever I could to figure out who I was and who I would be. It was a time of tremendous change and formation and opening me up to new ideas.

 

One day the devotional I read, in a booklet called Portals of Prayer, said that somebody or other had once said that if you read 1 Corinthians 13 every day for 30 days your life would be changed completely.

 

That sounds like an awfully simple way to change – just read a few words every day? -  but I was also searching SO HARD for whomever it was that I needed to be, and I lived alone, and I was a student but also had a lot of schedule flexibility, so I tried it. 

 

Every day for one month I read 1 Corinthians 13, the passage I read to you today. I paid special attention and took the time each day to NOTICE what I was reading. I decided that if I was going to read it every day then I would pay attention to it every day.  I didn’t just skim the words or read them by rote. 

 

I was so very, very ready to be changed forever!

 

And at the end of 30 days, well, I don’t know. I examined what I could see of my life and wondered… had I changed? I somehow realized that I didn’t exactly know who I was, or who I would become, so how was I supposed to know if I had changed?

 

Looking back and noticing the circumstances of my life today, though, I’m pretty sure I had indeed changed. There is something about reading this description of love that settled into me. Something that took root.

 

And now here I am, daily taking every chance I can to tell people – including you, my beloved friends here at Springmoor - that God loves you and that our best response to that love is to love one another. That God *IS* love and that Jesus came to earth – God in the body of a fully human being – and showed us what it was like to be human beings living according to how we were created to be. What it was like to live whole lives, death-defeating lives, lives that would never end because death is only for those who do not love perfectly.

 

Of course, no living person has ever been able to love perfectly except for Jesus. That’s what Jesus did. He always loved, always loved perfectly, and as a result, death could not hold onto him. He died like a human being, yes, but it turns out the death couldn’t stick because he had been SO human, so whole, that he never ceased to love.

 

So if all we need is God, and God is love, then all we need is love and The Beatles got it right, whether they knew it or not.

 

Kind of mind-blowing at first glance. But then…. What if that is how God’s love is?

 

Churches and church services are lovely places to go be in community and hear Scripture and learn more about God from people who have taken the time and energy to study those Scriptures.

 

But WHAT IF God’s love is independent of that study? What if we are born to know, and somehow we can all figure out that what we need is love, even without a church or a pastor? That we can, even if we don’t, or we take a maddeningly long time?

 

WHAT IF the point is not to arrange things so we keep living some kind of life after death does take us, but the point is to love each other so much right now that the pain and sorrow of this life are pushed aside and we are all freed to truly LIVE. To live into the wholeness for which we were created. To live lives now. To help all people live good lives now. To do the opposite of ignoring or discounting some people so we can take resources that don’t actually make life better anyway?  Money and power are not the same as loving and living with each other and everything I read in Scripture is that we were created to live together and love each other. Even the Ten Commandments, so often used as a source of punishment, fundamentally show up how to best live in love with one another.

 

What if the point is to love each other now so that sin does not hold sway, so that when we do die we can die knowing we have loved and been loved, and can recognize the love that is God, and be in that love forever?

 

We are in a time when saying “all you need is love” seems very naïve and silly. We are in a time when cruelty is held up as somehow necessary, and anyone who does not look or act or think like that small group of men is obviously deficient. We live in a time when it is not only ok but financially profitable to lie and deny obvious facts and connections and accumulate power by destroying those who would protest.

 

We live in a time when the response to that cruelty and greed is often violence.  When our first response to the harm being done is “why don’t they get punished? Put them in jail! Kill them! Punish, punish, punish.”

 

We live in a time when we as people of the United States (but not just US citizens – it’s happening in other parts of the world too) have been convinced that someone else should solve the problems, that the most important thing is money and financial wealth (and, buried somewhere in there, power… but only a few can actually attain that power), and that there isn’t anything we can do to stop the horrors, the disasters, the cruelty, the abuse of public power and disregard for the systems that have been developed over the last few hundred years. People say “how can the richest country in the world be so mean to its citizens?” and I say “how can the richest country in the world be anything else?” We got this way by privileging money over all things, including humanity, and here we are.

 

But that emphasis on money and power and punishment (even punishment of those who have caused harm) is not what God has given us to do and no human being is called to wield the power that belongs only to God. I am most definitely saying that those who cause harm should be left unchecked, but I am saying that our current focus on punishment rather than, well, anything else, is not at all in line with who God is.

 

Please hear me… regardless of what some people would have us believe – MONEY AND PUNISHMENT AND THE POWER ASSOCIATED WITH THEM ARE NOT OF GOD.

 

Because God is love.

 

And as God’s creations, we are called to follow that example – the example set by Jesus when he came and showed us that it is actually possible to love during times when some people are treated badly, to give love so that power, such as it is, can be spread more or less equally across all people, not concentrated in a very few.

 

We are called to love each other, to recognize our own foibles and brokenness and in so doing, to show compassion and grace for the foibles and brokenness of others. We are called to care for each other, especially for those who are harmed but also for those who are causing harm in creative and individual ways. We are called to shine God’s light on each other so that the darkness of evil is cast aside and hearts are made new.

 

I could talk on and on and on about love and some of you may even think that’s what I do. That I’m always talking about love and never about how we are supposed to call one another out. But when God says “vengeance is mine, I will repay” I think God is saying “I’ll take care of the punishing, you just carry the healing love to everywhere your hands can reach.” Everything we are called to do is to begin and end with love, to be literally soaked in love.

 

But loving is a tricky business. We are tempted to try to decide who DESERVES love, especially given how soaked we are in this culture of money and power and punishment and hierarchy.  Loving is not some kind of rule. Love depends on the person being loved. A particular behavior may be loving to one person but not to another. That is why I admire my old friend 1 Corinthians 13 so much. It explains how to tell if something is love or if it is not love, not as a list of rules, but as a set of characteristics: what love is and what it is not.

 

When The Beatles say “All you need is love!” just what does that mean?

 

Paul, who started out as that lover of power and punishment called Saul; Paul who was knocked off his horse and shown in a flash what the truth is, tells us:

·      Love is not being the loudest, winning arguments by shouting over all other messages

·      Love is not knowing everything and being able to do huge things by sheer determination

·      Love is not martyrdom or being a hermit, it happens in community

·      What Love is, you see, is 

o   Patient

o   Kind

o   Humble, not jealous or boasting or arrogant or rude. 

·      Love

o   does not insist on its own way, get angry, and threaten to harm or punish those who disagree 

o   does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.

·      Love  

o   bears all things – including ridicule

o   believes what people speak from their hearts

o   hopes all things, 

o   endures all things instead of prioritizing only ourselves

·      Love never ends. Everything else ends – everything else dies – but love does not die. Our proof is that Jesus, who only ever loved, was not held by death. 

 

And so it is in love that we also defeat death and all the things that bring so many kinds of death to so many people. Cruelty to people whose skin is not white, mistreatment of women, harassing people who are loving in ways that the situation calls for but that might not meet some money-and-power-driven idea of how things should be.

 

Paul acknowledges that we won’t get it right. After all, no human being is God. But we can know God. We can catch glimpses. We can see what is going on, kind of like when you stand in front of a big store window or car window and see enough of your reflection to know if your hair is a mess or there is tomato sauce or chocolate on your face. We can definitely see the difference between loving and not loving. I think that’s one of the things that reading the passage for 30 days did… it somehow internalized what love is and what love is not. What a tremendous gift that has been!

 

Regardless of what we can know or not, regardless of how our knowledge changes and we learn new things, regardless of how scientific understanding and fashion and worldviews change, there are three things that will last, three things that will sustain us:

·      Faith

·      Hope

·      Love

 

And the greatest of these is love. 

Amen