Seventh Sunday after Epiphany – Year C – Bill Harkins
The Collect
O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing: Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts your greatest gift, which is love, the true bond of peace and of all virtue, without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you. Grant this for the sake of your only Son Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The Gospel: Luke 6:27-38
Jesus said, “I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. 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. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you…
In the Name of the God of Creation who loves us all…Amen.
Deep River,
My home is over Jordan.
Deep River, Lord.
I want to cross over into campground.
The words of this powerful spiritual speak so well to us and to the life and ministry of so many, from Martin Luther King and Ghandi to all those who work for justice and compassion. Campground is that place where justice is realized, and compassion and hospitality allow us to see the face of the other and accept them as children of God. And these words remind of that night in Memphis, when Martin Luther King said, “I’m not fearing any man. I’ve been to the mountaintop… and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you…These words resonate the themes of both the Exodus story and of Luke’s Gospel. Like Moses, he was leading his people out of bondage to powers and principalities. He was formalizing and clarifying a new relationship with the old order. He referred to the mountaintop experience of Moses in such a way as to place in context the nature of his service and, if necessary, his suffering. His speech also exhibited the codification of a new law in relation to contemporary social issues. His solidarity with the Memphis garbage workers, on strike because of racially biased, unfair wages, called for a transcendence of the current law. He called for a new covenant. His voice spoke out against the injustice of laws that violated the fundamental rights of his fellow human beings and, though “legal” in the technical sense, were unjust. His identification as a contemporary Christian allowed him to call upon these two traditions with integrity and power. His suffering and eventual death were in the extreme an example of how service to God a particular kind of freedom is indeed. Had he been bound by old codes of vengeance; the movement would have never gotten beyond the “eye for an eye” stage and gone the way of all such movements. Insisting on the practice of non-retaliation and using the language of the Exodus out of Egypt, King manifested in his own life journey the tensions inherent in both the Exodus account and the Gospel of Luke. There was, to be sure, ambiguity and suffering. The way was not always clear, nor is it now. Jesus is rarely who we want him to be. We want him to be comfortable, reassuring, and safe, but sometimes he is none of these things. Jesus’ teaching is hard. If we really hear it, no matter where we are situated in terms of economics, society, or politics, it will make us uncomfortable, unsettled, and feel decidedly challenged. Jesus was and is a radical — not in the sense being on the extreme ends of the political spectrum, but in the literal sense of ‘down to the roots.’ His vision for humanity, for the Church, for us, is not about stopgap solutions but about a deep and thoroughgoing transformation of our beliefs, ideals, and actions.
There are few places in the Gospels where this is more evident than in Luke’s Sermon on the Plain (Luke’s version of Matthew’s more famous Sermon on the Mount), which our Sunday lectionary started last week and continues today, with these challenging words:
Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. 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. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.
This ethic runs pretty much opposite to every human instinct. We recite the Golden Rule — Do unto others as you would have them do unto you — often enough, but here in context it seems more difficult, because what it’s really saying is “Do unto others not as they have done and are doing unto you.” Ouch. When Jesus says, “Love your enemies,” he’s not talking about abstract figures, but the literal people who hurt us. This is love completely devoid of sentimentality. But is this kind of love even possible? And if it is, is it good? The twentieth century was a golden age for nonviolent resistance. And a lot of that was driven by Christians who saw in Jesus’ teaching not a way of reinforcing power structures, but of a means of empowering the oppressed by revealing those power structures as being evil. Howard Thurman, a theologian whose writings inspired many of the leading figures of the American Civil Rights movement wrote powerfully about this: Hatred, he says, only reinforces hatred and harms the hated and hater alike. The way of love is not a sentimental retreat or a submission in the face of injustice, but a way for the oppressed to take ownership of their lives by taking the initiative over their oppressors. As Richard Rohr has written, “Just don’t get into the tit-for-tat game… Create your own loving set of rules, which will blow the system apart. You take the initiative and change the rules, the expectations and the outcome” (Jesus’ Plan for a New World). In teaching in this way, Jesus takes away the idea of reciprocity and retribution. We don’t do good because others do good to us; neither do we do bad because others do bad to us. We do good because it’s good. Full stop. But what’s interesting is that, right at the end of the passage, Jesus gives us back reciprocity in a transfigured way:
Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; 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.
As the theologian Matthew Root has suggested, here the mirror for our actions is not our neighbor, but God. God, in whose image and likeness we were made, is the one whose image our lives are to reflect. And so, we are called to mercy, to withhold judgement and condemnation, to forgive, and to be generous. And, because we do this, we will receive these as well, even if in ‘the next life’ or in a ‘spiritual way’ in this life. This remains difficult teaching. Our sense of justice and fairness demands that things balance out in this world; sadly, the reality of sin makes that unlikely, if not impossible. The most we can hope for in this world is consolation to go along with the difficulty, and to build the best, most whole and healed relationships we can, and exercise our true spiritual freedom— the freedom to set aside our natural urges for retribution and to love even our enemies.
One of my dear friends and colleagues told our group of a ministry they call the Starfish Collective. It’s based on a story of a young mother and her child who discover while walking on the beach that the retreating tide has left hundreds of starfish stranded above the waterline, where they will die in the heat and sun before the next incoming tide can cover them once more. The two of them rush from creature to creature, picking each one up and flinging it back into the sea. A curmudgeonly old man walking by scoffs, and says derisively, “You’re wasting your time. You can’t possibly make a difference here. There’s just too many of them and only two of you.” The child picks up one more starfish and tosses it into the waves. “Made a difference for that one,” she says. “Be merciful,” Jesus told his disciples, “As your heavenly parent is merciful.”
Service to God is, in this sense, perfect freedom because it ultimately means a transcendence of self, as one embraces a higher calling. We make our voices heard, amid uncertainty and ambiguity, and make ourselves willing to embark on a journey out of bondage to a servanthood to self alone. It is very easy to be kind to those who are nice to us – and to love those who love us. The challenge for Christians is to go further. Among Jesus’ own disciples there were strong characters and the potential for disastrous relationships. Simon the Zealot was violently opposed to Roman occupation; Matthew had made a living as a tax-collector in effect collaborating with the Romans; in the early Church at Philippi, Luke would have met a community in which a wealthy woman called Lydia met and worshipped on equal terms with dockers from the local port. Peter, as we know, struggled time and time again to understand and live out what Jesus was saying. His humanity is, in this sense, what draws me to him. And yet Jesus said he was the rock on which his church was built. I take comfort in that. Christian communities are never uniform – people hold different political views – and have strong opinions about a wide variety of issues; we belong to different social groups, and so on. And yet, week by week, we gather to worship God and, hopefully, to build up the Body of Christ in our own community and the locality in which we live. To do this, we must employ much of the teaching in today’s Gospel, cultivating qualities of compassion, forbearance and forgiveness. We must go beyond what might be expected in a club or other organization – being willing to sacrifice something of our own self-interest to create harmony. Such a community is a powerful witness to the world and will attract others to us. Yes, we may find ourselves exploited from time to time – but, as Jesus says, God is never outdone in generosity – and what we give we will receive back in even greater abundance. “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” King quoted these very words in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail. “I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.
King made the remarkable observation that the greatest enemy of justice in Birmingham at the time was not the sheriff, armed with clubs, and fire hoses, but rather the indifference of those who knew better. Believe that as long as you keep going, you will arrive. Another prophetic voice of that time, Marvin Gaye, sang about taking those first steps: ”Mother, mother There’s too many of you crying Brother, brother, brother There’s far too many of you dying. You know we’ve got to find a way…to bring some loving, here today.”Campground, in the old spiritual, is that place, dear one’s where we are all heading when we respond to the question, “And what does the LORD require of you: To act justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” It is that place where we are committed to justice, and compassion.
Oh, don’t you want to go,
To the Gospel feast;
That Promised Land,
Where all is peace? Oh, deep River, Lord,
I want to cross over into campground.
Amen.