"Love your enemies"

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

This is a quote with many authors, because the sentiment is true. 

We remember how others make us feel long after we have forgotten what they did to us or said to us. 

This is why many people have very strong reactions to Jesus' Good News.

Love offered always makes us feel.

Even when we are angry about offered love because it comes from the 'wrong' person,

Love, once offered, is never forgotten, because it makes us feel. 

Unfortunately, we cannot all rush out of here and love our enemies and change the world. 

I wish that we could! 

Most of us are not in a place yet where we can offer love to our enemies, as Jesus teaches this morning in our Gospel passage, or even to our neighbors, as he says many other times. 

We haven't done the steps we need to get to a place to be able to really offer love to those against us.

We haven't examined our own socialization, our prejudices and assumptions about our enemies in order to go beyond our assumptions to offer love. 

Jesus flips the script, as Rev. Anne said last week, on human relationships in this teaching. 

Where we would normally hate those who hate us, Jesus asks us to love them.

Love our enemies. 

But love requires us to look beyond what we already know, or think we know about others, our assumptions about others, our socialization about difference in this world, to really see each other. 

Socialization is a powerful and tricky thing. 

For example, while I am giving the sermon, I am in a socialized position of power. 

Mostly because we have been socialized to stay quiet during the sermon, so I could almost say whatever I want and most of you will simply sit there. Its a unspoken rule we have learned, either from childhood, being told to be quiet in church, especially during the sermon... or from more recently, when starting to be a part of this community and noticing that no one else talks during the sermon. 

In a different kind of church, the socialization pattern is different. Some churches want, desire, almost require the congregation to talk back during the sermon. 

Which socialization, which way is better? I don't know if one is better than another, but the issue is that we don't tend to think about this socialization at all. 

But that is the power of socialization. We learn, whether we realize it or not, we learn from others what to say, what not to say, what to do, where to go, how to respond, how to dress, how to treat those different from us and a million other things we are not always fully aware of without thinking about what we are learning! 

In our society, we are socialized to treat our enemies, those we are told are our enemies, 

in certain ways. 

When 9/11 happened and al-Qaeda took the credit for it, many people started seeing all Middle Eastern people, all Muslims, as enemies. And they acted on their fear and hatred, by treating them horribly. 

However, once we start looking at our assumptions around who are our enemies, we realize, that pretty much everyone else in the world is not our enemy. When we look at what we have been taught, we start to realize that some of what we have been taught is wrong.

Most people are not our enemies.

They are neighbors who think differently. 

In the 1990s in South Africa, the ending of apartheid started because two men started political negotiations, not on the basis that they were enemies, but that they were two people who wanted the same goal, a better system, with different ways of looking at the problem. The negotiations were not always smooth, but both Nelson Mandela and F W de Klerk said in later interviews that part of their success was accepting the other as a person and accepting what they said as what they said. They moved past their assumptions about what they thought the other wanted, and accepted what they said as truthful. Despite their differences, they offered each other friendship, brotherly love, and it changed South Africa. 

While we cannot stay in learning or in book groups for ever, we need to start there. We need to start with learning. We need to start with learning about our own socialization, learning about our assumptions and where they come from, getting curious about what we think, and then learning to think and do differently. This is an area of our life together where we cannot stand on the sidelines. We cannot say, 'others will do this work.' No matter how old we are, or how young, no matter where we have grown up or how or with whom, the future of our nation and our humanity depends upon us. We cannot look at all those around us as enemies, worried about what they think about us.

Usually they are too worried thinking about what we think about them!

When we remember Jesus' commandment to love,

we know we have to do this work. 

It can be painful learning about our own socialization, about the systematic problems in our country caused by the unconscious, unintentional actions of good people.

I don't imagine Jesus thought that flipping the script on human relationships by telling his followers to 'love their enemies' was going to go over easily. 

Jesus knows humanity, yet, Jesus still said, more than once, 'Love your enemies'. 

Today at St. Peter's, we are celebrating and commemorating the life and work of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. A man who certainly knew the dangers of socialization in this world, and yet, despite having plenty of enemies, offered love and friendship to all those around him, and taught others to do the same. 

In his April 7th, 1957 sermon to the people of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he said,

"Let us fight passionately and unrelentingly for the goals of justice and peace. But let’s be sure that our hands are clean in this struggle. Let us never fight with falsehood and violence and hate and malice, but always fight with love, so that when the day comes that the walls of segregation have completely crumbled in Montgomery, that we will be able to live with people as their brothers and sisters. Oh, my friends, our aim must be not to defeat Mr. Engelhardt, not to defeat Mr. Sellers and Mr. Gayle and Mr. Parks.11 Our aim must be to defeat the evil that’s in them. But our aim must be to win the friendship of Mr. Gayle and Mr. Sellers and Mr. Engelhardt. We must come to the point of seeing that our ultimate aim is to live with all men as brothers and sisters under God, and not be their enemies or anything that goes with that type of relationship."

While Dr. King was specifically talking about the white leaders of Montgomery during the bus boycott, his address follows Jesus' teaching to love our enemies and is an example of the kind of passion and sacrifice Jesus calls us to in his teaching. 

Dr. King worked passionately and unrelentingly fought for the Beloved Community. The Beloved Community is a vision of the world where everyone is seen as a sister or brother. Where there are no enemies. Where the human script of thousands of years of war and hate have been completely flipped. Where love and respect and dignity and compassion are the underlying foundations of human relationships. We can follow Dr. King's preaching by learning about his work of nonviolence, by learning more through Black History Month starting February 1st, by joining the long standing St. Peter's Racial Healing Group as they learn together what it means to offer friendship and love across the bridges of hate and divide. 

Dr. King wasn't just talking to his congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. 

Jesus wasn't just talking to all those sitting in the countryside that day listening to him preach and teach.

No, Jesus was talking to us. 

'Love your enemies.'

Jesus didn't say, ask your neighbors to love others. No, Jesus says to each of us, love your enemies, love those who curse you. We cannot wait for others to do it first, we cannot have others do it for us. It is our task, as Christians, followers of Jesus and Jesus' Word, to love our neighbors, our enemies, our haters. (There will always be haters...) 

Jesus calls us NOT to be the haters, but the love-ers. 

Not romantic lovers, but those offering God's love to all,

those who make it their business to change the world by offering others God's love.

Jesus calls us to be the "reading the books, talking to our neighbors, offering blessings to those who curse us" love-ers.

The "digging into history, upsetting the status quo, standing up for human rights" love-ers.

The love-ers who look and see the whole person before them, 

black, white, latino, indigenous, asian, middle eastern, semitic, young, old, middle aged, homosexual, heterosexual, pansexual, able bodied, differently abled, Episcopalian, Pentecostal, Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Wiccan, the whole rainbow of diversity in this world

the love-ers who give others power by seeing them fully.

the love-ers who don't accept socialization without examining it. 

The love-ers who change history because they make others feel loved.

The broken-hearted love-ers who pray for the world and every body in it. 

Jesus calls us to a life of love for all.