"Not all positions and policies are created equal"

Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Epiphany, Year C

Saint Peter's | Arlington, VA

Ps. 37:1-12,41-42; Luke 6:27-38

As a child growing up with two older brothers and two younger brothers, the Potter household was no stranger to the occasional conflict. To put it mildly. On one occasion, there was even something of a tussle, believe it or not, over a children’s book. [Some stories you save for a Sunday when there’s isn’s a captive children’s homily audience]

To set the record straight once and for all: I had the book first—at least as my memory recalls. One of those many brothers had unjustly taken it from my hands, and forcefully I might add, obviously leaving me with no choice but retaliation. In that moment he was my sworn enemy. 

Eventually our Father broke up the fist fight over the children’s book: the title, by which he was perplexed and utterly dismayed, was ‘The Giving Tree.’ You just can’t make this up; sometimes that’s just the way it goes. 

In an article titled ‘The Forgotten Christian Discipline of Loving Your Enemies,’ the mennonite pastor and community organizer, Melissa Florer-Bixler offers a fairly straightforward suggestion: “If you’re going to love your enemies, you need to know who they are.” What she has in mind of course is something a little more substantive than petty squabbles between sibling frenemies.

This morning, Luke’s Gospel affirms the existence of enemies. It is the expectation of Jesus that his followers will have enemies. Because there are forces that are hostile to our well-being; we might argue that to suggest anything otherwise would simply be pollyannaish. 

Not everyone or everything should be considered friendly. We need to be honest about this, uncomfortable as it may be.

Some things threaten our livelihoods, or our bodies, and perhaps even our very existence. Some things threaten to undermine the Way of Love we seek to live and practice. And to pretend those threats are simply inconsequential personal preferences does a disservice to the work God’s Spirt seeks to do in this world.

In recent weeks, the Vice President claimed there is a hierarchy of sorts to the Christian practice of love. That we are called to love God first, then ourselves, then our family and friends, and if there’s anything left to then love our neighbors. But as he emphasized this last part is only necessary so long as loving our neighbor doesn’t compromise the higher priority of protecting our own nuclear family and ensuring its comfort is never inconvenienced.

Now, to be clear, no matter how much JD Vance claims this is a historical Christian teaching: it is fact heretical. And it has been appropriately denounced as heresy. 

Loving one’s neighbor only when it is convenient to do so is incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Even more directly, it is antithetical and incompatible with the very lessons we hear this morning. The project of American Civil Religion and the Way of Christ are simply not one and the same. 

On a hot summer night in August of 2017, the night before the Alt-Right Rally to be held in Charlottesville, VA, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church entered into that heated moment and held a prayer service—a counter narrative to the violence and hatred that would unfold that weekend. And as the service was near concluding, the building—along with several hundred people inside—was put under lockdown: because white supremacists carrying flaming torches were marching toward the church from the UVA campus—where only moments before, as we would learn later, several students were beaten with those torches.

As we huddled in the church basement waiting for safe clearance outside, I asked the Rev. Dr. Cornel West “What is the work of the church in this time?” As I probably could have predicted, he said in response, “Oh, my Brother, it’s the same as it’s always been: love.”

Now, like all leaders, Dr. West doesn’t get everything quite right all of the time, but on this I don’t think he could have been any more so. Because as our former presiding bishop, Michael Curry, would put it, “If it ain’t about love, it ain’t about Jesus.”

There’s a peculiar thing in the air these days. As the men’s group discussed this last Thursday night, a kind of crisis of hypermasculinity seems to be permeating so much of our public dialogue. It is a version of masculinity that views weakness with disdain, considers vulnerability to be a threat, and warns against the dangers of committing the “sin of empathy”—a nonsensical accusation that has been circulating around the internet in these weeks following Bishop Mariann Budde’s plea for mercy at the Inaugural Prayer Service. In so many ways, this thing in the air is what fueled the tragedies in Charlottesville in 2017 and those on the Capital Grounds in 2021. And it’s will to power by any means necessary is shaping our collective moral imagination. 

A generation of young men are yearning to live out some kind of a heroes journey. For this reason, merciless vengeance is relished and retribution on one’s personal and political enemies is celebrated, delighted in. Maybe there’s something to this that’s just how things have always been but I would suggest something different is happening. If nothing else, the harmful consequences are now more drastic. This growing movement of hypermasculinity is a cheap counterfeit of identity and belonging. And it holds a warped view of justice fueled by petty grievances and insecurities: all off which are rooted in the pain of real wounds desperately in need of the strength of tenderness and of compassion. As Richard Rohr says, “That which is not transformed is transmitted.”

Dr. West would put it this way, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” 

And it is to this shared work I believe we as the Body of Christ are called: the same as we always have been. In troubling days, we are called as the Church to live out the way of Love by enacting the justice of God—who “makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous” alike.

Not all positions and policies are created equal. But hear me on this: positions and policies are not people... People, all people, in the manifold differences of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and ability are beloved children of our Creator—and the justice of God seeks to provide refuge just like a loving mother hen gathers her chicks under a protective wing.

Wouldn’t it be easier though if Christian discipleship were really just about defining clear boundaries? About simply identifying who stands with us and who stands against us?

Truthfully, at times, I do find myself wanting things to be this simple. To be as convenient as creating an “other”—and then making up ways to insist they’re not like us! Transforming the prejudices I hold is so much more demanding than transmitting them, or maybe even embracing them; after all my prejudices and petty grievances exist rot make my comfortable. And sometimes I’d rather just keep The Giving Tree all to myself.

But loving enemies? Sacrificial love: the kind that puts itself in a position of vulnerability and willingly gives up power? I’m not always sure I have the strength or stomach for that.

But Christ’s Way of Love refuses to reduce people to enemies. And love does not happen by mere accident. Love is a choice; sometimes it is hard work. And truthfully, we cannot do it alone.

Some would suggest we are unprepared for or incapable of meeting the complexities of this time. I disagree. Because what we need now is already part of our spiritual DNA.

So, friends,

Commit your way to the Lord and put your trust in him, and he will make it to pass.          He will makes your righteousness as clear as the light and your just dealing as the noonday.          …the deliverance of the righteous comes from the Lord; he is [your] stronghold in time of trouble.”

“Do not fret” then: because we are not alone.

Let us love and be loved in return—for the measure of love we hope to see in this world depends on the measure of love we dare to imagine and create within it.

Amen