Solo le Pido a Dios

Luke 6:27-38

February 24, 2019

Luke 6. I was part of an experiment that began about a decade ago to create a dispersed intentional community grounded in that text. Dispersed intentional community is difficult. Luke 6 is impossible.

Love your enemies. Love your enemies. Love your enemies. No matter how you slice it, that’s a remarkable and remarkably difficult challenge. What kind of love is this, this love for the hated one?

“Hated one” is a more suggestive, but still accurate translation of the Greek exthros. It’s as if Jesus anticipated, and then totally upended, the old Crosby, Stills, and Nash lyric – love the one your with – to render it love the one you hate.

Love the one who brings out the opposite of love from you. How is that supposed to work?

We could run quickly through the various Greek New Testament words for love – eros, philos, agape – and note the distinctions between the erotic love of lovers – clearly not applicable here; the filial love for those we treat as siblings – perhaps slightly easier to grasp if you’re from a particularly dysfunctional family, but still clearly not what Jesus was on about; and then agape – that self-giving, self-sacrificing love that seeks what is best for the beloved.

But even though Jesus uses agapate – the imperative form of agape – it’s still hard for me to understand how I am to seek the best for the one I hate. For the one I love? Sure. But there it is, clear as can be: love the hated one. Love them and pray for those that spitefully use and abuse you. Love your enemies.

One of the most powerful sermons I’ve ever heard was preached by my friend John Lentz on Sunday, September 16, 2001, in which John offered a heartfelt prayer for Osama bin Laden. That I remember it going on 20 years later testifies to the power of that proclamation, that prayer, that expression of, if not love, then at least concern for a murderous, fundamentalist, theocrat who clearly felt, at best, indifferent about our lives, and whom we were being called to hate by leaders from most every corner of our country … and from many pulpits, as well.

As much as we were being called to hate, I must confess that I really never managed to conjure that feeling. Honestly, I am hard pressed to name anyone for whom I’ve genuinely felt hatred.

Does that mean I have no enemies? Does that mean I am not patriotic? I’m not sure.

I do feel hatred, but it’s simply not often personal. For example, with regard to bin Laden and his ilk, I hate religious extremism but I feel something more akin to pity for individuals caught up in such movements whether they be Muslim fundamentalist theocrats or Christian fundamentalist white nationalists.

Truth be told, I have known a few folks who probably fall in that latter camp, and as long as you stick to talking about bar-b-que and baseball and Jimmy Buffet they’re pretty nice guys.

Of course, niceness is not what Jesus calls us to. After all, as others have noted elsewhere, the staff at Auschwitz were probably nice neighbors who came home from work, grilled bratz, and listened to Bach and Beethoven.

Nice is not what we’re called to. Cultured isn’t our calling either – whether that’s the high culture of Bach and Beethoven or the pop culture of Buffet. Brunch is also not our calling.

Love is our calling, and, in its highest most challenging form, that call is to extend love somehow to the hated ones.

If Luke 6 is to be our guide then we will follow it straight into a new kind of community. That new community is key, for the demands placed upon us by this gospel call are too high for any one of us alone to live into. That is why Jesus was always about the work of calling together a new community – the church – as a new way of being in the world bound together not by blood and tribe, but, rather, by love and justice.

Such a way of living takes the work of the whole community, because on our own we are simply too timid to live it. Such timidity is one of the great enemies of the Beloved Community, of the true church that is worthy of its confession.

That is why Dr. King addressed his letter from the Birmingham jail not to right-wing political leaders, night-riders, and Klansmen. It’s why he didn’t address it to the chamber of commerce or commercial leaders in town. No, he addressed it to mainstream religious leaders, and he called them out specifically for their timidity, their embrace of “a negative peace which is the absence of tension” over “a positive peace which is the presence of justice,” for being “more cautious than courageous and […] remain[ing] silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.”[1]

It’s often easy and comfortable to hang out behind these windows; to wall off the world outside of this serene setting. Sometimes when I find myself doing that, getting too comfortable, I recall the sermon preached by the Rev. Dana Jones at my ordination, 20 years ago.

I was ordained during the Christmas season, so the image of stable and manger was resonate. Echoing Bonhoeffer’s observation that cross and the manger remain the two places that the rich and powerful of this world fear to tread, Dana reminded the congregation that “we cannot get to the manger if we live fenced lives.”

You see, we think we build barriers to keep out our enemies, those we hate, those we fear. But the truth is, when we build fences we all too often find ourselves dwelling in a false security, securely attached to much more powerful enemies.

For me, that deep and powerful enemy is indifference. As King noted in the opening of his jailhouse missive, the religious leaders deplored the disturbance of the demonstrations in Birmingham, but did not “express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being.”

As King said, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and when those not directly threatened by injustice are indifferent to the suffering of others then injustice prevails.

You may have noticed the title of this homily and wondered what it means. Perhaps literally so, since it’s in Spanish. It’s a prayer, really. A prayer for enemies, as it were.

It translates roughly as “all I ask of God.” It comes from a song by the same name by Leon Geico, a singer-songwriter from Argentina who, through the 70s and 80s – a dangerous time in his country – was one of its biggest stars – kind of a cross between Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. The fact that 50,000 people would fill arenas for his shows may have been the only thing that kept the right-wing junta from imprisoning him or worse.

This song was sung at my ordination. All I ask of God, it says, it that God not let me be indifferent to suffering, to injustice, to war.

Indifference is my enemy; it is what I hate most in others and in myself. Perhaps the best way to pray for my enemy is to pray for a way through it. Solo le pido a Dios.

Amen.

---

[1] All King quotes from the Stanford manuscript version of the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/document_images/undecided/630416-019.pdf