The Way of Loving Enemies

Transcripts are computer-generated and may not be 100% accurate.

Thanks Mark, and I'm Cody Sanders, one of the pastors here. Apologies for my voice, I have some allergy issues because I forgot my allergy bill yesterday. Really sad story, I know. And I don't know what I'm allergic to, so I can't solve that mystery. Aside from allergies though, how many of you are not okay tonight? Okay, good, yeah. Seems like an appropriate number. Just wanted to be sure that you knew you weren't the only one. This is obviously a really difficult time during a poly-crisis in our country and in our world, and dissociation and inaction are often a symptom of kind of collective trauma. So if you're around people every day and they're not talking about the poly-crisis that we face, the ways in which we are not okay, sometimes that's just our trauma response ways of keeping us going. It doesn't mean that the people you're around every day aren't also experiencing the not okay-ness that you're experiencing. So I just wanted you to see that there are hands around the room, including mine, of folks who are not okay right now. And it's good for your body to send you those signals that something's going on that is important to pay attention to.

Tonight, we continue in the ways of Jesus. And I wanted to start with a trans sci-fi writer, Charlie Jane Anders. Anyone read Charlie Jane Anders books? I'm just getting into them. One person familiar with her writing. She says, "Visualizing a happier, more just world is a direct assault on the forces that are trying to break your heart." It's what keeps her writing. She talked about how important writing was for her through the COVID pandemic when she lost her dad to COVID, when the world was falling apart. Visualizing a happier, more just world is a direct assault on the forces that are trying to break your heart. We might see what Jesus is doing and the passages we're looking at here tonight as something like that.

While not science fiction, unfortunately, Jesus's Sermon on the Mount in Matthew's Gospel is a lengthy vision of a more just world. And tonight's passage is just one small little portion of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount. It comes from Matthew chapter 5:38-48. It goes like this:

You have heard it said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, do not resist an evil doer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, give your coat as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to the one who asks of you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you. You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be children of your Father in heaven. For God makes God's Son rise on the evil and on the good and sins reign on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly Parent is perfect.

I need to get this out of the way up front. Love your enemies is not a euphemism for being nice people. It's important to say in Minnesota, that is not the totality of the gospel. And it's not just Minnesota, but American Christianity has often reduced the most radical teachings of Jesus to something like being nice to people, as if that were the teaching of the gospel. But in fact, this is the most challenging and radical teaching in all of Christianity.

Jewish New Testament scholar, whom many of you know, Amy-Jill Levine, whose work makes clear the continuity between Judaism and the teachings of Jesus, even highlights the distinct radicality of this passage. She says in Jewish thought, one could not mistreat the enemy, but love was not mandated. Only Jesus insists on loving the enemy. He may be the only person in antiquity to have given this instruction, Levine says. And whether we dismiss it is too impossible a task for someone like us to live up to, or reduce it to a simple admonition to be really nice to everybody. This unique challenging radicality of loving your enemies fades away and we're left with little more than a kindly preschool-teacher-Jesus, trying not to get us to, you know, push each other on the playground.

But Jesus had real enemies. Living squarely in the midst of occupied territory under the rule of the Roman Empire, Jesus's own enemies saw Him as a seditious conspirator and a professional agitator. And just like prophets beforehand and prophets after Him, those charges, sorry, those charged with maintaining an oppressive status quo had a vested interest in either keeping Him silent or seeing Him dead.

Another prophet whose own empire saw Him as a seditious conspirator and professional agitator, millennia later, Martin Luther King Jr., asked of this very teaching we're looking at tonight, "It is easy to love those who love you, but how can one love those who openly and insidiously seek to defeat you?" That's become a question for more and more of us these days.

And friends, Jesus and King were seditious conspirators provoking the imaginations of those under the empire's rule and reign to imagine a different way of being in the world, to tell a story of an unjust world that is an attack on the injustice of our day. Jesus and King were professional agitators attempting to incite a rebellion of resistance against the forces of oppression, injustice, and violence. And so there were real enemies openly, insidiously seeking to defeat them with a vested interest in either keeping them silent or seeing them dead. And from Jesus to King, the prophets continued to preach, "You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."

This is one of the places in English where we're really limited in our ability to get what the passage is saying with simple translations. In English, we just have one word for love, and we use it to carry as much weight as possible. I love barbecue, I love my mama, I have a t-shirt that says that. I'm just kidding, I don't. But in Greek, there are multiple words for love. There's eros, this is the sexual love of passion. There is phileo/philea, the love that you have for friends. And then there's agape. That's the love you have for barbecue. I'm kidding.

Agape is used in the New Testament for the love of God for humanity and humanity for God, as well as to describe the love of parents for their children. It's also used throughout the ancient Greek sources with a rich complexity of meaning from things like to welcome warmly and to be content in Homer, or the rapacious appetite of wolves of prey in Plato. Centuries later, Thomas Aquinas described agape as meaning to will the good of others. And that's the word that is being used here, not eros, this love of passion and sexuality, not even phileo, the love of brothers, comrades, but agape.

Centuries later, after Jesus, King describes this kind of love, agape love, saying, "When Jesus bids us to love our enemies, he is speaking neither of eros or philea, he is speaking of agape, understanding and creative, redemptive goodwill for all people. You have heard it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Treat your enemies with understanding and creative, redemptive goodwill."

With the scandal of this teaching, the line between how we treat our neighbors and how we treat our persecutors grows thin, not because we don't have real enemies, but because we do. It's only because Jesus had real enemies who openly and insidiously sought to defeat him that his message here is the most challenging and radical teaching in all of Christianity. And it's only because we today, you and me, have real enemies, that it continues to offer a radical invitation to have our entire perspective on the world and ourselves within it changed, reshaped and transformed even today.

But how in the world do we actually do that? Here's Jesus's clue to the question of practicality:

You have heard that it was sad, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you, do not resist an evil doer, but if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.

One of the best treatments of this text that I've ever encountered comes from the late biblical scholar Walter Wink. Wink says that this text is a strategy for the non-violent resistance to oppression. And it takes a little unpacking because there are cultural mores written into this passage that we don't share today. So we can't really see the radicality of this passage on the surface level.

For example, if you're struck on the right cheek first in this era of Roman occupation, a society built upon hierarchy, people knowing their place and their status and who is above them and who is beneath them, and those positions don't change very much over the course of time. So if you're struck on the right cheek, it is from the backhanded blow from the right hand of a superior. The backhanded blow because the left hand wouldn't have been used for landing such a blow and only equals in the society, only equals fight with their fists. So we know up front that what Jesus is describing here is an act of humiliation, an act of the superior does to an inferior, a backhanded blow. So turning the other cheek would be a non-violent refusal of such indignity and an act of resistance to another's dominance over you. By turning the other cheek, Wink says, the inferior is saying, “I am a human being just like you. I refuse to be humiliated any longer. I am your equal. I won't take it anymore. If you're going to hit me again, you'll have to use your fist and hit me like you're equal.”

Likewise, giving your undergarments to the one who has sued you for your outer garments isn't a simple acquiescence to that person's power over you. Instead, it's putting your creditor, the person who has sued you because you haven't paid them back and so they're going to take the clothes right off your back, it's putting your creditor to shame with your nakedness, as it was taboo in this culture to cause another person's nakedness. It's an act that unmasks the cruelty of the system through non-violent means.

These kinds of activities have taken place in non-violence resistance movements pretty much from the day of Jesus to the present. We've seen them in the civil rights movement, we've seen them in queer and trans rights movements. I read just recently of a South African village that was going to be bulldozed by the government, apartheid government, and the men were all at work. No one was there to protect the village. It was only the women in this village. So the women came out and stood before the bulldozers and stripped naked. And everyone just left because no one knew what to do at that point. These kinds of non-violent means of resisting the hierarchical oppression have worked in many and varied contexts all over the world for millennia.

Now, going the second mile, now we've reduced this phrase from any of its radicality in everyday speech. We usually talk about it as just like giving it the extra effort. Nothing to do with that. Wink says that this action addresses the allowance of the Roman soldier in this period of time to force subjugated peoples into servitude for the distance of one mile. By going the second mile though, the subjugated person is asserting their own human dignity and agency in a situation that can't be immediately changed. They have no power to overthrow Roman rule. So a complete reorientation toward our enemies takes shape. And you shame the superior, the Roman officer, by going the second mile because they either have to break the rules making you continue to carry their pack or they have to enact compassion and say, “No, no, stop. Give it back to me now.”

These kinds of things invite us to experiment with a new set of creative and innovative tactics to resist oppressors and unjust forces when our entire perspective on the world and ourselves within it is challenged and reshaped and transformed. A new world of possibilities opens before us for creatively resisting the death dealing practices of empire.

Does anybody know the name Micah White? Micah White. I read a book of his a few years ago. He's the co-founder of the Occupy Wall Street movement. He wrote a book sometime after that movement ended called The End of Protest, a New Playbook for Revolution in which he argued that an era when we continue to replicate protests that have worked in the past but have lost their potency and effectiveness, we need some challenge, some change. The old ways don't always continue to work anymore. There was an era in which mass protests could shame politicians into doing the right thing and it worked. It largely doesn't anymore. Micah White says that what we need are methods that help us to break the script and begin innovating. I want to read a little paragraph of his to you. He says:

Innovation means to renew, to make new. For activist innovation means to introduce a new way of protesting that breaks the pattern. History shows that the weaker side, the adversary with 10 times fewer resources in asymmetric conflicts, tends to win if they innovate. Innovation in the context of protest means acting differently from our adversary and our predecessors. It means adopting tactics that are experimental and untested. It means refusing to mirror or mimic our opponent.

This is what Jesus is doing here in this passage, radical innovative tactics of non-violent resistance. It's hard to imagine the potency of these kinds of things unless you try to imagine it in its first iteration. Can you imagine the shock on the face of a superior, a man of the upper class, of Roman citizenship, power, wealth, distinction, in the heat of anger, back-handedly striking a lower class down-and-out servant who has no recourse whatsoever. And instead of scurrying off in deference to the superior's authority and unquestioned use of violent force, instead of fighting back and risking intense punishment, the lower class down-and-out servant in silent resistance to his status as an object to be taken advantage of, turns the other cheek, tacitly saying, “You're going to have to hit me like an equal next time.”

Can you imagine the disequilibrium of the first Roman soldier who commands one of the subjugated underclass in occupied territory to carry his heavy equipment for the mile allowed by law. And when they come to the next mile marker, the soldier reaches for his pack, and the subjugated person insists upon defying the law and carrying his oppressor's pack for a second mile, giving the oppressor little choice but to either act with compassion and take back the heavy load or break the law and continue to use the subjugated person's labor.

These non-violent tactics are similar to what White, uh, Micah White calls wobbling in resistance and in activism. Innovative protest methods. He says, "To wobble means to protest unexpectedly by constantly breaking the script. Wobbling requires developing detachment from an unfolding campaign.” He says, “When we wobble, we select the protest moves as if each day of the campaign were the start of a new game. We refuse to respond predictably or to direct our opponent's moves. We break the continuity between the past and future behaviors. This scheme forces our adversaries into a mode of constant reaction as they cannot plan a long-term strategy without a sense of what protesters will do next.”

We've seen this in so many instances across time. I've told you some of the stories in the past, stories of Black Panther activism, stories of queer and trans activism, stories of civil rights activism, and it's becoming clear that this type of innovation is going to be critical in the coming days. I'll give you one example of why that is the case. In the early 80s, the church where I used to serve as pastor—not in the early 80s, but before my time there—practiced sanctuary with undocumented people.

There was a network all across the country, and they joined this network, and they got hooked up with a woman from El Salvador who had been violently treated to the point of near death, and it was clear to her if she got caught by these same people again, she would die. She got connected to this network of people in the US, got to the US, and ended up living in our congregation's church. She would sleep in the chapel. She would bathe in our baptistry because we were Baptists, so our baptistry didn't look like that, it was an actual tub that you could get into. She would be carried around from our church by church members at risk of their own arrest and imprisonment if caught with her. She would be carried around all over Massachusetts to tell her story, to bring other people into the sanctuary movement. Eventually, her children were able to join a network of people who got them up to the US-Mexico border from El Salvador, and one of our church members went down to the border and physically got them and brought them into the US and back to Massachusetts. Years later, that woman eventually did get her citizenship status and is still living in the community, teaching preschool. I met her once when I was serving there as pastor.

During the last Trump administration, our church knew we needed to do this again because there were a lot of people at risk of deportation. For a lot of people, going back to the place that they've come from means facing the risk of violence and death. We were connected with a woman and her two children for whom that was the case, and we all covenanted to not share pertinent details of her story publicly, but it was really clear that if she were sent back to where she came from, she would also face death. She lived in our congregations. We had 10 partner congregations at that point. She lived in one of our congregations buildings for upwards of four years, all through the Trump administration and even into the early days of the Biden administration. 24 hours a day, two people from these 10 congregations stayed in that church with her so that if I showed up, she wasn't going to be alone. At one point, the police in our city came to the churches and said, “We have just taken down a video surveillance camera outside of the church,” and we didn't put it there. We don't know who put it there, but we can all presume that ICE put it there, that they were monitoring her movements so that if she came out of the church, she would be arrested.

Back in the 80s, the church had been infiltrated by an informant. I don't know how they knew this, but they knew that there was an informant in the pews. The bottom floor of the church had some Central American organizing agencies with offices down there. The church would constantly be broken into, but the only thing that would be damaged were the computers of those Central American organizing agencies. They started praying every Sunday morning for their informant, having no idea who they were, just knowing that they were somewhere in the pews, and they prayed for them every Sunday morning that their hearts would be changed.

Fast forward again to the early, the Trump administration, the first time. These churches worked together to hold this woman in compassion and companionship and love. We traveled with her many times to her hearings, which were never compassionately moved to Massachusetts, where she lived, but were scheduled in Arizona, where we would have to drive her each time that she needed to go there. Years into this, she did get her documentation. It took 10 very well-resourced churches and a group of lawyers from the Harvard Immigration Clinic to make this happen for one person, but she did get her papers, and she's still living now safely in the community, no longer in the church.

I tell you that story because it illustrates well the need to continue shifting our tactics. Sanctuary in that way no longer works, because immediately, in the first days of this administration, the memo that limited ICE from going into churches, hospitals, and schools was erased. Now those places are on the table. At any point, ICE can enter a church, ICE can enter a hospital, ICE can enter a school. Of course, that rule wasn't on the books for ICE because they wanted places that could be sanctuaries. That just happened to be a way that churches were able to work that rule into the favor of compassionately companioning people in sanctuary in the churches. It was a rule because people deserved to be able to get an education and to be able to get medical care and to be able to worship without the burden of fearing that they would be arrested in those places and detained and deported.

So here we are today, a new day, when old tactics that have worked since the 80s don't work anymore. And I don't know what the new answer is for that particular piece of this really large poly-crisis that we are facing right now, but it's an illustration that's important for me to tell you because it shows the ways that the powerful, those in the dominant positions, learn the strategies of resistance and then shift in relationship to them so that those strategies don't work anymore. And we have to continue to figure out new ways of protecting those whose lives are on the line.

Loving our enemies and engaging in nonviolent resistance is an invitation to have our entire perspective on the world and ourselves within it challenged, reshaped, transformed by the ways of Jesus. This reorientation toward our enemies from hatred and ill will to love and creative, redemptive goodwill is an invitation to be innovative in our methods of resistance to an oppressive status quo, not to acquiesce to them, but to be innovative in relationship to them.

You've heard it was said, meet force with power, more force with more power, but I say to you, change your tactics. Rather than force with force, start a new game, refuse to respond predictably or directly to your opponent's moves, learn your enemies and love them and work for their redemptive goodwill. And you'll know you're doing this when you don't hate all the people that you're supposed to hate. When you don't fight back with the tactics the powerful are already well prepared for. When the line between how you treat your neighbor and how you treat your persecutor, how you treat your friend and how you treat your enemy, grows so thin for you that it's practically imperceptible. And that, friends, is the most challenging and radical teaching in all of Christianity.