Imagine this scene with me. Jesus comes upon you as you sit by the side of the road. You have heard about him. You have been intrigued by him. You even suspect he may be the Messiah – the promised one of God come to bring salvation to a broken and wounded world.
He comes to you. You! Of all the people he could have come to, he come to you and looks you in the eye. You feel addressed to the deepest reaches of your soul. What he asks you will do. You know it even before he asks. What he says is simple: “Come, follow me.”
Then something else kicks in. What does Jesus mean when he says, “Come, follow me”? Does he mean that I should follow Jesus in a spiritual sense, acknowledging that he is who he says he is and trusting and believing in him? And if I do that then I am fulfilling the intent of what he has invited me to do and I won’t actually have to physically go and follow him. That would upset a whole lot of things in my life right now, after all. To actually follow Jesus, I’d have to leave behind my possessions, my attachments, my habits, my family, my friends, my small pleasures and daily routines. Would Jesus really want me to leave those things? Surely what Jesus means is that I should follow him with my faith and with my heart and not with my feet and my body.
No. No. No. That is ridiculous! When Jesus said, “Come, follow me” maybe, just maybe he meant, “Come, you, now and follow me.” Get up off your duff and put one foot in front of the other and take the risk that I mean what I say and that your salvation is bound up in doing what I say. This is Nike theology here. Just do it.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who died in one of Hitler’s death camps during World War II, struggled with this same question in his most famous book, Discipleship. He lamented that Christians in his day were paying lip service to following Christ but had convinced themselves that they could be lived out without changing their lives in any way. “Jesus’ call is to be take ‘absolutely seriously,’ but true obedience to it consists of my staying in my profession and serving him there, in true inner freedom. Thus Jesus would call: come out!—but we would understand that he actually meant: stay in!—of course, as one who has inwardly come out.”[i] And so the Christian Church capitulated to the Nazis and allowed themselves to be co-opted by the structures of evil and to allow the murder of millions of Jews and others, all the while maintaining that they were following Jesus spiritually, even as their bodies followed Hitler. The people who bore Jesus’ name were indistinguishable from the followers of Satan.
So here’s what disturbs me and what made me want to start this new sermon series today: I am wondering what it means to be a Christian today. I am wondering if we believe any longer that it makes a difference to look different from the world. Do we really believe that something like prayer matters? What is the value of worship? Why in the world should we forgive? What is the point of giving offerings to God? Do we really think these things matter?
I know. I know. These things are strange in this world. They don’t talk about forgiveness down at Sonny’s Barbershop. They don’t break into prayer over eggs and scrapple at the Captain’s Deck. When you go to school on Tuesday or Wednesday this week, they’re not going to be encouraging you to witness. These are things that belong to the people of God and the people of God, because they also live in the world, are not always certain they want to be different. It seems a little threatening. It seems a little uncomfortable. To tell you the truth, it seems a little crazy.
But I want us to get a little crazy over the next couple of months. I want to talk about 8 crazy things that Christians do – crazy according to the standards of the world around us. I could have picked more. I could have been more topical. I could have stayed on the lectionary. But I’m feeling a little desperate. I’m feeling a little disconnected myself. I want to know what it means to follow Jesus with my whole self. And I want to know what the world feels like, what I feel like, when I try to live out of the simple obedience Bonhoeffer talks about. This is risky business, you know, and I’m not sure what we’re getting ourselves into, but I want you to come along, because Jesus is still calling.
So today we go to Romans and Matthew and we read this command that immediately takes us to our first “yes, but…” "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.” [Mat 5:43-44]. Love your enemies! Yes, that girl in your homeroom class who whispers behind your back and is always texting other people in class with nasty comments about you. Love her. Yes, that businessman who shafted you on a deal. Love him. Yes, that horrible boss who treats you like trash. Love her. Yes, that criminal who beat you up. Love him. Yes, that terrorist who is so blinded by religious ideology that he sees in you only a target for elimination. Love him.
“Yes, but…” There are no “yes, but”s here! Jesus didn’t qualify his statement by saying, “Love your enemies, except those who are truly horrendous.” There are no distinctions. All enemies are alike in the eyes of God and they are worthy of only one thing from you. They are worthy of your love.
“O.K., Jesus, but I don’t have to like them, right? I can love them in the abstract the same way that I love humanity but not have to really associate with them.” No, you can’t love them in the abstract. You must love them in the concrete. Paul makes that clear, "If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink.” There are actions that should be taken. There are things that need doing. Loving your enemies is an active verb. Paul does at least give you a little bit of satisfaction in doing this because he says that when you do these things for your enemies “you will heap burning coals on their heads."
“But Jesus these people hate me.” Of course they hate you. They are your enemies. That’s what enemies do.
“But they don’t deserve it.” Of course they don’t, but they do need it. Who needs love more than your enemy? If your life has really been turned around by Jesus…if you have really experienced the love that God has offered…if you have been saved and transformed…then you will show love. What your enemy does with your love is none of your business, but what you do with your love makes a world of difference. You can love your family and those who do good to you, but how does that show that you have been transformed? As Jesus says, even tax collectors and Gentiles, (pretty low folks in the eyes of his listeners), can do that. Loving your enemy – now that’s radical.
Bonhoeffer, when he talks about this command, says that this command is what separates disciples from nonbelievers. This is what makes disciples different from the world around them. This is what makes them look peculiar or extraordinary. “What are you doing that is special?” Bonhoeffer asks. “The extraordinary – that is what is most offensive—is a deed the disciples do. It has to be done—like the better righteousness—and done visibly.”[ii] It is offensive to human nature and to our standards of justice to love those who wrong us. In that light, the most offensive thing Jesus ever said was uttered from a cross, after he had been battered and bruised and whipped and spit upon and nailed to a bar and strung up on a hill outside the city. And he said, “Forgive them, Lord, for they don’t know what they are doing.” Loving his enemies and dying for them. What an offense. And how many of us would do the same? And yet…it’s not about what our enemies might do with such a display of weakness…it’s about what Jesus has done by going to that extent.
Will Campbell is a crazy man like this. Campbell is a Baptist preacher from Mississippi who spent his life struggling to follow Jesus as literally as he could. In the 1950s that led him to be involved with the Civil Rights Movement. He was one of four people who escorted the first black students into a white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. He worked to integrate schools and to ensure voting rights for blacks across the south. He thought he had a pretty solid handle on what he was supposed to do. He was loving everyone.
When Campbell talked about his work, he always thought about it as a matter more of faith than racial politics. When a friend who didn’t believe in God asked him to describe Christianity in ten words or less, he said, “We’re all bastards but God loves us anyway.”
Then one day he was forced to confront what he really believed. His friend, Jonathon Daniel, a seminarian, was in Alabama helping in a voter registration drive. As Daniel was exiting a convenience store with another white priest and two black civil rights workers, he was shot and killed by Thomas Coleman, a special deputy who was incensed by what the workers were doing. He got the news from his friend who did not believe in God.
His friend challenged him to test his belief. Was Jon Daniel, his friend, a bastard? Campbell was forced to admit, “Yes.” Was Thomas Coleman? That was easier. “Yes.” Well, then Campbell’s friend asked, “Which of the two do you think God loves the most?”
Campbell called it a moment of conversion, a time when he realized that the full implication of his faith was that God loved the victim and, yes, God loved the man who killed him. “That a man could go to a store where unarmed human beings are drinking soda pop and eating moon pies, fire a shotgun blast at one of them, tearing his lungs and heart and bowels from his body, turn on another and send lead pellets ripping through his flesh and bones, and that God would set him free, [was] almost more than I could stand. But unless that is precisely the case, then there is no Gospel, there is no Good News. Unless that is true, we have only bad news.”[iii]
Campbell went on to develop relationships with members of the Ku Klux Klan, something that his civil rights associates could not understand. But for Campbell it was the concrete thing that he could do to live out the love of Jesus. Of course he would love the victims. That was the easy part. Loving the enemy. That was the challenge.
Yes, this is crazy stuff that Jesus calls us to. But he must know something that we find hard to believe. He must know that love works. We pay it lip service. We say that we believe in it. But when it comes to the hard realities of life and the challenges we face we seldom think of love as the answer. Love is all fine and good until we have to face death and murder and war and abuse. Then we have to have recourse to something else. Fear takes over and we reach for different methods and different tools. But love is what Jesus left us. Love is the biblical method for dealing with enemies.
Bonhoeffer says that “Jesus does not promise us that the enemy we love, we bless, to whom we do good, will not abuse and persecute us. They will do so. But even in doing so, they cannot harm and conquer us is we take this last step to them in intercessory prayer. Now we are taking up their neediness and poverty, their being guilty and lost, and interceding for them before God. We are doing for them…what they cannot do for themselves.”[iv]
What I’m asking for you on this first day of this series is no easy thing. I’m asking you to follow Jesus and to follow him in loving your enemy. Think of the person it is hardest for you to pray for. That’s who Jesus is asking you to love. That’s who Jesus is asking you to bless. That’s who Jesus is asking you to pray for. That’s who Jesus is asking you to intercede for. Not because it’s therapeutic. Not because it’s got an immediate payoff. Not because it makes sense. It doesn’t. But because he’s come to the side of the road and picked you out of the crowd. He’s looked you in the eyes and has addressed you at the deepest reaches of your soul. And you know that what he asks of you, you will do. And he’s asking you to love your enemy. Who is it? What are you going to do? Jesus, take me by the hand. I want to follow. I don’t want to be afraid. I want to know that love is the engine that runs the universe and nothing else. Thanks be to God.
Romans 12:9-21 (NRSV)
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.
Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." No, "if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
He comes to you. You! Of all the people he could have come to, he come to you and looks you in the eye. You feel addressed to the deepest reaches of your soul. What he asks you will do. You know it even before he asks. What he says is simple: “Come, follow me.”
Then something else kicks in. What does Jesus mean when he says, “Come, follow me”? Does he mean that I should follow Jesus in a spiritual sense, acknowledging that he is who he says he is and trusting and believing in him? And if I do that then I am fulfilling the intent of what he has invited me to do and I won’t actually have to physically go and follow him. That would upset a whole lot of things in my life right now, after all. To actually follow Jesus, I’d have to leave behind my possessions, my attachments, my habits, my family, my friends, my small pleasures and daily routines. Would Jesus really want me to leave those things? Surely what Jesus means is that I should follow him with my faith and with my heart and not with my feet and my body.
No. No. No. That is ridiculous! When Jesus said, “Come, follow me” maybe, just maybe he meant, “Come, you, now and follow me.” Get up off your duff and put one foot in front of the other and take the risk that I mean what I say and that your salvation is bound up in doing what I say. This is Nike theology here. Just do it.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who died in one of Hitler’s death camps during World War II, struggled with this same question in his most famous book, Discipleship. He lamented that Christians in his day were paying lip service to following Christ but had convinced themselves that they could be lived out without changing their lives in any way. “Jesus’ call is to be take ‘absolutely seriously,’ but true obedience to it consists of my staying in my profession and serving him there, in true inner freedom. Thus Jesus would call: come out!—but we would understand that he actually meant: stay in!—of course, as one who has inwardly come out.”[i] And so the Christian Church capitulated to the Nazis and allowed themselves to be co-opted by the structures of evil and to allow the murder of millions of Jews and others, all the while maintaining that they were following Jesus spiritually, even as their bodies followed Hitler. The people who bore Jesus’ name were indistinguishable from the followers of Satan.
So here’s what disturbs me and what made me want to start this new sermon series today: I am wondering what it means to be a Christian today. I am wondering if we believe any longer that it makes a difference to look different from the world. Do we really believe that something like prayer matters? What is the value of worship? Why in the world should we forgive? What is the point of giving offerings to God? Do we really think these things matter?
I know. I know. These things are strange in this world. They don’t talk about forgiveness down at Sonny’s Barbershop. They don’t break into prayer over eggs and scrapple at the Captain’s Deck. When you go to school on Tuesday or Wednesday this week, they’re not going to be encouraging you to witness. These are things that belong to the people of God and the people of God, because they also live in the world, are not always certain they want to be different. It seems a little threatening. It seems a little uncomfortable. To tell you the truth, it seems a little crazy.
But I want us to get a little crazy over the next couple of months. I want to talk about 8 crazy things that Christians do – crazy according to the standards of the world around us. I could have picked more. I could have been more topical. I could have stayed on the lectionary. But I’m feeling a little desperate. I’m feeling a little disconnected myself. I want to know what it means to follow Jesus with my whole self. And I want to know what the world feels like, what I feel like, when I try to live out of the simple obedience Bonhoeffer talks about. This is risky business, you know, and I’m not sure what we’re getting ourselves into, but I want you to come along, because Jesus is still calling.
So today we go to Romans and Matthew and we read this command that immediately takes us to our first “yes, but…” "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.” [Mat 5:43-44]. Love your enemies! Yes, that girl in your homeroom class who whispers behind your back and is always texting other people in class with nasty comments about you. Love her. Yes, that businessman who shafted you on a deal. Love him. Yes, that horrible boss who treats you like trash. Love her. Yes, that criminal who beat you up. Love him. Yes, that terrorist who is so blinded by religious ideology that he sees in you only a target for elimination. Love him.
“Yes, but…” There are no “yes, but”s here! Jesus didn’t qualify his statement by saying, “Love your enemies, except those who are truly horrendous.” There are no distinctions. All enemies are alike in the eyes of God and they are worthy of only one thing from you. They are worthy of your love.
“O.K., Jesus, but I don’t have to like them, right? I can love them in the abstract the same way that I love humanity but not have to really associate with them.” No, you can’t love them in the abstract. You must love them in the concrete. Paul makes that clear, "If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink.” There are actions that should be taken. There are things that need doing. Loving your enemies is an active verb. Paul does at least give you a little bit of satisfaction in doing this because he says that when you do these things for your enemies “you will heap burning coals on their heads."
“But Jesus these people hate me.” Of course they hate you. They are your enemies. That’s what enemies do.
“But they don’t deserve it.” Of course they don’t, but they do need it. Who needs love more than your enemy? If your life has really been turned around by Jesus…if you have really experienced the love that God has offered…if you have been saved and transformed…then you will show love. What your enemy does with your love is none of your business, but what you do with your love makes a world of difference. You can love your family and those who do good to you, but how does that show that you have been transformed? As Jesus says, even tax collectors and Gentiles, (pretty low folks in the eyes of his listeners), can do that. Loving your enemy – now that’s radical.
Bonhoeffer, when he talks about this command, says that this command is what separates disciples from nonbelievers. This is what makes disciples different from the world around them. This is what makes them look peculiar or extraordinary. “What are you doing that is special?” Bonhoeffer asks. “The extraordinary – that is what is most offensive—is a deed the disciples do. It has to be done—like the better righteousness—and done visibly.”[ii] It is offensive to human nature and to our standards of justice to love those who wrong us. In that light, the most offensive thing Jesus ever said was uttered from a cross, after he had been battered and bruised and whipped and spit upon and nailed to a bar and strung up on a hill outside the city. And he said, “Forgive them, Lord, for they don’t know what they are doing.” Loving his enemies and dying for them. What an offense. And how many of us would do the same? And yet…it’s not about what our enemies might do with such a display of weakness…it’s about what Jesus has done by going to that extent.
Will Campbell is a crazy man like this. Campbell is a Baptist preacher from Mississippi who spent his life struggling to follow Jesus as literally as he could. In the 1950s that led him to be involved with the Civil Rights Movement. He was one of four people who escorted the first black students into a white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. He worked to integrate schools and to ensure voting rights for blacks across the south. He thought he had a pretty solid handle on what he was supposed to do. He was loving everyone.
When Campbell talked about his work, he always thought about it as a matter more of faith than racial politics. When a friend who didn’t believe in God asked him to describe Christianity in ten words or less, he said, “We’re all bastards but God loves us anyway.”
Then one day he was forced to confront what he really believed. His friend, Jonathon Daniel, a seminarian, was in Alabama helping in a voter registration drive. As Daniel was exiting a convenience store with another white priest and two black civil rights workers, he was shot and killed by Thomas Coleman, a special deputy who was incensed by what the workers were doing. He got the news from his friend who did not believe in God.
His friend challenged him to test his belief. Was Jon Daniel, his friend, a bastard? Campbell was forced to admit, “Yes.” Was Thomas Coleman? That was easier. “Yes.” Well, then Campbell’s friend asked, “Which of the two do you think God loves the most?”
Campbell called it a moment of conversion, a time when he realized that the full implication of his faith was that God loved the victim and, yes, God loved the man who killed him. “That a man could go to a store where unarmed human beings are drinking soda pop and eating moon pies, fire a shotgun blast at one of them, tearing his lungs and heart and bowels from his body, turn on another and send lead pellets ripping through his flesh and bones, and that God would set him free, [was] almost more than I could stand. But unless that is precisely the case, then there is no Gospel, there is no Good News. Unless that is true, we have only bad news.”[iii]
Campbell went on to develop relationships with members of the Ku Klux Klan, something that his civil rights associates could not understand. But for Campbell it was the concrete thing that he could do to live out the love of Jesus. Of course he would love the victims. That was the easy part. Loving the enemy. That was the challenge.
Yes, this is crazy stuff that Jesus calls us to. But he must know something that we find hard to believe. He must know that love works. We pay it lip service. We say that we believe in it. But when it comes to the hard realities of life and the challenges we face we seldom think of love as the answer. Love is all fine and good until we have to face death and murder and war and abuse. Then we have to have recourse to something else. Fear takes over and we reach for different methods and different tools. But love is what Jesus left us. Love is the biblical method for dealing with enemies.
Bonhoeffer says that “Jesus does not promise us that the enemy we love, we bless, to whom we do good, will not abuse and persecute us. They will do so. But even in doing so, they cannot harm and conquer us is we take this last step to them in intercessory prayer. Now we are taking up their neediness and poverty, their being guilty and lost, and interceding for them before God. We are doing for them…what they cannot do for themselves.”[iv]
What I’m asking for you on this first day of this series is no easy thing. I’m asking you to follow Jesus and to follow him in loving your enemy. Think of the person it is hardest for you to pray for. That’s who Jesus is asking you to love. That’s who Jesus is asking you to bless. That’s who Jesus is asking you to pray for. That’s who Jesus is asking you to intercede for. Not because it’s therapeutic. Not because it’s got an immediate payoff. Not because it makes sense. It doesn’t. But because he’s come to the side of the road and picked you out of the crowd. He’s looked you in the eyes and has addressed you at the deepest reaches of your soul. And you know that what he asks of you, you will do. And he’s asking you to love your enemy. Who is it? What are you going to do? Jesus, take me by the hand. I want to follow. I don’t want to be afraid. I want to know that love is the engine that runs the universe and nothing else. Thanks be to God.
Romans 12:9-21 (NRSV)
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.
Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." No, "if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
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