What makes us revolutionary: June 28

Year A, Independence Day Readings                                                  Matthew 5:43-48                              

                The readings you heard today are the assigned readings for Independence Day.  As many of you know, we are celebrating Independence Day two consecutive Sundays as we were not sure what the surrounding streets would be like on July 5^th.  On the first page of our service leaflet is an excerpt from our vestry minutes on July 4^th 1776.  The vestry is the leadership body of the church and they work with the clergy.  This vestry realized that their prayers for the King of England and his family might not be very popular in Philadelphia in 1776. On the one hand, crossing out the names of the King and the royal family was an act of courage as it fundamentally changed who we were as a church.  We were the Church of England. It was also an act of self-preservation.  If they had continued to pray for the King of England when we were at war with England, there is a good chance they would have had to shut down the church and the clergy would have been forced to return to England.

            Yet what is interesting to me is how our Gospel for today pairs with this action, “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…”  I wonder if the rector at the time, Jacob Duche, thought about these words of Jesus.  We know that he was ambivalent about the war and especially the decision to declare independence. He acknowledged that England had not treated the colonies fairly, but he hoped this revolution would give us a place from  which to negotiate a better relationship, not create a new nation 

He undoubtedly knew this Gospel reading and knew Jesus asked his followers to pray for those who persecute them.  However, given the extraordinary tension that our new nation was experiencing, quoting these words of Jesus might not have been well received.  People would have said, well we are not supposed to pray for this enemy…this is not the enemy Jesus was talking about. 

In my last church, the tradition was to pray for the president, governor and the mayor by name every Sunday.  After Trump was elected, I had one person who was leading the prayers refuse to pray for him. I had to say, I understand you have a passionate dislike for this president, but Jesus did cover this very thing when he told us to not only pray for our enemies but to love to them.  You want to guess how they handled that perfectly reasonable and scripturally accurate argument? Not great. She said, “I can’t do it.”  I understood and didn’t try to convince her, but she took a break from leading the prayers because it would have set a bad precedent to have people only pray for the leader they voted for.

            That’s the thing about Jesus’ words…I bet not one of you shuddered when you heard them today. But when we have to put them into practice…it gets a lot harder.  One argument I have made in the past about praying for people who we disapprove of is, “Look, I get that this is hard, but you can at least pray that God changes their heart.”  But just this week, I was reading a commentary that said that praying for your enemy to change isn’t what Jesus was talking about. Now you might be thinking, how do we know that’s not what Jesus was talking about? Let’s look at the context… “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…”  

Jesus doesn’t tell us to love our enemies because that is his grand plan for changing the world or even changing the people of the world.  He tells us to do that so that we can be children of God.  In Jewish thought, referring to someone as a child of another is to show that person shares the quality or nature of the person they are a child of.  To be a child of God is to share the qualities of God. Jesus was saying that to be a child of God, be like God, we have to love the person as God would love the person.

            That sounds like a tall order. How can we possibly see our enemies as God sees them?  One way is to acknowledge that we share something with them…we share a common humanity.  We were all children once who desperately wanted to be loved and to love without condition or qualifier. When we were children, we didn’t care what race a person was.  We didn’t care who they voted for. It wasn’t until Joshua was 5 when his friends looked confused when they saw his parents were not his own race.  Before that, they didn’t even notice.  I remember Joshua’s best friend being shocked at the realization that he was adopted.   At some point, we learn to focus on the differences and not what we have in common. We need to remember how we saw the world as children and how the world saw us. 

The other way we love our enemies is by reminding ourselves of the way that God loves us.  Even in our worst and darkest moment, God is looking at us (maybe with a slightly concerned expression) saying, “That kid is mine.”   In loving our enemies, it helps to acknowledge our own sinfulness. Now usually the place I go to (in my own mind,  not a sermon) after I have acknowledged my own sinfulness is then jumping to, “But I am still not as bad as that person …” That is where we need to stop ourselves. That is where we need to realize that we are doing the one thing we can’t stand…we are judging someone else. 

            Loving and praying for our enemy doesn’t mean we can’t hold them accountable for their actions.  We can and we should.  We should do our best to shine the light on injustice, cruelty and greed.   Yet we can find ways to do that while acknowledging our own complicity, our own failures. That is why I think the confession is such an important part of our worship.  It’s a reminder that we have all fallen short in some way but we are just one prayer away from forgiveness. 

The end of the confession reads, “For the sake of your son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways…” Walk in your ways…that is how we come closer to the character and nature of God. That is what confession of our own sin gives us…an opportunity to be a little more like Jesus.  That also allows us to love ourselves without those self deprecating comments that always seem to hover around us, lest we love ourselves too much.

If we can look at ourselves with honesty and understand that God loves every part of us (even the parts that it pains us to see)…then we can come a little closer to a place where we are loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute us. Remember, prayer isn’t about changing God’s mind, or another person’s mind, it’s about changing ourselves…coming closer to God.  If we pray for someone, we can’t help but be a little more open and understanding.

            We are all familiar with the idea of empathy.  Some people have said that empathy is a bad thing because it makes people ignore the teachings of their faith or their values. Others have responded to that accusation with horror.  But even those who are most passionate about empathy don’t often extend it to those who they consider cruel or corrupt.  They assume it is there only for those who are vulnerable and suffering.  But imagine if there were just small factions of divided groups who tried to listen to the other side, really empathize with them...that could change the conversation. It might even change the way we govern.

            Whenever someone references Christ Church’s revolutionary spirit, I always want to ask them, “What do you mean by that.” I think they mean Christ Church was brave and bold, willing to throw off the tyranny of the British.  But during the revolution, we were just trying to keep our doors open, trying to keep people who were on opposite sides still worshipping together. Maybe that is what made us truly revolutionary, an ability to stand in the midst of violence and chaos and remain open to the idea that people of different sides of an actual war can still worship together. They might not have been praying for the leader of the actual enemy, but I hope they were still praying for one another, still acknowledging that they were all children of God.  Maybe that is what actually makes us revolutionary, an openness (and perhaps even a love) for the other.

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Prisoner of Hope: June 14

 Year A, Pentecost 3                                                 Romans 5:1-8                                                                     Desmond Tutu was the Archbishop of Cape Town South Africa for over 30 years.  For even longer than that he led the fight against apartheid in South Africa.   Being black in South Africa during that time was a struggle— being black and on the frontlines of that struggle would have no doubt led to suffering and frustration.  He didn’t have an easy life.  Even after apartheid ended in 1994, he continued the hard work of truth telling by leading the Truth and Reconciliation Committee that worked to address the injustices committed during apartheid.  Archbishop Tutu never shied away from hard truths.  Yet I think what he is best known for is his joy, love, hope and his infectious laugh.  At the same time, he made sure to distinguish the hope that he practiced from the sunny optimism the world often associates with the word hope. He said, “I have never been an optimist. I am a prisoner of hope.”

            The Apostle Paul, the author of our 2^nd reading, would not have called himself an optimist, but was definitely a proponent of hope.  In his letters, he mentioned hope over 50 times.  In today’s reading he says, “…but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us...”  One commentator described this as “chain reaction of grace” because it starts with the fact that we are standing in grace.  Grace is the free, undeserved gift that God has given all of us.  It’s the love that God gives us regardless of whether we deserve it or even want it. We have all been called to stand in grace.

            I have to say that I both love and hate these words of Paul.  I love the idea that suffering can create endurance which would then lead to character and inevitably hope.  I love the idea.  What I am not too fond of is the actual experience of suffering.  I don’t know anyone who is.  It kind of reminds me of that phrase “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”  I have never liked that phrase much either.  Because I have witnessed a lot of suffering that didn’t lead to strength or hope.  Sometimes suffering just leads to anger or depression. 

            It would be easy to say well the difference is that as Christians, we have faith and that enables us to transform our suffering into strength and hope.  Yet I have seen many Christians who can’t make it to the other side of suffering. And it’s not because they weren’t good Christians.  It’s not because they weren’t faithful enough.  Sometimes it’s because the suffering was too intense, too endless. There was no reprieve.  I don’t believe that Christians have some special sauce that enables us to have hope in the midst of pain.  I think our hope is different. 

            You see our hope isn’t based in some idyllic life that we have been promised.  It’s not based merely on what can be. It’s based on what Jesus did for us and what he continues to do for us.  Christian hope is born not in life, but in death, in the death of Jesus Christ.  Jesus suffered in both his life and death.  That suffering is what enabled Jesus to be resurrected and thus enables us all to have new life.  Our hope is different than the hope we might read about in greeting cards and chicken soup for the soul kind of messages. Our hope was forged out of darkness and death.  That is why darkness and death cannot defeat Christian hope...because darkness and death---they birthed hope.  That is what makes the hope we have in Jesus so incredibly powerful.

            But here’s the thing, this Christian hope isn’t easy.  Having it doesn’t even make our lives easier. In some ways, life becomes harder with hope.  Esau McCauley, a priest and writer, wrote, “Hope is a demanding emotion that insists on changing you.  Hope pulls you out of yourself and into the world, forcing you to believe more is possible.”

            That’s what Archbishop Tutu meant when he said that he was a “prisoner of hope.” Once that hope took hold of him, he could not give up.  He could not despair.  Despair is a horrible feeling, it really is.  No one would want despair.  Yet while hope is demanding, “despair allows us to give up our resistance and rest.”  That makes being in a state of despair easier because we can stop trying to make the world better….we can stop being aware of the pain and anguish that surrounds us.  We can just stop.  And I have to say, that can be tempting sometimes.  In a world that is broken and seems intent on breaking our hearts a little more every day, it’s tempting to throw our hands up in the air and say, “Well, there is obviously nothing I can do about this, I might as well just stop trying…stop hoping.”

            We think that hope is something that should come to us naturally…but it’s not our natural state.  It’s something we have to work for.  That work can be exhausting.  You might be thinking, that doesn’t sound very good.  If that is what hope is, why would we want it? Why?  Because we Christians stand in grace.   That is God’s gift to us.  It’s our starting point.  And while hope is challenging, it’s also uplifting.  It brings joy.  It is life giving.  It gives us life and it gives those around us life.  Despair, it’s easier because we don’t have to do anything.  We don’t have to face the hard truths or our world. We don’t have to face how even our actions contribute to the despair of others.  But that is not why God put us on this earth.  We are not here to lean into despair.  We have not been given grace so we can squander it.  We, (the church) must be beacons of hope in this dark and lonely world.  We cannot give into the despair or the hate or the apathy. 

            Our Gospel reading says that Jesus saw the crowds and had compassion on them because they were harassed and helpless.   Then he told the disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into the harvest.” The harvest is the people who are living in despair, who can’t see out of their despair. Sometimes we are part of the harvest.  There are times, when we all might be in that place.  But there are also a lot of times when we are the laborers, when we are prisoners of hope who can’t possibly give up.  The harvest is plentiful.  Despair and darkness can indeed feel overwhelming.  But never forget that Christian hope was forged in darkness and death, which is what makes it indestructible and impenetrable.  Be a prisoner of hope.  Let hope captivate you.   Whatever is happening in our world, whatever suffering we might encounter, never forget that we Christians were created to defeat death.