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 5th. On the first page of our service leaflet is
an excerpt from our vestry minutes on July 4th 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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