by Rev. Thomas Disrud

We gather here this morning

Together as one strong body.

We bring our stories,

Our hopes and our sorrows here.

We come together that

we might know the other as ourselves.

It is good that we are here together.

Come, now, and let us worship


In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says: “You have heard that it hath been said,” ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy.’ But I say unto you, ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.’”

There are many words in scripture that challenge us, but few that challenge the way those words challenge.

Love your enemies? Do good to them that hate you?

What does that mean? How can we do that? Seems more than a little counter-intuitive.

Jesus, we know, was not one to make everything comfortable. Quite the opposite—he liked to shake things up and to call people to see things in a whole new way. Certainly a call to love your enemies fits into that category.

And it is certainly a message that is needed in our present times. We live in times of division—of red and blue states, of liberals and conservatives, pro-war and anti-war. The name of the game in politics these days is not just to win but to do whatever it takes to win, even if that means destroying the other guy in the process.

These are polarizing times. I’m not always sure I want to stay in the conversation.  I have to admit that when the voices of some of our top leaders come on the radio these days, I can’t bear to listen. I go over to the radio and turn it off and I turn it back on to see whether they have finished. That, in the last few years, is new for me. Too often I just want to take all the cynicism that I feel and pull back and not participate at all.

But I know in my heart that being isolated makes it even worse. It is in such times that I need others more than ever. I know that ultimately we are all in this together. I know that ultimately we are all citizens together.

And I am brought back to Jesus’ injunction to love—even to those I see as my enemies.  Martin Luther King, whose birth is celebrated with a holiday this weekend, had some things to teach us about loving your enemies.

King’s journey came with overwhelming struggle. But through all that struggle, he was clear about what would bring forth freedom and what would keep it away. He had a lot to say about what is required of us—even when it comes to the people we are most at odds with. What he understood was that hating your enemies only made you more like your enemies.

He talked about how impossible it seemed. He talked about how naive a concept it seemed. But he also talked about how necessary it was for the survival of everyone. The way through injustice is always striving for the open and loving heart. If his people were going to survive through the struggle, that was the path that would take them there.

Now he speaks of a certain kind of love. It is the biggest form of love, what might be called unconditional love, the love that encompasses everyone, no matter what they have done, no matter how lovable or unlovable they might be. This is what we are called to. He reminds us that we don’t necessarily have to like someone, but ultimately we have to find a place to love them. That eventually we can see them—and ourselves—as children of God.

I should also say that this requires of us a large degree of self-love. A knowing that we are whole, that we, too, are part of this much larger love. If we can’t know that we, too, are embraced in this, then we can’t begin to hold that love for others.

Now, how do we get there? King taught his people in the civil rights movement to be grounded in this love—to hold onto it even for those who threatened them.

First of all, he said, we need to develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. Essential to being open to loving someone else is also being open to finding forgiveness—that our hearts might remain open even to those who are against us.

We must, he said, be willing to try to see the whole of a person, and not just what they have done to us. In this we see not only someone else’s capacity to do evil, but also their capacity to do good. And for ourselves this means embracing that we, too, are capable of both good and evil.

Third, he said, we must act in such a way that attempts to not defeat someone and humiliate them but to win them over. Believing that somewhere there is goodwill.  How we struggle, he said, is so important.

When we hate another we risk becoming the person we don’t want to be. We risk becoming ourselves the very thing that we despise in another.

We lose our sense of objectivity and our values and get focused on someone else. And in the end we lose what is most important to us. Hate cannot be allowed to nurture more hate.

King’s words: “Returning hate for hate multiples hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiples violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says ‘Love your enemies,’ he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies—or else? The chain reaction of evil—hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars—must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”

Words still so very relevant for our times.

King, of course, had to keep reminding himself of those words throughout his life and through all his struggles. A couple weeks ago, TIME magazine published excerpts from a new book that is out by Taylor Branch entitled At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68. It is about the last years of Martin Luther King’s life. It was not an easy time. After triumphs in the Montgomery bus boycott and the March on Washington. After passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and winning the Nobel Peace Prize, King found the movement strained. Black-power movement militants and even some of his closest advisors were questioning the use of non-violence. Many whites who supported the movement shifted their attention to fighting the war in Vietnam. Others criticized him for speaking out against the war. His marriage was strained and he was being harassed by the government. It was a lonely time for him.

But even as he foretold of his death in the days before he was killed, he held out the vision of non-violence and how the movement should be grounded. He only saw part of that vision, of course. Change, we can see, can be so painfully slow. The mistakes of the past seem to keep being made over and over.  It doesn’t come easily. Change—and justice—don’t come without a cost.

What does this ask of us? It is easy, especially in times of fear, to want to see the other as just that—the other. It is easy to see not ourselves in them, but all of our own worst qualities in them. Is it not easy to find ourselves taking on the very traits that we find most distasteful in others?

It is easy to be filled with a sense of self-righteousness when confronted with something we don’t know what to do with. But it can be that very self righteousness that can be our blind spot. It can be a way that we don’t have to understand our own capacity to hurt. That can be a trap.

Our values are tested and we are asked to ask those hard questions and always to call ourselves away from self righteousness and towards being able to see how we are connected with all of creation. We do this over and over again—to be reminded over and over again that we are all in this together.

Life has a way to presenting us over and over again with opportunities to grow. The questions might be how are we going to respond to that invitation? 

A story. You may have heard of Ruby Bridges. In 1960 she was the only black child ordered by a judge to attend the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. A white mob is standing outside, yelling, “2, 4, 6, 8, we don’t want to integrate!” They are yelling at a six-year-old child, the only black child ordered by a judge to attend this particular all-white school. Her walk inspired the 1964 Norman Rockwell painting “The Problem We All Live With,” a small black girl escorted by four federal marshals walking to school beside a wall bearing a scrawled racial epithet and the letters KKK.

Ruby Bridges says she didn’t know what to expect. She remembers, “Driving up, I could see the crowd, but living in New Orleans, I actually thought it was Mardi Gras. … They were throwing things and shouting. …”  Four federal marshals escorted her inside. The sound of the mob was deafening. Years later, one of those marshals, Charles Burks, says, “For a little girl, six years old, going into a strange school with four strange deputy marshals, a place she had never been before, she showed a lot of courage. She never cried. She didn’t whimper. She just marched along like a little soldier. And we’re all very proud of her.”

Inside the school, Ruby thought she was early; no one else was there. But for more than a year, no one else was there; it was only Ruby, and her teacher. And even for those parents who might have been willing to have their white child educated with a black child, they would have had to cross a picket line of their neighbors in order to get inside.

Ruby’s mother, Lucille, was determined that her daughter get an equal education. Her father, Abon, was fired from his job. His parents were forced to leave the farm where they had been sharecroppers for 25 years.

And as if this were not more than enough, there is more. One morning, Ruby paused on the way into school, right in the midst of the furious mob. The marshals, and her teacher, who was looking out the window, saw her speaking, or moving her lips. The crowd went wild, and began yelling even louder. The marshals, fearing for her life, urged her onward.  When she got inside, her teacher asked her why she had stopped to talk to those angry people.

Ruby Bridges explained that she was not talking to those people; she was talking to God. Indeed, she was praying a homemade prayer, which, thereafter, she repeated each day.

She said,

Please, God, try to forgive those people
Because even if they say those bad things,
They don’t know what they’re doing.
So You could forgive them,
Just like You did those folks a long time ago
When they said terrible things about You.

No matter our age, no matter our circumstance, we are asked to see the other as ourselves and to work to transcend the boundaries that separate us from others. We are asked to see ourselves in the people who are on the margins, we are asked to see ourselves in those who may not have much of anything in common with us.

We live in times when it is much easier to see the other and to not see ourselves as interconnected and interdependent beings.

It is not just that we are called to love those who are most like us but to love those who are also, it would seem, different from us.

If we are to meet our enemies, we first have to find a place where that can happen. That takes time, that takes something of the spirit moving.

Our Universalist heritage has something to teach us about this—that we are all held in a love much greater than ourselves. That this is ultimately what holds us together. We are asked again and again to find love for others and for ourselves.

Each of us is called to be in the world and to live our lives out of our values. Each generation is called to do the work or justice. Step by step, in our lives and in the life we all share.

A wise teacher asked his students, “How can we know when the darkness is leaving and the dawn is coming?” “When we can see a tree in the distance and know that it is an elm and not a juniper,” ventured one student. “When we can see an animal and know that it is a fox and not a wolf,” chimed in another. “No,” said the teacher, “those things will not help us.” Puzzled, the students demanded, “How then can we know?” The master teacher drew himself up to his full stature and replied quietly, “We know that the darkness is leaving and the dawn is coming when we can see another person and know that this is our brother or our sister; otherwise, no matter what time it is, it is still dark.”

Every day of our lives we are given opportunities to transcend all that keeps us from others. Quite simply we are asked to love ourselves as we love others as we love the unity of it all—what some might call god.  It is the work we are called to every day. It is the work of a lifetime. Sometimes we might succeed. So often we might fall short. But through it all we live in the awareness that we are not just isolated beings, but connected through it all in mystery and wonder, in love and in hope. Amen.

PRAYER
Great spirit of life, hold us in all of our days. Call us away from hate, and towards love. Call us to be in right relationship with all those around us. Give us courage for the journey. Call our hearts to be open to the spirit that is with us and that moves among us. When we are afraid, remind us that we are held in a love so much greater than any of us. May that love guide us. Amen.

BENEDICTION

 
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