Giving Up Enemies
Rev. Becca Wieringa
4/2/2017
There's a Spanish story of a father and son who had become estranged. The son ran away, and
the father set off to find him. He searched for months to no avail. Finally, in a last desperate
effort to find him, the father put an ad in a Madrid newspaper. The ad read: Dear Paco, meet me
in front of this newspaper office at noon on Saturday. All is forgiven. I love you. Your Father.
On Saturday 800 men named Paco showed up, looking for forgiveness and love from their
fathers.
Our scripture reading for today is from the Gospel of Luke this morning, chapter 19, verses 37 to
44. I’ll read from the English Standard Version.
When Jesus was starting down the Mount of Olives, his large crowd of disciples were happy and
praised God because of all the miracles they had seen. They shouted,
“Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory to God.”
Some Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, make your disciples stop shouting!”
But Jesus answered, “If they keep quiet, these stones will start shouting.”
When Jesus came closer and could see Jerusalem, he wept and said:
It is too bad that today your people don’t know what will bring them peace! Now it is hidden from
them. Jerusalem, the time will come when your enemies will build walls around you to attack you.
Armies will surround you and close in on you from every side.
They will level you to the ground and kill your people. Not one stone in your buildings will be left on
top of another. This will happen because you did not see that God had come to save you.
Our sermon series for Lent has been “Giving Up.”
We’re talking about giving up things that get in the way of our relationship with God. We’ve
given up control, expectations, and superiority. We’ve talked about giving up our lives and
taking up God’s purpose for us.
Lent is about renewal and allowing the spirit to clear out the things in our heart that distance us
from God. It’s about reclaiming both the promises and the responsibilities of our faith. We
continue this Lenten journey today by asking the question, what if we gave up enemies for Lent?
Loving our enemies can feel like as idealistic a notion as instantaneous world peace, but Jesus
showed us that caring even for those who persecute you is a real, doable thing.
Peace isn’t just a far-off fantasy. In Luke, Jesus wept over Jerusalem because the people
following him misunderstood his message to be about peace in Heaven instead of peace on
Earth.
We call Jesus the Prince of Peace, but that only means something if we really believe and live
like peace is possible in our world today.
Have you ever thought about how powerful hate is? When we hate our enemies, we allow them
to have significant control over us and our lives. Letting go of the hate allows us to let go of our
obsession with our enemy and frees us. As free people we can love even the one who we named
“enemy.”
Martin Luther King Jr. had some enemies. People who wanted to keep him from speaking his
mind. People who wanted his cause to fail, a mission that claimed all human beings have the
right to be treated like human beings, and all people deserve to be free. His enemies even
imprisoned him. But even in jail, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote this:
We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive
is also devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the
best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.
Of course, some of you may feel like you don’t have enemies. It’s true, “enemies” is a harsh
word. Maybe you prefer words like opponents, adversaries, antagonists, foes or maybe some of
you have a nemesis.
Or maybe you have frien-emies. Frien-emy a new word from the facebook generation that means
people who pretend to be your friends, but really don’t have your best interests at heart.
There are words for the people who have done us wrong, hold grudges, hurt us. Whatever you
call them, I invite you to leave them at the altar today, as we give up our enemies so that we can
draw closer to our God.
Holding on to hate is damaging, to you, to the one you hate, to your relationship with God and
others.
Praying for your enemies or those who persecute you, is a deep act of love. And I don’t mean
praying for them to be nicer to you or that they’d change their behavior. I mean, praying that
God will bless them, heal them, and open their hearts to receive more of the Spirit, even when
they persecute you.
I read Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermon on “Loving Our Enemies” recently and I am in awe of his
ability to put into practical use Jesus’ words. King understood, as Jesus taught, that genuine love
comes from a total and complete surrender to God. Just as humanity is not capable of fully
forgiving, we are not capable of fully loving – not without God any way. For King, loving our
enemy, or adversary, or opponent, or person who perpetually harms us in one way or another,
begins with forgiveness.
Jesus said in Matthew 28:20, "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate
your 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."
We can learn two important things from the way Jesus loved his enemies.
First, Jesus taught us that those who are different from us are not necessarily our
'enemies'.
The religious leaders in Jesus’ time believed that the law required you to love your God, your
family, and your own people, but to hate foreigners, like the Samaritans and those who had
different religious and political beliefs. But remember the story of the woman at the well?
She was a “foreigner.” She was supposed to be the enemy!
But Jesus embraced her and offered her living water. What a warning this is for us today
who are tempted to think that those who are different religiously or politically are enemies!
Difference is what makes life beautiful and interesting. It is not a cause for enemies. God
who created us also created everyone else---people whose skin color or language or religion
or cultural identities or genders or sexualities or economic backgrounds are different. These
people are not our enemies, regardless of what the politicians or newscasters of our days
would have us believe. We are all fellow sojourners on a wondrous, windy, journey through
life, and we can learn so much from each other if we simply open up our hearts to new
people and new relationships.
Second, Jesus did not say that we will not have enemies. And he didn’t teach that we can
change all of our enemies into friends.
That’s actually kind of interesting, isn’t it? Jesus doesn’t tell us to get rid of our enemies. He
doesn’t say we have to be friends with everyone or that it is even possible to be friends with
everyone.
In fact, I think Jesus is telling us that there will be people in our life we don’t get along with,
people who make our lives difficult, people we’d rather not associate with. But we are called to
be bearers of light and hope even to them. We are instructed to love everyone, even the ones we
don’t even like.
See, love is a call to action. Liking someone is about emotions and preference and things in
common. But that has nothing to do with love. We are called to love people regardless of
how we feel about them, because even our enemies have been created in the image of God
and are valuable to God.
So how do we do this? How do we love those we don’t even like? Jesus said the key is
treating them the way we want to be treated by others, blessing them, doing good to them and
praying for them.
The English writer C.S. Lewis said that to not be able to 'feel love' is no more a sin than
having bad digestion. Jesus never says anything about feeling love. The real issue is
whether or not we are willing to take action. To be a vessel for God's love means that we
need to forget about how we feel about someone or whether or not we like them and do good
to them anyway.
Every week we pray the Lord’s prayer, and we say, forgive us as we forgive others. In the Greek,
those words mean “Forgive us in the same way that we forgive others. In other words, if we are
stingy with handing out forgiveness, we are asking God to be stingy forgiving us. Instead, our
faith demands that we forgive those who have wronged us and pray for those who are perpetually
mean to us, because God forgives us in the same way that we forgive others.
Not long before she died in 1988, in a moment of surprising candor in television, Marghanita
Laski, one of our best-known secular humanists and novelists, said, "What I envy most about
you Christians is your forgiveness; I have nobody to forgive me."
I’ll admit that I do have a few enemies. Oh, I don’t like to call them that, but there are people in
my life who I’d rather not run into on the street. People who have hurt me, lied to me, used me.
People who make my life difficult. People whose values are diametrically opposed to my values.
People whose actions and decisions bring chaos and pain to others.
Yet the words of Jesus echo loudly in my head.
“Love your enemy.” “Forgive one another.” “Pray for those who persecute you.”
And here’s the thing: I think the starting point of giving up our enemies is prayer.
Pray for those who do you harm.
Pray that they will experience God’s love.
Pray that God will open their hearts.
Pray that the Holy Spirit will transform their lives.
And in doing so, let’s give up a little more of what holds us back from real discipleship. This
Lent, let us commit to giving up our enemies to God so that God can give us more of what we
need. Amen.