Gotta Love Those Enemies

Gotta Love Those Enemies The Dover Church
February 20, 2011 - 7th Sunday after Epiphany
Scripture: Matthew 5:38-48

"Love the enemies that hate you." Enemies. Hate. Hate you. This is not at all the kind of thing most folks like us come to church to think about. Enemies that hate, enemies that you hate... The words alone can make our skin crawl and stomach knot up. Most of the time, we prefer the Jesus who talks about love and friends, friends who love us, God who loves us, Jesus who loves us, God and Jesus who are our friends, friends whom we love. That's all very pleasant. But Christianity is, in a nutshell, about salvation, nothing more, as if there could be anything more than salvation; certainly nothing less, although every time we try to steer away from the really difficult and seemingly unpleasant topics which Jesus drops on us we do just that, try to make Christianity into something much less than a path of salvation. The name Jesus means "he saves" in Hebrew. Salvation is what Jesus was about. Salvation is what Jesus offers us. No one I know needs saving from love or friends. We need saving from our enemies who hate us and persecute us. We need saving from ourselves when we have enemies we hate.
The very words "enemy" and "hate" are so emotionally charged that I think we need to unpack them a bit so we know what we are talking about. It is always best to be clear about what we mean, whether we're talking about life and death, or about how to decorate the living room, so that we don't waste our time going a long way down a road only to discover that we have very different things in mind. The word "enemy" comes from the Latin word inimicus, which is the word amicus, "friend," with the negative prefix in. Quite logical, really. An enemy is the opposite of a friend. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a friend is one with whom one shares a bond of affection; a person who supports and helps you; an ally; a person who uses their influence on your behalf. Friend comes from an old Germanic root which means "love," but this is only partly about warm feelings. A lot of it is relational action, about mutually compatible and promotional relationality out of which those feelings grow. Right off the bat, we can see that we don't have to go all the way to an Osama bin Laden or an Adolf Hitler to find an enemy. Enemies tend to be much closer to home in most cases, and often a lot less sinister.
And then there's the word "hate." Again from Oxford, hate is another old Germanic word which means "to feel a strong aversion to, an intense or passionate dislike for." This also makes logical sense, in that anyone who is an enemy is, by definition, going to evoke in us strong negative emotions. If someone does not share a bond of affection with us, works against us, uses their influence against us, does not support or sympathize with us or what we are working towards, well, we're not going to feel the love, are we?
So, to sum up, enemies are the folks who in one way or another, make our lives difficult: they don’t like us and the feeling may be mutual, they work against us and they get others to do so as well. And how do we feel about that? If we're self-contained, restrained New Englanders, we might be forced to confess that we don't like it all that much, do we? If, however, we're more passionate Mediterranean or Middle Easterner types, like Jesus and his immediate audience for example, we wouldn't beat around the bush, being polite or proper. We'd come right out with it: we hate them and all the ways they are messing up our lives and our agendas.
That may sound quite harsh, but it's really just the beginning. Let me take this one step farther. The real problem with enemies who hate us and enemies whom we hate is that, quite frankly, they own us. Our enemies control us and dictate who we are and what we can do. Before you think I have gone too far, consider this. The real opposite of love is not hate. The real opposite of love is fear. Yet another Old Germanic word, fear is "an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat; (fear for) a feeling of anxiety concerning the outcome of something or the safety and well-being of someone; the likelihood of something unwelcome happening." Doesn't that capture exactly how we feel around and about our enemies? And not the distant Hitlers and bin Ladens, but the very people we live and work with? We fear them because they threaten us, threaten us immediately and directly all the time, not hypothetically or eventually. And because we fear them, they own us.
How so? Our experience of enemies is visceral: we feel them in our bodies, with tensed muscles and a heightened heart rate. In other words, they make it difficult for us to relax and enjoy ourselves. Unless we are confrontational, we tend to avoid them, which means that they are determining where we will go and where we will not go. Because we know they will oppose us, we spend a lot of time considering how to go around, through, over or under them rather than just doing what we feel called to do, living into our joy and the things which we know will bring us and those we love our joy. They make us modify our hopes and dreams, not to mention our actual goals and objectives. Our enemies are the people who star in the interior monologues which go on inside our heads all the time, when we say the things we wish we had the courage to say on the spot but were too afraid to, our regrets, frustrations, anger, how we are right and they are not.
What I am saying is that a lot of us give our enemies altogether too much power over us. Truth be told, it isn't just a lot of us. It's all of us. There are those of us who know our enemies and tactfully avoid them, thereby ceding the playing field without even trying. There are those of us who try to always please others, hoping to have no enemies, but we're living lives that others give us rather than being ourselves living our one life. Even those of us who have the power and toughness to just bowl over our enemies, crush them, drive them off. All of that domination energy is still power which they are making us use against them rather than for us. In a very fundamental way, even when we win, they called the shots.
Which brings us to loving our enemies. Why should we love them? Because Jesus commands us to? That's a starting point, but I think most of us here are going to need something more motivational than a command to actually give this a try, let alone keep at it when the going get tough. And the going will get tough. I have discovered that my enemies are really worthy of my love because they provide me with a window into my soul. When I am able to not be overcome by negative emotions, I use my interactions with enemies analytically. If I am reacting strongly, why is that? What does that tell me about the importance of something to me? About how we are interacting? About my behavior and motivations? I get more clarity out of a good conflict than I do out of holding my sons on my lap. Those good times are good enough for me and do not need any analysis. They're something to just enjoy while I have them. But a good blow up? Well, why did that happen? Why am I so upset? Why is this so important to me? Why is this so important to them? Wow, this wasn't even really about him or her. It was the way they reminded me subconsciously of my rotten cousin who I haven't seen in twenty years that got me going. My bad! Tried to get a drink out of a mirage again. And gradually, if you stick with it, you come to know what you can let go of, and what you really will go that second mile for, what is incidental and what is essential to who you are, who you want to be, and what you feel called by God to do with your life. Believe me, knowing the difference cam make all the difference.
Jesus ties this lesson about loving our enemies together with an enticing goal: the vision of being perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. The Greek word in the Bible is teleios, which means "complete or whole." The perfection is not in moral rectitude, ethical purity, or even spotless conduct. It's about not being all over the place, feeling fractured, broken up or broken down as the case may be, living fearfully and piecemeal. It's about living out of that whole center, where you are loving God and being loved by God, where you are loving yourself and knowing that God loves you, where you are loving your neighbor, both the good and the evil ones upon both of whom God causes the sun to shine and the rain to fall, because that's the only sane way of going about living. From that place, you are you, living your love. You are calling the shots. You are no longer dancing fearfully around others, not daring to be this or to do that. You are just dancing to the song God has put in your head and heart. If that's not as close to perfect as any of us messy, flawed people can hope to get, then I don't know what is.
Before this drifts into sentimentality, however, let me say that there will come the times, often frequently every day, when someone stops you, diverts you, drives you back, makes you question who you are and what you're doing. With practice you'll learn to discern what is essential and what is incidental. You're going to mistake the two all the time. I certainly have. In time, letting go of the incidental will get easier and easier. And going the second mile will be the way you want to go, the way you have to go if you are going to be true to yourself and your God. You dance right on, fearless, seeking not to deflect or retaliate but to redirect all that negativity into God's positivity embodied in you and your life. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells us “I came that you might have life and have it abundantly”(10:8). That abundance lies right now on the other side of the fear we feel for our enemies. If you want to know salvation, if you want to live salvation, then you gotta love those enemies.