Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on February 23, 2014
Scripture text: Matthew 5:38-48
Memory is a funny thing. You can remember events from decades past with perfect clarity and yet not remember where you put your cell phone just five minutes ago. I’m often astonished at the crazy things my brain can recall. Weird bits of trivia. Dreams I had as child. Events in my lifetime that no else remembers (mostly because they don’t care about whatever it was.)
For instance, I remember with a great deal of clarity a birthday party I once went to in 1st grade. Yeah, all the way back then. Of course, there’s a reason why I remember it, which will become clear to you in a moment. Grant was the boy’s name; one of my classmates in grade school. Not necessarily a friend or playmate even then, but it was the habit then as now to pretty much invite everybody in your class to your birthday. So there I was, at this party.
I remember the party favors for all the guests. There were two stacks of stickers. Superheroes. Superman, Batman, the like. There were two stacks because there were two different kinds of guests at this party. Those who were worthy of the big sheets of stickers (Grant's "real friends", I supposed), and those who only got the little ones.
Now, in my seven year old mind, I found a certain unfairness in that. So I decided to take matters into my own hands and helped myself to one of the big sheets. Grant was furious that I had broken the rules of his party, which I had admittedly. But here’s the thing, and it’s the reason I remember such a seemingly inconsequential episode of my childhood. He never forgave me for that and in the years that followed throughout my schooling, he never let me forget it either.
I talked numerous times about how I was bullied in school. A lot of kids are. There is one simple truth about most bullies however. They pick on you because you are a target of opportunity, easy prey to a kid who is bigger or tougher. Not because they have any emotional investment in what they are doing. They don’t really hate you; they generally don’t care about you at all. Grant was not like that. He was the first person in my life that I can say truly genuinely hated me, down into the core of his bones. With every fiber of his being, he despised me. If I were hanging off a cliff by tree branch, he not only would not have helped me, he probably would have gone looking for an axe.
I haven’t seen him since I was a senior in high school, but I haven’t forgotten him and the way he acted around me. All over some petty stupidity from my obviously-not-very-mature 1st grade self. Never made any sense to me then and it still doesn’t. But maybe that’s the point. Hate really doesn’t make any sense.
Oh, we like to think it does. Someone hurts us in some fashion. A co-worker cheats us out of a promotion we deserved. A significant other breaks our heart. A criminal attacks us. And in our anger, fear, and pain, we hunger for retaliation. I know. Every time Grant treated me like crap for no reason whatsoever, I wanted to slug him. Every time a bully pushed me around, I wanted my revenge. We’ve all been there. We rationalize it. Scum deserves it. Woman gave me lip. I have to defend my honor. I have to stop them. And so forth.
All while deep down inside that little demon within each of us giggles with perverse delight at all horrific things our imagination is conjuring up that we might do in revenge and then laughing with unmitigated glee when we act on them.
They say we preach best what we need to hear the most. Perhaps, I preach so often about hate because it’s what I struggle against most within myself. I talk about racism and homophobia and bigotry so much because they are things I struggle with. That little giggling demon is not so little inside me.
But one thing I have Grant to thank is that he taught me what it’s like to be on the other end of all that. To have someone, even as a child, who held such a vendetta against me. It made me realize something. It made me realize just how right Jesus really is when he talks about hate in the Sermon on the Mount.
“You have heard it said that you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” Curiously, the Bible actually doesn’t say that anywhere. But then again, it doesn’t have to because that’s what humans have always said from time uncounted. “But I say to you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” He’s right. It has to be this way.
Imagine for a moment if we all acted on those hateful impulses. Every slight avenged. Every wrong repaid. The world would look like...well, a lot like it does now only more so. Property destroyed. Lives lost. The weak abused, tortured, enslaved. People murdered in wars, crime, violence. Civilization would break down. And it wouldn’t just be the villains that would get theirs. Each of us, as Grant once taught me, can be the villain of another person’s story. The world would be a mound of corpses, with only the vultures happy about the outcome.
It cannot be that way.
It cannot be that way because not only would we seek to destroy ourselves, but what would God do? Is he not the one most wounded by our foolish hunger for hate and vengeance? Are not the ones we seek to hurt precious in his sight? We do all this horrible stuff (and more besides in our own minds) and yet he sits back. Imagine if he didn’t?
Oh, that’s a fantasy of some of us. But be careful what you wish for. God watches us ravage this planet. He watches us murder and destroy one another in fits of pointless rage. All over who has the most gold, oil, land or power, or who has the better government or better religion. We destroy each other over nonsense, each time wounding someone or someones that God Almighty sees as more precious than all else.
Imagine what it would be like if God acted on his anger and hate. Noah’s flood would seem like a spring rain in comparison to what God could do. But he doesn’t, because he knows that it will not work. He cannot hate, because hate leads only to death and destruction, and our God is a god of life. Only love leads to life. So God will love even his enemies.
God could have hated us and been within his rights to do so, but he made a choice not to. He made a choice instead to save us from ourselves. That was what the old covenant was about. That was why Jesus came. The whole plan of salvation was truly one of love for his enemies; for us who have so callously and shamefully treated him and one another. There’s a better way, God says. And through the mouth of Jesus on that mountain, recorded in the book of Matthew, we hear that better way.
But not only do we hear it, we see it too. We see Jesus take the abuse of his captors. We see him tortured, mocked, beaten, and then hung on a cross to die. And his words of response to all that torment. “Father, forgive.” Love, even from the cross, for all of us who put him there.
God made a choice to save all of us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. He asks that our lives reflect that same love, that same choice. It is not easy, but it is the right thing to do. Amen.
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