Enemy Mine

sermon by Torin Eikler
Matthew 5:38-48 Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18

A couple of weeks ago I was reading an article in the Christian Century or Sojourners or some other such magazine (I don’t remember which) that talked about the well-known teachings Martin just read for us. The author talked all about how Jesus wasn’t actually saying anything new. He was reaching back into Jewish scriptures and traditions and asking his audience to look at them with new eyes – eyes that would reinterpret them in a new light.

Those of you who have heard Carrie and I preach very many times before will recognize that this exegetical process is not particularly new either. Jesus teachings are strongly marked by a commitment to upholding the authority of the prophets and the law while questioning the established interpretations taught by the religious elites. He looked beyond the particularities of the text to the spirit in which it was written and applied that understanding to the time and place in which he lived, looking through the lens of his vision of the Kingdom of God.

It sounds like a complicated process, but it’s actually one we are all familiar with. It’s what Carrie and I do each week as we prepare for worship. It’s what we all do each time we pick up the Bible, read a passage of scripture, and try to apply it to our lives. If we only had Jesus’ understanding of God’s vision we could figure it all out. (You’ll let me know, won’t you, if it ever comes to you? Wouldn’t that be great?!)


Back to the text at hand…. All my life I have heard sayings like “let your ‘yes’ be yes and your ‘no’ be no” and “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” – sayings that remind us of the admonitions in this part of the Sermon on the Mount. And, if there is one thing that a dye-in-the-wool Brethren grows up with, it is “turn the other cheek” and “love your enemies!” I know it all by heart, but what struck me when I read that article was how mundane it seemed to me … and how little it connected with my life. And that made me a little sad, though it may seem strange to be unhappy that I don’t really run into Al Qaeda as I walk down the street.

This week, though, I heard Dr. Scott Atran speaking on an NPR program called “On Being.” He was talking about the violence and upheaval in Africa and the Middle East, and the interview got me thinking in a new way. Dr. Atran comes at the situation from a sociological background, and he begins by looking at what groups people form and why.

People form groups, he says, because they have a need to belong to something greater than themselves. Building that sense of kinship is an evolutionary urge that provides security, and it can give meaning to lives that might otherwise seem hollow. Ultimately, though, it’s an urge that grows out of our foundational experience of family that shows up in the way that “all political movements [or religious] or territorial movements or even transnational movements … consider themselves in terms of brotherhoods or sisterhoods or fatherlands or homelands or motherlands.” These movements use the sense of attachment and loyalty that grow from those terms to define who is “us” and who is “them,” who is “good” and who is “evil,” who is a “friend” and who is an “enemy.”


A colleague of mine offered this story for black history month….
One of our evening Sunday Schools, he said, recently had a guest speaker who had participated in the March for Voting Rights in 1965. He told us how he’d watched the television news with his fifth-grade daughter, and how she had said to him, “We have to do something!” He wanted to respond to her compassionate plea, but did not know how.

Shortly after that a friend of his called him and said, “We have to go to the march.” His first response was that he couldn’t possibly get away from his full schedule, but he thought better of that excuse in the end. And he went to Selma with his friend.

As he talked about the experience, he described a three hour argument between the police and the African-Americans they prevented from crossing into the white part of town. He went on to tell about some of the horrific things that were taking place. People were beaten by bystanders for no reason at all. Police rode their horses through and over crowds of people without regard for the lives they ended. The marchers were spit on, yelled at, and insulted.

Then, he told us about the training the demonstrators had received in preparation for the march. At first, he said, he resented the mandatory meeting. "We're marching,” he thought. “How much training do we need for that?" But as he listened, he began to realize that what they were about to do was something much different, much more challenging than the “march" he had pictured in his mind.

The marchers were instructed on the peaceful and non-violent method of resistance. They were told:
•to march together, and not to separate under any circumstances,

•not to return insult for insult, but to march peacefully, remembering their
purpose,

•to cover their heads if someone came at them with a club or a fist, but not to
fight back,

•to wipe it off when people spit on them or threw things on them, and to
keep marching.

The most difficult instruction by far - and one that brought tears to the man's eyes lo these many years later because he witnessed it - was the final directive:
•anyone standing near someone who fell to the ground or who was beaten to
the point of unconsciousness was to carefully nudge their way over and lay his/her body over the person. By doing this they were presenting their own body as a sacrifice to save another’s life.

I didn’t live through the years of that struggle. I don’t know what it was like to see or hear stories of everything that was happening. Some of you do. I can only imagine that if this story moved me, it must be even more powerful for you.

Most of the demonstrator survived those marches, but there were people gave their lives protecting others exactly as they had been taught. Instead of fighting back, they turned the other cheek. They loved their friends enough to give their lives, but did they love their enemies so well?

I don’t like to think of myself as having enemies, and I certainly have not experienced the kind of hatred and denigration Civil Rights activists lived through. But I have to admit that there are a few (well more than a few) people that I just don’t like. They rub me the wrong way. It may be because we disagree about something that’s important to me or I know they have talked badly about me behind my back or something about how they look or act sets my nerves on end. Whatever the reason, being around them makes me feel like I’m not safe and I have to be on my guard all the time.

One of those people was my seminary nemesis, I’ll call her Fran. I met Fran on the second day of classes. As we sat together in Old Testament, I grew frustrated by the frivolous comments she made and the way she interacted with the professor as if she was somehow special. Later that semester we had a conversation about holy war as presented in the historical books of the Old Testament. Things quickly devolved into an argument, but it was not because either of us supported war. It was because Fran thought it was just fine to throw out anything she didn’t like in the Bible. That was a perspective that I couldn’t understand and wasn’t prepared to accept, especially in another seminarian. And so began a long and torturous animosity … at least on my part.

For four years, I tried to avoid her, but in such a small community that was impossible. So, I sat in worship, at meetings, and in classes with Andrea, and every time I found it stressful. It was an exercise in self-control to avoid arguing with her or disparaging her comments just because she had made them. I even found it a struggle to be worshipful in her presence.

I suppose that Fran was less my enemy than I was hers, but finally, in my last year, we were assigned to be partners in a project. As we sat and worked together, I began to learn a bit more about her, and I discovered that my prejudices had blinded me to the truth of who she was. During those two weeks, I came to appreciate her insight and to understand the insecurities and experiences at the heart of her style of interaction. In the end, we never became close, but there is a part of me that wishes I had gotten to know her sooner rather than later. We might have made good friends instead of one-sided rivals.


How do we love our enemies?

The author of Leviticus gives us some basics for loving our enemies: take care to provide for them, do not bear false witness or take what should be theirs, and set aside vengeance. Jesus takes us farther down the road, saying: turn the other cheek, give to them if they beg from you, and pray for them. But he doesn’t stop there. He connects loving your enemies to treating them as you would a friend.

For me that means overlooking faults that might otherwise drive me mad. It means looking beyond the surface to see what pain they might be suffering or how they might need my help and support. It means opening myself up, being vulnerable to them, and forgiving them when they hurt me.

None of that is easy to do … even with friends. It is much harder to do with people that we don’t like – people we might even hate, but Jesus was quite clear that the road he invites us to travel is not an easy one. More than changing the world, it involves challenging ourselves to live more fully as God intends: to show compassion, to give forgiveness, and to recognize everyone as a child of God. Brothers and sisters in Christ, we are meant to love one another as family.

Once, after receiving flak for speaking kindly of the Southern Rebels instead of trying to destroy them, Abraham Lincoln replied, “do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?" I think that’s what Jesus was getting at … in his teaching and in his way of interacting with those around him. Whether or not others accept it, we are called to treat them as friends, to show compassion, to give forgiveness, and to accept them as family. Enemies or not, we are called to love them.

There’s a challenge in that. There’s work and love and peace and struggle, but there is peace in freeing ourselves from hate and retaliation, vengeance and fear. In the end, there is joy in loving even our enemies as friends.