love your enemies mothers' day / after the bin laden killing Rev. Brent Wright Broad Ripple UMC

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1 love your enemies mothers' day / after the bin laden killing Rev. Brent Wright Broad Ripple UMC Matthew 5:38-48 You have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you. You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. For those who came this morning looking forward to a warm & fuzzy Mothers' Day sermon, I had planned to oblige. It is the season of Easter, after all, the season of light and life and new birth. My wife, seven months pregnant, is celebrating her first Mothers' Day today. It is a beautiful day, worth celebrating and noting God's love through that lens. Rev. Brent Wright 1 Broad Ripple UMC

2 But I just can't, not on the Sunday after our military killed Osama bin Laden, our brothers and sisters celebrated in the streets, and there's been endless discussion in every forum. It's time for a little theological reflection on what happened this week. Before anything else, I need to start from a place of confession. 1. My first response to the news of bin Laden's death was relief and awe and pride. I felt twinges of the feelings that led many to dance. There's a little boy inside me that's in awe of the Navy SEALs and wants to know all the details of their raid and the killing and wants to see the pictures and diagrams of how it all went down and hopes that there's a movie one day that I can go see. I felt pride at being on the winning team; I felt cool to be represented by the SEALs and their seeming invincibility. 2. Since that first response, I have felt anger at those who celebrated. I have felt adversarial toward those who embrace violence as the way forward for our nation. Even as I've spent the week ruminating on the words and actions of Jesus the Peacemaker, I've been fighting inside. This is my starting point; honest confession of the very same brokenness & struggle I lament in others. The very thing I resist in our world lives in me. Thanks be to God, that doesn't change the Word of God in the life and words of Jesus. Whether or not I can live it completely, all of us who follow Jesus are challenged with this word at times like this. Hear again Jesus' speech on the subject as part of what we call the Sermon on the Mount: [reread] When Jesus said, You have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye, he was quoting his own community's law. This idea of equal retribution as punishment shows up in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. This was the law of the People of God (and it was an improvement on common practice of the day by restricting retribution to only what matched the transgression). But Jesus changed things. No more eye-for-eye stuff. Love your enemies. Pray for them. (And anyone who can pray for someone while doing violence to them is not praying to the God of Jesus Christ.) He was echoing sentiments that appear in the voices of the prophets of the Old Testament, like Ezekiel: Do you think that I like to see wicked people die? says the Sovereign LORD. Of course not! I want them to turn from their wicked ways and live. [18:23 NLT] Rev. Brent Wright 2 Broad Ripple UMC

3 As those who seek to follow Jesus, we need to look at the events of this past week through the lens of Jesus' and the prophets' words. Here's what I see. What was this week's celebration of bin Laden's killing about? 1. Our genuine wish that this killing would bring closure to the tragedy of 9/11. a. This reflects a misguided understanding of grief; nothing brings real closure; only feeling the pain can allow healing to take place. National chest thumping and assassinating terrorists is distraction from what can bring real healing. b. This response demonstrates our confusion of justice with vengeance. Taking revenge against the one responsible for the 9/11 attacks is not the same as justice. It's the adult version of the bully finally getting back at the mean kid for beating him up last month. I'll come back to justice in a few minutes. 2. Our superpower fantasy that killing bin Laden defeats Al Queda or takes the wind out of terrorists' sails. a. Which is really about soothing ourselves that our military might can solve our problems. b. Also reveals the ugly fantasy of more people than we want to think that our actions are the arm of God or somehow done in God's name. i. While the reality is that our violence only fuels terrorists' fire. Robert Jewett (author of Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil and The Myth of the American Superhero) writes of a set of myths still rampant in the US: 1. the forces of law and order are weak and inefficient; 2. the bad guys are getting away with it; 3. the hero has to act outside the law, under cover, to perform the redemptive violence that will restore order to the embattled community. We have accepted the world's lie that violence can stop violence. We somehow believe that we can kill enough killers that the rest will stop killing because they're afraid. We assume that some people are Bad for their whole lives so the only way to peace is by eliminating them. But what if Bad People are just like you and me, just further down the slide into Hell? What if every hurt, every injury, every deprivation pushes them further down the slide? What if Good People are simply Bad People who have been supported and loved into cultivating compassion and love instead of fear and hate? How does that change our response to Evil? In this frame, Paul's words in Romans 12 make a lot more sense: Rev. Brent Wright 3 Broad Ripple UMC

4 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. No, if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. [verses 14-21] Instead of sounding weak, this begins to sound strong. Instead of enemy love being the lack of a strong response, loving enemies is the strongest response: it is the response that can bring change to the world. Love is the strength of God to defeat evil. Not violence. Violence is the strength of evil to defeat love. Looking through this lens, the foolishness of torture comes into focus. Sure, these days we call it "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" because we're America and we don't torture people. Playing games with the name doesn't change the reality; whatever we call it, these techniques are violence, and using violence to try to force our will on those who are sworn to resist us is playing the devil's game. When we use violence, we participate in the same evil we condemn. This is one cost of having such great power: we end up worshiping it. When we are hurting, we turn to our own power expressed through violence forcing others to obey our will through military might and through economic coercion. The God of Jesus Christ is a God of power, but Jesus' life, death, and resurrection show us what kind of power. Not the power of coercion, but the power of compassion. Not the power of violence, but the power of self-giving love. This sounds crazy in our world today just like it did to his fellow Jews in the days of the Roman Empire. While the Empire was busy crucifying those it deemed terrorists outside the city, God was going about showing the world how transformation happens: through loving so deeply that the worst violence the Empire could dish out was shown to be the foolish flailing of a desperate giant. Just like our violent approach to defeating terrorism. We are the Romans of our day, and we as Christians ought to be the first to cry out against this violence done in our name. Rev. Brent Wright 4 Broad Ripple UMC

5 So what is justice? This is a very difficult question. I don't know exactly what justice is. I know that killing is not justice. If we love our enemies, as Jesus commanded, justice must flow out of deep care for them; it must involve hoping for our enemies' reform and repentance and restoration to life abundant. Augustine (the great saint who lived around 400) taught, "We love our enemies and we pray for them. That is why we desire their reform and not their deaths." Rashied Omar, a research scholar at the University of Notre Dame, reminds us that Muslim wisdom, just like Christian wisdom, highlights the necessity of compassion: "The Quran teaches that you never should allow enmity to swerve you away from compassion, because without compassion, the pursuit of justice risks becoming a cycle of revenge." Martin Luther King, Jr. preached about this cycle of revenge: Returning hate for hate multiplies 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 multiplies 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. 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. Whatever justice is, it must not participate in the cycle of retribution. Perhaps King offers us a glimpse into what makes for justice when he encourages us to listen to our enemies: Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition. Justice is complicated because it must involve humility and compassion, not vengeance. Justice is not clear-cut or simple. True justice requires living in real tension and mystery. Perhaps our greatest sin is our unwillingnes to live with this mystery, to live in tension. We avoid mystery by oversimplifying God's mysterious Creation. When Rev. Brent Wright 5 Broad Ripple UMC

6 faced with a world bigger than us, with human beings more complex than we can control by explaining and understanding, we long to be God and see the whole. Out of this desire for control, we dishonor the Creator by reducing everything especially each other to ridiculous caricatures of the whole human beings we are. We de-humanize our enemies (and our heroes alike) as part of our vain effort to control our world. bin Laden was Evil, we declare. And the flip side of the same coin: Our soldiers are Heroes. In both cases we dehumanize them, denying the fact that there are multiple facets, some good, some, evil, most a mixture of both, to all people. The truth of their existence remains: all people are creations of God, just like you and me. Why is it shocking that bin Laden was living in a house in the suburbs? In part because it forces us to see him as a person like us, rather than the vermin, the rat in a cave to be hunted down that President Bush called him. This is part of the genius of the Amish people: they don't participate in dehumanizing others in the same way. When a man shot ten children, killing 5, and then committed suicide, the community responded not by declaring him evil and ostracizing his family. Instead, one father told others to remember that "He had a mother and a wife and a soul and now he's standing before a just God." The community reached out to the shooter's family, loving them and caring for them. Was there any lack of justice in this case? No. There was the radical healing justice of love. Want an alternative to participating in the cycle of violence? The Amish response to horrific violence in their community is a contemporary example of what it looks like to love our enemies. What would it look like if we in our families, in our church, in our neighborhood, in our nation took seriously what Jesus (and the rest of the world's religions) tell us about how God's world works: violence only creates more violence, but love creates peace? What would it look like if we began to learn the rhythms of responding to violence with compassion and love at every level of our lives? Let's pray for this wisdom as we go forth today. Rev. Brent Wright 6 Broad Ripple UMC

Matthew 5: The POWER of Conquering Love

Matthew 5: The POWER of Conquering Love Matthew 5:38-48 Matthew 5:38-48 You have heard that it was said, Eye for eye and tooth for tooth. But I tell you: Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the