Sermon for August 13, 2023: Is Perfect Overrated? based upon Matthew 5:43-48

Scripture Matthew 5:43-48 Love for Enemies 
‘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. 

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     Ok, Jesus, but what if I really don’t want to love my enemies?” That’s what I imagine at least some of the folks who were listening to the Sermon on the Mount thought when they heard this particular bit of teaching. My enemies are my enemies for a reason. They are not very nice. I really only want to love people who are not my enemies. Be reasonable, Jesus.

     This whole “love your enemies” thing doesn’t come from out of the blue. Today’s reading is still in that part of the Sermon where Jesus is expounding on how a person might actually live a life that follows the Ten Commandments and other important Jewish religious law. Last week, we learned about addressing destructive anger so that it doesn’t rise to level of doing physical harm to another. That’s how he instructs his disciples and the crowds to follow the “do not murder” commandment: deal with the anger first, so you don’t get to the murder.

     Between last week’s reading and today’s, he also addresses issues in marriages, like adultery and divorce, and the breaking of oaths, other issues covered by the Commandments. And then he gets to other important teachings that we would find in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. These are teachings about how to respond to violence that is directed at you. Today’s reading is connected to that. First, he talks about dealing with violence, and then he talks about how to deal with the people who enact the violence.
The scholars I read this week took great pains to remind readers that the people gathered to listen to Jesus were living under a kind of systemic threat that comes with being a nation conquered by Rome. While there was always the risk of individual conflicts leading into interpersonal violence, the people Jesus was preaching to were also at risk of official violence sanctioned by Rome. In her commentary on this text, Carla Works reminds us that the folks in the crowd listening were largely living at a subsistence level- just barely having what they need- and their everyday interactions with agents of Rome, particularly soldiers and tax collectors, were rife with the possibility for violence. It is a deeply pastoral impulse to talk with people who live under the threat of violence about how to deal with that violence in a faithful way.

     I’ve preached before on the work of Walter Wink, who offers up an interpretation of Jesus’ teaching about retaliating against violence that I find very useful (go find my sermon from February 19th, 2017 if you want a more full exploration of Matthew 5: 38-42). I won’t go through all of what he said, but the short version is that turning the other cheek, going the second mile, and giving someone more than they are suing for are all ways to disrupt how someone intends to use power. The three types of harm mentioned- slapping a cheek, suing a poor person to take the last clothes they have left, and forcing a civilian to carry a soldier’s stuff- are all examples of using power to humiliate someone. Disrupting their tactics can surprise them and make them look shameful for degrading someone who has less power.

      Now, I’m not sure that this always works. Plenty of people in power have no shame and relish humiliating others. At the same time, I remember actions like the 1990 Capitol Crawl protest and know that disruptions can work. In that protest, more than a thousand people marched from the White House to the US Capitol to demand that Congress pass the Americans with Disabilities Act. Once they got to the Capitol, 60 of the protestors who used some kind of mobility aid, from crutches to wheelchairs, set their aids aside and crawled up the steps. It was a powerful demonstration of how inaccessible supposedly public buildings are. Seeing all the disabled activists, including a six-year-old child who wanted to participate, shamed the people in power into voting for the Americans with Disabilities Act. That act has been, and continues to need to be updated, but, even as imperfect as it is, it makes people’s lives more livable and our country more just. Shaming the Devil works, at least sometimes.

     According to Jesus, then, after you’ve disrupted the hatefulness directed at you, you need to go one step farther, which, is too bad, because I really like the “shaming the oppressors” part. That feels just to me. Jesus said we can’t stop there, though. We can’t just disrupt our enemies. We also need to love them. Jesus said, “even those traitorous tax collectors can love the people who love them. That’s not very hard.” If you are only kind to the people who think and act just like you, Jesus says, “what more are you doing than others?”

     This is one of the places where it is good to be reminded that, as Carl Works says, “God’s kingdom is bigger than Roman rule.” We enact the kindom of God when we live out our faith in this world. And, Jesus says, living out this faith means acting differently than the ones who hate us. It even means that we should pray for them. It even means that we should love them. We practice offering the kind of perfect love God offers. Even when we think that kind of perfection is overrated.

     I will freely admit that I don’t always know how to love my enemies. Some neo-Nazis rallied at the state capitol here in Maine yesterday and I feel very little love towards them. On the other hand, I saw some love in action recently from someone who isn’t a Christian, that might serve as an example to me when I struggle to figure out how to love so radically as a Christian. Poet, speaker, author, and comedian Alok Vaid-Menon is trans and gender-non-conforming. They dress in ways that many of us would think of as feminine, use they/them pronouns, and often have a short beard. This mix of clothes, pronouns, and body hair can be really challenging for people who have narrow ideas about what kinds of clothes people with certain kinds of bodies can wear. Given that their work is so often public, people make rude and hurtful comments to them in very public places. Their responses offer a great lesson in loving your enemies.

     Recently they shared a comment someone left on one of their pictures. The commenter said, “be yourself, no problem with that, really; but I find this disgusting, sorry.” The thing the person found disgusting was Vaid-Menon existence as a person with beard wearing bright, feminine dresses and heels. Rather than ignoring that person, Vaid-Menon responded. It’s a long response that I’ll share a link to in when I share the whole sermon, but here’s part of it:

     “I am a human being: born with a heart, two lungs, and no shame. I’m sorry right back at you. Sorry that you have such a narrow worldview. I can see it’s hurting you. It must be exhausting to feel as if your worth comes from winnowing yourself down to other people’s opinions of who you should be. Shame is interrupted joy. And I believe you are worth joy.”

     I am grateful for this example from someone with whom I don’t share a faith who nevertheless has shown me a way to love someone who is unkind to them and do so with great integrity. It is no small sacrifice to expend this energy on someone who might rightly be called an enemy. And, yet, Vaid-Menon has the spiritual strength to find the right moment to do so. My prayer this week is that we can find a way to pray for the ones who cause harm, whether it’s us or our enemies. Maybe our first prayer for them is that they will have a change of heart. That prayer is a good enough place to start. It’s not perfect. But it gets us one step closer to the love and justice Jesus’ hopes for us.
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Resources consulted while writing this sermon:
Karoline Lewis: https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/seventh-sunday-after-epiphany/commentary-on-matthew-538-48-2
Carla Works: https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/seventh-sunday-after-epiphany/commentary-on-matthew-538-48-3
An article about the Capitol Crawl: https://www.history.com/news/americans-with-disabilities-act-1990-capitol-crawl
Alok Vaid-Menon's post where they respond to a hateful comment: https://www.instagram.com/p/Ct9Oc0uu7x_/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Walter Wink, Powers that Be: Theology for a New Millennium (New York: Galillee Doubleday, 1998)