Sermon — February 20, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
It’s been a week of love. On, Monday, Murray got a homemade Valentine and some cookies from a preschool friend, I baked Alice chocolate muffins, and Alice bought me not one but two varieties of pickles. (Spicy green bean and smoked okra, if you’re curious.) Then, this Sunday, we hear not one, not two, but three reflections on love in our collects and our readings.
“O Lord,” the Collect of the Day begins, “you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing: Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts your greatest gift, which is love…without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you.” Love is truly the greatest gift of God; whether it’s romantic love, the love between family members or friends, or the love that we make manifest in the service of our neighbors, love is one of the most powerful forces in the world.
For “if you love those who love you,” Jesus says, “what credit is that to you?” (Wait. What?) “For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same… But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.” (Luke 6:32-35)
This is not the “Sunday after Valentine’s Day” kind of love.
“Love” is, of course, one of the core concepts of Christianity; you might even call it one of the key practices of our faith. It’s certainly been at the center of my faith. I remember reading the First Letter of John for the first time during college, at a time when I had a good friend who was struggling, and being struck by its beautiful account of love: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1 John 4:7–8) For whatever reason, I’d never grasped before how central “love” is to Christianity, and I can’t describe how comforting it was to hear that the love that was sustaining me as I tried to care for this friend was God’s love working in me. And I found that I was able to anchor my faith and my life in those Two Great Commandments that Jesus names from the Old Testament: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” (Luke 10:27) Wherever I went, and whatever I did, I knew that if I walked this road, loving and serving my neighbor, loving and serving God, I couldn’t go wrong.
It wasn’t for a couple of years that I realized I’d been tricked. Loving a friend in need, caring for a neighbor who needs help, these things are wonderful and important—but they are not the most difficult or the only forms of Christian love. After all, Jesus has a point. Loving those who love you is one thing; loving your enemies is another.
Because “love your enemies” doesn’t mean “have warm and fuzzy feelings about Vladimir Putin’s army massing on the borders of Ukraine.” It means desiring and working for the good for the person right here, in front of you, who has wronged you. Your enemy is not an abstract, faceless horde. It is the person you can’t stand, the one who takes up your headspace as you rehash old arguments and rehearse the ones to come. “Love your enemies,” Jesus says; “Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” (Luke 6:37) But sometimes, it can be hard to forgive. At the very same moment that I felt so comforted by the idea that my love for a friend was God’s love working in me, I was, at the very same time, utterly refusing to forgive another person, a family member who’d done something wrong. I was mulling and stewing and raging against this person, even as every day I fell more deeply in love with our loving God.
But if you ever think your family members have treated you badly, you might want to recall the story of Joseph. You may remember the details: Joseph, the youngest of twelve sons, betrayed by his brothers as a child and sold into slavery, rises with God’s help to the heights of Pharaoh’s administration in Egypt. Now there’s been a famine, and his brothers have come to Egypt for help, not realizing that he’s in charge, and while he takes his revenge, messing with them for a while, eventually his old love of his brothers rises to the surface.
“Joseph could no longer control himself,” the story goes, “before all those who stood by him, and he cried out, ‘Send everyone away from me… And he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard it.Joseph said to his brothers, ‘I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?’ But his brothers could not answer him, so dismayed were they at his presence…[But he] said to his brothers, I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt… Do not be distressed” (Genesis 45:1–5) And he comforts them, and he provides for them, and he embraces them.
He loves his enemies; he blesses those who cursed him; and it is like “a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over,” put into his lap; “for the measure you give,” as Jesus says, “will be the measure you get back.” (Luke 6:38) And the most poignant moment of the story turns out not to be the moment when Joseph’s brothers bring their faith the bloody Technicolor Dream Coat, and he thinks his son has dead, but the moment when that son finally meets his brothers again and forgives.
The truth is, we all have the power to do what Joseph did. We have all been forgiven, and we can all forgive.
A few years ago I went to a preaching conference just outside Richmond, Virginia. and the keynote speaker, was a psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University named Everett Worthington. Now, keynote speakers can be hit or miss. But this was a hit. Worthington was a psychologists, working at a public university, not a theologian or a pastor; but he was a Christian, and his work was a kind of ministry, because his academic specialty was the psychological study of forgiveness.
Now, it was a week-long conference, and I have more than one of his books still sitting on my shelf, but to a certain extent you can summarize what he had to say in a few key points.
First—and this is important—you can make the decision to forgive. Whether someone has apologized or not, whether they’re still alive or not, whether you’ve ever met them or not (imagine, here, the person who’s just cut you off in traffic!); whatever the case may be, you can choose to forgive. You don’t have a choice whether they wronged you. You don’t have a choice whether you felt angry or hurt; and you probably should have! But you do have a choice between forgiveness and unforgiveness; between ruminating and plotting revenge and forgiving and beginning to heal.
The actual emotional process of forgiveness takes much longer than this initial decision. It’s almost like painting a wall that’s been painted many times before: without replacing the feelings of anger, or pain, or frustration with this person, you add layers of empathy, or compassion, or love. You can start with a primer of empathy, remembering a time when you’ve needed forgiveness, remembering that you, too, are fallible. You can add a coat of prayers for their wellbeing, or even for their repentance and change. At the very least, in the most horrifying situations, sympathy, even pity, can do the trick; it must be so terrible to have a soul so twisted as theirs. Poor baby. But in any case the emotional work of forgiveness consists of gradually adding more layers onto that wall, until the color slowly shifts from the green and red of envy and anger to the pink and blue of love and, one day, peace.
And while there will sometimes be chips, flakes that show the layers of old color beneath, for the most part, you no longer have to look at that ugly wall every day.
I’ll be honest with you, I hate that this is the case. I wish that the Christian religion was about being right. That it was about me loving you, and you and me loving God, and all of us working together to build a world shaped by love; which is to say, a world where everyone held my opinions and lived according to my values and voted for my favorite politicians. I wish that Christ’s message of love were about how awesome I am when I am loving, and how terrible those people are who aren’t as accepting and loving as I.
But alas. Christianity is not a religion of perfection and good deeds. It’s a religion of forgiveness. And thank God for that, because I need it. “Forgive,” Jesus says, “and you will be forgiven,” (Luke 6:37) and it’s not a commandment or a burden or a judgment but an invitation and a gift. “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” Set yourself free from the burden of age-old wounds, and if you can’t—if loving even your enemies is just a bridge too far—then remember, always, that if God extends such love and forgiveness to her enemies, then she will surely, surely, forgive you, her beloved friend.
“O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing: Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts your greatest gift, which is love, the true bond of peace and of all virtue, without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you. Grant this for the sake of your only Son Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.”