Remember

Psalm 20, Matthew 5:38-48

May 25, 2008

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

Power. The passage from Matthew today is about power and how we use it, particularly in reference to those we consider our enemies.

Now the usual way people think about using power with enemies is in terms of defeat and retaliation, and even those of us who consider ourselves peaceful, forgiving people can think that way. One of the most popular songs on top 20 Radio for the past year has been Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats.” She sings the story of a woman who has been cheated on by her man, and the chorus of the song gets sung with gusto by women in karaoke bars all over the country: “And he don’t know, that I dug my key into the side of his pretty little souped-up four wheel drive, carved my name into his leather seats. I took a Louisville Slugger to both headlights, slashed a hole in all four tires, maybe next time he’ll think before he cheats.” You can almost hear the shouts around the world of “You go, girl!”

Women, and men, who’ve been done wrong, or worse, who’ve been abused resonate with the emotions of that song, partly because it seems the only alternative to retaliation is to roll over and play dead, to be a doormat, a wimp, powerless. When many people read the text we read from Matthew today, they assume that is what Jesus is suggesting. How many abused women have heard “If someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the left also,” and assumed Jesus wants them just to put up with abuse? On a global scale, we would call this appeasement or defeat. O, and love your enemies? The guy who has just beaten you up or the folk who plant those roadside bombs that blow up young men and women in the streets of Baghdad? Love them? Jesus is asking the impossible. And so these words of Jesus are dismissed by all but the hard core pacifists, people like Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. (and look what happened to both of them!), or Jesus’ words are corrupted by abusers and bullies.

So how else can one understand this, both in reference to personal enemies and to the enemies of our nation or our faith on a global scale? Well, as I said at the beginning, it’s about how we understand power. Jesus is not at all suggesting we condone evil or appease bullies. Rather he is suggesting we disarm their ability to have power over us by claiming our own power, power based not in weapons or the ability to retaliate (those horses and chariots the Psalmist talked about), but power based in freedom and love. Let me explain using one of Jesus’ examples.

Roman soldiers in Jesus’ time had the legal right to compel anyone to carry their baggage for one mile. It didn’t matter why you might be traveling on any road: to visit family, to go to a funeral, to rush to a sick friend, to work your fields; you could be taken without notice or compensation from your task and marched with the soldiers for a mile. Then, legally, they had to let you go. Now you can imagine that this practice infuriated people. It took control over their lives away from them and demeaned them. So what might the response to this be? To damage the soldier’s baggage? To foment revolution?

Jesus’ response was to urge people to insist on carrying the bag two miles. Now this act of non-violent civil disobedience would have several consequences. First, the soldier could be in trouble for violating the law. But much more important was that the person so demeaned and enslaved would claim back their own control over their lives, they would re-assert their freedom to make their own decisions. By reclaiming their own power, they disarmed the soldier’s power over them. By so doing, they loved their enemy by not only not hurting him, but by showing him how his use of power was ultimately futile. If anger and hate rules our relationships with our enemies, then they are in control of our emotions and actions. If we reassert control by deciding not to react in anger, we release within us the power of a radically transformative love.

Many times during the civil rights demonstrations of the 50’s and 60’s in this country we witnessed this kind of reclaiming of power. When black men and women stood while white men and women spit and cursed at them, refusing to give their attackers power over them, they embodied these words of Jesus. When people realize that power does not consist in the ability to retaliate against or defeat an enemy by force, but that the ultimate goal of our relationships with enemies is reconciliation and love, it transforms the interaction, especially when we remember that when Jesus talked about love, he never meant a warm feeling. Love, for Jesus, was an action, not an emotion. That kind of love can happen on a personal scale as well as on national and international levels as we have seen throughout human history.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, a day set aside to remember those who have died in wars in which this country fought. Some of you may be remembering family members who have died in wars. Many, many people will simply go to parades or barbecues and not give a thought to those who have died.

I think we must remember tomorrow. We must remember that to deal with enemies in the common way that humanity has for millennia has an enormous cost. I remember the first time I went to the Vietnam Wall in Washington and ran my hands over all those names, thinking of lives that were never fully lived. Every week I speak the names of those who have died in Iraq and I think the same thing. The cost of hating enemies and dealing with them by waging war is high in the bodies of human beings on all sides of a conflict, and the cost is also reflected in the severing of relationships between people and nations, a severing which often has consequences for generations, as any student of history can tell you, and we must never forget that.

There’s something else I think we also must remember. We must remember that there are other ways to relate to enemies and to keep people from becoming enemies in the first place. These ideas of Jesus are much more difficult than resorting to killing, and they ask of us all our effort and all our power. When, I wonder, is the day we will set aside to remember those who have changed the world by loving enemies and claiming the power of freedom rather than hate or revenge? When is the day we set aside to practice the command of Jesus that we love our enemies and, in so doing, strive to let the image of God in which every human being is made blossom in us in all its fullness? When do we teach our children how to do this? When is the day we celebrate not merely the ethereal dream of people like Martin Luther King, Jr. or Nelson Mandela or Oscar Romero or hundreds whose names we do not know, but the real actions they lived and taught that have the power to disarm enemies and change the world without hating, hitting and hurting? When is the day when we remember and reward the peacemakers as much as we do the victims and perpetrators of wars?

Perhaps every Sunday here needs to be that day, as we remember that Jesus lived what he spoke. He did not lash out at his attackers, but kept his power and freedom, choosing to walk into Jerusalem and not to flee or call down those legions of angels the thief hanging on the cross beside him suggested. Then Christ rose from the dead, not as an avenging warrior, but as one who spoke words of peace and fed his frightened followers with bread and love.

“Be perfect,” Jesus said, “even as God is perfect.” Many a Christian has heard these words, which refer to how God loves enemies, and turned away in defeat, sighing that God asks the impossible. I read a prayer this week which ended in this yearning, “O God, make me a mirror that reflects your uncompromising love.” Uncompromising love. What if we were as uncompromising in our love as we are in our patriotism or principles of justice? When I read that line, I thought of the moon. People have been there; it is barren rock and dust. Yet every night when we look up, it shines with such a beauty that poets and singers and lovers are drawn to its grace and power. Yet that moon has no capability of producing its own light. It is a mirror of sorts, reflecting the light of the sun, the source of all the light and warmth and power in our solar system. When we are barren of all ability to love, when we feel no power, then God, the source of all light and warmth and power in our lives, gives us what we lack. O God, make us mirrors to reflect your uncompromising love. Amen.