Year C 7th Epiphany 2025 Love Your Friends

Year C 7th Sunday after Epiphany, 23 February 2025

St James the Less Episcopal, Ashland, VA

“Love Your Friends”

Collect: 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.

Luke 6:27-38

Jesus said, "I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

"If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? 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. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

"Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back."

This week I saw someone post on social media, “Good luck to all you preachers out there. I know I wouldn’t want to preach on this lectionary reading this week.” I have to admit, in these days we are in, I have to agree with him.

So rather than start with the obvious, I am going to start with the only way that I know how to handle the seemingly impossible task that Jesus is asking of us. It all comes down to perception.

If our thinking shapes our actions, then how we look at situations will elicit the responses that we will have.

Common sense. (Which seems to be less common than once thought.)

How we choose to see something makes all the difference. A study was done on the psychology of the classroom, and in it teachers were told at the beginning of the school year that one of their class was a genius, a child prodigy of unbelievable potential, but they were also told that which child that was could not be shared. So the teachers were on pins and needles trying to figure out which amongst their group was so special. And what the study found was that by treating the class as if it had someone special the entire class’s test scores went up. The story the teacher told themselves is they had to treat every child as a genius, just in case. And every child did better because of it.

If the teacher perceived that a prodigy was in her midst, then she would act accordingly. And if we perceive someone to be our enemy, I dare say that the same is true. They can do no right. And if they dare do something right it is perceived as having duplicitous agendas.

The opposite is also true. When someone is seen as a friend, we give them the benefit of the doubt even when they mess up. We give them space to try again and we forgive their peccadillos. While we might work with them to correct their ways, we do not write them off. Not so with perceived enemies.

This is where we are when Jesus very clearly calls us to do something that the world just cannot comprehend. 

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.

Jesus is calling us to treat our enemies as friends. Love them. Do good for them. Bless them. Pray for them. Do that long enough and they might just stop being enemies. But wait, maybe that perception is what Jesus wanted us to shift all along.

If I choose to see everyone I meet as a Friend, or at worst, a Friend Becoming, then I would have a whole different approach and attitude to the world. 

If they struck me, I might think, “Friend, why would you do that?” instead of thinking how to get the next blow in.

If someone takes your coat, you might think, “Friend, you obviously are in need. Here, take my shirt, too!”

It takes the radical teachings of Jesus, and turns them into a friendly, natural interaction.

It is near impossible for me to love someone I perceive as an enemy. The problem is that I see them in light of that. The problem is not with them, but in how I choose to see them. I can do right by a friend. I can even go out of my way to make a difference and do right by them. Jesus even said that. 

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? 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. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

And there's the rub. Jesus calls us, as Children of the Father, to be like our Father. He calls us to do right by all, like God. Rain falls on the Just and the Unjust.

This last week I saw a headline that caught my attention. Columbine survivor Anne Marie Hochhalter, who forgave gunman’s mother, dies at 43. The article was sad. Ms. Hochhalter finally succumbed to the injuries inflicted on her when she was a student at Columbine High School 26 years ago. But what I found fascinating was that half the article was about her death, but the other half was about her forgiveness extended. She wrote to one of the mothers of the gunman 9 years ago saying, “Bitterness is like swallowing a poison pill,” and then she went on and offered forgiveness.

The world cannot offer anything like what Jesus does when he offers us a way to let go of that poison pill. In our anger and rage we think if we swallow this thing, that seems so small, it will work on our enemies and not totally consume us. Poison pills work on the one swallowing them.

Or think of it this way, what is the opposite  of Love? We might naively think it is Hate. But Hate is finding pleasure in the dislike of something. We feel good gushing our negative emotions out at the source of our hatred. Apathy is the opposite of Love. Not caring at all. Jesus warns us against that, too.

But here in this teaching, and in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Jesus clearly calls us to rethink our underlying perceptions.

If we see that the grass is greener over there than over here we have a deficit mindset. If we have gratitude and approach what we have with thankfulness, guess what, we not only have enough we have abundance.

If we see ourselves as despicable and incapable of loving or being lovable, that is soon what we see in the mirror. But if we see ourselves as lovable and capable of loving, we soon will be.

Perception is what Jesus came to change. It begins with the Beatitudes we had in our lectionary readings last week, and it was the way Jesus began the Sermon on the Mount. If we see ourselves as Blessed no matter our current conditions, we are Blessed. Perception. If we see things as shady, they will soon become that and we will not be able to see it any other way. If we see things as beautiful, they soon become that as well.

We are empowered and enabled in our relationship with God in Christ Jesus to change how we see the world. I think that is why Jesus starts today’s reading the way he does. 

I say to you that listen, Love your enemies…

Many of us might hear, but how many of us truly listen.

Friends, the world needs this very different way of seeing and hearing if we are going to survive. And the choice, the power, is up to us. We can be divided and manipulated, or we can see all God’s children as beloved and our siblings. No one has the power to change how you see them unless you give it to them.

A story is told of a Moody Bible College professor in Chicago who got of the El (elevated train) every day and got his newspaper and went to the school. One day a friend accompanied him. When he got to the newstand, the shopkeeper cursed him up one side and down the other talking about blankety-blank Christians, blah blah blah. But the professor did not even respond, paid for his paper and went on his way. His friend was shocked. Did this happen daily? “Yes,” said the professor. The friend asked why on earth he would stop there every day then. “It is the newstand between the El and Moody. How he acts is not important. Why would I allow him to have that power over me to make me go out of my way for the exact same paper they sell across the street?” 

Forgiveness is about us letting go of the emotion and energy around a situation. And in that non-anxious presence, we can actually help transform the situation and maybe even the other person. Though perceived one way, the professor rejected the way he was being seen. He chose to see himself as loved and lovable in Christ, and refused to be inconvenienced because of the shopkeeper's prejudice.

To be that secure, to be that Christian, it makes people stand up and take notice. It can and does change the world.  One mind, one heart, one life at a time.

I already mentioned Columbine, but the school shooting where forgiveness and loving your enemy struck me the most was the Amish school shooting 15 years ago near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I told this story 5 years ago, but it remains all the more powerful today. A mentally ill man entered a small one-room schoolhouse and killed 5 students, injured 5 others, before taking his own life. These tight, insulated communities work hard to live a life fully devoted to the teachings of Jesus. They build boundaries to limit temptations but they do interact with the outside world.

[From this point I quote extensively from a StoryCorps 10 year anniversary piece. You can listen to it HERE.] 

Their non-Amish neighbors are usually highly respectful of the Amish faithful’s choices, and that is what hit the father of the gunman after he heard of the tragedy. He said, according to his wife, “I will never be able to face my Amish neighbors again.”

That week, the Robertses had a private funeral for their son, but as they went to the gravesite, they saw as many as 40 Amish start coming out from around the side of the graveyard, surrounding them like a crescent.

"Love just emanated from them," Terri says. "I do recall the fathers saying, 'I believe that I have forgiven,' but there are some days when I question that."

Terri finds it especially hard to accept that forgiveness when she thinks of one of the survivors, Rosanna.

"Rosanna's the most injured of the survivors," she explains. "Her injuries were to her head. She is now 15, still tube-fed and in a wheelchair. And she does have seizures, and when it gets to be this time of year, as we get closer to the anniversary date, she seizes more. And it's certainly not the life that this little girl should have lived."

Terri asked if it would be possible for her to help with Rosanna once a week.

"I read to her, I bathe her, dry her hair," says Terri, who herself is battling cancer. And, while she can't say it with 100 percent certainty, Terri believes Rosanna knows who she is.

"I just sense that she does know," she says.

"I will never forget the devastation caused by my son," says Terri. "But one of the fathers the other night, he said, 'None of us would have ever chosen this. But the relationships that we have built through it, you can't put a price on that.' "

"And their choice to allow life to move forward was quite a healing balm for us," she says. "And I think it's a message the world needs."

I could not agree more. Jesus could not agree more.

Mark Twain said, “It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”

What makes Jesus saying Love your Enemies so hard is that there is no subtlety or nuance we can dance around. It is very clear and straight. And if you perceive your enemy to be a friend, the scales fall from our eyes and we can start working that transformative love that the world needs so desperately.  

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. Amen