Love and Forgiveness 2-23-25
Love and Forgiveness
Gen 45:3-11, 15; Luke 6:27-38
Gen 45:3-11, 15
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. Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Come closer to me.” And they came closer. He said, “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years; and there are five more years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest. God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God; he has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt. Hurry and go up to my father and say to him, ‘Thus says your son Joseph, God has made me lord of all Egypt; come down to me, do not delay. You shall settle in the land of Goshen, and you shall be near me, you and your children and your children’s children, as well as your flocks, your herds, and all that you have. I will provide for you there—since there are five more years of famine to come—so that you and your household, and all that you have, will not come to poverty.’ And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them; and after that his brothers talked with him.
Luke 6:27-38
“But 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.”
Prayer – God of love and forgiveness, to be honest, sometimes it feels like you set the bar too high for us. Your commands to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek, to give to the needs of others without expecting return, seem way out of reach of ordinary, frail, finite folks like us. Are you serious, Lord? Is it realistic for you to expect ordinary people like us to meet such high expectations of goodness? That’s why sometimes, when we hear Jesus’ words, we try to interpret our way out of them. We find it easier to change the biblical text than to change ourselves. We hear that which is most comfortable for us to hear and ignore the rest. To be honest, we would rather be approved of by you rather than changed by you.
Forgive us when we forget how much you love us, how much you believe in us, how much you have done for us. Forgive us when we fail to remember that you are not only demanding but also forgiving. Amen.
You know it is never going to be a good way to start a sermon by saying, “But I say to you. . . “ If a minister starts out a sermon like this then you know that some challenging words are next, words that you, me, we are expected to live by and it isn’t going to be easy. That is the case with our gospel passage this morning as we continue with Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain.
Last week, Jesus spoke words of blessing and curse, similar but different from Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount and for those of you who have joined us for ‘The Chosen’, we know this is a sermon Jesus worked tirelessly on for an extended time – much longer than I work on a sermon I can assure you. Our passage this week from that same sermon offers some very specific directives for love and forgiveness in all of our relationships – family, friend, neighbors and even enemies. As a friend of mine used to say, it is those words in ‘red letters’ that are hard to hear sometimes.
And we can’t accuse Jesus of not relating his sermon to our everyday lives. He gets quite specific about exactly what we are to do when faced with the enmity of others (note that Jesus tells us what to do with those who are our enemies, not how to make enemies), what to do when slapped by another (not when how to slap others), and when another somebody owes us (not when we’re indebted to others). Is Jesus serious? How can ordinary, regular people like us be expected to live like this?
We are not helped, in our attempts to get this text off our backs, when we note that this sermon is addressed, not to some select inner circle of spiritual elites, but “to all who listen”. Perhaps Jesus’s intentions in the sermon become clearer when he says, after giving us these prescriptions for human behavior, he contrasts how his followers are to live with the way everybody else live. Maybe it’s true that nine-out-of-ten Americans live in a certain way or “everybody else is doing it,” but we, as faithful followers, are to be different. Jesus is unashamedly putting forth a very different way of living from that of the majority of the world. Loving enemies, giving without expecting return is not how most of the world lives.
What Jesus commends is not natural, not innate. Why does he commend such a difficult, unnatural way to us? The answer to that question is found toward the end of his sermon. We should act in this way because it’s the way that Almighty God has acted toward us. We’re to live with kindness and compassion because kindness and compassion has been shown toward us. It’s almost as if Jesus is saying, “I’ve forgiven you, now you try it.”
In Jesus we see the key to true humanity. We were not created for enmity and cruelty; we are created by a God who is kind and compassionate. We therefore ought to live in such a way that is congruent with the reality of God’s creation.
I typically don’t tell people, strangers, what I do? I mean how do you act and talk when you are confronted with a preacher. But while at the conference in Georgia recently, sitting with a group of people I didn’t know from Adam’s housecat, someone asked me, what do you do? Reluctantly, I responded that I was a minister. “So, you’re a preacher,” the stately elderly woman said to me. “You preachers! You always make religion sound complicated and difficult. I think, when it comes down to it, religion is just a matter of trying to live a good life and help other people when you can. Simple as that.”
Oh, there were so many things I yearned to say to her, but being a good Southern boy, I chose not to offer a typical Mike smart ass remark. Religion isn’t quite as simple as it may seem. Jesus’ words for us this week - “But I say to you who are willing to hear: Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you. If someone slaps you on the cheek, offer the other one as well. If someone takes your coat, don’t withhold your shirt either. Give to everyone who asks and don’t demand your things back from those who take them. Treat people the way you want them to treat you.” Words of love and forgiveness are not quite as simple as they seem.
Jesus says we are to love our enemies. Not love like you do a spouse or family member, no, agape love is much more challenging. “What it does mean is whole-hearted, unreserved, unconditional desire for the well-being of the other. Expecting nothing in return." How many of us honestly can say that is the way we love our friends, church members and neighbors. And Jesus is saying to us, love your enemies like this. Ahhh, NO. Not happening, can’t do it, don’t even want to do it. I mean other than Valerie, and a few other people, Dook fans can go to – well you know where.
Now I’m well aware that some of you come to church each week and stare up at the ceiling or think about the grocery list that needs to be picked up while I’m up here sharing my reflections on Jesus’ words, but for those of us who hear his words today, we have to realize that we’ve come to head on collision with a way of thinking about God, the world, that is not our typical way of thinking – loving and forgiving
And you may have noted that the concluding verse of that sermon sounds a whole lot like the Golden Rule – ‘treat others the way you want them to treat you.’ And although the Golden Rule is a great one to live by, I’m not sure it reaches far enough to express just how radical Jesus’ demands are. In fact, in his sermon Jesus contrasts his way with the world’s ways, think countercultural.
Besides, “Treat people in the same way that you want them to treat you,” is hardly an adequate summary of all that Jesus taught about the way his followers are to act. I remind you that Jesus didn’t say to his followers, “Come, follow my Golden Rule!” His invitation was, “Come, follow me! Love the way I love.” To be a disciple of Jesus is not so much to be checking off how well we follow a set of rules derived from Jesus, it’s about being in relationship with and trying to follow Jesus and not settle on simply worshipping him.
Jesus’s point, as I understand it from his sermon, is that we are to act toward one another as God has acted toward us. We are to dare to try to live as if God is the standard for our faithful lives, not just our feelings about goodness or even our neighbor’s feelings about what’s right and just.
In Jesus Christ we discover that God has taken us -- who time and time again have shown our enmity with God, disobeying God, trying to put as much space between us and God as possible, bowing and scraping before all sorts of stuff as if it were God—forgiven, loved, and commissioned us to live and work for God. In Jesus Christ we learn that we have learned that, while we may not have gone so far as to “hate” God, we sure didn’t do much to show that we loved God. While we may not have attempted to murder those who have done bad toward us, we didn’t do much good to them.
So here we sit, listening to Jesus preach. We react to most of what we hear with, “Yep, that makes sense to me,” or “Sure, I can go along with that.” We are the judge of the appropriateness, the truth of whatever we hear.
When Jesus tells us to love our enemies, perhaps we are tempted to say, “Well, that doesn’t really apply to me. I am so nice to other people that I haven’t made in enemies.” Come on now. Be honest. If you have lived in this world, very long, and if you have been required to interact with very many people, you will probably have enemies. I would even say that the better person you are, the more you try to live a good and righteous life, the greater the possibility that people will react against you with enmity. That’s often the way the world responds to the very best of people. Look at how the world responded to the preacher of this sermon!
Then Jesus tells us to love our enemies, to not refuse those who ask us for financial help, to turn the other cheek when we have been assaulted, most of us react with, “There is no way that I could do that! After all, I’m only human.” And it is human, all too human to plot against our enemies, or at least do everything we can to avoid them, to retaliate when we of been struck, to be careful to whom we loaned money.
But I say to you that this sermon is not first of all, a list of rules and duties for us. Rather, Jesus’s sermon is first of all a picture of the sort of God who comes to us in Jesus. We’re not being handed a new, impossible rule book of dos and don’ts. We are being given a sketch, a vision of God. This sermon is pointing to who God is and what God is up to in the world. In effect, Jesus is saying to us that we should love our enemies, that we should not retaliate tit-for-tat when we have been offended and assaulted, because that is exactly the way that God has reacted to us.
As we shall learn later in this gospel, the saddest, most disturbing enemies of Jesus were not his critics but rather they were his own disciples. When the going got rough, they fled from Jesus. And even as he was in mortal agony on the cross, Jesus forgave those who had crucified him. Jesus is not a preacher who is urging upon us a way of life that the preacher has no intention or ability to live. The wild, absurdly difficult moral exhortations of this sermon were actually fulfilled in Jesus own life. Jesus preached the way he lived; the way he died.
And yet, we have no need to evade these commands of Jesus. Note that these are not suggestions or ideals that Jesus says, but rather actual commands to those who have followed him. When it comes to living our lives, for deciding how we ought to treat other people and how we are to respond to the injustices that are often inflicted upon us, it makes a great deal of difference to know the sort of God you are dealing with.
It’s almost as if Jesus is saying, “I’ve forgiven you, now you try it.” The real world was not created by a vengeful God who is out to get you when you mess up. The world—the real world, reality, all the way down—was created by a loving God who loves and forgives God’s enemies, some of whom happen to be God’s best friends.
How many people do you know who live by the dictates of the sermon? How many communities, especially churches, have formed themselves around the dictates of this sermon? Not many. I wonder if the scarcity of concrete, living examples of people living in ways that are aligned with the sermon, is testimony to the sad fact that we have forgotten who God really is, we have overlooked what God is really up to in the world.
Something about us seems determined to worship God’s other than the God who meets us in Jesus’ sermon. And yet, maybe the preacher is right: In living out of step with his way, difficult though it may be, we risk living out of step with reality, out of step with the way God has created the world to be, counter to who God has created us to be. In one way it is simple, and yet in real life it is so very difficult – to truly follow Jesus we are called, commanded to love and forgive just as he did – good luck – it is hard for me, for you, for all of us to do and still that is what God asks of us – our world needs that more than ever right now – amen.