AN OVERTURE ON HOSPITALITY

Deuteronomy 10:12-22; Luke 6:27-36

September 11, 2011 – Rev. Jerry Duggins

“Congregations respond to this text in the same way my children respond to seeing cooked spinach on their plate at dinner. No matter how much I explain the nutritional value, no one around the table really wants to dig in.” (p.381)

So writes Vaughn Crowe-Tipton, chaplain and associate professor at Furman University about these words of Jesus. In a world of so many needy, who really wants to go beyond assisting the deserving? We find loving friends and family challenging enough and now Jesus calls us to love enemies. “Do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” Can Jesus be serious about this? “If any strike you on the cheek, offer the other also.”

I don’t believe I’ve ever heard someone respond to this text enthusiastically, saying, “We should definitely do these things.” There are always questions. What about women who have been beaten by their husbands for years? Doesn’t giving money to beggars enable their addictions and indigence? Does Jesus intend for nations to adopt this ethic? Surely we are not intended to bless those who fly airplanes into tall buildings?

Aside from these more serious questions, I would just as soon leave this “spinach” on the plate. I admit to nursing injuries and personal slights, to imagining all kinds of harm coming to those who hurt me, even to thinking unkind thoughts of those who disagree with me. In these cases I know that this ethic would be good for me, but as Tipton goes on to say about “the real problem with nutrition; there is a vast difference between what we want and what we need.” (p.381)

The truth is that the church has seldom embraced this ethic. We are a “love your neighbor” institution. Loving one’s enemies is often considered too radical and largely impractical.

It may help us to begin thinking about this radical ethic of Jesus if we recognize that he did not pull these words magically out of a hat. Love of enemies has its root in this summary of the law that we read from Deuteronomy, “you shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Loving the stranger flows from the experience of having been a stranger. One is able to love the stranger because one understands what it is like to be a stranger.

When the Hebrew people first came to Egypt, they were fleeing famine and they had Joseph who looked out for them. Perhaps for several generations they were well cared for, but as they became a numerous people, the Egyptians became suspicious of them, eventually enslaving them. The Hebrew people came to know what it was like not to be trusted.

Few of us have experienced this level of suspicion, but many of us know the unease of traveling in a country where we don’t know the language. Or perhaps we get lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood. The anxiety level rises. We have to breathe deeply. Maybe fear creeps in around the edges of consciousness. More often than not the defensive barriers go up. Caution kicks in. Connections of trust become nearly impossible in the unfamiliar setting. Perhaps we even worry that as the stranger we may be perceived as the enemy.

If the dis-ease of being the stranger can lead to efforts to understand and offer hospitality to the strangers who come among us, then surely it is also possible that our experience of being the enemy might lead us to an attempt to understand our enemies.

It is not the normal course of things. People do not normally turn the other cheek or give to those who take from them. Such things usually only occur when one is too weak to strike back. But let me be clear here. Jesus recommends these responses as acts of resistance, not of surrender. We need to understand that Jesus is not offering advice to the abused spouse or child. He does not have in view the maintenance of a tragic static quo, but the transformation of the world into something like the kingdom of God. According to Dena Williams,

“The anointed prophet of the synagogue, the preacher on the plain, seeks to shape the future, to bring about the kingdom of God, not by demands and threats, but by gentle persuasion. Luke’s Jesus models in words and deed the compassion of a loving God for all people.” (p.385)

You get a sense just how radical this compassion is in verse 35: “Your reward will be great and you will be children of the most high; for God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.”

Susan Hylen reminds us that this ethic is recommended to those who are Jesus’ disciples. She writes:

“When the teachings of the Sermon on the Plain are not grounded in the disciple’s identity as God’s child, they become an onerous list of ethical demands that do not further justice and wholeness. When the disciple understands his actions as flowing out of God’s abundance, to which he belongs and which belongs to him, turning the other cheek becomes an act of resistance to evil that has the power to transform others and the world.” (p.384)

The world is transformed when we love our enemy. The church has settled for a watered down version of “love your neighbor.” We take Jesus’ classic story of the Good Samaritan and see it as a call to help those who are in need. We often forget that the Samaritan is in fact the enemy of those in Jesus’ audience, and that it is the enemy who chooses to behave as a neighbor. It is as much a call to cease being the enemy as it is to attend to the needs of our neighbors.

If we want to change the world, we will need to figure out how to love the enemy, how to stop being the enemy. We will need to come to some understanding of ourselves as strangers and enemies. We will need to refuse to elevate the tension. We will need to find our security in God’s grace and generosity.

We can secure our borders, protect our citizens, guard against threats, and certainly a nation has a responsibility to do these things. They may even make parts of the world a better place. But they cannot bring fundamental change. But then, maybe we don’t want that.

“Love your enemies, do good and lend, expecting nothing in return.” This is a hard one folks. I’m pretty sure it would be good for us, like cooked spinach, unless you like cooked spinach, of course. I feel a little like the rich young man whom Jesus told to sell all he had and give it to the poor. He went away very sad for he was very rich. I wonder though what the church would look like if we took up Jesus’ challenge, if even a few of us took it up?

I wonder if the church, resting secure in God’s love and gifts, could love those whom the world finds difficult to love, could love whom the church has traditionally kept at arm’s length. I’m not talking about terrorists here. We have plenty to do with loving those whose taste in music is different from our own, whose opinions challenge our own, whose actions sometimes cause pain. We don’t call them “enemies,” but the walls of separation are set and plain to see.

I think we must find ways to love our enemies or the church may lose its opportunity to exhibit God’s kingdom to the world. And the world has never needed the church to shine more. Amen.

“Luke 6:27-38” in Feasting on the Word: Year C, Volume 4. edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor. Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville, KY. 2009, pp.380-385.