Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany
February 23, 2025
Delivered by the Rev. Dr. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Ashfield, MA
“Love your enemies” (Luke 6:27). That’s got to be one of the most distinctive, startling, and difficult things that Jesus ever said. The whole first sentence of today’s Gospel passage is worth re-reading: “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.’” What happens inside you when you hear Jesus make this appeal? How do you receive this message in such a chaotic and frightening time? It’s not so easy to love our enemies these days – not that it’s ever been easy, but the new political reality into which this country has suddenly been plunged makes Jesus’ message even more demanding.
A sign at the Presidents Day rally held in Springfield, MA, February 17, 2025Over the past four weeks the impact of the current Administration has been compared by critics and supporters alike to a natural disaster. With approval or disapproval, people in this country and abroad have compared our newly elected leaders to a tornado, a tempest, a flood, a tsunami, a volcanic eruption, and an earthquake. This Administration is forcibly pushing aside whatever stands in its way, breaking down and emptying out the structures in its path, and rapidly re-shaping the landscape. Just about everything we care about is under threat: clean energy and a stable climate, public health, public education, medical and scientific research, immigrants and refugees, racial justice, gender justice, economic justice, human rights, the rule of law – the list goes on. I’m guessing that many of us in this room know someone who’s already been affected.
Love your enemies? Our response might well be, “I don’t think so! That’s an impossibly high bar, and not even a desirable one, when people and communities I care about, and values I hold dear, are being trampled and cast aside.” What’s circulating in many of us – including me – are feelings like anger, shock, anxiety, overwhelm, maybe even despair. Being asked to love our enemies can sound hopelessly sentimental, naïve and weak, out of step with the world’s harshness, out of touch with reality.
Research tells us that we humans react like other animals when we perceive danger. When we’re in a stressful or traumatic situation, our nervous system quickly – almost instantaneously – triggers one of four defense mechanisms to protect us: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.1 When we fight, we feel intensely angry, we act aggressively, we fight fire with fire. Cut me off in traffic? I’ll cut you off. Insult me? I’ll insult you back, but louder. Tit for tat, an eye for an eye, and before long the whole thing escalates into the world we see before us, the dog-eat-dog world of violence and war. I can’t help thinking of the anecdote about a parent who hears the kids squabbling and asks, “Hey, what’s going on? Who started this?” One child looks up, righteous and aggrieved, and says, “It all started when he hit me back.” That’s how it works, right? We’re practically hard-wired to react with aggression when someone threatens us, and it’s a snap to blame someone else for starting the fight.
Rather than fight in the face of danger, we may instead feel an instinctive impulse to flee – we just want to get out of there, to leave, to run away. When fight or flight doesn’t seem like an option, we may freeze in place, as threatened animals sometimes do – we “play dead”; we shut down emotionally; we feel numb or confused or as if we can’t move; we hold our breath. Or, as a fourth reaction, we may feel the impulse to fawn: that’s when we try to placate and please the one who is threatening or abusing us; we play “nice”; we do what we’re told; we pretend to agree; we kiss the ring.
Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn are all normal, involuntary, and immediate reactions to stress, triggered by fear and the wish to survive and stay safe. Much of our country is experiencing trauma right now, so it’s no wonder that many of us are freaking out and getting stuck in emotional reactivity.
Jesus was just as human as we are, and I’m guessing that he experienced these reactions, too, and with good reason: he was living in a time even more dangerous than ours, when the Roman Empire was occupying his homeland and ruling with an iron fist. Yet Jesus showed us another way. He could see that bouncing around on turbulent waves of fear and emotional reactivity left people adrift, thrashing about and drowning in a sea of endless suffering and violence. Jesus learned to live below those waves, from a deeper, quieter, calmer place, in union with the God he called Father. Love your enemies, he said – don’t go after them tooth and nail. Don’t be overcome by fear.
Why should we love our enemies? Because God loves them. Because God’s love is expansive, extravagant, and (to our possible annoyance) all-inclusive.2 As Jesus puts it in today’s Gospel text from Luke, “[God] is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked” (Luke 6:35). Jesus makes the same point in Matthew’s Gospel: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you… for [God] makes [the] sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:44-45). Like sunshine and rain, God’s boundless love is freely offered to everyone, without weighing their merit. God’s love embraces not only the people we love but also the people we reject and hate. As Anne Lamott puts it, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
But loving our enemies doesn’t mean that we passively acquiesce to evil or injustice and become pious doormats. Far from it. What it does mean is that our activism and our efforts to heal and transform the world, our efforts to stop the harm and redress the wrong, come from a deeper, more grounded place. That’s where all the world’s great nonviolent movements for social justice have come from – from the discovery that beneath those agitated waves of fear and anger, there is a holy Love that is infinitely greater than our own small selves, a Love that bestows dignity on every human being and that sets us free from our own reactivity. Rooted in that love, we find strength for creative, nonviolent moral witness. We are less tempted to demonize each other and less prone to mirror the behavior of our enemy. We don’t have to react so automatically and blindly to anger with anger, to hatred with hatred. We learn not to react but to respond.
How do we live from that deeper, freer place? We learn to listen. I find it interesting that at the beginning of today’s Gospel passage, Jesus says explicitly that he is speaking to those who listen: “I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you...” Listening to his voice inside us is a discipline, a spiritual practice, as we pause to notice the impulses and the feelings that are swirling through us, give them space and a good hearing, and keep listening for the inner voice of love that is always sounding in our hearts. Because “[God] is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked,” we can feel free in prayer to be real with God: to confess and to share not only the parts of ourselves that we like and are proud of, the parts that we consider noble and good, but also the parts of ourselves that we’d much rather project onto our enemies – our murderous rage, for instance, our greed, our desire to dominate. Everything that we see outside us is also inside us – there is a Hitler inside us, and, yes, there is likewise an inner Trump – and our spiritual work is to keep making those parts of ourselves conscious, to keep offering them to God for healing, and to keep letting Love shape us and guide us and order our steps.
A banner outside St. John's Episcopal Church, Ashfield, MA, reads "Immigrants and refugees welcome"For those of us who’ve been reeling with anger and fear, today’s psalm is worth praying through slowly, with its wonderful refrain repeated three times: “Do not fret yourself because of evildoers… Do not fret yourself over the one who prospers… Do not fret yourself; it leads only to evil” (Psalm 37:1a, 8a, 9b). How do we learn not to fret? The answer is hidden in verse 7, in the center of the psalm: “Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him” (Psalm 37:7). In stillness and silence, we wait for God to speak. We place our trust in the One who is always with us and who will never let us go, no matter what happens. When our actions spring from that kind of inner assurance and security, what we do is more likely to be effective and wise.
Whether we know it or not, God is at work behind the scenes and can take what was meant for harm and use it for good. That’s the crux of the story from Genesis: Joseph’s brothers did something evil when they sold him into slavery in Egypt, but now, years later, Joseph can see that God overcame their evil, setting Joseph on a circuitous path that resulted in his being able to provide plenty of food amidst a famine. When Joseph encounters his enemies again – in this case, his own brothers – rather than seek vengeance and retribution, he can love and forgive them, because he trusts in the providential care of God.
That’s how God’s love works, surprising us with the power to forgive, and blessing us with the longing, as John Wesley put it, to:
Do all the good [we] can,
By all the means [we] can,
In all the ways [we] can,
In all the places [we] can,
At all the times [we] can,
To all the people [we] can,
As long as ever [we] can.
There will be plenty to do in the days ahead as we look for ways to express the love of Christ and respond to the forces that have been unleashed in this country. The push for social change has historically included economic boycotts, and a campaign is building on social media to urge Americans not to buy anything from major retailers, online or in-person, this Friday, February 28, for 24 hours.3 This one-day, nationwide economic blackout is particularly aimed at large corporations that rolled back their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. It will be followed in March and April by several week-long boycotts of national chains like Amazon and Walmart.
Are we witnessing the first stirrings of a massive movement? I don’t know. What I do know is that we are children of God, made in God’s image, and that, with reverence for ourselves and for all created beings, God’s love can flow in powerful ways through our hands and eyes and words and choices.
To stay centered, day by day we can give ourselves the gift of stillness. We can listen inwardly and ask to be guided by what Dante calls “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.”4 Let’s take a moment of silence now, to rest in that love.
2. C.f. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 266-267. Wink calls loving our enemies "the acid test” of Christianity.
