Love and Prayer that Sets us Free

A sermon preached with the people of St. Francis of Assisi Episcopal Church in Youngsville, Pennsylvania and Holy Trinity Memorial Episcopal Church in Warren, Pennsylvania.

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.”

These words of Jesus give me pause. Do they do the same for you?

They set before me a vision of the countless victims of a legacy of warped Christian teaching that has used this proclamation to excuse and even protect abusers and those who commit violence.

As Melissa Florer-Bixler says in her book, How to Have an Enemy, this “teaching has been deployed to hold women captive to intimate partner abuse and to impede people from reporting sexual assault in the church. It has been weaponized against vulnerable communities who attempt to pull themselves out from under the heel of oppressive power.”

So as a church, as Christian people, I think on “love your enemies Sunday,” we are appropriately called to pause after reading these words, to repent of this weaponization of holy scripture against the very people Jesus tells us are blessed, and to pray for those who have been and continue to be oppressed by this kind of death-dealing theology.

Because the truth is Jesus is not interested in excusing, much less glorifying, suffering, abuse and oppression.

In fact he has just finished echoing the words of his mother Mary’s song, telling us that God will destroy these old human systems of oppression and violence, and reveal that it is in fact the poor, the hungry and those who weep who are the blessed.

Jesus is not giving the people gathered around him – or us – a list to check off for “good behavior,” as though “keeping our cool,” living in unsafe conditions, or sitting idly by in the face of cruelty or injustice is our work. Jesus doesn’t say we aren’t allowed to be angry at those who inflict harm – Jesus himself shows us what holy anger looks like more than once.

What I think Jesus is doing here, is asking us to start imagining life in God’s kingdom of holy reversal, where those systems humanity has built – prison walls that keep the powerful in their thrones and the lowly in poverty – crumble.  

When we pray for our enemies, we pray for them to be set free. We pray for all to be set free.

Nine years have passed since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that took place in Newtown, Connecticut. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing that day. I imagine you do too.

I remember the prayers of lament that came flowing into my consciousness – straight from the psalms – words of anger, desperation, despair and … vengeance. Children. Children. Children, I thought.

And then we learned that the perpetrator, Adam Lanza, had killed himself, avoiding the possibility of ever facing the people whose lives he changed forever.

How do I pray for someone like this?  How do I love someone like this?

This week, I got a glimpse of the answer.

On Tuesday, it was announced that families of nine Sandy Hook victims settled a lawsuit for $73 million against Remington, the maker of the gun used in the massacre.

The New York Times reported that “the families pointed to the way the company portrayed the AR-15-style Bushmaster rifle as a weapon of war, with the use of slogans and product placement in video games that invoked combat violence. The lawsuit contended that hypermasculine themes — including an advertisement with a photograph of the weapon and the slogan “Consider your man card reissued” — specifically appealed to troubled young men, like the Sandy Hook gunman, who was 20.”

These families, through the worst kind of anguish and pain, have loved their enemy.

In seeking this settlement, they are not excusing Lanza’s slaughter of these innocents. Far from it. They are exposing the way in which both Lanza and their precious children became victims of a deadly system that profits from toxic masculinity and glamorized war and violence.

These families are allowing us to imagine a world that sets all of us free from that system.

David Wheeler, whose son Benjamin died that day, said of the settlement, "perhaps there's some solace in knowing, or thinking or hoping that another family will be spared this kind of tragedy and trauma and loss because another young person doesn't feel it necessary to make themselves feel like more of a man, or more effective or make a mark in society by using this in the wrong way,"

This morning, we are being asked to reimagine what is to have an enemy.

Rather than participating in our well-worn human pattern of violence meeting violence meeting violence – blood for blood – Jesus asks us to respond to our enemies with love and prayer.

Not the kind of love and prayer that excuses evil, or shirks accountability or suppresses our feelings of holy sadness, or rage or despair.

But the kind of love and prayer that believes there is a way out of these prison walls that stand between us and God’s promised holy reversals.

The kind of love and prayer that prevents us from simply looking away from the hard things. That allows us to accept that sometimes the best and safest thing is to sever relationships. That insists we hold even our most treasured institutions accountable when they fall short of protecting the most vulnerable.

The kind of love and prayer that anticipates the coming kingdom God.

The kind of love and prayer that sets us free.

*This sermon was inspired by and is indebted to Melissa Florer-Bixler’s How to Have an Enemy. Read it!