(Yes, it’s hard)
Epiphany 7C  |  Luke 6:27-38

Love. It isn’t surprising to hear Jesus preach about love, is it? That’s his deal. That and coming back from the dead after three days. But he doesn’t preach on that until he’s got everybody’s attention. 

It is only natural that we would hear about love today. That we would hear Jesus preach about love and we also get to preach love with word and deed ourselves. That is what this life is about, isn’t it? Loving and being loved. That’s the whole ballgame.

Love is our everything, but there are a lot of factors that go into living, aren’t there? Factors like eating things. And when I want to eat Taco Bell, I’ve only got one person in the family who will join me, willingly. And I like the thermostat a little higher than Rose does. But we manage. Isaiah and I get Taco Bell when she’s not around and we raise the thermostat to a whopping 68.

Love gets even more complicated when we walk out the door and I have to contend with the people who park in the wrong direction on the street. That is one of my pet peeves because where I’m from, you’d be ticketed. Not just because an officer would always come by and notice the car parked in the wrong direction on the street, but because someone probably called it in. Because some things just won’t stand.

But we don’t even have to leave our houses to encounter our neighbors, do we? We just have to turn on the TV, fire up the old laptop, or draw that ridiculous device from your pocket that we still refer to as a phone. Our idiot neighbors are just a text away.

So as long as we’re talking about love in the abstract and not our neighbors in the particular, love is the best thing going. It is, as those four lads once sang, all you need. But when people around us get involved, doesn’t love seem like the last thing on our minds?

And when we hear about love, like loving your neighbor, don’t we suddenly become constitutional lawyers or scholars on Oxford’s payroll for their famous English Dictionary? 

When you say “love” do you really mean affection for, or devotion to?
Your Honor, when Jesus says to love our enemies, he doesn’t say anything about enhanced interrogations.
What I mean by love hems closer to the agape than the file in Greek.

This is exactly the kind of stuff Jesus was talking about.

So what does he say about love? 

Jesus has to establish some stuff before he even brings love into the conversation: that love is not relative, transactional, or exclusive to one’s ingroup.

So he doesn’t have us start on the couch in our little mind palace. He starts with the guy storming onto your lawn because he thinks you let your dog poop in his yard. That’s where he starts.

The Love/Conflict Paradox

Jesus starts with our lizard brain limbic system. That sensation when conflict is right there and our brain is compelled to pick a direction: fight or flight. Or, in many cases, no direction: freeze. This is our ingrained self-preservation system and it loves to save our lives, let me tell you. It is what accounts for anxiety when we watch the news and our inherent racial bias when we see pictures of people who don’t look like we do.

Jesus invites us to recognize that the old lizard brain that developed in human beings long before we developed the rest of our brain; that it needs reminding to let the smarter parts take the wheel. Like the prefrontal cortex—when it tries to tell the old crotchety part of the brain that it actually doesn’t want to watch the news tonight and probably should put on a funny movie instead. Listen to that part!

Jesus wants us to break free of that fight/flight/freeze trap and recognize that there are other options. Even if popular culture likes to pretend there aren’t.

What does Jesus say you are to do if someone hits you on the cheek? Turn your head to offer the other one.

How do we who were raised in Western culture hear this message? We hear the phrase, “turn the other cheek” to mean take the shot and simply roll with it. Which is about half right. It means take the backhand and dare him hit you again as an equal. 

Notice that this action is not fighting, you’re not throwing punches. You’re not fleeing, running from it. Nor are you freezing, doing nothing. You are actively daring the aggressor to keep aggressing.

This is what the Civil Rights leaders understood. They used the teaching of Jesus to help the world see what oppressors do: they keep oppressing. And they oppress violently when someone dares to stand up and say they’ve had enough. Sitting at a lunch counter, riding on a bus, or marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And when people saw them sick dogs on those protestors, those people, many so young, arm in arm, singing songs of love overcoming hate and God come-be-hear, Kumbayah, and the dogs tearing into the flesh and batons beating these men and women, boys and girls, black and white, the people got to see how awful that is and how awful it is trying to enforce these awful laws and how we aren’t people who are OK with any of that. And I think Jesus would recognize that tactic as being exactly what he tells the disciples to do.

Jesus starts with our brains so he can get us to recognize that loving people is serious work and means we’ve got to think harder about it. We can’t just be looking at our kids or our parents or best friends, or the nice young woman who hands you the coffee in the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru and saying these people are worthy of love and not be looking at the people who drive us nuts, like the jerk who parks in the wrong direction on my street, and acknowledging that love is for them, too. And if it is for them, then it also goes to people who actually are a problem, who actively seek us harm. And now, we’re talking about loving the unlovable, and have to reckon that such a word has no context for a Christian, because there is literally no such thing as an unlovable person.

And before you argue back or gravitate to the hypothetical abstraction, Jesus pushes us to stop and simply ask: if it weren’t hard, how could it count as love? Jesus really means it. There are no excuses. But remember, this is why we started with the Love/Context Paradox because it isn’t a thing we call love that really means blowing them away with bombs or refusing asylum or taking food from the hungry. We don’t get to retaliate and call it love or demand the faithful person do nothing while the evil persists — it is something different and something that demands a whole lot more from us than our culture even wants us to imagine. Like loving enemies. When others want us to hate, to justify abuse, we see a person worthy of love and redemption through the grace of God.

Real Love

You might be wondering what this means in a functional sense. Like a real life situation with a neighbor or what this means for, say, a country that likes to count and name its enemies frequently. And to this, I offer the very unhelpful, yeah, that’s a tough one. Except that this is the way of Jesus. Full stop. And that other stuff, those inkling questions about how could this possibly work “in the real world” generally aren’t. That stuff isn’t from Jesus. And I think that’s a pretty good clue for how to respond to things. 

We might undersell, too, just how active this vision of love really is. Because it, unlike the supposedly realistic “real world” response, doesn’t pretend hate will work for the first time in human history. Jesus knows that it takes love to produce more love, so go and love people. Stop pretending that our petty judgments will produce love. That our condemning those we hate will produce love. It doesn’t take a PhD in psychology to know that making people’s lives miserable produces misery, not love. 

Love is our deal. That’s our guiding light. The rest is just intoxication. An elixir of drunken submission to pessimism and false promises of permanent security. But blessed are we in the struggle. Blessed in knowing the pain of poverty and division, of exile and rejection. Blessed like the person sitting next to us is blessed. Blessed, not with wealth or fame or any worldly possessions of note; perhaps not even blessed with the ability to carry a tune, but they are blessed by God to witness the love of Christ with other people here, in this beautiful community. Blessed in our poverty and cursed with our wealth, a paradox, perhaps the same one, in fact. Of love, yes for these lovely people. And for the people who drive us crazy. And for those who don’t have a place to bathe or to be and for those who do and just don’t. Love for people we simply don’t want to love — and Jesus is there like Mother or Father telling us when we were little, maybe six or seven, that we have to hug Grandpa — that age when we suddenly stopped and we didn’t want to anymore and the parent says we don’t have a choice here, he’s family and there is no reason other than he squeezed too hard that one time. Jesus is saying to us, Yeah, you’ve got a choice, but not really. If any love is real, you offer it here, when you don’t want to, when it seems most wrong, but that’s precisely when it is most warranted, most really like love. And it isn’t like you’d know this otherwise, this is a group project and the due date is sometime in the future, so go easy on yourself and learn. Because loving is worth it. Loving like God is worth everything. And God has every faith in you. That you are up to the task. Just keep at it. Loving in new ways, clever ways. Ways that break down barriers; revealing the love that is always there, like free refills at a restaurant, like fresh laundry, like a text out of the blue from a friend who misses you, like Christmas Eve anticipation, like homemade birthday cake, a joy, always new, fresh, for you, made as always with love.