Pray for your enemy.
Two hard-to-live-out gospels on two back-to-back Sundays. Both go against the grain of how we normally react and live our lives.
Pastor Dorothy (who presided today with Pastor Michelle on vacation and celebrating her birthday) pointed out in her sermon, more than a couple of times, how hard today's gospel is to keep. I believe we all know exactly what she means, how truly unreasonable loving your enemy first sounds when we try to understand what Jesus is telling us, and how we prefer not to dwell on it. If we do we almost always follow with rationales that start with "Certainly when he said this Jesus did not mean..."
Do not resist an evildoer.
Pray for your enemy.
Yet Jesus lived these words out. He did not resist his arrest. When he looked at his executioners from the cross and offered forgiveness, could there have been any stronger show of his love? He offered his prayers for them to God.
Martin Luther King Jr. in Strength to Love posits that "Forgiveness is the decisive factor in how much you can love your enemy." And we know in our hearts that this statement is pregnant with truth. We always need inspiration, example and faith to activate within us the possibilities of how to respond to evil and enemies. We also know that the rationales, as to why praying is hard, tend to drop away when there is strength to follow Jesus. When we pray for the enemy, when we forgive, and when we love, the rationales for resisting become small or meaningless. And this isn't only confined to what Jesus said and did.
I think here of the relatives of the victims in the South Carolina church shooting who offered their forgiveness to the young man who murdered their loved ones and their pastor, the Reverend Pinckney. Can anyone doubt that they were seeking to take Jesus’ words and example seriously? They also honored the spirit of Reverend Pinckney and their faith with this forgiveness. Knowing this is not passivity but the pursuit of reconciliation and justice goes without saying.
I'm also reminded of the Amish school shooting of 10 young schoolgirls in a one-room Amish school in October 2006. According to a Lancaster, PA blog:
In the midst of their grief over this shocking loss, the Amish community didn’t cast blame, they didn’t point fingers, they didn’t hold a press conference with attorneys at their sides. Instead, they reached out with grace and compassion toward the killer’s family. The afternoon of the shooting an Amish grandfather of one of the girls who was killed expressed forgiveness toward the killer, Charles Roberts. That same day Amish neighbors visited the Roberts family to comfort them in their sorrow and pain. Later that week the Roberts family was invited to the funeral of one of the Amish girls who had been killed. And Amish mourners outnumbered the non-Amish at Charles Roberts’ funeral.
It’s ironic that the killer was tormented for nine years by the pre-mature death of his young daughter. He never forgave God for her death. Yet, after he cold-bloodedly shot 10 innocent Amish school girls, the Amish almost immediately forgave him and showed compassion toward his family.
In a world at war and in a society that often points fingers and blames others, this reaction was unheard of. Many reporters and interested followers of the story asked, “How could they forgive such a terrible, unprovoked act of violence against innocent lives?”
Another story to reflect on is Nadia Bolz Weber's reaction to the Sandy Hook shootings that she wrote about in her book Accidental Saints.Pastor Nadia shared with her intern Alex how she wanted to remember the Sandy Hook dead in worship that week by reading the name of the 26 teachers and children who died and ringing a bell after each name. He responded "You mean praying for the 27. Adam Lanza, the shooter, also died". Although she initially resisted praying for the killer, she also knew the voice of Jesus in what Alex said.
To quote her about what happened next:
I stood in front of my congregation that day and prayed the names of dead teachers and children, our intern Alex solemnly struck a bell for each of them. “Charlotte Bacon, 6” A bell rings. “Daniel Barden, 7” another bell. “Olivia Engel, 6” the vibration from each bell felt as though it was shaking my insides so hard that images are escaping from deep in my mind of every 6 year old I’ve ever known and with each bell strike I see them laying in a classroom corner.
I couldn’t read the final name on the list right away, since it took me a minute to reach deep enough into my theological convictions in order to find the mercy to do so since I didn’t have much of my own to offer. I had been so intensely focused on telling the truth about the kind of world that God entered that I had forgotten in my sermon to actually mention why God entered it. If I couldn’t also speak the truth that God came to us in Jesus Christ in order to save us, that God created us in God’s image and that lives we’d rather extinguish are still precious to their maker, and that the North Star that so brightly lit the way for the Magi to find the Christ Child shone for them and Herod and myself and Charlotte Bacon and the sick young man who killed her, then I really had no business mentioning anything at all. So I dug deep to speak the truth of God. “And in obedience to your command to love the enemy and pray for those who persecute us” my voice cracked as if the courage was draining out of it. “Adam Lanza, 20”
Another, final bell ring.
As C.S. Lewis once powerfully wrote "Prayer doesn't change God, it changes me".
Back to Pastor Dorothy's sermon, she cited a time when she heard an enemy of the U.S. prayed for in a worship's Prayers of the People that she attended. She was shocked and outraged. It felt like a betrayal. Yet this stuck with her and, in one of her Prayers of the People here today, she prayed for the enemies that we name in our hearts.
I think that speaks volumes to another power of praying for the enemy. The fear that causes us to label our enemies also may invert our vision so that the outside world is obscured by that fear. The fear that contorts the human faces in front of us into monsters. We magnify our own pain and obstruct the pain others may feel when we don't see them as human. We can blind ourselves with lies.
Praying for the enemy acknowledges and helps us confront that label "enemy". That realization may cause a reevaluation that can restore the "enemy's" humanity in our minds and even call into question our basic understanding of the "enemy".
I don't mean to minimize that even intellectually or emotionally accepting this takes tremendous vision and will. The temptation not to pray for your enemies will always be strong and hard to overcome.
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