Choose Love: Sermon on Luke 6:27-38

 

Below is a sermon I preached on Saturday, February 22nd, and Sunday, February 23rd, at Salem Lutheran Church in Sycamore, IL. 

To view a recording of the sermon, click here. The sermon starts around the 28-minute mark. 

For the children's sermon, I read Choose to Love by C Kevin Wanzer, someone who I met when I was involved in Circle K. 

The gospel for the day was Luke 6:27-38. To read the text, click here.

Grace, peace, and mercy be to you from our God, who is continually creating, redeeming, and sustaining. Amen. 

 

Love your enemies…

 

Easier said than done, right?

 

Loving our enemies might be one of the hardest things we are called to do as children of God, as people of faith. We are being called to do something uncomfortable.  We are being called to something counter-cultural, something radical, and something hard. 

 

I am sure we can all remember a time when we were being asked to show love to our enemies. Maybe that enemy was a stranger, maybe that enemy was our own family, maybe that enemy was ourselves, maybe that enemy did the unthinkable, causing lasting pain in our lives or a loved one’s life. 

 

I am sure we can all remember a time when we responded to hate with anything but love. I am sure we can all remember a time when responding with love seemed impossible and even the wrong thing to do. 

 

There's one moment out of millions of moments that sticks out for me when I think about our call to love our enemies. 

 

This moment was the first time I encountered a hater on my journey to living authentically. 

 

Early on in my transgender journey, I worked as a hospital chaplain as part of my seminary education. It was meant to be a summer of learning how to walk with others through some of life’s worst moments. It was meant to be a summer of self-discovery and growing into a pastoral identity. I never could have imagined when I started that it would be the summer that I would experience a stranger who chose to respond to my existence with hate. 

 

That summer wasn’t the first time that I experienced someone who disagreed with who I was or the journey that I was on. From the moment I came out, people who I thought once cared for me walked out of my life because they couldn’t see past who I was becoming. But that summer was different, instead of just walking away, instead of just ignoring who I was and who I was becoming, this person chose to speak hate, they chose to attack my humanity, they chose to respond with anything but love. 

 

It was in that moment, where my existence was being attacked, that I found myself at the crossroads. I could have responded with the same hate that I just received, raising my voice and yelling at this person, but instead, I chose to respond the only way I knew at the time: I chose to walk away. 

 

I chose to protect myself rather than engage with someone who was focused on breaking me down. 

 

I chose to respond with love. Love for myself and love for who God was and continues to be in my life. 

 

Choosing to respond with love seemed impossible. But here is the thing that I have realized in the years after that moment. Here is the thing that we often forget when we first look at our Gospel text. 

 

When we choose to respond with love, there is not one right or wrong way to do that. The way we show love, for ourselves and for others, largely depends on the places we find ourselves in. 

 

For me, in that moment, choosing love looked like walking away, walking away and trusting in the promises of baptism, trusting that God did not make a mistake when creating me, but I was and will forever be a beloved child of God. 

 

That moment was almost 10 years, and it is still a moment that I reflect on as a reminder of what love can look like. That moment serves as a reminder to me that loving our enemies starts with loving ourselves and living into the love that has been poured out for us.

 

Living into the love that God has for us, the love that gave us Jesus, the love that was witnessed on the cross, is the love we are being called to show our enemies. 

 

The love that we are called to show is the same love that Jesus led his ministry with. 

What does it look like to love our enemies? 

 

Loving our enemies starts from within and seeing the stranger the same way that God sees us, as a beloved child. Loving our enemies starts from loving ourselves. 

 

When we are able to love ourselves and trust that love will sustain us, we are able to share the boundless, transformative love in a world that is looking for small glimpses of it. 

 

Loving our enemies looks like feeding the hungry. Loving our enemies looks like clothing the naked. Loving our enemies looks like creating space so all are not only welcomed but regarded as an equal. 

 

Loving our enemies looks like creating gender neutral bathrooms, so all may have a safe space to take care of bodily functions. Loving our enemies looks like being creative in design so that everything is accessible to a variety of needs. Loving our enemies looks like providing translation before someone asks for it. Loving our enemies looks like showing up for others even when we don’t understand. 

 

Loving our enemies is not exempt from being mad, exempt from shedding tears, exempt from pain and hurts. But loving our enemies forces us to live into the love we first experienced, the love that brings us back to this place week after week, yearning to be filled. 

 

Loving our enemies is the same as loving our neighbors. Loving our enemies is the same as loving ourselves. Loving our enemies is the same as how God loves us. 

 

We are being called, today, tomorrow, every day, in every moment, to lead with love. To invite others to hold firm in their identity as beloved children of God, who deserve to be fed, to be clothed, to be safe and to be loved. We are being called in this time and space to live into our faith, to trust the promises that a new kingdom is coming, one where love is louder than anything else in the world. 

 

Hear the words from our gospel again, this time from the Message translation:

“I tell you, love your enemies. Help and give without expecting a return. You’ll never – I promise – regret it. Live out this God-created identity the way our God lives toward us, generously and graciously, even when we’re at our worst. Our God is kind; you be kind.”

These are the words promise, these are words of our calling that invites us into something bigger than ourselves. Even when we are tired, even when we are hurting, and want to so badly respond with hate, we are being called, invited to be kind, to love generously and graciously. We never know what might come of it when we decide to love our enemies. We never might know what difference our love makes in someone else’ world but we know what it does to us. 

 

Each day, in every moment, I invite you to pause, to trust in the waters of baptism and the body and blood we share. I invite you to choose love, love for yourself and love for your enemy. Amen.