This week we continue our look at Jesus' teaching as found in the Sermon on the Plain in the Gospel of Luke. (Luke 6:27-38) What does it mean for God is merciful to the wicked and unjust? What do we do with the fact that Jesus calls us to do the same?
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We talk about the unwed teenager who becomes pregnant with the Son of God, but we don’t often dig too deeply into what that means whether out of an inability to believe this girl was really a virgin or because we don’t want to think about how our modern culture treats unwed mothers. What does it mean for us today that this is how God chose to come into the world?
We hear the stories of Jesus feeding the multitudes, how a handful of bread loaves and a couple of fish turned into enough to feed thousands with more leftover than they started with. But is the miracle in so little being turned into so much, or in the people present actually sharing the food they had brought with others? Either of these thoughts can be hard for us to believe.
And what of the Trinity? God is three in one and one in three. God is God, but God is also Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is the eternal embodiment of relationship. But how the heck do we begin to talk about that in a way that makes any sort of coherent sense in today’s world?
Each of these ideas, and many others, present difficulties. They don’t quite fit into the world as we know and understand it, but they didn’t quite fit in Jesus’ time either, or why would they even have been listed as miraculous? And yet, we do believe. We believe that God is God and that God can do as God wills. We believe that Jesus is both fully human and fully God, both at the same time. That Jesus came and modeled a different idea of what it means to be human, that Jesus died on a cross, and that Jesus continues to live today. We believe that the Holy Spirit continues to blow through the world, guiding us in God’s ways even as we do our best to put God in a box and say that God is this and no more.
We believe even when we cannot fully understand these great mysteries. We believe these things no matter how hard it is for us to accept. But, as hard as some of these things are for us to accept, I think perhaps the hardest for us to accept is one that is really not even that complicated - God's grace.
You see, grace is God’s undying love for us. Grace is God’s forgiveness offered to all of us. Grace is God coming down to live as a human among us calling us into deeper relationship with God and each other. Grace is God not giving up on us humans because we continue to break our covenants with God. Grace is God continuing to call us into relationship even after we nailed Jesus to the cross. Grace is God’s free outpouring of love, forgiveness, and mercy offered to all people even though we have done nothing to deserve it. Grace is God’s love offered to you...and to “those people” out there in the world.
Grace is not something we deserve. Grace is not something we can earn. Grace is not something we can barter with. Grace is not something that is only for certain people. And grace is not something we have any control over whatsoever. We don’t get to define who receives God’s grace and who doesn’t; only God can do that. And so we have a hard time with grace.
I think that often our difficulty with grace tends to take two forms. These are not mutually exclusive, so you may at times recognize both of these things at work in your own experience of grace.
To help us explore one of the first of these difficulties, I want to tell you a little about a friend of mine. This friend is a pastor in Michigan. We met while we were both in seminary. Later I learned that he and his wife were some of my wife’s best friends before she came to seminary, and they remained so after. So we have stayed connected over the years. They are godparents to our oldest son and April is godmother to one of their sons.
Our friend is a well liked pastor, and the churches he has pastored have thrived as they have explored together God’s grace and how that is understood and lived in everyday life.
One of the things for which he is best known is his constant reminder that “God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it.” This is a really powerful message in the communities he has been a part of. On the one hand, there are many of us that feel like there is no way we could deserve God’s love. We know the things we have done. We have sinned exceedingly. We feel like we have fallen too far. We are so sure we have placed ourselves beyond God’s grace. we say to ourselves that "God could never love me, a sinner." Our guilt is so strong, we believe that it keeps us from God’s love.
Or, on a related note, there are also those of us who have been judged by the church for years. Rather than experiencing the love and relationship that Jesus has modeled for us, we experience judgement and rejection. We are told over and over again by others that we are beyond God’s love. These human authorities do their best to separate us from God’s love, forgiveness, and mercy.
But that is the thing about God’s grace, and what makes my friend’s words so powerful. God loves us and there is nothing we can do about that. We do not get to define God’s love, nor are we so powerful that we can stop God from loving us. As Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans: “I’m convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not death or life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers or height or depth, or any other thing that is created.” (Romans 8:38-39; CEB)
The hard part for many of us is believing it. We sometimes have an easier time believing that the bread and the cup physically change into the flesh and blood of Jesus than we do believing that God loves us no matter what we have done.
If you were paying attention, you may have noticed that our scripture passage today picks up where we left off last week. This continuation of Jesus’ powerful teaching illustrates our other significant difficulty with grace. Grace isn’t just for us alone. By that I mean, God’s grace doesn’t just exist for those of us in this room, or those of us in this or that church; God loves everybody. Whether we want to label them as enemies, those we hate, or unrepentant sinners, whether they are saintly or “ungrateful and wicked people,” God loves them and wants to offer forgiveness. Jesus makes this quite clear in the midst of this teaching - “[God] is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked;” “[God] is merciful.”
But where it gets even more difficult is when Jesus makes it clear that grace is not for God alone to offer. This is the immediate challenge for us in today’s text. It is not only making clear God’s love for “ungrateful and wicked people,” but we are called to love those people as well, without reservation.
Following his flipping of our expectations around what makes one rich or happy in the world, Jesus continues with the call to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate you. Rather than telling his followers to treat other people as they have treated us, Jesus tells us to treat other people how it is we wish to be treated. This is the Golden Rule that so many of us know as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Not only are we called on not to seek retribution when treated unfairly, we are called to treat people as we wish to be treated no matter what who they are or what they have done.
Jesus makes it clear that this is how we are set apart from others, though we must be clear that being set apart is not about marking us as better than others, but about serving as an example to others. We love our enemies, we do good, and we lend without expecting anything in return not because we are better than others, but because this is the model that Jesus gives us.
This is not to say this is without additional difficulties. As with all of Jesus’ teachings, once we humans take them, we tend to bend them to our own will rather than living them in the Spirit which Christ intended. We use these sayings to force people to remain in abusive relationships or to force continuing relationships with someone actively seeking to harm another. We tell others they must forgive even when we are unwilling to do so ourselves. We call on others to treat us better than we treat them. We expect people to continue loving us no matter how much hate or pain we cause them.
No matter that we can never separate ourselves from the love of God, we can and do harm our relationships with each other when we uncritically call on others to forgive the wrongs we have done them. We fail to serve as an example of God’s love when we call on others to forgive while we continue to cause harm. Somehow this admonition to love others always seems to be applied disproportionately to those in harm's way, to those on the margins. We too often fail to realize that the call to treat others as we want to be treated applies not only to those who have wronged us, but also to those we have wronged. No matter how much we love those who harm us, we have missed the point of the Gospel if we fail to show love to those we have caused harm.
As odd as it might seem considering the seriousness of Jesus' call here, I am reminded of the movie Groundhog Day. I realize it may have come out before some of you were born, but it is a good movie about grace and new birth. Bill Murray plays a narcissistic, self-centered weatherman who absolutely hates having to report on the groundhog every year. It's not about him; he gets nothing out of it; it doesn’t advance his career; what’s the point?
Somehow on this particular trip, he begins living the same day over and over again. He lives through the day, goes to bed at night, and wakes up the next morning right back at the start of Groundhog Day. At first, he is obviously confused, but soon he begins to live out his most selfish desires. But he fails to find fulfillment and happiness there. In the end, it is his forgiveness of him self and the mercy and compassion shown to others, both those he had seen as enemies as well as those he had previously harmed, that breaks the cycle and allows him new life.
In the coming days, I want us to think about the implications of this way of looking at the world for how we live our lives. We have a tendency to live our lives the same way. We get stuck on repeat. We fail to find fulfillment in our self-centered pursuits. We act as if others owe us something even when we have not treated them with the same respect.
But Jesus shows us a better way. Jesus calls us into a deeper relationship with God, a relationship that we are called to mirror in our relationships with others. Jesus teaches us to love others as we want to be loved, to love others just as much as God loves us. Jesus calls us to offer others the same grace that God has shown to us.
And, frankly, that can be hard hard.
We have no idea how God could possibly love us because of all the things we have done. We know ourselves and how we have fallen short.
But God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it.
And we like to be so certain we are right and those other people are wrong. We sometimes think that assurance of forgiveness is for us alone, or only for those people that are just like us.
But God loves those we hate just as much as God loves us.
And then Jesus calls on us to go forth and do the same.
So let us go forth from this place assured of God's love for us. And let us, in that assurance, show that love to others.