Scripture: Matthew 5:38-48
I ended last week by referring to Martin Luther King’s interpretation of the passage from the Sermon on the Mount that we just heard and that was our scripture for last week as well. I should say that I consider Dr. King to be not only a great civil rights leader, and not only a great preacher in the sense of being a great orator, but also an insightful interpreter of the Bible. By way of reorienting ourselves for this morning, and especially for those who were not here last week, let me just quote again some of the words from a book Dr. King wrote about the Montgomery bus boycott, Stride Toward Freedom, where he directly commented on the words of Jesus: “Christian love is love seeking to preserve and create community…Christian love is a willingness to go to any length to restore community. It doesn’t stop at the first mile, but it goes the second mile, to restore community. It is a willingness to forgive, not seven times but seventy times seven to restore community…If I respond to hate with a reciprocal hate, I do nothing but intensify the cleavage in broken community.
And to recap further just very briefly, my comment on Dr. King’s commentary on scripture was that I found it very helpful to me to place Jesus’ words in this context. It is not just an abstract teaching that we should not strike back, turn the other cheek, give your clothing away indiscriminately, and so forth. It is not about some moral standard that applies the same way in all situations and that can lead even many Christians to wonder whether that kind of a standard is reasonable, rational, or practical. It is not about whether a person can be that good or not. It is about building and restoring community and we need to think about Christ’s words in that context…which is what I want to do this morning. I actually want to reflect as much on the idea of community as on Jesus’ words. Just a few thoughts. It’s our annual meeting today, and I’ll try to be brief, but a few thoughts on community seem appropriate.
First to expand a little on what I was just saying. I think one of the things we tend to do with these words of Jesus is treat them too literally and from too much of an individual perspective. I don’t know about you, but the image that comes most easily to my mind when I read these words of Jesus is to put myself in some situation where my commitment to the words would be tested. What would I do if someone physically attacked me? Would I turn the other cheek? Would I be able to resist striking back or at least offering some kind of resistance or self-defense? But I’m not sure that’s the most helpful way of thinking about these words of Jesus. If we take those words at face value and try to apply them in this way, most of us are going to end up dismissing them, maybe because we confess that we’re never going to be that good a Christian, and we might just as well not even try. The passage at the end counsels us to be perfect as God is perfect. Well, some of us might say, I’m not. No sense even trying. I’m willing to do my best to love my neighbor. Loving my enemy, really loving my enemy, is quite a bit harder, and this business of turning the other cheek is out of reach. Or, we might say, Jesus is just out of touch. In either case, we sort of put these few paragraphs aside as not really relevant to the way the world is or the way we are as humans and we lose the tension that should be there in a real encounter with these words.
It would be a good thing for those of us who don’t take the Bible literally not to take these words literally either. I am unable to take them just at face value and the example that comes to mind often for me because it lives inside me is that some years ago I counseled with a woman who was being beaten regularly by her husband. She had been told by the minister of the church she belonged to that Jesus had taught us to turn the other cheek and to forgive and that although it was important to get the fellow to stop beating her, it was also important for her to stay in the marriage and try to offer love and forgiveness and maybe that would help change him. I could hardly believe that a minister would actually offer such advice, and maybe his message wasn’t quite what she heard, but maybe it was, and in any case it was what she heard. I find it hard to imagine Jesus offering such advice or sticking to his own teaching in such a situation. I think he would say his own words do not apply in situations like this. There are other options besides an eye for an eye on the one hand and submitting to further violence on the other. And in any case, whatever Jesus’ words, I cannot consider such advice in any way Christian. In this very unhypothetical situation, turning the other cheek was a teaching that clearly to me did not apply.
But that doesn’t mean it has no relevance. Let me bring up quite a different example that may have something to do with the teaching “turning the other cheek” and “loving your enemy”. It’s been on my mind recently, and maybe on many of yours. The question of Rick Warren being asked to give the invocation at the inauguration. This is a man who is a well-known leader in evangelical Christian circles and who has been part of a movement among some in the evangelical community toward greater concern with issues such as poverty and the environment. He is also a man who could be seen, who is seen as an enemy by many particularly because of his views on homosexuality in general and his support of Proposition 8 in California in particular. He has, in a figurative sense, struck people in the lgbt community as well as many in their families, their friends, their supporters and allies across the face, and not very gently at that. What about turning the other cheek in this situation?
So far as the inauguration is concerned, you could say that there might be some ways of going the second mile with Rick Warren, that we could refrain from looking for ways to “get back” at him, to strike back in anger in some way, that we could even extend some measure of forgiveness to him, but none of that means you have to give him a prominent and honored place in the inauguration ceremonies. And that would be true, but at least as I’m thinking about it today, a little beside the point. I sort of doubt that President Obama or those who advised him on making that choice had the Sermon on the Mount in mind when they came up with the idea. But it seems to me extending the invitation is an act very much in keeping with the spirit of what Jesus is trying to say here, especially if you don’t take it literally, and especially if you understand what Jesus was saying in the way Dr. King did—that this teaching is all about the building and restoring of community. Whether you agree with the invitation or not, it seems to me that that is precisely what it was all about—the building or restoring of community—a small step in that direction in the long term, but a step. And it required on the part of the inviters and on the part of many of the rest of us something like a willingness to go the second mile or a willingness to turn the other cheek in an active sort of way, not just a passive one.
As I say, in the big scheme of things this is probably a minor issue, though it hasn’t seemed so minor to some folks recently. I raise it not because I think I know what the right thing to do was in this instance, or because I am sure how Jesus’ words apply in this situation, but because it’s an example of the kind of tension that I believe we do necessarily live with if we take Christ’s words at all seriously. It’s a tension we are going to be living with a lot if there is to be a new political climate and if there is to be any hope of rebuilding and restoring a greater sense of community among the American people on a large national scale. It’s a tension between standing up for principles that need to be stood up for and fighting battles that need to be fought and won vs. trying to establish connections among people who may disagree on principles, trying to restore bit by bit some sense of community where previously there were just armed camps.
It’s a little bit like the situation we find ourselves in as a church—not Sojourners, but the Christian church and even the larger UCC. I have expressed myself in other sermons and on other occasions that in general I do not think it is the right thing to do to put aside the efforts toward full inclusion of sexual minorities in the life of the church and efforts toward justice in the larger society in order to try to keep peace in the church. I have always felt any such peace would be a false peace. And if that means that there will be divisiveness and conflict and the breaking apart of community for a while, even quite a while, then so be it. Sometimes a little chaos is not the worst thing in the world. But Jesus’ words remind me of two things. One is not to give up that tension between standing on principle and the desire to value human connection and community in spite of differences. I shouldn’t feel that my attitudes that I have just expressed settle the issue once and for all even in my own mind. There is a tension there I need to live with. And second, the reason not to attach so much importance to unity in the church is that there is a larger unity, and larger sense of community that we are always straining for. The goal is not Christian unity but human community.
I hear Jesus telling me always to strain toward community, and that straining toward community, not just thinking it would be nice, but straining toward community almost always involves doing something that does not come naturally, taking an extra step, going a second mile, turning the other cheek. I hear Jesus encouraging me to do things that are not normal, not convenient, not easy on behalf of community. And if that value of trying to build, rebuild, restore community comes into conflict with other values that are important to me, as it often does, then I need to live in that tension.
Meanwhile, here at Sojourners we go about trying to build community in a way that is most real and that most matters. Hopefully most of the time this doesn’t require us to turn the other cheek or go the second mile, though there will be times, there are times, when something like that is required even in this face-to-face community where many values are shared. And I know there are those among us who feel that the consensus process sometimes makes a one-mile trip into a ten-mile trip, but mostly what is required of us is not so great. We don’t look around the room and see many enemies we are called on to love. But the process of building community even here is not without its tensions. There is always the temptation to adopt more of a live and let live approach. In spite of sharing many values we are very different people. We do bring, in a manner of speaking, many names for God, born of different stories and personal histories, different church experiences, different approaches to faithful living, different spiritual quests. There are lots of differences among us, and it is always easier to accept the differences, to tolerate the differences, even to celebrate the differences than it is to engage our differences in the effort to build community. Even in a place like this, community is something we need to strain toward. It doesn’t happen naturally. It is not the only important value here, but I hope it is one of our important values. May it be part of our story as we take the next steps in our congregational life. May our congregational life be not only a collection of individual journeys of faith but in some real and meaningful way a common journey. Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 25, 2009