Empowered to Do the Impossible

[Below you'll find both the video of today's 11:00 AM worship service with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio and the text of the sermon. Have a blessed week!]



Luke 6:27-38

Today in our Gospel lesson, Luke 6:27-38, Luke continues to share Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain. The words are addressed to Jesus’ disciples. That includes you and me.

And just to be sure the we understand that He’s talking to us as individual believers, Jesus uses the second person personal pronoun throughout this part of His sermon. You see, unlike the English language, which has a single word for a person to address you, whether that you is one person or a million, Greek, the language in which the New Testament writers composed their gospels and books, has different words to address people, whether singularly or plurally. Throughout today’s gospel lesson, Jesus talks to you and me personally. He speaks to you and me as individual people who want to have life with God. Today Jesus says repeatedly in different ways, “Love your enemies, love the people who hate you.” That means turning the other cheek; giving to whoever asks of you; and so on. These words are directed not to governments or the Church as an institution, but to each of us, you and me, individually, as His disciples.

How do you react to this teaching? 

I can tell you how I, when I’m utterly honest, react. 

I think that if that’s how I need to live in order to be part of God’s eternal kingdom, I am in big trouble. The way Jesus tells it, to live a life acceptable to God, it seems that I need to go around with a sign on my head, saying, “Use me. Exploit me. Abuse me.” I like the idea of loving my enemy (sort of), as long as my enemy, the person who hates and disdains me, will love me too. Honestly, the commands Jesus gives to you and me as individual Christians today are impossible!

If that’s how they strike you, good! That means they’re doing their job, that God’s Law is doing what God’s Law is meant to do to us. 

The Law shows us our sinful natures. As the apostle Paul puts it in Romans 3:20: “...through the law we become conscious of our sin.” In His Law, God says, “Love God and love neighbor. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” We may be inclined to agree that those are good ideas. But when we read the fine print, as in Jesus’ words to us today, we must admit our inability, by the power of our own will, to live like that. In fact, truth be told, you and I may not even want to live like that. My very revulsion toward the life of love to which Jesus calls me condemns me. Considering the impossibility of keeping Jesus’ Law of love, I feel like Paul, who writes, “Who will rescue me from this body that is taking me to death?” (Romans 7:24)

The answer, of course, is the One Who gives these commands, Jesus, God the Son and sinless man. 

It’s Jesus and only Jesus Who can save us from our unloving, sinful natures. Jesus perfectly kept God’s command that we love but because it’s His very nature to love. 

Jesus shows us that while we are sinners, God, Who is love, still loves us and wills to save by God’s grace all who trust in Him. 

On the cross, Jesus has done everything necessary for us to enter, live, and thrive in God’s eternal kingdom. (John 15:5)

The One Who commanded you to “bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you” prayed from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34) 

The One Who commanded, “If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also…” refused to retaliate when, during His trial, “[people] spit in his face and struck him with their fists…[while others] slapped him…” (Matthew 26:67) 

Jesus perfectly obeyed the command of God to you and me to love even those who hate us and because of Jesus' perfect obedience and sacrificial death for us, God the Father has opened eternity to us. 

This is why Jesus says a few chapters later in Luke’s gospel, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23) In other words, to become heirs of what Christ achieved on the cross for sinners like you and me, we acknowledge our sin–our lovelessness–and turn to Jesus in trust. Jesus covers us in His perfect obedience…and He does even more than that.

But before we talk about what else Jesus does in the lives of those who believe in Him, we must address the question all of us wonder about when confronted with His words today: Are we supposed to love the spouse who’s been abusive, the classmate who’s been a bully, the authority who’s misused his power, the businessperson who’s exploited me or others? 

The short answer is yes. 

But this is why God has given, for our common benefit in this fallen world, governments, civil authorities, and parents. 

Without such authorities, Martin Luther said, Christians  would live in this world as “innocent lambs among ravenous wolves.” 

And so, the abused wife should love her abusive husband, but still call the police. 

The bullied child should love his tormentor, but still go to his parents and teachers. 

The command to love doesn’t mean that wrongdoers aren’t to be held accountable. In fact, there are times when the most loving thing we can do for others is to hold them accountable for their harmful or illegal actions. Even the Church is to have authority to hold its members accountable when any unrepentantly breach God’s commands. God recognizes that while we who believe in Jesus Christ already live in God’s eternal kingdom, we also live in a fallen world. And so, children need parents; schools need teachers and principals; communities and nations need law enforcement and those who enact laws for the common good.

Nonetheless, when we trust in the God we now know in Jesus Christ, God uses His Word to transform us from those indifferent to others to those who love even our enemies. The God we know in Jesus takes up residence in the lives of baptized believers and makes it possible for us to love even those who have hurt us. 

Our first lesson for today comes from Genesis and tells part of the story of Joseph, the son of Jacob, one of the patriarchs of the Jewish people. You know Jospeh's story well. Resentful of Jacob's love for him, ten of his brothers sell Joseph into slavery. Later, the victim of a false accusation, he goes to an Egyptian prison. Later still, God empowers Joseph to understand a dream God sent the Egyptian king, the Pharoah, and the Pharaoh puts him in charge of the first government rationing program in history, saving the lives of Egyptians and others in the Near East, including his own brothers and their families. Eventually, Jospeh is reunited with his father Jacob and the enire family. But then, Jacob dies and Josephe's brothers think, with the old man dead and gone, Joseph might use his power to take his revenge. Joseph is heartsick that his brothers would think such a thing. 

He assures them: “Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. So then, don’t be afraid. I will provide for you and your children.” (Genesis 50:19-21) 

Joseph doesn’t deny that his brothers had acted as his enemies. He doesn't deny that his brothers have done wrong to him. 

But he could also see how God used his brothers’ hateful action to do God’s good. Because he lived in fellowship with God, Joseph was empowered to forgive and to love his brothers. God made it possible by His power for Joseph to do what would have been impossible in his own power. Joseph couldn't. God could.

Jesus commands us to love all people, even our enemies. We know this is impossible, although deep in our hearts we know that God’s command to love all people is right. 

This state of affairs would leave is in despair...except that there is good news! 

There is a Gospel! 

God has acted to break the power of sin and lovelessness that had us in its grip from the moment we were conceived. 

God has loved the unlovable and forgiven the unforgivable, including you and me. 

By the power of His love, given on the cross, God transforms spiritual orphans into His children and sends His Holy Spirit to make us agents of His love for everyone. 

We cannot resolve to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, no matter how good our intentions may be. 

But baptized believers in Jesus, sinners made saints by God’s forgiving grace and mercy gifted to us on the cross, can follow Jesus and, as He lives in us, be the means by which His love reaches a whole needy world. 

May Jesus fill us with His love each day. 

Let’s pray. 

Jesus, thank You for loving us in spite of our sin. Love the world through us. Amen

Loving Your Enemy?

[This message was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio earlier today.]

Luke 6:27-38
A number of years ago, a friend of mine, a pastor, was visited by his parents for the first time at the first congregation he served as a pastor. His parents attended worship, then took my friend to lunch. 

“Did you meet John and Mary Smith?” my friend asked his parents. “They’ve been great to me.” “Oh,” his mother answered. “I met them but I wasn’t nice to them because I thought you didn’t like them.” 

My friend was mystified as to where his mom got the idea that he didn't like this couple and then asked her, “Why would you decide to not treat someone well even if I didn’t like them?” 

He said that his mother was stunned by his question, looking at him as though he was from another planet. People who seek to follow Jesus Christ often have that effect on others.

Last Sunday, we looked at the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain. In it, Jesus described the blessed life that those who, because they’ve been saved by grace through faith in the crucified and risen Jesus, are citizens of the kingdom of God.

Today, as He continues the sermon, Jesus tells us how we who are in His kingdom, but still in a fallen world, are to live. Jesus does so in a stunning command, unlike any that appears in any other religious or ethical system in the world. Jesus sets us free to live differently toward the Johns and Marys in our lives, whether their ill treatment toward us or the people we care about is real or imagined.

So, let’s take a look at today’s gospel lesson, Luke 6:27-38. Verse 27: “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”

I love how Jesus begins “to you who are listening.” When I was a boy and a vacant look would cross my face as my mother was telling me something, she’d ask me, “Mark, are you listening?” It’s possible for us to hear someone without listening to them. Jesus is saying, “This is for you who are listening to what I’m saying about the kingdom of God.” 

And then, Jesus gives those of us blessed to know Him a single command, expressed in four different ways: Love your enemies. Do good to the people who can’t stand you. Be blessings to those who condemn you. Pray for the people who are cruel to you.

The word in Luke’s original Greek text that we translate as enemies is ἐχθροὺς. It describes someone who is openly hostile to us, someone animated by a deep-seated hatred for us. It’s these kinds of people that Jesus says we are to love. 

And, just in case we're inclined to look for an escape hatch, the word for love Jesus uses is Ἀγαπᾶτε, from the word you may be familiar with, agape. It’s a verb that means to take pleasure in, to wish well. Agape love wishes another person well even when that other person hates them. 

This is the kind of love that God has for us, a love that caused God the Father to send Jesus into the world for us. Paul says in Romans 5:8: “...God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” It’s with this kind of love that Jesus commands us to love the people who hate us!

And so He tells us, starting at verse 29: “If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

This is the point at which I (and maybe you) want to tell Jesus, “But, if you only knew what that person did to me, what this person said about me, how annoying so and so is…” 

It seems we all have people we think God will understand us loathing. 

But to our rationalizations and excuses, Jesus asks three questions, starting at verse 32: 

“[One] If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. 

"And [two] if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. 

"And [three] if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. 

"But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

That last line of Jesus gets me every time: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” When other people hurt me or those I love, I find it so easy to write them off as forever damned and irredeemable. But, if God refuses to withhold His mercy from me, then who am I to withhold my mercy, my understanding, my love, or my willingness, in the words of The Small Catechism, “to put the most charitable construction” on what my neighbor does or who my neighbor is, from any human being? 

Even when the God I know in Jesus disapproves of what I do, He never stops loving me, never stops offering grace or the possibility of forgiveness. 

In gratitude for God’s grace, I owe my neighbor nothing less.

In seminary, I had a New Testament professor who made me crazy. In his lectures, he seemed to drone, then flit from subject to subject. I wrote off him and the textbooks he required us to read. I figured I would skate through the course and never have to mess with this prof again. 

The final was a set of essay questions and I always did well with essay questions. I was stunned when I saw my final grade: F!

I confess that at that moment and for a few years after that, I regarded that professor as my enemy. I was sure he was out to get me. I was sure that he didn’t like me, didn’t like my piety. I convinced myself that he probably wasn’t really a Christian and was trying to sabotage me from being ordained. 

A year later, I took the class again, this time with a different professor. I got a B. I felt vindicated and was tempted to go to the first professor's office and dance a victory jig. 

The next year, Ann, our baby son, and I were in Michigan for my internship. When I returned for my last year of classwork, I realized that I needed one more course on a New Testament epistle to graduate. There was one that worked with my other classes and my schedule: First Peter. Guess who taught it? My enemy, the professor who had it out for me. I gritted my teeth and signed up for the class.

I wondered what I would have to do to pass this class and what kind of grief this professor would give me. To my surprise, the class was fantastic. And the prof couldn’t have been fairer. 

Just before the end of the term, I got a note from him, asking me to meet with him. I braced myself. “Mark,” he told me when we connected, “I have a class I’m teaching next term, Theology of the New Testament. It’s done seminar-style. I know that you don't need the class to graduate, but you’re so good at engaging people in helpful discussion, I wonder if you’d do me a favor by enrolling in the class?” 

I could hardly believe it. I stammered that I’d be happy to take the course. I thoroughly enjoyed it too. The last two classes I took from that prof brought As, something I wouldn’t have imagined possible three years earlier. 

A few weeks before our last class, at the end of my Master of Divinity program, the same professor I thought had hated me told me that I should consider getting a doctorate in New Testament studies. “I think you could make very useful contributions,” he said. 

I never felt called to be a New Testament professor and have always believed that the parish is where I belong. 

But to this day, I’m moved when I remember that dear man’s vote of confidence. He had never been my enemy at all. I only thought so in my sinful, selfish mind. And even when he must have known how much I disdained him, he still showed me mercy. He still loved me.

Did my prof do that because he was such a great guy or because there was something loveable about me? You know the answer to the second question already. But I will tell you that the answer to both questions is the same: No! 

But the professor belonged to Jesus and Jesus works in the lives of those who belong to Him. 

The Savior Who loved the human race even when we tried to kill Him and put Him away, empowers believers in Christ to love others even when we would rather do something different. 

The first martyr in Christian history was a man named Stephen. The book of Acts tells us that when Stephen’s very real enemies were hurling the stones at him that would bring his death, he looked to heaven and prayed, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” And then, “When he had said this, he fell asleep.” (Acts 7:60) Stephen’s final words echo Jesus’ words on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34) It’s as though Jesus had taken up residence in Stephen. 

And so He had! Christ lives in everyone who turns to Him in repentance and faith. Like the apostle Paul, we who daily seek to live in our baptismal covenant can say, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)

If I were to set out to love my enemies in my own power, first of all, I wouldn’t want to do it. Who but a person who knows that they’re a sinner saved by grace through the crucified and risen Jesus would choose to love an enemy? To the world, any talk of loving an enemy is insane!

And even if I wanted to love my enemy, I couldn’t do it in my own power. As often happens any time I set out to do the right thing, my sinful nature would get in the way.

But when Jesus is living inside of us, when we turn to Him each day and He fills us up again and again with His Holy Spirit, Jesus loves others through us. 

And when our enemies receive our love, all sorts of good things happen. 

Forgiveness happens. 

Grace happens. 

Life happens. 

We experience the kingdom of God that Jesus speaks of in the final part of our gospel lesson, a kingdom in which we “do not judge” the worthiness for salvation of any human being, knowing that Christ has saved us in spite of our unworthiness, and a kingdom in which God gives eternal blessings to us “a good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over...poured into" our lives, now and forever.

Let’s pray. Lord Jesus, fill us up with You, Your love, Your gospel, Your Holy Spirit and love others through us so that they too can live in Your kingdom. Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]