I’ve known Lenny for about a year now. He used to live in one of the camps over on Charlotte, out near Lowes and Walmart. One day he came by the church, an older man with a cane, with bad arthritis in his hands and knees, and asked for some groceries and a bus pass. I had run out of gift cards for the grocery store, so we went there together. In the car, he told me a little about himself and the hardships of life on the streets, especially for an older guy like himself. He asked me to pray for his lady friend up in Massachusetts — twice he told me her name was Edna, to make sure I wouldn’t forget — he asked me to pray for her because she had heart problems and she was afraid of Covid. Lenny gets about $600 Social Security a month, and every month he sends some of it to Edna, so she can stay in her small apartment. After we were done shopping, I dropped him off at the bus stop, and before he shut the door, he bent in one last time to thank me, and asked me again to pray for Edna, because her heart is not well and she’s so afraid of the Covid.[1]
Lenny came by the church a few more times after that, to get a bus pass or a grocery card, or just to chat. I hadn’t seen him for a few weeks, when on my way back from Edwin Warner Park yesterday, I saw a man with a cane at the intersection, holding up a cardboard sign, Thank you for your kindness. That looks like Lenny, I said to myself, but there were several cars in front of me, and then the light changed. So instead of crossing Hwy 70, I turned right, pulled into the parking lot, took some cash out of my wallet, and walked over to him.
“Hi, is that you, Lenny?” I had to ask because I had never seen him without a mask, but his eyes and bowed legs looked very familiar.
“Yes,” he said, looking a little puzzled at first, but then it clicked, and he laughed.
“I thought that looked like you,” I told him, “so I stopped to see how you’re doing.”
He was doing well, he said. “God has really blessed me. I have a little place where I’m staying, and they gave me a bus card that’s good for a year. I even had a job for over a week, but then I got Covid, so that was that.”
We continued to chat, and he told me about a guy he invited to stay at his place one night a couple of weeks ago when it was really cold. He didn’t know him, but he wanted him to be safe. So he went to Kroger and bought some chicken, prepared a nice supper, and they ate. Lenny, you will know by now, is a very generous man. The next morning, Lenny woke up, and his guest had already left – but not without taking Lenny’s money and his phone.
“Oh no, that’s the thanks you got?” There were a few more choice words in my heart; I knew how much he needed that phone, and how much it meant to him to be be able to call or text Edna.
I didn’t say any of those choice words, because Lenny responded, “Yes, I prayed for him.”
“You prayed for him?”
“Yes, isn’t that what Jesus taught us to do, Do good and pray for those who treat you bad?” He didn’t remember the exact words, but he remembered them well. Do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. Lenny held a cardboard sign, Thank you for your kindness, and he himself lived a kindness which Jesus attributed to the children of the Most High who is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. I’m grateful I ran into him. He told me he’d come by sometime to chat, and again he asked me to pray for Edna, Edna in Massachusetts, he repeated.
Jesus says, “Do good to those who hate you.” I’m not aware of anyone who might hate me, but I try to imagine what these words do to people who are the target of organized hate – Jewish people, black and brown people, queer folk. Jesus says, “Pray for those who abuse you,” and I try to imagine what these words do to the victims of clergy sexual abuse who are waiting for accountability, for some acknowledgement of complicity from the hierarchy, and for real reform and transformation, and not just in the Roman Catholic Church. And I think about those of you who have been abused by family members, partners, spouses, supervisors – and I wonder what hearing these words does to you. Pray for those who abuse you. Bless those who curse you. Do good to those who hate you. The sayings are so short, and dangerously memorable. I say dangerously memorable, because these pithy sayings easily take on a life of their own. They float around in the mind and the culture, and without the ballast of Jesus’ proclamation of good news to the poor, release to the captives, and freedom for the oppressed — without that critical ballast these pithy sayings turn into destructive, little pills perpetuating religiously white-washed oppression and abuse.
Love your enemies. Listen to your mother. Brush your teeth. The three sound deceptively similar, but the first one doesn’t pretend to be folk wisdom. The first one isn’t time-tested advice, passed down from generation to generation, for how to deal with the bully, the batterer, the abuser. Cruel advice is hardly good news. And telling the bullied, the battered, the abused, “Love your enemy” is cruel advice. Saying it may well be the least merciful act imaginable.
Love your enemies. Jesus says it twice in this brief passage from Luke. But let’s not forget, never forget, that everything Jesus says, everything he does, is good news for the poor, healing news, liberating news.
Love your enemies. The only one who can say that is the One who did say it. The only one who can say, Love your enemies, is the One who’s done it. The One who embodied God’s compassion and mercy like no other. The One who revealed the unfathomable depth of God’s mercy in his whole life and in his death by execution. As Paul reminds us, “Christ died for the ungodly… While we still were sinners Christ died for us… While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God.”[2] Love your enemies is not some pithy adage, short, memorable, made for meme, for instagram, for the scroll-by tweet. Love your enemies is the life of Jesus in three words. It is the revelation of the heart of God.
Miroslav Volf is a theologian from Croatia who has lived and taught in the U.S. for much of his life. In the preface of his fine book, Exclusion and Embrace, he recounts an experience from the winter of 1993. It was at the height of the fighting between Serbians and Croatians in the former Yugoslavia, and Volf delivered a lecture arguing that disciples of Jesus ought to embrace our enemies just as Christ embraced us. After the lecture, a member of the audience asked him if he could embrace a četnik. Četniks were notoriously wicked Serbian fighters infamous for destroying Croatian cities, and rounding up, murdering and raping civilians. For Volf, a četnik stood as the epitome of a real and concrete enemy. Could he embrace a četnik? “No, I cannot,” he answered after some hesitation, “but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to.”[3] “I think I should” describes the direction of his life and his life’s work — toward that impossible embrace. Volf struggles to fully imagine and live, what Jesus and the first Christian witnesses teach: Like me, my enemy is the recipient of God’s love and stands with me beneath the cross of Christ, both of us together in the embrace of the love that will not let us go.
Pray for those who abuse you. Bless those who curse you. Do good to those who hate you. Love your enemies. These words were not spoken for easy repetition, to be passed on as pious advice. The only place to hear and ponder them is in the embrace of God’s love. And it is only there that we can even begin to think about living them.
The world says, do to others as they do to you. Jesus teaches, do to others as you would have them do to you. And then he points to the reality in which, as recipients of God’s unfathomable love, we already live, and says, do as God does to you: be merciful. And heaven knows, there’s no shortage of realities needing our best, most thoughtful mercy now.[4] I keep thinking about Lenny and his kindness, mirroring the love of the Most High who is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.
[1] I’m not using their actual names.
[2] Romans 5:6-10
[3] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 9.
[4] Thanks to Sarah Henrich for this lovely phrase; https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/seventh-sunday-after-epiphany-3/commentary-on-luke-627-38-2