December 21, 2008

The Advent of Loving Your Enemies - Luke 1:26-38

Dear little Mary. Fourteen to sixteen years of age. Peasant girl of no social standing or education. Resident of an insignificant town with a reputation like Trenton, New Jersey. "By the way, Joseph, I'm pregnant. God did this to me."

This is the real world Mary had to face as her body grows, as she suffers through morning sickness and as she get's steadily uncomfortable with the glorious load in her womb. If family and friends aren't embarrassed and angry, they are laughing then fearful for her mental health. Surely she doesn't think she can pull this tall story off!

And what about Joseph? How could he let his girlfriend go into such denial to save their engagement and his reputation? What a scoundrel!

Of course, we know it is far worse than this. The honor of two families has been severely damaged. And honor killing, where members of the family kill their daughter or sister, is the cultural expectation of the day. Frankly, Jesus and his mother already made enemies before he was born. And frankly this little peasant girl has a lot of courage and pluck to endure and overcome her enemies -even in her family. This is a very strong woman by the time Jesus meets the world. But they had their enemies from people and family who didn't really know what was really happening: God's advent in flesh. And so the Advent of Jesus is still fraught with all the darkness and evil the human race is capable of. From most of what we read of Jesus' life that darkness and evil, the enemies, never left him. We never hear of grandparents. But we do hear of people plotting to kill him and carrying it out.

And yet the Gospel to all this ugly reality, the good news, which is much harder for us all to grasp than we think, is that Jesus never had any enemies. I mean, this child of God was so close to God that, engulfed by God's love, Jesus couldn't hate in return. He had plenty of good reason to hate. Beyond grandparents who probably despised him as the object of their dishonor, he was without any wealth or power. He was among the oppressed. Zealots despised him because he appealed to them to forgive their enemies. The Roman overlords saw him as an expendable object in their administration in the gathering of glorious wealth.

The clergy saw him as a threat to their fiefdom, possessed by devils to dare to forgive others, to ask us to forgive and love one another by an authority they couldn't quite recognize. He was homeless although he seems to have supported himself by a trade or just odd jobs. Jesus had every reason to hate and to pick out his enemies.

But, are we ready to admit that Scripture is clear that Jesus saw no enemy in anyone he met. He had harsh words of judgment at times, but there is no record of hate or enemy lists. I wish, no, I pray we could say the same. Loving our enemies. We can't, can we? We nurse our grudges, some we are in denial about, and some so deep we are unable to put into words. But the fact that God passes over the rich, the powerful, the middle class, the blue collared, and chooses a marginalized peasant teenager sets the tone -this is indeed something new that will bring good news.

The gospel is that God begins on God's terms and acts in love on our behalf. We are simply asked to trust that God knows best and wisely. And we are baptized into forgiveness in that trusting. And we are raised to live in what the Scripture says "the revelation of the mystery…now disclosed…by the wisdom of God." -The revelation of the ordinariness of God in and among us. We are encouraged, exhorted, to love our enemies and we have the power of that wise God to help us to love our enemies.

No better test is presented to us than in President-elect Obama's selection of the Rev. Rick Warren to give the Invocation at his inauguration. Pastor Warren is explicitly homophobic, strongly supported Proposition 8, and described gay marriage as incest, pedophilia and the like. In these respects he is our enemy.

My first reaction was bewilderment, then anger, at Obama's choice. I struggled to hear Obama's defense that he is a reconciler of the nation and will not exclude the population that Pastor Warren represents from the dialog this nation needs.

My second reaction was a bit philosophical. As Ken Hedrick puts it, we need to distinguish between uncompromising belief in our right to equality and the strategies to accomplish this. Ken's example is with herding cattle.

In the movie Australia, which I rushed to see, the firm objective was to get the cattle to Darwin. This was an unshakeable conviction. But the strategy of little miss muffet Nicole Kidman and killer good looks Hugh Jackman, the cattle drover, was not to lead the cattle by bolting down the middle of the herd to the front. That would cause chaos. Drovers, or stockmen in American, lead the cattle from both sides towards the rear and this causes the herd to follow in the direction of the goal.

Perhaps this is what Obama is attempting to do: -to lead both sides, and all the variations in between, toward the stated goal of equality for LGBT people. You can't do that by ignoring one side over the other. That has been the politics of the past administration. Only a strategy of national dialog can any genuine rapprochement be eventually possible.

Gay and Lesbian persons and their supporters have a real enemy in Rick Warren. But shall we be zealots and force victory by crushing him? Or shall we continue to play gay uncle Tom games that all oppressed people have to play when they have no power? Either way we promote hate in ourselves and see enemies.

My third reaction is that if we are Christians, if this Advent reality of a pregnant marginalized teenager is true for us, then Jesus' invitation to us in the Holy Spirit to love our enemies, to love Rick Warren, has somehow to gain traction. I honestly don't know yet how to get that traction, but we share this earth, we share this country, we even share this faith -and even though there is something fundamental we do not share, that is, our right to have equal rights, we can maintain our right and our principles, but we still can engage him as a human being and a Christian. We are all children of God, but, boy, do we disagree!

At the edge of Jesus' birth, are we going to continue to hate our enemies? If so, why should Jesus be born or even die for us and for Rick Warren? Amen