But I say to those who hear me: "Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you." Luke 6.27.
This is the text I preached on this morning in our small church, with a diverse and thoughtful congregation. The young people's part was about how we use the word hate, from "I hate cold macaroni", to "I hate it when people dive and cheat at football" to "I hate when drivers overtake and cut in and risk accidents." The four letter word hate is easy to use, difficult to unsay once it is said.
So we then looked at how hating easily becomes hating the person who does the things that annoy us, hurt us, offend us. And then at what Jesus says, replace one four letter word with another, hate for love - do good to those who don't do good to us. That's fine, and it's hard to argue that a Christian response to offensive and hurtful behaviour is as Jesus said, "to love, do good, bless and pray for" that person, seeking to befriend someone we could easily have a fight with.
Then came the sermon. I have hesitated to post the notes of my sermon here because they are not full notes. Much of my preaching is prepared in mind and heart, and the notes are mainly the controlling framework of thinking already done. So I am not tied to what is written; usually more is said than is in the notes. But starting tomorrow I'll post the essence of what I shared with our folk this morning. The truth is, trying to say anything meaningful and practical about events such as happened in Paris on Friday 13th, will always be inadequate, provisional, a search for comfort, wisdom, hope and a way to live our lives forward with faith.
The sermon isn't trying to tell people what to think, what you should feel or what you should do. It is a serious and admittedly partial and quite inadequate attempt by one Christian pastor, to share what I as a follower of Jesus have been thinking and praying and feeling as I try to respond to the Paris attacks. The sermon is me thinking out loud in the good company of brothers and sisters likewise seeking wisdom, grace and help in dealing with events that raise our deepest questions and fears.
The constraint I have felt to preach on hate has been urged by two deep convictions. First, as Christians we are called by the very nature of the God we believe in to understand the nature, cause and consequences of human hatred, and to work out our responses from a rootedness in the Christian Gospel, and those responses shaped by the God we believe in. It should not surprise us if we have a sufficiently robust doctrine of sin that there are those in our world who carry out planned and purposeful atrocities perpetrated and justified in the minds of those who practice their own hatred with such cruelty and fatalistic certainty of the righteousness of their cause.
Second, I believe every follower of Jesus is called to respond to hate in terms of the God who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.This means as a Christian I am called to resist the language of hate, to stand alongside those demonised and made scapegoats for our fears, rage and urge for revenge, and to refuse to buy into any construal of events that is driven by cynicism, prejudice, populist rhetoric or hatred, covert or overt.
Jesus said, "To those who will hear me, Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you."
I'll post the first part of today's sermon tomorrow.
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