In my twenties, I worked in the magazine business in midtown Manhattan. I was trying to be a Buddhist and for many lunch hours walked a few blocks to Saint Bartholomew's, the gorgeous Episcopal cathedral, to meditate. I never had the slightest interest in the church as an institution, but it was a beautiful and quiet place to find some peace before I had to return to my pointless job in the circulation department. I was practicing metta, loving-kindness meditation, and it probably did me some good, though I don’t remember much about it except for this one spring day.
On that day, my usual path to the cathedral up the east side of Park Avenue was blocked by a very visible police presence in front of the Waldorf-Astoria. I crossed over the avenue and asked a nearby cop what was going on at the hotel. “President’s there, having lunch,” he replied.
Wow. I worked my way over to the cathedral, sat in a pew, and started practicing sending loving-kindness to the world, starting with President Reagan, less than a block away. My God, it was hard. My heart was pounding. I absolutely despised the man for his refusal to deal with the AIDS crisis, which was then mowing down gay men all over the metropolitan area. He wouldn’t even say the word “AIDS.” I thought he was phony and callous. I purposely did not own a TV set for the entire duration of his administration because I lived in fear of accidentally seeing his face.
I gritted my teeth and sent him as much metta as I possibly could, but it was not from my heart. He was my enemy.
**
I suppose we all have mottoes or sayings that we find ourselves repeating from time to time as we go through life. The ones that cause our spouses or kids to roll their eyes when they hear us saying them for the umpteenth time.
One of mine is “only boring people have no enemies.” I don’t know how or when I came up with that, but it seems true to me. I’m sure there are saints among us who have no enemies, but most people I’ve encountered develop enemies if they stand up for what they believe, if they have any spine at all.
Does Jesus’ call to love our enemies mean that we should remain silent in the face of injustice?
Jesus called us to love our enemies. But to love an enemy, we have to befriend them first. And to befriend an enemy, we first have to acknowledge their existence, understand who they are, and recognize the ways they are acting in opposition to God’s good news.
In How to Have an Enemy: Righteous Anger and the Work of Peace, Melissa Florer-Bixler, a Mennonite pastor, looks closely at what the Bible says about enemies—who they are, what they do, and how Jesus and his followers responded to them.
The result is a theology that encourages us to name our enemies as a form of truth-telling about ourselves, our communities, and the histories in which our lives are embedded. Only then can we grapple with the power of the acts of destruction carried out by our enemies, and invite them to lay down their enmity, their weapons — opening a path for healing and reconciliation. Jesus named and confronted his enemies as an essential part to loving them.
I’m reading a book called The Countryside: Ten Rural Walks Through Britain and Its Hidden History of Empire, by an English historian, Corinne Fowler. She depicts the connections between some of England’s most beloved rural places and stately mansions, and their buried, unacknowledged connections to the slave trade.
She notes that whenever these connections are highlighted in popular history books and TV shows, there is an angry pushback from the British public, who feel that bringing this history to light sullies their experience of the beauties of the land. She says:
Exploring the history of Britain’s countryside is not incompatible with a love for it. This new knowledge may be disturbing, shocking at times, but, rather than alienating us from the landscapes we all love, it can deepen our relationship with them.
*
When I first studied the Psalms, I was struck by their raw honesty. Whether speaking in rapturous tones of gratitude for the beauty of the world or in the deepest bitterness, rage, and pain, the Psalmists expressed the full range of human experience, giving us a remarkable library of resources for every human condition and mood. Especially for lament.
Melissa Florer-Bixler writes that the Revised Common Lectionary has left many of these angry, lamenting psalms out. She writes:
“The Psalms give words to unspeakable suffering. They create vessels for unspeakable responses to this suffering.
“These psalms reach into the places of our fear and anxiety because they imagine terrible destruction on the enemies of the psalmist. This, along with the graphic nature of their descriptions (including the desire to see one’s enemy shrivel up like a salted slug), led the lectionary compilers to excise these psalms from corporate worship.
“The Revised Common Lectionary cuts out the most troubling prayers expressed by the lament psalms. The most radical of these psalms are often called imprecatory psalms — "Imprecatory" describes something that expresses or contains a curse or a prayer for evil or misfortune to befall someone. Imprecatory psalms are those within the Book of Psalms that call for divine judgment and curses upon the enemies of the psalmist or the people of God.
“These psalms express anger and a plea for God's justice against those perceived as wicked and oppressive, often involving requests for destruction, calamity, or divine vengeance.
“Page after page these prayers make room for vulnerable flesh and blood people to express the terror, danger, and trauma wrought by those who threaten and enact catastrophe. But more than a curse, these psalms are movements of prayer that lament, that weep, and that wail over calamity. Each time, the writer releases from their hands the possibility of retributive violence and returns the action of justice back to God.
“The psalms of lament are requests. In prayer people ask for God’s anger to be tipped over like a pitcher of water onto their enemies. They pray for infliction of genital pain, blindness , a rain of sulfur, the amputation of tongues and lips….
“Each time the psalmist speaks these words to God, they let go of their own participation in the destruction of their enemy, pushing the deepest wrath they can imagine into the hands of a holy judge.
“People do cry out to God for vengeance because for some, at a certain point in suffering, it is impossible to see another way to bring an end to an unimaginable situation. These psalms preserve for our corporate memory the furthest extreme of human suffering.
“To make space for the words of those facing catastrophe, who have nowhere left to turn, who have nothing left—this is the memory preserved in the psalms. “In the face of monstrous evil, the worst thing is not to express anger,” writes J. Clinton McCann, “it is to feel nothing. What must be felt is grief, rage, and outrage. In their absence, evil becomes an acceptable commonplace. To forget is to submit to evil, to wither and die; to remember is to resist, be faithful, live again.” The psalms of rage remind us that somehow, in spite of absolute defeat, someone dared to say aloud that the world is not as it should be.”
*
Every Sunday, in this sanctuary, we are reminded in the land acknowledgment of the injustice done to the Duwamish tribe, exiled from their home territory by the expansion of Seattle. It is an uncomfortable, lamentable history.
As the uncomfortable, lamentable, tragic aspects of US history are erased from our history websites, our textbooks, and our national parks, by the powers of authoritarianism and racism, we are at risk of losing our awareness and our outrage about the cardinal sins of our country — the brutalization and murder of native peoples and the enslavement of millions of kidnapped Africans.
And when we lose those pieces of history, we also lose the memory of those incredibly brave people who stood up and rebelled against those evils — Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth. We lose their examples and their inspiration.
*
When we gloss over, explain away, or avoid the most difficult parts of Scripture, we lose a crucial part of our vocabulary of faith.
* *
When I meet with people in spiritual direction, I ask only one thing of them. Authenticity. I ask them what they want, in their heart of hearts. I ask them to be honest with themselves and with God. Transformation cannot come about by pretending we are something we are not.
At our best, we come to God as we are. The Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe reminds us that “genuine prayer means honest prayer, laying before your Father in heaven the actual desires of your heart—never mind how childish they may sound. Your Father knows how to cope with that.”
We pray for the things we want and the things we need because we can’t fool God, and because we crave authentic relationship with the Divine.
***
One of the more difficult passages in the Bible is the admonition by Jesus “Be perfect … as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Whether we admit it or not, many of us strive to be perfect. I grew up with a mother who was an extremely talented artist, and a perfectionist. Her perfectionism often woke her up in the wee hours to fret about a flower painting she was working on, or the right color for a picture frame. This caused her pain and it wasn’t always easy to grow up with her. I avoided doing any kind of visual art for many years because I always bumped up against that impossible demand for perfection. I would occasionally buy a sketchbook, make some unsatisfactory attempts, and tear out and discard my messy sketches, and give up trying to do art since perfection was never going to happen.
But much later in life, I discovered urban sketching -- which was invented here in Seattle, by the way — urban sketching, with its emphasis on quick, authentic sketches of whatever is in front of you.
The urban sketchers’ manifesto reads in part: Our drawings are a record of time and place. We are truthful to the scenes we witness. We use any kind of media and cherish our individual styles.
No mention of perfection! This liberated me and I’ve found much satisfaction over the past few years in making messy, imperfect, but alive sketches of my surroundings. And I don’t throw away the terrible sketches any more — I wince when I look at them, but I learn something from every one of them.
*
Really, Jesus didn’t intend for us to pursue the impossible goal of perfection. The Hebrew word translated as “perfect” is tamim and means, among other things, “whole, sound, healthful”; “having integrity” and “wholeheartedness.”
Just as individuals in 12-step programs are required to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of themselves, in other words, to be completely honest with themselves, so our country will have to do the same thing one day, if we are to experience healing, if we are to experience tamim. Glossing over or attempting to ignore our shortcomings, the messy parts of our history, will never work. True peace and reconciliation requires honesty and reckoning with all the stuff, even — especially — the most shameful and violent stuff.
I believe that authenticity is what God wants of us. If we are angry, if we are afraid, if we want those who harm the vulnerable and oppress the weak to face justice, let us make friends with those feelings, having faith that God’s love, working through us, will eventually make something worthy of them.
*
As my lunch hour that day in Saint Bart’s neared its end and I stood in that glorious sanctuary to walk back to the office, I turned my attention back towards the President and tried to send him loving-kindness.
I was not successful in the least.
But I had to hope my honest intention counted for something, somewhere.
Friends, if we have enemies -- personal, national, or corporate -- and wish them ill, that is human nature. We would do well to express our hurt and rage to God in prayer. And then, we must do what is ours to do, whether to work on forgiveness or demonstrate in the streets or call our representatives.
And we should open our hearts to ourselves, to these authentic feelings. When we open our hearts to all of our feelings, recognizing and embracing all of them as part of our humanness, all of them as beloved by God, we open the path to understanding and perhaps even, ultimately, loving our enemies.
May you be richly blessed. Amen.