One hundred and forty-eight years ago today, soldiers from this country fought against one another at the Battle of Gettysburg. On July 3rd of that year, the Confederate army charged the Union army on Cemetery Ridge in what would become known as Pickett’s Charge. The Union army fought off the Confederate soldiers with artillery fire. Young men died in droves. In the three day battle, 50,000 men died. Never has the United States lost more lives than we did in the war that we waged against ourselves.
I am from the North, a Yankee by ancestry. My husband is a Southerner, his family fought on the Confederate side. Sometimes I think about that Battle, how brother fought against brother and died. Blood soaked that field on that day. Men who could have loved one another were driven to kill one another.
Abraham Lincoln would later say that it happened so that the liberty of all people could be restored. And that is what we give thanks for today, for our freedom. We give thanks to God today for this country and for the freedom that we all enjoy, the freedom to argue and disagree, the freedom to make decisions move and live where we wish. The freedom to be able to gather here in church and worship God without fear. Unless you have visited countries where there is no freedom, you cannot even begin to understand what we have here. It is part of the air we breathe, the fact that we are free. We take it for granted.
God wants you to be free. God wants us all to be free, but there are many kinds of bondage. And the bondage that is worst of all occurs when we are unable to forgive.
In the gospel, Jesus tells us that we are to pray for our enemies, that we are to love them. “Be perfect,” Jesus says, “Just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
It is the highest form of love, the love of your enemies. I cannot say that I am very good at it. It is the stuff that makes the gospel unique in every way. It is at the heart of the message of Jesus. We are to pray for those people who hate us and persecute us. Pray for them and love them.
This means that, as a country, we must pray for Al-Quaida. This means that, as an individual, you must pray for the woman who hates your guts and tells everyone how awful you are. And you can’t just pray for her to fall into a deep pit. You must pray for her wellbeing.
Why must we pray for our enemies? Because if we do not forgive them, our hatred and resentment will drive us to pieces.
In the movie True Grit, a 14-year-old girl named Maddie goes on a hunt for revenge. Her father was killed by a man named Tom Cheney. She considers it her duty to hire killers and avenge her father’s death. This act of revenge will set her free from the hatred and grief that consumes her. So she makes her way through the dust and violence of late 1800’s West to find a man who will act out her aggression. And once she has found him, a man with what she calls True Grit, she rides with him out into the wild to catch and murder this Tom Cheney.
It is a story of despair. The man she has hired is a drunk who has shot more men than he can count. They are accompanied by a Texas Ranger who is also on a mad hunt for the same man. When they finally come across this enemy, Maddie succeeds in shooting him, but the kickback from her gun sends her flying backwards into a pit where her arm is broken and she is bitten by a rattler.
Maddie’s life is spared but her arm is amputated. She never marries and spends her life remembering her trip of revenge. But she is not free. She is never free.
Not forgiving someone, it’s like drinking poison and hoping that the enemy will die. Maddie sought revenge and she consumed her life with it.
Be perfect, Jesus said. As your heavenly Father is perfect. The word in the ancient Greek is complete. Be complete, be whole. Do not drive yourself into pieces over the wrongs of another person. Forgive them, love them, and gain your life, gain your freedom.
Who is it that makes you really angry? Who is it that treats you unfairly or makes you feel unworthy? Everyone has someone who rubs them the wrong way. And many of the people who treat us poorly are very close to us.
Whoever it is that really makes you angry, whoever it is that really gets your goat, it is that person that you must study and come to understand, because they will teach you something valuable about yourself. If you are to declare your independence from them, then you must know them and even love them.
Think back to the Revolutionary war and the Declaration of Independence. This country was defined by its enemy. We wanted freedom from the tyranny of Britain. We wanted to be a people who were free to elect our own rulers, free to make our own decisions, pay our own taxes. It was Britain’s rule of us, Britain’s taxation without representation that brought us to know ourselves. You could say that our enemy was our best teacher. Because of our vehement need to define ourselves as free, we created a democratic nation. Our greatness was influenced most by our enemy. If we hadn’t wanted so badly to be independent, if we hadn’t wanted so badly to be free, we might not have become who we are today.
Do you want to be truly free? If you do then you must declare your independence from the ones who treat you worst by praying for them and yes, by loving them. By love, I don’t mean feeling all warm and fuzzy towards them and I don’t even mean that you should not defend yourself. I mean that you should understand them and want what’s best for them. I mean that you should trust God enough to place them in God’s hands.
We are defined more by our enemies than by our friends. So we’d better get to know them well.
At our wedding, some of JD’s relatives flew up North. These folks had never been to the North. JD’s tone-deaf Uncle Homer from Tennessee danced at the reception and sang out loud. JD hired a Memphis funk band and the southern blues rocked the house in Connecticut. North married South and it was a blast.
My brother and father decorated our Jeep with all the normal just married stuff. We were to drive down to Kennedy airport just outside of New York City the next morning. As we got into the city, something incredible happened.
Normally nothing makes me more frustrated than driving in New York City. It is like being trampled. Everyone is honking, there are no lanes, people lean out their windows just to swear at you. Everyone hates everyone, it is just part of the deal.
We landed in a traffic jam at a toll booth outside of the city. “Oh, no,” JD said. “This is going to last forever.”
Then something amazing happened. A souped up BMW, blasting rap music, beside us, honked his horn.
“JUST MARRIED! COME ON!!YEAH!!”
He let us in. Then another old junky car, with Mexican guys all crowded inside started cheering. The cars began to move. Audis and Vans, trucks and beetles. Everyone understood what had happened to us, everyone was honking and cheering. The lines just seemed to part. Everyone was smiling and waving. It was like the Kingdom of heaven.
I had never seen anything like it. I had never felt more free than that day, in the middle of a traffic jam.
If you truly want to be free, then you must love your enemies. Love them and forgive them.
