Idolatry

Last week, a hen came to church. It was St Francis day and her owner brought her at 10:30 inside instead of at 9 outside, where most of our animals were blessed. But this hen did a wonderful thing. She laid an egg in the back of the church. And the ushers sat there deliberating about whether or not they should put the egg in the offering plate. After all, this was her gift to us.


Every Sunday, we make this big procession and we put stuff on the altar.  Why?  Why do we bring up beautiful silver vessels and money? Sometimes the kids will draw pictures or pick a flower that is placed in their offering basket. Why do we do all this? What is the point?

In 2005, Steve Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer. His cancer was a was a more treatable form. Most pancreatic cancer victims die within 6 to 8 months. Steve would live for six years, undergoing surgeries and inventing some of his most innovative technological tools. At a lecture at Stanford, Steve said this about his diagnosis...

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life,"

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

One day, this man may be regarded as another Einstein, as the world’s greatest innovator. His name is already spoken in many households. China mourns him. All over the world, people are grieving a man who knew how to be truly creative.

Steve's life was not easy.  Steve was an orphan. Born of a mother who was too young and could not raise him, he was adopted by Mr and Mrs Jobs. He only went through six months of college. At what should have been the height of his career, he was fired from one of his greatest jobs. At 50, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and instead of seeing all this as bad luck, or an occasion to feel sorry for himself, he saw every setback and every failure as a great opportunity. Steve seized life as a gift and he milked it for all its worth. He brought his best game to life, every day. And he changed the world.

Did you know that you won the lottery? Even if nothing good happens to you for the rest of your life and you die young and miserable, you still won the lottery. Because you were born. Stop for one minute and consider all the possible genes and chromosomes that could have been combined to create a person. The chance that you would be YOU is one in a million, literally. It is a miracle that you were born.

The first and greatest sin that is talked about over and over again in the Old Testament is the sin of idolatry.  Remember the first of the ten commandments?

I am the Lord your God who brought you out of bondage.  You shall have no other gods but me.

 Most of us have no idea what idolatry really means. We hear the story of how the Hebrew people got worried and anxious when Moses was talking with God in the mountain and they made a golden calf out of all their jewelry. And then they worshipped the god that they had made. We hear this story and we think, “OK, I don’t have to worry about that one. There is no way that I am going to be caught dead bowing before a golden calf! So I don’t have to worry about idolatry.” WRONG.

Let the calf go. We don’t do calves anymore. But we do idols. Believe me, we do worship idols.

What is an idol?  It is anything that takes the place of God in your life. Anything that becomes more important than God to you becomes your idol.

Idolatry begins with the myth that you must be happy all the time.  The myth continues when you start searching for something or someone to make you happy. Whatever that something is that will make you complete, that becomes your idol. Your family. Your money. Success. Your body. Your parenting. Your job. You tell me what it is, but there is something or somethingS in your life that rival God for your top priority. And whatever they are- these are your idols. They distract you from living life as a gift. You waste your time searching for them, serving them, and you are not fully alive.

Here are the voices of some of the idols.  Maybe you will recognize them.

“If only I were thin, I’d be happy.”

“I have to raise the PERFECT kids.”

“If I had more money, I would be happy.”

“I need to succeed to be respected. I must be respected!”

Idols tell you that there is something in your life more important that your relationship with God. And nothing makes God angrier than when you listen to them.

This miracle that is called your life, this is a gift to you from the Creator of the Universe. It is a gift, a party, a banquet. You were created not to fix the world or to keep God company but just for the sheer joy of it. God was dancing when God made you! God was playing. And God wants you to celebrate and relish this life, all of it, the good, the bad and the ugly. All of it is a gift.

In the parable that Jesus tells us today, a King throws a wedding feast. In Jesus’ day, there was nothing more special, nothing more fun that the celebration of a wedding. It was a feast that would last for days. People would sleep and eat and sleep again. The guests were treated lavishly. It was the best thing going.

This King invites guests, but the guests refuse to come, so he goes out on the street and invites anyone who wants to come, rich and poor alike. All are invited. But one man comes without a wedding garment.

It was customary to wear a white wedding robe. It was a sign of appreciation, a sign of gratitude, of respect. But this man did not wear one. And when the King asks him why, he says nothing. He is a free-loader, come to take part in the banquet but not to thank or respect, not to show his gratitude. So he is thrown out, into the outer darkness. Jesus describes this scary place as a place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Have you ever listened to fingernails on a chalkboard? (My first grade teacher sometime would do that by accident. She had long nails. It would send chills up my spine.  Think of that for all eternity.  It is not pleasant.)

Life is a feast of tastes and sounds and sights.  Life is a gift. Every day, when you open your eyes, you have been given a gift.  You think that any of this really belongs to you, your clothes, your body even? It is all a gift from God. All of it. And God wants you to say thank you and most importantly, to enjoy it.

Steve Jobs had a choice about his life. He could have been grateful or he could have been bitter.  He chose to wear the wedding garment, even when he was dying. He chose to relish every moment of his life, to make the most of it.
Many people are horrified by the notion that the King might throw a guest out. But God does get mad, there is no avoiding that fact. It is there in Scripture, in both the Old and New Testaments. God gets really mad.  There is no sin greater and nothing that makes God angrier than when we waste our lives chasing after idols, running around like chickens with our heads cut off, going nowhere.

As Celie once put it in the book The Color Purple, “I think that it makes God mad when you pass by the color purple in a field and do not notice it...”

Why do we bring plates up to the altar every Sunday?  We are showing you how to live.  We are reminding you of the most important, first action that all of us should take, with each breath, each moment, each day.  We are saying Thank you.

Remembering September 11th

When I was a child, my parents built a bomb shelter in the basement. It was the height of the Cold War. We lived in New Haven Connecticut where the Yale intellectuals were telling us that nuclear war was simply a matter of time. We watched the movie The Day After in which we saw the effects of nuclear war. Most likely the Soviets would strike New York City, so New Haven would receive residual effects. Our hair would all fall out, our bodies slowly disintegrate. Only cockroaches would survive.


Sometimes, when my parents were fighting, I would go down into the basement. It was usually at night. I would run my hands over the thick walls filled with sand until I found the light switch. Then I would sit alone in that tiny room. We had some cans in the corner, bottles of water. I felt safe in there but I also felt sad, lonely, even depressed. I remember thinking, “If we are ever attacked, why would we even come down here? What kind of life is this?”

When the Hebrew people were fleeing from slavery, God rescued them. In this dramatic scene, full of violence and hope, God parts the sea with a huge wind, leaving dry ground in the middle. The Hebrew people travel safely with God as their protection. And then the enemies come, and God destroys them. God is so active, so protective, so brilliant. It is a wonderful moment, a moment remembered for thousands of years. God fought for us!

I want to know why. Why didn’t God blow a great east wind when the first plane came towards the World Trade Center? Why didn’t God push that plane off course, make it land somehow?

We never thought that an airplane could become a weapon until that day. When the first plane hit, I thought it was a terrible accident. The pilot lost control. I could not fathom a person deliberately flying a vehicle full of people into a building. How could someone think like that? How could they even consider it? And later, we would hear about how they were crying out Allah Akbar! They were calling to God…Calling to God while performing an act of unspeakable evil.

When a tragedy of this magnitude happens in the life of a human being, we cannot make sense of it, so we retreat. How could this happen? How could God let it happen? We go inside of ourselves. We don’t know how to explain it and it hurts so much, so we run away, deep inside ourselves. When a young woman is raped and beaten almost to death, she changes dramatically. She hides within herself. When a child is molested or wounded, when a loved one dies in a tragic accident, we go into the bomb shelters of our hearts and we hide there. There is very little light in the place where we go, but it is safe. And we need safety. We need safety because we are afraid.

Some of you may think that we are making too much of this day, this tenth anniversary of 9/11. You may think that this country has gotten over it, but I think that most Americans have not gotten over it. Some have buried it deep inside. Others have just tried to forget it. On that day, and for a few days afterwards, we were united as a country. We cared for one another and valued one another. And then, when the chaos died down and the immensity of the event began to sink in, we hid from the pain and went back to bickering amongst ourselves.

In the Episcopal Church, like the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, we have Scripture assigned to us each Sunday so that we read the entire Bible within the space of about three years. Today’s gospel is assigned for today. I did not select it myself. And in this gospel, Jesus talks to Peter about forgiveness.

“How many times must I forgive my neighbor?” Peter asks. “Seven times?”

“Not seven times, but seventy-seven times,” Jesus replies. Over and over and over again. You must forgive over and over and over again.

Does this mean that God is telling us to forgive the terrorists – those 19 hijackers and their leaders who slaughtered innocent people on that beautiful September morning? And how in the world can we do that? I myself do not know how. How can you forgive an act of unspeakable violence, an evil act which ends in the death of thousands of men and women, an act that left hundreds of children motherless and fatherless? How is that possible? And is it even the right thing to do?

The ancient word for forgiveness is afiemee. Let me first tell you, very clearly, what it does NOT mean. It does not mean to forget. It does not mean to say that everything is OK. It does not mean to like the one who hurt you. It does not mean to go back to life the way that it was before you were hurt. And it does not mean that you will ever be the same.

Afiemee means just one thing: Release from bondage. Release from imprisonment. It means that one day, when you are ready, you leave the bomb shelter deep in the basement of your heart and you learn to live again. It means that, one day, you will no longer be afraid.

We need to understand that God did not leave us to die alone that morning. God was there, in the towers. God ran into the buildings with the firefighters. God held hands with the chaplains and prayed. God stood by the windows as people got ready to jump. And God was there in the rubble and the dust, crying.

That’s what Jesus came to tell us, that God stays with us in the midst of tragedy and violence. God never leaves us.

9-11 is our cross. It is an event which has marked us as a nation and we have been changed forever. We will never be the same. But we have not yet experienced the full forgiveness of God, of our enemies, or of ourselves. We have not yet experienced true resurrection. We have imprisoned ourselves since that day. Never has this country been more divided than it has since that day ten years ago. We are fighting amongst ourselves in ways that go beyond the normal differences of political parties. And this must end.

In my first year out of college, I worked in an emergency room at Yale New Haven Hospital. One day, I was called to the burn unit to translate. A Russian man had been brought over to this country for treatment. I went to his room.

The curtains were drawn and the room was quite dark. “Come closer,” he said. “The light hurts my eyes.” I found out that he had been just 18 years old when he was asked by his government to fly over a town called Chernobyl and drop cement onto the site of an accident there. He wore a protective suit but his hands and his face were burned. The cancer had spread all over his skin and into his bloodstream. He was swollen and red, his hair was singed off. “I am here so that they can study my illness he said. I know that I am going to die. All my life I have wanted to see America. But the light hurts my skin and my eyes so much that I cannot go outside.”

After a few days and much paperwork and discussion, some of the nurses and I managed to get permission to take the Russian soldier outside. We covered him with strips of cloth, even over his face and hands. He wore dark sunglasses. We took him to my old station wagon. And we drove him around America. I will always remember his words, ‘I see it, Kate!” he said, “I see it!” He died three days later.

My Russian friend had the courage to leave his little room even when he knew that he was going to die, to see the light even though it hurt his eyes. We need to have the same courage, the courage to forgive, to be released from bondage.

Our country has always had this remarkable spirit, this remarkable gift of freedom and creativity, the ability to make something new and inventive in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. Jesus tells us to lift up our cross and follow him. That means that we are not to forget 9-11 but to let it become part of who we are. We are to define ourselves not by our hatred but by our ability to step out in the future. To lift it up and remember it as a day on which everything changed for us.

This is a day of remembrance. We will toll bells for those who died. It is also a day of hope, for there will come a time when we will stop bickering with each other and remember who we really are. There will come a day when we are ready to join hands again and step out into the light.

I don’t know when or how forgiveness happens. It is a gift from God. You know when you have forgiven, it just happens to you, from within. Suddenly, you are no longer afraid. I pray for that day, for all of us, when we can join hands once again and together step into the

I See You

She came and knelt before him and said, "Lord, help me."  He answered, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs."  She said, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table."  Then Jesus answered her, "Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed instantly.

Matthew 15:26-28


Mothers can be powerful when they are desperate for their children.

My own mother stands at about 5 feet and 4 inches. One morning, when I was a teenager, I fainted in the shower. When my mother heard my body hit the ground, she pulled the entire bathroom door off its hinges. The bathroom door was locked. We had to get a repairman to come and put the door back on.


In the gospel, we hear about a mother. This woman had a little baby girl. She loved her child, that much is very obvious from the gospel. She loved her little daughter with all her being. But one day, that little girl began to have fits. We don’t exactly know what those fits looked like, but the mother claimed that her daughter had been seized by a demon

I have always imagined that her little one became epileptic and that those seizures were violent and terrifying. Her little girl one day must have begun to writhe and jerk, to foam at the mouth and then go limp. Her child just would suddenly have been lost to her, present one moment with smiles and then she became a frightening mass of flesh. She would wet her pants and bite her tongue. And her mother was desperate, absolutely desperate.

In the days of Jesus, women amounted to nothing. And Canaanites were considered not even human, not worthy of being taught about God. They worshipped idols. They were lost to God and were not to be saved. This is what Jesus had been taught.

When Jesus passes by, this mother races up to him and begs for him to help her daughter. And Jesus does not even answer her. All of his life, he had been taught not to speak to Canaanites. They were dogs, not worthy of attention. But the woman will not give up. Her desperation for her daughter drives her to assert herself in ways that were unfathomable back then. She yells and screams at Jesus.

“Send her away,” the disciples say. And Jesus tells her that he cannot take the food that is meant for the Jews and feed it to the dogs. I have always been bothered by these words, for they seem so unfair, but they were what Jesus had been taught. He was simply parroting what he had heard all of his life.

“Yes, Lord,” she says, “But even the dogs eat the crumbs from under their master’s table.”

And with her powerful words, Jesus looks at the woman. He looks at her and he really sees her. He sees beyond all that he has been taught. He sees a human being with tremendous faith. He sees a mother who adores her daughter. He sees as broken woman who would who do anything, anything to make her child well. And Jesus realizes that everything he has been taught is wrong. “Woman,” he says, “great is your faith.” And when he recognizes her, her prayers are answered.

When Joseph was ruling Egypt, he was busy distributing food to all the hungry people, when his brothers came to him. His brothers, who in their jealousy and envy, had sold him as a slave when he was just a child, come to ask for food. And at first Joseph does not let them know who he really is. He impresses them with his wealth and his power, scaring them by making it look like one of them had stolen something from him, keeping one of them hostage in his prison. But eventually he gets tired of playing games, and when they tell him that their father cannot bear to lose another son, Joseph sends all the servants out of the room. Then he breaks down and cries. He wails so loudly that people can hear throughout the palace. It is as if the truth is just bursting out of him. “I am Joseph, whom you sold as a slave,” he says.

The Scripture says that, at that moment, the brothers of Joseph open their eyes and they see him. They see who he truly is: a powerful man, the man who will save their family from famine, but also their little brother, who was mistreated by them, that little boy that they threw into a pit and sold as a slave. For the first time in their entire lives, they see him for who he really is. When they were children, they did not really see him. All that they saw was this annoying little brother, a brat, a braggart. His words made them angry, they despised him. But when Joseph the ruler reveals himself to them, and their eyes are open, they see him as he truly is, as their brother and also as a great man. And they are able to love him, no longer to be jealous or violent, but simply to love him for who he is.

If only we could see one another as Joseph’s brothers saw him, as Jesus saw the Canaanite woman. If only we would look at the person in the next pew and really see them, struggling to do the best they can, a person of great beauty and enormous depth. But instead we waste our lives living under an illusion, that everyone else is happy, and that we alone are broken and in need of God’s grace.

There was a young woman who went to college with me. We sang in the choir together. I knew her name. One night, we were sitting together on a couch in the choir lounge and she asked me if she could come and hang out with me and my friends. She explained that she didn’t really have any good friends. I said sure, but I got busy and never really thought about it.

Three weeks later, she hung herself by an extension chord in her dorm room.

At her funeral, I had terrible feelings of guilt. And I kept talking to her inside my mind. I would ask her over and over again, “Why? Why could you not have shown me who you really were? I had no idea that you were in so much pain! Why didn’t you tell me?”

She had given me a glimpse of her loneliness but she had glossed over it, making it sound like something that she wanted to work on, not something that was tearing her apart inside. I did not really know who she was. Had I known who she was, I would have rushed over to her dorm room and introduced her to everyone I knew. I would have tried to help her. If only I had known. But I never really saw her.

We go through our lives hardly seeing one another. You can come to church and sit next in the same pew with someone for months and never know that the person is getting a divorce or that their father is dying of cancer. We say hello to one another. We say, “How are you?” and the expected answer is “Fine.” That’s all most of us want to hear, “Fine.” There is this social expectation that we will not really tell the truth, not really tell each other about our pain or our struggles. So we say fine.

It’s only places like Alcoholics Anonymous where people are forced to be brutally honest. Their addictions force them to the tell truth up front about who they are. They are told to say, “Hello, My name is Frank. I am an alcoholic.” But in the rest of the world we don’t do that, we don’t say, “Hello, My name is Jennifer. I am estranged from my sister.” Or “Hello, my name is Dan. I suffer from chronic depression.” Or “Hello, my name is Sally. I am lonely.” Instead, we just say, “I’m fine.” And we tell each other where we live and what we do for a living. And we do not know one another at all.

Look at the person next to you. See them. That person is unfathomable, deep and full of mystery. That person has experienced pain and suffering. That person is beloved of God.

I have started taking yoga. At the end of the class the teacher puts her hands together like this, and she says a Hindu word, Namaste. I have been saying it for months. But only a few days ago did someone tell me what it means. It means, I See You.

Esau's Blunder

And so, Esau despized his birthright.
                                                      Genesis 25:34

"I am going to another church."

"But why?" I asked. "Why are you leaving?"

"I just went to a Bible study and felt that God wanted me to go…"

And so the conversation goes. I find it so hard when someone decides to go somewhere else to church, but our back door must be open as our front door is open. This is not a cult and I cannot force people to stay. But it does break my heart.

It is not uncommon for the new member, feeling so moved and inspired at first, will one day come to church and find it so so, and it is at that point that they begin to look for another church home, a place where they can find that emotional high again. And they will move from church to church, seeking that feeling of being inspired. They will leave whenever someone disappoints them, when they have a disagreement, when they get bored.

The divorce rate is at an all-time high in this country. More and more people are falling out of love just as easily as they fell in love. They will come and tell me that they no longer love each other, but what they really mean is that they don’t have the in-love feeling anymore. And without that exciting feeling, they just don’t want to stick it out. From this new perspective, marriage is much less romantic and much more like hard work.

Jacob and Esau were brothers, twin brothers. They fought all the time. They even fought in their mother’s womb (Esau won that battle and came out first). And they were so different. Esau was read and hairy. Jacob was bare and pale.

Their parents made this competition worse by playing obvious favorites. Their father loved Esau best, their mother loved Jacob. Esau was a practical man, an impatient man. He was a hunter, used to being on the move. His brother was quieter, more thoughtful. It was Esau’s impatience that was his downfall.

One day, Esau came back from hunting and he was famished. And I don’t mean normal hunger, I mean the hunger of a growing young man who had just finished at least one full day of strenuous exercise. Esau could think of nothing but food.

I can just imagine the tent. The smell of sweaty exhausted Esau must have competed with the smell of the cooking. Esau would drop down on the floor of the tent in pure exhaustion. All he would want is some food. His mind would be totally focused on that one thing, food.

And Jacob had soup. Not just soup, stew, the red lentil stew. The kind whose scent can fill an entire house while it is cooking, making your mouth water and your stomach ache. Jacob had the stew. There was not enough for both of them.

“Give me some of that red stuff,” Esau says. He was a man of few words, and he meant what he said.

Jacob asks for Esau’s birthright in exchange for a bowl of stew and Esau, thinking only of the surface of life, agrees. He gives up the line of the patriarchs, the favor of God, for broth and vegetables.

In American culture, we believe that the faster something is accomplished the better. But fast is not always best. And those who seek results quickly may give up their birth-right for stuff.

Think of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Satan said, “Just take it. Don’t think about it. I know God said not to, but don’t think about that too much. Just take, just do it!”

How often the greatest mistakes in our lives are made because we did not give ourselves time to spend with God, time to wrestle with God, time to absorb and grow. The spiritual life is not like McDonalds. You don’t pull up to church in your car for McEucharist. We ask you to come week after week, month after month, to pray and to give regularly. This is a way of life that takes time to foster and grow. It is not instant gratification. It is called discipleship.

When Jesus speaks to us about the spiritual life, he speaks to us in terms that come from nature. He knew that the people of the Galilee would know about rain and harvest, plants and vines. He knew that this was their language and when he used these images, they would relax, open their hearts, and listen.

In today’s gospel, Jesus uses images of seeds falling on the ground. The seeds are made by God and they are good stuff. The seeds are the presence and love of God, which God showers upon you like rain, upon the good and the evil, the children and the elderly, the strong and the weak. God showers love and grace upon us all in equal amounts. The question is not whether or not God loves us, it is what we will do with that love and grace.

We are the soil. We are the ones who receive his grace, his love, his patience and kindness. But our soil varies a great deal depending on the kind of life that we have led. And good soil takes time to become rich and fertile.

Do any of you have compost piles? If so you know the process. God takes the experiences of our lives, our mistakes and our failures, and God lets them distill down within us, decomposing down into rich, fertile soil. The process takes time. Christians are baptized once and for all, but disciples take years to be formed.

I want to encourage all of you not to sell your birthright. You are a child of God, baptized and beloved. This world will ask you over and over again if you would like to trade in that birthright for a successful career, for romance, for respect. Just tell a lie, the snake will say. Just make fun of that person, don’t think about it, just do it. Just take that drug, that drink. Just gossip, cut someone down, hurt. It’s not that serious. Don’t think too much about it. Everybody else is doing it.

And before you know it, you have traded God in for popularity, for some money, for a good time. And you are left with nothing.

Seeds cannot live for long in shallow ground. They may spring up, but they will wither and die if they are not deeply rooted in the soil of life. Life with God takes time and it takes commitment. It takes years of love and generosity, prayer and community. It takes time.

God causes us to grow, not just in the inspired moments, but in the humdrum, the day in and day out faithfulness of life. Don’t chase the high, even if you are hungry for excitement or think that you must have something now. Be patient.

You have been given the most precious gift in the world. Don’t hand it off for ANYTHING.

This fall, we are not going to do a pledge drive. Instead we are going to ask you to make a life pledge. I am going to get you to think of your life as a gift to God, a long-term gift. How will you pray? What will you do to form a small group that meets weekly? What will you give? How will you devote time to your loved ones? How will you care for your body?

And you will say, why. Why are we being asked to pledge all these parts of our lives? Because true discipleship takes a long time. It takes consistency and devotion. It takes a lifetime of prayer and a true community of people who know you intimately and meet with you regularly. It takes commitment.

And so, Jacob became the father of nations while Esau gave all that up for STEW.

God bless poor Esau. Let us not make the same mistake.

Freedom

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.