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All Saints Lutheran Church
February 22, 2004 - Transfiguration Sunday
Pastor Tim Johnson
Focus Texts: 1st John 3:11-20
Luke 6:27-31
Today, according to the church year, it is Transfiguration Sunday,
the day in which we hear and consider the story I just read. A story
about a mountaintop experience that Peter, James and John had with
Jesus, Moses and Elijah.
There’s a lot to talk about in this story, but this morning
I want to focus on only three words—and they are three words
that come from God: “Listen to him.” In other words,
“Listen to Jesus.”
Last week, we heard the reading of the Beatitudes—that very
first part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, as we call it, in
which he declares certain blessings or woes, depending upon what
your experience is in life. But then, today, we leap all the way
past the rest of the sermon to today’s text from Luke. So,
rather than talk about mountaintop experiences and transfigurations,
I thought we’d spend just a bit more time down the mountain,
backing up as it were, and catching a little bit more of Jesus’
sermon. Doing what God said: Listening to Jesus. Because I believe
that the following verses in Luke are the most important words that
he speaks in this, Scripture’s most noted sermon.
So, please turn with me in your bibles to Luke chapter 6: verses
27-31. I believe that here we discover the most controversial thing
that Jesus commands his followers to do. (Read the lesson)
I don’t really know what you think of when you hear these
words, but it seems to me that most people think of how nice and
altruistic it all sounds, but also how impossible it all is to do.
In fact, I think that these may be among the most ignored of Jesus’
teachings, and yet here in his sermon, it ranks at the top in terms
of the directions he gives his followers as to how to live.
Frankly, over the years, I have heard far more reasons from people
on why this commandment is impossible or why Jesus really means
something different from what he says, than have I heard people
describe their attempts at actually doing it.
So, as you think of your enemies, who comes to your mind? Do you
think about national enemies? Saddam Hussein. Osama binLaden. North
Korea. Or, perhaps you think about people who have hurt or harmed
you. People who have deceived or disappointed you. People who disgust
you. People who make your blood boil. Or, perhaps they are people
whom you have now effectively shut out or marginalized in your life.
After all, it has been said that the opposite of love is not necessarily
hate, but indifference.
Well, if you’re a Christian, that’s not an option. To
love your enemies, to bless those who curse you, to do good to those
who hate you is central to your life as a follower of Christ. This
morning, rather than just focus on how difficult loving our enemies
is, I’d like to explore how following this commandment can
impact life.
Perhaps the best starting point for ever loving ones enemies is
to understand that we were once enemies of God. Now, strange as
that may sound, it is true. In Romans 5, it says: “For if,
when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through
the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall
we be saved through his life!” [1] Put another way, “For
while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”[2]
You see, in our sin, when we lived only for ourselves, we essentially
made ourselves our own boss—our own God. But when we surrendered
that old way, when that sin was drowned in our baptisms, when Jesus
became Lord of our lives, we went from being enemies to being friends.
So, you and I know what it is like to be the enemy and to have been
loved with a love that came to us at the initiative of the lover,
that is, God. Nothing we could do but accept it and let it make
us into people that share that same kind of love. We heard it in
our first lesson. We love because we have been loved. We love our
enemies because we were loved as enemies.
In case you hadn’t noticed, this is not a love that is driven
either by emotions or by human reason. When we allow our emotions
to determine who to love, well, then we only love when we feel like
it. We only love if we think the person we’re to love is worthy
of being loved. In fact, there’s a lot of parenting that goes
on out there, where the children are only loved when they show that
they are deserving of love. You mess up, the love gets withheld.
But Christian love, or agape love, isn’t like that. It is
love that is expressed because the giver of the love has chosen
to express it or give it. Christian love isn’t based on the
merit or the behavior of the one receiving it. Just the opposite.
In Romans, we hear that “It does not, therefore, depend on
man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy.”[3]
Now, I don’t know about you, but that strikes me as incredible
freedom—to love independent of whether the person is undeserving
of that love. Sounds risky.
Last Sunday, following the 11am worship service, my family and I
became mindful that we didn’t know where Noah was. And as
time continued to pass, and as we searched all the corners of this
building, I had to increasingly grapple the gravity of a parent’s
greatest fear—the disappearance of their child. As that fear
and my prayers became more intensified, and as I went into my office
to find a photograph just before calling the police, I can tell
you that anger and not love was welling in my heart as I began to
ask, “Who?” Turned out that Noah was playing a game,
and that he had found a really good hiding place.
I struggled that day to be open to any love for my perceived enemies.
But, as a youth I experienced a powerful example of a father who
was able to love his enemies—namely, my friends and me.
I remember, as a boy, my friends and I being approached by a father
whose family had just that school year moved into our neighborhood
from India. He surprised us as we were sitting out in front of my
house, when he walked up to speak with us. For, there were a few
of the kids in my group who had been harassing his son, who had
been mean and ostracizing and hurtful. Now, this father could have
given us what for, and we would have been deserving of his anger.
But he approached us not only with his own son in mind but with
us in his heart, as well.
His interactions with us—his respectful, firm, kind ways,
resulted in our getting caught up in the deeper truth and meaning
of loving one’s enemies. Instead of retaliating against us
for the hurt we caused his son, through his loving approach toward
us he absorbed even our desire to do any harm. For, that is the
way of love. Indeed, that day I was changed by a father who loved
his enemies.
This Wednesday is not only Ash Wednesday, but it also marks the
release of the Mel Gibson movie, “The Passion.” As you
well know there has been a lot of controversy about the film, but
the one thing that I hear over and over again is how realistic and
brutally violent the movie is in its powerful depiction of the last
hours of Jesus’’ life. It is heart-wrenching. It is
offensive. It is bloody. It is provocative. It is the story of how
your and my salvation was won. It is the story of how deep God’s
love is for us. I am going to see it; I encourage you and your friends
to do so as well and to be sure to talk about it.
From all accounts, it appears that huge numbers of people will see
it. People of faith and people who are just curious. In fact, I
think there will be scores of people who have loved Mel Gibson’s
other movies, like Lethal Weapon. I think that people will go out
of some genuine curiosity of how Christianity views violence. After
all, we’re inundated with the way the world works: Eye for
an eye kind of living. Aggression as the principal means of solving
conflict. We know that. And, we embrace it well. After all, we’re
not only the most armed citizenry in the world, in terms of personal
weapons, but we are also the world’s most formidable armed
force as a nation.
But, what about this Jesus? How does this Son of God respond to
violence, particularly when its violence done to him without any
wrongdoing on his part?
Mel Gibson, a Christian, said that making the movie changed his
life. In fact, he said that he could never go back to being a part
of movies like Lethal Weapon.
For what we learn in the passion of Jesus Christ is that love’s
response to hatred is to absorb it. Not to pass it on. Not to feed
the cycle of violence. Not to perpetuate and extend and justify
aggression. But in the passion of Jesus, we discover what God does
with perfect love and complete power. We discover that the buck
stops with Jesus. That at the cross is ultimate absorption of violence
and evil.
Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself
and take up his cross daily and follow me.”[4]
Let’s do what God told Peter and James and John to do on that
mountain. Let’s listen to his Son!
Amen.
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[1] Romans 5:10
[2] Romans 5:8
[3] Romans 9:16
[4] Luke 9:23
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