Looking for congregations that have a practice of praying weekly for enemies

I've been increasing interested in the fact that congregations and worshiping communities I'm part of don't pray for those who persecute them, and I wonder what that practice would do to a community to have to discern, discuss and pray about enemies week by week. (Image above by Pr. Daniel Erlander) So I've decided to try to seek out examples and make a little study of it, perhaps writing more about it here, or perhaps writing a little booklet on prayer when I get some stories.  I preached on this topic Sunday, and although I don't usually put my sermons  here, I've posted it below.  We were looking for a hymn of the day about loving enemies and those who persecute us, and found that actually there isn't really a hymn about that in our Lutheran hymnal!  Wow!  So we sang a Bret Hesla original (he is a wonderful contemporary hymn writer in the folk tradition and belongs to our church). So, if your church regularly prays for enemies, write me an email or leave a comment and tell me about it!

Sermon below

Anon, and peace,

Chris

Sermon for Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church

Epiphany 3C

Nehemiah 8:1-10

Psalm 19

I Corinthians 12:12-31a

Luke 4:14-21

This gospel lesson is a tale of love and rejection. 

Unfortunately the story is split, half this week and the other half next week. This week, its all love; next week comes the rejection.  The only reason I can think of that the committee preparing the common lectionary divided this story into two parts was they viewed it as a good story to spend a couple weeks on before the official ‘lovers’ holiday, Valentine’s day. Valentine’s day, the committee must have thought, will surely lead us to a view of love that is all romantic and gooey.  We need to slow down on this story, I can hear them saying, so that our attention and imagination are directed towards another sort of love.

Fine, I say. Let’s ask: What is this love? What, this rejection?   If you can stay with me a few minutes this morning, I want to set before you this story from Luke in a bit more detail and then turn to a contemporary story on the way to asking what it might mean for us, now, to have this lover’s word fulfilled ‘in our hearing’, or even put more sharply, ‘in our living.’

In this gospel lesson, Luke develops a story also told in Mark and Matthew about Jesus’ first trip home after graduating from the Wilderness Seminary.  Luke is an evocative storyteller, a historian who, he tells us in chapter one, after ‘investigating everything carefully from the very first” intends “to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus.”  Most excellent Theophilus.  That is the intended audience for Luke’s gospel.  Here is our first clue about this story of love and lovers.  The story is for, very likely, no one person but rather any person who is a theo-philus, a ‘god-lover’. 

And because of his investigations, apparently, Luke is able to make his version a bit fatter, with more details than either Mark or Matthew’s versions.  All three versions tell the same basic tale of the congregation’s amazement turned to hostility and rejection.  In fact, in my bible the passage comes with the handy summary heading “The Rejection of Jesus at Nazareth.” Not that it starts out as rejection; he has done enough teaching and ‘deeds of power’ in the Galilean countryside to have a reputation when he gets home.  The home routine goes as usual, Luke tells us.  Mom and Dad pack Jesus off to the synagogue to show him off, and sure enough, proud of their local boy made good, they pull him up front and hand him the microphone.  Taking the scroll--it was the prophet Isaiah, Luke tells us—Jesus quotes a text from the end of Isaiah, words spoken by a disciple of Isaiah to the people long after the original Isaiah’s harsh words of warning against injustice in the land. These words, written for those returning from exile, are meant to envision the shalom God intends, an active setting right of all that had gone wrong. 

Claiming publicly his baptismal anointing with Spirit of the Lord, Jesus spells out the meaning of such unity with God’s purposes as if, here, Luke wants us to see Jesus’ whole ministry in miniature.  As if Jesus is saying, here, before the home crowd, well, folks, this is what I’m up to!  And what a plan it is! Good news to the poor; release to the captives; sight to the blind; freedom for the oppressed; the year of Jubilee when all debts are forgiven, and everyone has enough, just as they did in the wilderness sojourn after their escape from Egypt.  The overall point is hard to miss: broken things set right, wholeness restored, rich and poor put back in balance so none suffer the indignity of begging for basics.  He finished reading the text, slowly rolled up the scroll, passed it off to the sacristan, and sat down to teach.  You can hear the anticipation in Luke’s sentence: The eyes of all were fixed on him.  And as far as Luke tells it, he only had a one-sentence sermon.  “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  The Hebrew is literally ‘this Scripture has been fulfilled in your ears.”

That is where our Gospel text ends, and I’ll leave it there for Pr. Laurie to pick up with next week, but suffice it to say that the fawning turns ugly as the implications of his words sink more deeply into their ears, so to speak.  The rejection here, in Luke’s telling of the story, contains in miniature Jesus’ whole life and the stunning rejection of that life by his own leaders.  In order to save their own fragile grasp on power they would rather kill him than admit what “has been fulfilled in their ears.” They do not, as Jesus would put it, ‘have ears to hear.’

Let me step back from this love story to say a few things about that love and rejection theologically.  Jesus, we might say, is perfect love made flesh and blood.  “He came down that we may have love” we sang a few weeks ago.  Such a claim is a way to say what it might mean to live entirely with the grain of God’s intention for all creation.   With the grain—that’s a good metaphor for a carpenter’s son!

 Yet much of what we experience is life lived against the grain of love.  We call this ‘living against the grain’ by that old term ‘sin’.  In fact, our lives depend on sin; the very structure of our society, our world, is ‘against the grain,’ locked in competition, cycles of rejection, defiance, greed, and violence. 

We are so locked into these patterns that they seem natural.  So natural that when one comes who is truly free to love, we think that one is against the grain, and we must plot to rid ourselves of that one, as Pontius Pilate and Herod, together with the people, did so effectively with Jesus.  The murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 reminds us of this pattern—the one who, in the words of the U2 anthem, comes ‘in the name of love,’ is at risk of the violent rejection of the status quo.  The only way out, in a sense, is for Jesus to bear the brunt of this human rejection, and for God to raise him, to say a final ‘yes’ to love we too reject, partly because of how deeply we are invested in and benefit from such patterns of sin.  When we have been transformed by this ‘yes’ to love, when we have had our ears opened by the spirit to hear, then we too shall face this rejection.  We, too, will face the force of the status quo pressing against love, against the fulfillment of Jesus own life in us as his body. 

What can we learn about how to live with the grain of love when we face rejection, resistance and even violence? Let me tell a brief story about Harry Belafonte and Martin Luther King before I conclude with some practical thoughts about how this might shape our life together at OSLC.

Harry Belafonte—does that name ring a bell?  You might think of his popular calypso music of the 1940s and 1950s.  The Banana Boat Song remains iconic.  Sing with me now: “Day O, oh day O, daylight come and me wanna go home.  Day, oh ho, Day, oh ho Day-o, daylight come and me wanna go home.”  That song is a traditional dock worker’s song from Jamaica where the laborers worked through the night to load bananas onto the ships.  Belafonte was, it turns out, trying to live ‘with the grain of love’ and had a profound commitment to the work of social justice.  A close confidant of Martin Luther King, Jr., Belafonte quietly provided for the King family and bankrolled much of the work of the civil rights movement.  It was Belafonte who bailed King out of the Birmingham City Jail.  Belafonte was one of the organizers and funders for the March on Washington in 1963. 

Belafonte tells a story about the civil rights movement, and about Dr. King, that offers us a concrete example of how to live ‘with the grain of love’ in the face of rejection, opposition, even persecution.   It might surprise some of you who know Robert F. Kennedy as a crusader for civil rights, as the one who gave such a moving tribute upon Martin King’s death in 1968, to hear he was not at all viewed as a friend of the civil rights movement upon his appointment as Attorney General in 1961.  Belafonte recalls a meeting of civil rights leaders not long after Kennedy’s election and the appointment of Bobby Kennedy.  They were utterly depressed, knowing that a ‘racist Irish northerner’ was now in a position to block, rather than help, their cause. John Kennedy had voted with Southerners on key civil rights bills in the 1950s and Belafonte recalls at the time that Bobby Kennedy was famously not interested in the civil rights movement.  Tired of their moaning, King slammed his hand down and asked if anyone had something good to say about Bobby Kennedy.  They said, Martin, that’s what we’re saying, there ain’t nothing good about this Catholic conservative; he’s bad news.  So Martin promptly ended the meeting, saying ‘we’ll re-adjourn when someone has something redeeming to say about Bobby Kennedy.”  Later they discovered how close Bobby Kennedy was to his bishop, and decided to work through the bishop to make a faith-based case for the dignity and equality of all people.  When Bobby Kennedy died, Belafonte concluded, there was no greater friend of the civil rights movement. 

So the question here is what do we do when we seek to live in love and come face to face with opposition?  How do we live in and through love’s rejection, even violent rejection? What do we find if we go back to Luke’s story?  One really deep and important tread is this: Jesus teaches--and lives by—loving enemies and praying for those who persecute us.

·      Take Luke chapter 6:27—“But I say to you that listen (again, the question of the word being fulfilled in our ears), love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. . . be merciful, just as your God is merciful.

·      Take Luke 23:34—“When they came to that place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left.  Then Jesus said, “O God, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.”

·      Take Acts 7:60—“While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” When he had said this, he died.

Such dramatic life or death circumstances are not often ours to face.  Yet recent events have brought it closer to home for all of us. 

A NW Airlines flight filled with holiday passengers was landing in Detroit.  It could have been any of us on that plane. It could have been our friends or family.  And a young Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, set off an explosive devise as part of an Al-Aaida effort to attack and harm the US.  Just this morning, in fact, a new message from Osama Bin-Laden to President Obama claims credit for Umar’s ‘message’ to us, making the connection to the message they sent on 9/11.

A local store, Seward Market, on Franklin Avenue had a handful of customers shopping for food and daily necessities.  Any of us might have stopped off to pick something up on our way to and fro.   It could have been a friend or aquaintence.  And on January 6^th two young men, Ahmed Shire Ali and Mahdi Hassan Ali, stepped in armed and wearing ski masks, attempting a robbery that ended as a triple homicide.  A deep tear in the fabric of the neighborhood, deep grief, and of course we must seek to pray for the three who died—Abdifatah Warfa, Mohamed Warfa, and Anwar Mohamed—and their families and community.  Of course justice must be done, as well. Those who seek to do harm must be restrained by the law.

Yet if we hear this gospel fully, Luke is telling a powerful story about what Jesus shows us of living according to grain of God’s love.  In the face of the rejection of life and love, it is not enough for this assembly gathered as Christ’s body to do anything less than take on the practice of praying: Lord, do not hold this sin against Umar.  God, bless and be merciful to Ahmed and Mahdi.  Merciful God, teach us to examine the violence within our hearts, too, and give us renewed desire for your ways.

Because Jesus’ words have been fulfilled in our ears, in our very flesh, we can take on the practice of praying by name for those people and patterns that harm this wild and precious life.  What if we were to do this not on occasion but week-by-week, as a matter of course? In doing so, what kind of love story might we become?

Comments

[Ann Hafften]

Hi Chris, thanks for your good writing. Think you should have credited Dan Erlander with that cool illustration. Maybe you did and I missed it. ANn

[Barb]

Not every week, but typically, as we pray for those on active duty by name, who are caught up in war, we pray for everyone in our armed forces, "and the armies of our enemies."

[Chris]

Thanks, Ann. I added the props to Dan--my bad. He never grows old to me--Dan just gets at the heart of it, making it simple and o so difficult, partly by never making it simplified.
Hope you are well.
+CS

[Pam Fickenscher]

Hi Chris
I don't know what their current practice is, but I remember the founding pastors of St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco being eloquent on this point: that Jesus commands us far more often to pray for our enemies and to forgive others than to pray for forgiveness ourselves.

Our congregation prays every week for peace in the current wars. We pray by name for those dead from our own country each week (found on icasualties.org), and then pray for all those, friend and foe, whose names we do not know. We don't often use the specific language of enemy though. . . perhaps we should.

[Peter Hanson]

Chris, A bit tangential, but there was a very thoughtful piece on npr by a former Marine speaking about the bible verses encoded on rifle scopes used by the US military.

He ends with this: "I leave you with a verse that has not been stamped on our weapons: 'But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you' — Matthew 5:44."

Here's the whole story (you may have heard it "live") http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122945924

peace, Peter

[T]

Chris,

Oddly enough, I was looking through a box of old magazines this weekend and came across a Pray magazine about praying for enemies.

I don't remember seeing any stories about congregations that engaged in this practice, but I'd be happy to mail the magazine to you if you'd like to contact the authors & see what they have to say.