The Cure for our Infected Hearts

February 23, 2025 - The Seventh Sunday after Epiphany

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good morning, Epiphany. Have you had enough of the snow yet? I was shoveling ice off our short driveway this last week and a neighbor stopped to ask me that question with a smile, “Have you had enough? Don’t you hate this?” Well, you know, when the sun’s out, I don’t mind the snow at all. It’s quite beautiful, actually. It’s all a matter of mindset, I think... if you love (or if you can learn to love) the snow and the cold, winter is actually pretty great. My kids certainly love it: sledding, building igloos and snowmen, days off school... we haven’t even tried skiing or snow tubing yet. Lily has said she loves the winter here more than the summer. She loves it, no hate. Love, it seems, is the key here.

And of course, love is the key of both our Old Testament and Gospel readings today. But before I get into discussing love, as we do often here at the Church of the Epiphany, I thought we might consider one of love’s opposites. I thought we might consider “hate.” Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel says that “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference,” “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” That’s certainly meaningful and true, especially in our world today, and it’s one of my favorite quotes. But hate is an opposite of love too, and hate is the action that Jesus uses here in Luke 6 to draw a contrast to love. The gospel today asks us to love our enemies, to do good to those who hate us... so, I’d like to start today by asking... who are your enemies? Take a minute and think about this. Who is your enemy?

It’s still my first year here at Epiphany, month eight officially started last week, so I think we’re still in the get-to-know-you stage, and so you’ll get another story today. I grew up playing baseball. I mentioned in our Enotes this week that I grew up loving hockey, but we had little opportunity to ice skate in southern Illinois, and baseball was the primary game for boys in Cardinals territory. I played organized, park-league tee-ball, coach pitch, and baseball every summer in elementary school; my dad took meticulous notes of my performances, each game writing up a brief game report that I still treasure today. My mom hated watching me pitch, too much stress for her, but I loved it... until sixth grade.

In 1996 at the age of 12, my metabolism dropped a bit; I started putting on some weight. Video games might have had something to do with it too, but I just didn’t like to run anymore, and that summer, I was placed on a baseball team with a coach that saw park-league, sixth grade baseball as the beginning of the path to the major leagues. We ran laps to start and end every practice, every day... he yelled at us like we were college athletes or military cadets... and the fun drained out of the sport for me. He noticed that I lagged behind on my laps, and he decided, either consciously or unconsciously, to run a play right out of a military playbook, one I would later learn to call “exclusion and embrace.”

Miroslov Volf wrote an amazing book on this concept, one that I read in my master’s in counseling program nearly twenty years ago and one I highly recommend, but “exclusion and embrace” essentially refers to the idea that groups and leaders of groups are constantly pulled to label someone as the other, someone to exclude, someone to set apart for derision and blame for all of our problems. In so doing, they create their own group identity, those who are not excluded, not to blame, those who are embraced. The group rallies around the idea of hating the outsider, which in turn unites their core. They are not like us, they are the problem, we are blameless, we are the in-crowd. This happens everywhere, from elementary school playgrounds to unhealthy churches. Kendrick Lamar has done this with Drake, uniting all of his fans by literally singing that Drake is “not like us.” Politicians are doing this right now in a far more serious, alarming, frightening way.

Coach Kasten tried to pull this with our sixth-grade baseball team, and I was the one marked for exclusion. His son Dave conveniently played the position that I had played well my entire little league career, and so I was relegated to right field, yelled at in practice, told loudly that I wasn’t good enough or fast enough. Our coach encouraged the team to laugh at me when I fell behind in running drills; every mistake was a reason for public scorn, and my teammates slowly began to join in on it all. Eventually, my mom snapped back at him loudly during a game, and we gave up on playing baseball altogether that summer. My poor dad’s time as a stat-keeper and sportswriter came to an early end.

But the ridicule followed me to middle school that fall, where Dave, the coach’s son who wanted to play my position, continued to harass me in the halls and in classes. Listen well: exclusion is a hard thing to let drop once its goals of group unity are achieved. Hate deeply infects the heart. Put simply though, Dave was a typical school bully. He might still be a bully or he might have repented and is a saint now for all I know, but he was a bully then, and I remember him still harassing me in the high school cafeteria years later. I had let baseball go years prior, but he couldn’t let the bullying go, I was still somehow worthy of his derision. But this sermon is not about him... friends, if there is one person I would still name today as my enemy, Dave Kasten’s name comes immediately to mind.

I don’t think of Dave often, it’s probably been ten years since I have actually, but when I read Luke 6:27 this week, I hear Jesus very clearly, very simply telling me to love... to do good to those who hate you, to bless those who curse you, to pray for those who abuse you. That was certainly not my natural inclination with the school bully then, and it’s not today either, ordination and fancy robes and all. But there’s so much counter-cultural and counter-intuitive goodness in this text and in today’s Psalm and in the story of Joseph forgiving his brothers, all stories that we have in the combined lectionary message today. There’s so much for us to learn and to keep learning, to write over and over again into the story of our lives, to shape, to form our natural inclinations. And it all boils down to love.

In Genesis 45, Joseph, who had been sold into slavery by his brothers begs them to come closer, asks them to forgive themselves, uses his position to take care of them and their father, and then kisses and weeps with them. He loves these men who by their actions have proven to be his enemies. In Psalm 37, we are reminded that our enemies, all evildoers, will wither like the grass, and that we don’t need to concern ourselves with them, that we must refrain from anger toward them, leaving rage alone, putting our trust in the Lord and doing the good we know we should be all about. And in the Gospel according to Luke, we have, what one commentator I read this week called “the simplest and the most freeing message in the entirety of scripture,” Jesus saying to those of us who would listen, “Love your enemies.”

We all, this morning, can get our heads around the very simple, Golden Rule concept of “love your neighbor as yourself.” It’s found in nearly every world religion, and it’s a good standard, foundational maxim. But love your enemies? Really? That simply sounds too difficult, it’s too sacrificial, it’s too impractical. If an enemy’s name came into your head at the beginning of this sermon when I asked, “who are your enemies,” can you really imagine loving them? Even him? Even her?

The answer, of course, is yes, even them. Because the hate we feel for our enemies eats us up too. Jesus is inviting us here, today, to give up the hate in our own hearts by loving those who hate us, those who curse us, those who make us angry. “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you,” Jesus says... everyone does that. The real challenge is to love our enemies. And why? A bad reading of this text might have us think that well, if we do this, God will give us reward in heaven, after we die. Nope. Jesus tells us that our reward will be great, but the reward comes today: choosing love opens the gates to joy upon joy, it frees us from the frustration, the aggravation, the rage that fills us when we choose to hate our enemies with the same hate they may send our way. It’s so simple. We love. Love is the cure to the hate that infects our own hearts, that infects the world.

Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” Friends, Jesus here sounds like he is challenging us to love our enemies, a difficult, nonsensical task that requires a great deal of self-sacrifice, an ideal only for the most pious among us, something we can dismiss for reality. But this is not a challenge, it is a gift, it is an invitation. Jesus invites us to something so much better than our hate, our anger, our frustration. He has shown us the better way. He invites us to love.

... Even Donald Trump? Even Rachel Maddow or AOC? Even the guy who cut me off in Chicago traffic? Even the guy who stole my kids’ scooters off our porch when they were little? Even the undocumented immigrant? Even Elon Musk? Even the guy on TV waving his MAGA hat in the Canadian hockey fan’s face? Even the person in this room who frustrates you to no end? Even Dave Kasten? Even the sixth grade baseball coach? Even the enemy that came to mind for you at the beginning of this sermon? Even the lowly Samaritan on the side of the road? Even the people who put Jesus on the cross?

Yeah. Even them. For Jesus, for us today, love does not stop with those who love us, it does not stop with your family, or your neighbor, or your community, or your fellow citizens... there is not a priority order for love. It simply never stops. It’s so simple, and still so difficult. Love is for all, even our enemies, equally, without reserve or measure, and we are invited to that kind of love for their sake, for our own sake, and for the world’s.

Amen.