FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT
November 4, 2001

THE TOUGHEST
COMMANDMENT
John M. Buchanan

O loving God,

To turn away from you is to fall,

To turn toward you is to rise,

and to stand before you is to abide forever.
Grant us, dear God,

in all our duties you help;

in all our uncertainties your guidance;

in all our dangers your protection;

and in all our sorrows your peace;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Augustine of Hippo (354-430)

Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
126 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, IL 60611-2094
(312) 787-4570

THE TOUGHEST COMMANDMENT
November 4, 2001

JOHN M. BUCHANAN, PASTOR
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Ephesians 4:1-6
Luke 6:27-31

Startle us, O God, with your truth, and open our hearts and minds to your word, that hearing we

might believe and trust you with our lives and submit our wills to your will; through Jesus
Christ, our Lord. Amen.

Someone has observed that Jesus issued two moral mandates that his adherents and followers
down through the centuries have found so problematic that they have been rather thoroughly
ignored. The first is his insistence that it is the responsibility of wealthy people to take care of
poor people by, among other things, redistributing their wealth. And the second is that we all

must love our enemies. It has never been easy to do that. It is not easy to do it, particularly in
times like these.

My earhest encounter with the rigor of Jesus’ command to “love your enemy” came during the -
first year of my ministry, at this time of year. It was the early sixties. The Korean War had ended.
less than a decade earlier. Our nation was deeply committed to a Cold War with the Soviet
Union. Cuba had become part of the Soviet Bloc, and we nearly went to war over Soviet Inter-
Continental Ballistic Missiles in Cuba, aimed at Washington and New York City. In the towns
and cities of America, a new program called “Trick or Treat for UNICEF” was in its early days,
and no one had ever tried it in the community where I was the new Presbyterian minister. I
thought it was a splendid idea. ] recruited the Sunday school superintendent and a few junior
highs, and we mapped our strategy to have our youngsters dress up for Halloween and instead of
begging for candy, knock on doors and say, “Trick or Treat for UNICEF!” and ask for money for
the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund. Each child had a little orange and
black UNICEF coin container and a stack of pamphlets explaining what UNICEF was. The
money collected would feed, clothe, shelter, and educate the world’s needy children. Seemed
like a good idea, a Christian idea. I did not yet understand how unpopular and difficult it is to
love your enemy—even the child of your enemy.

A leader in the congregation, an active, generous man, with a wonderful family, called me and
said he wanted to see me. It was about the UNICEF thing, he said. When we met in a day or so,
he let me have it. Didn’t I know that UNICEF helped communist countries, our enemies, the
Cubans, and the Czechoslovakians, the Yugoslavians, even the Soviets? Didn’t I know those
countries couldn’t feed their own children because they were using all their money preparing to
destroy us—which Soviet leaders used to threaten to do in those days? Didn’t I know they were
our enemies—who had promised to destroy us—and that the only way to deal with that kind of
enemy was something we had learned in 1941 the hard way, was to destroy him first? Didn’t I

know that helping them feed their hungry children was aiding and abetting the enemy; that our
dear innocent children, dressed up as ghosts and circus clowns and princesses, were virtually
communist pawns, agents of the Soviet Union?

He was already pretty unhappy with me, and this was the last straw. If I persisted with this
UNICEF business, he was going to quit and take his family to another church. Ina congregation
of eighty-five souls, the loss of a solid family is a major event, not particularly good for the new
minister. He also represented about 10 percent of the church’s budget, which further complicated
the matter. So I tried scripture. “Jesus told us to love our enemies,” I pointed out. It didn’t work.
“T love them alright,” he said. “I’m just not going to help them. My kids aren’t either.” They
didn’t. We participated in UNICEF. He and his family joined another church. And I learned that
the mandate to “love your enemies” is not a simple matter.

It is not a popular text.

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for
those who abuse you. . . . If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For
even sinners love these who love them. . . . But love your enemies, your reward will be

great, and you will be children of the Most High.

Let me assure you that the preacher, particularly this preacher, feels the weight and pressure of
that every bit as much as the listener. Retaliation for wrongs done to us seems to come almost
naturally. Answering hate with hate, responding to violence perpetrated by an enemy with our
own violence seems to be written into our DNA and is simply the way we are, from the
playground to the battlefield. When NFL linebacker Bryan Cox was seriously injured two weeks
ago by what he considered to be an illegal block, he announced defiantly to the press, several
times, that if it took him all his life, he would “get” the perpetrator, “take him down,” he said.
It’s a theme of Hollywood movies, getting the violent enemy who did something terrible to the
hero, evening the scales of justice. And, of course, it is written into the judicial code of most
ancient world religions. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” the Code of Hammurabi teaches,
twenty centuries before Christ, a mandate reflected in our own Hebrew tradition.

Reciprocity is the basis of our judicial and penal systems. Punishments, in theory, are supposed
to correspond to, or be the moral equivalent of, the harm done. It is the theory behind capital
punishment. A life taken can only be justly answered by taking the perpetrator’s life. Proponents
of capital punishment attempt to argue that what really is at stake is crime deterrence, even
though there is absolutely no evidence to back that up. Something like 70 percent of the
American people favor capital punishment because it makes us feel good, apparently. And if it
continues the cycle of violence—this sponsored by all of us, not to mention the propensity to
make mistakes fairly regularly, executing innocent people—so be it. Our need for vengeance—
described as justice—runs deep in us.

Frederick Nietzsche said love for enemies was an ethic for cowards, deserving of contempt, not
respect.

Sociologists and anthropologists observe that many societies define themselves in terms of the

other, the enemy everybody hates, and that once the enemy is vanquished, the society either has
to find a new one or suffer an identity crisis.

So perhaps it was one of Jesus’ most courageous moments when he said, “Love your enemies, do
good to those who hate you.” And perhaps it is not only the most difficult mandate, but also the
most realistic and authentic and true. Perhaps, given the historic reality that every war to end all
wars is simply the prolegomenon to the next war, and given the reality that our penal system
seems to succeed best at training and motivating prisoners to become more efficient and more
violent criminals when they get out, and given the personal reality which we have all
experienced—that hatred breeds hatred, or as someone succinctly put it, “’an eye for an eye’
merely leaves two people blind”—given all that, perhaps Jesus is the final realist and instead of
ignoring or blowing off his moral teaching as too weak, too vulnerable, perhaps we should be

taking it seriously and entertaining the notion, at least, that love for enemies may be a very
practical strategy.

It is easy to hate at a time such as this. Grievous harm has been done to us. Innocent people have
been killed; innocent people continue to be victims of bio-terrorism. And to make matters worse,
the murderers who hijacked the planes, flew them into the World Trade Center, and those who
organized, trained, inspired, and supported them, and those who continue to lionize them as
righteous martyrs, claim that it was done in the name of their religion: a holy war, a jihad against
infidels, they continue to call it. And it is easy to hate that, and to hate them, and hate everybody
who looks like them, and hate everybody who talks like them, to hate Islam and its adherents,
and to hate Afghans and their friends. And if that is what we do, Osama bin Laden will have won
a very great victory.

New York Times correspondent, Andrew Sullivan, wrote a thoughtful and helpful piece in the
Sunday Magazine, “This Is a Religious War,” in which he argues that it is foolish to ignore the
fact that the terrorist grow out of a radical, fundamentalist form of Islam and that this is surely a
religious war—not of Islam vs. Christianity and Judaism, however, but a war of fundamentalism
against faith of all kinds that are at peace with freedom and modernity. This war has echoes in
American religion, Sullivan points out, which has its own form of fundamentalism and radical
violence. A similar editorial in the Economist urged Americans to continue to understand that
this is not a war against Islam and to keep saying that, but also not to deny the terrible propensity
of fundamentalist religion to turn hateful (30 October 2001). Our own record is not so good.
Before the Middle Ages, after all, Christian nations were far more cruel and violent than the
Muslim world. The Crusades were not at all the romantic, heroic attempt of Christians to rescue
the Holy Land, but an all-out war on Islam, a holy war, a Christian jihad that produced infidel
blood in the street of Jerusalem, deep enough to cover the horses’ ankles.

The Koran teaches mercy and forgiveness and justice and tolerance. But there are also passages
in the Koran that urge the faithful to kill those perceived as a threat to Islam. “Kill those who join
other gods wherever you find them. . .. Wage war against such infidels as are your neighbors”
(see Sullivan, New York Times, 7 October 2001).

But the same can be said about the Bible. Israel’s ancient law commanded love for neighbor,
defined neighbor pretty narrowly, and often urged hatred and violence toward the non-neighbor:

Psalm 29: “Evildoers are doomed for destruction.”

Psalm 94: “He will repay them for their iniquity and wipe them out for their
wickedness; the Lord our God will wipe them out.”

Psalm 139 (one of the loveliest in the Bible, a favorite): “You have searched me and
known me. . . .Where shall I flee from your spirit. . .” also says, “O that you would kill
the wicked, I hate them with a perfect hatred.”

Did you choke on the words we read together in Psalm 149: “Let the high praises of God be on
their throats and two-edged swords in their hands to execute vengeance on the nations”?

It is important not to blame Islam for terrorism, and it is important to acknowledge that millions
of Muslims live comfortably in the Western world and that Muslim leaders have abhorred the
violence of September 11. It is also important to start to learn as much as we can about Islam,
Islamic history and culture. And it is important to acknowledge, difficult as it is, we are
complicit in our creating conditions that fan the flames of radical fundamentalism and its
resulting violence. Muslims resent our troops stationed in Saudi Arabia. Muslims resent our
support of Iraq when it was at war against Iran and now our continuing embargo against Iraq, our
unquestioning support of the Taliban so long as they fought against the Soviets and now our
bombing. Muslims resent and radical fundamentalists exploit our wrongful bombing of a
Sudanese pharmaceutical factory that turned out not to have anything to do with chemical
weapons, our obvious partiality to Israel over the Palestinians even as Israeli tanks batter and
destroy Palestinian homes and businesses in Bethlehem, our rude refusal of a Saudi gift to aid the
September 11 victims and now our bombing of Afghanistan, causing inevitable suffering and
death for an already devastated and oppressed people.

I do not propose ignoring what happened to us. ] deeply believe that we must do what we have to
do to bring to justice those who did this and those who helped them. I do not, personally,
oppose—in fact, I support—our military initiative, but alone it will not accomplish our goals. It
is important that we understand why we are hated and begin the hard and demanding work
necessary to changing how we act in the Muslim world. The Economist editorialized that
“Muslims who think the West must be fought and defeated are not going to be bombed into
changing their minds—but we could be bombed into changing our minds, that is into agreeing
with Mr. bin Laden that this is a war of civilizations that must be fought and won. What a
horrifying thought.”

“Wars always begin in the mind,” William Sloane Coffin wrote. “You have to first think others
to death. You cannot kill a brother. You cannot kill a sister, a friend, a fellow human being. Wars
begin in the heart when fear displaces love” (Courage to Love, p. 75).

Jesus asks us to love our enemies and ethicists have always observed the paradox in that, because
when you love your enemy, he or she ceases to be an enemy. In his second Inaugural, as the

Civil War was ending, Lincoln said, “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with
firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in;
to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle.”

How could he talk like that about people who hated him so deeply, a woman asked him? Lincoln
responded, “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”

The commandment is not to feel love, but to show love—and the promise is not that it will
always transform your enemy into a nice person. That seems not to have been the point. When
you love your enemy, you change, Jesus said. You become more the human being God created
you to be. You become, in fact, a child of God and a maker of the peace of God.

Kenneth Angell, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Vermont, lost his brother and sister-in-law on
American Airlines Flight 11. Bishop Angell stood up in his pulpit and told his parishioners that
he must forgive the hijackers. He said that it was not going to be easy, nor was he minimizing or
softening the brutality of the hijacker’s crime. He said that it is precisely what cannot be
condoned that must be forgiven and that anything else—hatred, retaliation, revenge—was simply
not the way of Jesus.

That is it, basically, for those of us who would follow him.

President Dwight Eisenhower, in words that sound surprisingly immediate, once said, “Down the
long lane of history yet to be written, America knows that this world of ours, growing ever
smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and must, instead, be a
proud confederation of mutual trust and respect” (See Joanne Adams, 23 September 2001.
Trinity Presbyterian Church, Atlanta).

We find ourselves living in a difficult time, a time quite unlike any we have lived in before. And
we, you and I, and all of us, must decide how we will live—in fear and hate or in trust and

respect.

And as we proceed, day by day, to decide how we shall live, | commend to you again these
challenging but truthful words of Jesus:

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those that curse you, pray for those
who abuse you.

And you will be children of the Most High.

Amen.

Prayers of the People
By Carol J. Allen, Associate Pastor for Congregational Care

God, you come among us in many guises. Today, as we come to you in prayer, we address you
as “Vulnerable love giver, Christ, wounded healer, Holy Spirit, compassionate friend” [Kate
Mcllhagga]. By your providence, all life comes from you and to you all life returns. We give you
grateful thanks. Draw us back to yourself and turn us again to your ways. In Jesus of Nazareth
we have seen “the love that dares to speak out, the love that listens, the love found most
powerfully in weakness, the love that heals, the love we need and long for, O God. . . . Love that
is there when sweetness has gone, love that endures beyond the barriers of pain [and of the
grave)” [MclIlhagga]. God, “you who love those whom we do not love, you who read the hearts
of others whom we do not understand, you who know the inward suffering of those whom we
ignore, you who discern the efforts of each one in attitudes that we perceive as deceitful, open
our eyes and our hearts. You who know each one of us far better than we know ourselves, who
love us better than we love ourselves, teach us how to love with your love [influenced by
Genevieve Graves]. We pray to know your love in ail its fullness.

“Where we have been so full of our own importance that we did not do the one needed thing,
where we have worshiped the idols of perfection and failed to see your glory in the vulnerable,
attaching more worth to the seen than the unseen, and where we have failed to make connections
between politics and health, economics and healing” [Mclihagga], God have mercy upon us.

Have mercy on those men and women who influence the life of this nation—those who frame
and administer our laws, the president, courts, and congress; governors, mayors, and city
governments; “those who mold public opinion through the press, radio, and television, and those
who write what many read. May all be influenced for what is good, not evil; for what is true, not
false” [Frank Colquhoun]. Give wisdom, O God, to the leaders of all the nations, a sense of
justice to those who wield power, that they may do what is life giving, “so that the poor and
weak may breathe freely” [Jim Cotter].

Strengthen this congregation in its work and worship, O God, that we may give graciously to
places of human need, speak your praise, and conform to the image of your Son. Fill us with
vision and vigor, with hope and healing energy, with commitment and caring action that we may
challenge what needs changing and feel the possibility of transformation in our attitudes and our
actions.

Look with compassion on all who suffer, those with incurable and stigmatized diseases, those
denied dignity, those who live without hope, those who are homeless or abandoned. Make the
sick whole, give hope to the dying, comfort those who mourn, uphold all who suffer in body or
mind, not only those we know and love but also those known only to you. Stand with those
whose world has been turned upside down by acts of violence. Be with all care givers, relief
workers, and peace makers. Keep them steady, keep them strong, encourage each one and hold
out your hope as their guide to going on. In ali things for which we pray, give us the will to bring
them about, for the sake of Jesus Christ, who taught his disciples to say when they pray Our
Father... -