Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity
“Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you”
How utterly impossible, perhaps, utterly unimaginable. Yet the Collect notes, “God has prepared for them that love [him] such good things as pass man’s understanding.” And so we pray God to “pour into our hearts such love toward [him], that we, loving [him] above all things, may obtain [his] promises which exceed” or go beyond, “all that we can desire.” Remarkably concise and comprehensive, it gathers together into a kind of fulness what is presented in the Epistle and Gospel. It is the crystallization of an essential theological and ethical understanding that belongs at once to the core of Christian thought and to what moves in the thinking of the great religions and philosophies of the world. In the most radical sense, we confront the deep meaning of love, not as sentiment and emotion, but as the divine love which seeks the perfection of our loves, without which, as Paul puts it in 1st Cor. 13, “we are nothing,” and, indeed, dead to God and to one another. “No story so divine.”
No passage of Scripture is more compelling and telling about God as love than today’s Gospel. It illustrates what the Epistle says about the radical meaning of baptism theologically and ethically in terms of “being dead to sin but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Only so may we begin to make sense of the Gospel reading.
Nothing could be more counter-culture in the face of a world of hatreds and animosities, of divisions and enmities. But, in truth, it challenges and counters each of us about the divisions and divides within our own hearts. Our “enemies” are not just out there in the world, which to be sure “hates” us, as John says in the 2nd lesson at Evening Prayer for today. “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you”(Jn. 15.18,19).
