These are the last
words of Jesus’ prayer for the disciples and for us before his arrest and
crucifixion. He prays that we might be
one. That we might know and abide in a
love so powerful it can overcome any barrier, any difference. That’s a powerful love.
We’ve been talking
about love for a few weeks now. Three
weeks ago when we baptized Estella, we read in 1 John that Jesus’ commandment
is that we “should believe in the name of Jesus and love one another,” laying
down our lives for one another out of our own agency—not out of guilt or shame. On Children’s Sunday two weeks ago we read
again from 1 John, learning that God’s love living in us makes us look like
God. We talked about some things we
might do to show love: sharing what we have, being kind, not judging a book by
its cover. Last week we read from Jesus’
farewell conversation with his disciples in the book of John, and we heard it
again this morning read by Dave. We only
just scratched the surface last week—thinking about how the kind of love in the
Greek—agape, one of 6 different words for different kinds of love, by the
way—how that kind of love applies to more people than any of the others, almost
without limit. That’s a powerful love.
And I was feeling
pretty good about myself. After church, several of you shook hands and said how
much you enjoyed the sermon, and then at coffee hour, Linda Delman approached
me. “You know,” she said, “I’m just
really struggling with how to love difficult people. If we’re supposed to love everyone, but also
not be a doormat, where’s the balance?
What does love look like in those situations?” Pretty great questions, Linda, and I admitted
that I struggle with that too. And her
comment stayed in my head all week.
There’s another big
event this week that has me thinking about what it means to love difficult
people—no, it’s not Mother’s Day. It was
a funeral, held last Monday, for the Rev. Dr. James Hal Cone, who had been a
seminary professor of mine. Being my
professor was not his claim to fame, however, Dr. Cone is now being remembered
as the most important American theologian.
In 1970 he changed Christian theology forever with the publication of
his book “A Black Theology of Liberation.”
In this book, Dr. Cone declares, along with the other liberation
theologians of his time who were writing in Latin America, that in fact God does
take sides, and that God can be found, definitively, on the side of the
oppressed. Writing in the United States
in the 60s and 70s, Dr. Cone applied those ideas to his own context of the Jim Crow
south, and declared that Jesus was black.
He didn’t mean that Jesus was literally an African-American, but that
Jesus is always identified with those who are oppressed and marginalized.
God’s love, for Dr.
Cone, could never be separated from God’s justice. And what that means, he wrote, kinda depended
on your vantage point. Listen to what he
says, in his own words: “What does Jesus Christ mean for the oppressed blacks
of the land,” he asks,
The task of explicating the existence of
Jesus Christ for blacks is not easy in a white society that uses Christianity
as an instrument of oppression. White
conservatives and liberals alike present images of a white jesus that are
completely alien to the liberation of the black community. Their Jesus is a mild, easy-going white American
who can afford to mouth the luxuries of ‘love,’ ‘mercy,’ ‘longsuffering,’ and
other white irrelevancies, because he has a multi-billion dollar military force
to protect him from the encroachments of the ghetto and the ‘communist conspiracy.’ But black existence is existence in a hostile
world without the protection of the law.
If Jesus Christ is to have any meaning for us, he must leave the
security of the suburbs by joining blacks in their condition.[i]
It is easy, Dr. Cone is
trying to get us to see, to talk about “love” when we enjoy privileges, as if
it were simply “niceness.” But when your
life is on the line, “love” takes on another meaning altogether. When we think back to the work of the Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., some of his most famous quotes are about love. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light
can do that. Hatred cannot drive out
hatred, only love can do that.” “Love
is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” This man believed in the power of love—of
loving all people—to literally change reality.
But his was not a soft suburban love, it was a love that could not stand
without justice. King’s love did not
look like “niceness,” like submission to unjust or abusive demands. King’s love looked like black young people
sitting at drugstore soda fountains where it was illegal for them to sit. King’s love looked like streets shut down for
marches, it looked like fearlessness in the face of arrest and violence, it
looked like resistance and the refusal to be treated as less than human.
Some of us, in this
congregation, still today face people who are difficult to love in a very
similar way. These are the people who
spew hatred about immigrants or are suspicious because of our skin color. Others of us do not have to deal with that particular
kind of difficulty, but we all know people who are wounded, or afraid, and
because of that act out against us, hurt us, draw us into cycles of violence
and pain, and we do not know how to get away from them, let alone love them. In this
complicated world, where people created in the Good image of God have been
corrupted and broken by the systems of sin, what does it look like, really, to
love?
What was so
revolutionary about Dr. Cone’s book in 1970, “A Black Theology of Liberation,”
was the power it gave to black Christians to assert their right to see
themselves as bearers of the image of Christ—as people not only worthy of God’s
love, but worthy to be loved by themselves.
And certainly this is where any of us must begin as well. If I don’t believe that I am loveable, if I can’t
have compassion for myself, I will never be able to succeed at loving my
neighbor. I’ll absolutely be able to pretend to be nice to people, but that’s
not what love is. And in fact, if I
can’t love myself, I’ll probably, sooner or later, find myself in a cycle where
I accept bad treatment, oppression, even abuse, in order to try to earn some love from somebody. That is not love,
that is sin at work within and among us.
I’m not really sure how
we get to the place of believing that we are worthy of God’s love, that Jesus’
most important commandment really was to love God and then love others as we love ourselves, other than to keep
saying it, over and over, until it begins to leave a trace on our lives. We can all do this, every day, practicing
remembering that God loves us, and created us in God’s own image—remembering
that we are worthy of love. Maybe say it
out loud? I don’t know, but this is
where we’ve got to start.
And from there,
well. There’s prayer of course, that’s
what I’m supposed to tell you, to pray for those people it is difficult for you
to love. There’s compassion and
understanding, right?, empathy. Often
times, the person who communicates with you the most violently is the person
most in pain. Sometimes, from that
perspective, we can have compassion for a difficult person. Dr. Cone, Rev. King, they knew that racism
and segregation in this country, our history of slavery and white supremacy,
were not merely harmful to people of color, but were systems that trapped all
of us into inhuman and traumatic ways of living. Maybe it was that understanding that made it
possible for them to love.
But compassion and
understanding are not enough. After all,
we don’t love our children by letting them do whatever they want. We love them by teaching them the boundaries
of good behavior, by showing them when they’ve done something hurtful or
harmful, by asking them to take responsibility for what they’ve done. I don’t know why we think that ends when we
become adults. We’re all continuing to
figure out what is the right way to act, what is going to hurt someone else,
and what might cause pain. Somehow, when
grownups do harmful things to us, we think we should just be “nice” in
response. This is not love. Jesus’ love for us is abundant, free of
limitation and condition, and it is a
love that, truly encountered, instructs us, forms us, teaches us in the ways of
righteous living. As Jesus has grace for
us when we mess up, so we are called to extend grace to one another as well—but
that doesn’t mean that we just ignore it when someone hurts us. In order to extend grace there must first be
an acknowledgement that something is not right.
We can stop holding grudges or punishing people for mistakes once made
while still holding one another accountable.
How do we really love
difficult people? (Not to mention, how
do we work to stop being the “difficult people” in others’ lives...!) It’s not as easy as pretending to be “nice.” It’s not as straightforward as just doing
whatever someone wants you to and putting up with whatever garbage they throw
at you. There is no easy way to do
it. But I think we can extrapolate the
following guidelines:
What to do when you are
given the opportunity to love a difficult person:
1.
Ask yourself, am I confident in God’s
love for me? Remember that God loves
you, all the time, and created you in God’s own image, worthy of love.
2.
Say a prayer for the person who is
difficult, but follow it up with one twice as long asking for insight and
compassion. What is at the bottom of
their bad behavior? If it is pain or
suffering, can God show you some way to alleviate it?
3.
Tell the truth. When someone does or says something that is
hurtful, tell them. You don’t have to be
overly emotional or layer on the guilt, just say, “you know, when you said or
did that, I felt like this, and that’s not ok with me. I’m telling you because I want to strengthen
this relationship.” You’re giving the
person the chance to break the cycle of violence and pain! If you need practice, tell me! I’m sure I’ve done something that offended or
hurt or bothered you—tell me! I cherish
the opportunity to apologize for pain I’ve caused and learn better habits.
4.
Resist abuse. If your difficult person is in a position of
power over you, and causing you repeated physical, psychological, mental or
emotional harm, you do not have to “just accept it.” Remember how we raise our kids—love does not
mean letting bad behavior go. Ground
yourself in God’s love for you, and give yourself freedom from the wrong belief
that you have to suffer in order to earn someone’s love. You don’t. You may choose to go through some kind of
hardship for someone you love—but that is entirely different from believing you
have to in order to earn their love.
5.
Go back to prayer and build up your
foundation. I don’t know, read the
Bible! Learn to know God’s love more
deeply—do the things that make you feel connected to God more, talk with your
friends about your attempts to love difficult people, ask other people to pray
for you.
Will
we all be one, united in love, free of boundaries and barriers that separate
us? I don’t know. Jesus believed we could be. And that was his last prayer for us on
Earth. So we might as well give it a
try.
[i] Cone,
James H. “A Black Theology of Liberation; Twentieth Anniversary Edition.” (Orbis
Books, 1990), p. 111.
