A sermon preached by the Reverend Canon Dr. David Anderson at St. Jude’s Church, Oakville, on the Seventh Sunday after Epiphany, February 23, 2025. (Text: Luke 6:27-38)
We live in perplexing times, don’t we? It seems like everywhere I go these days, people are talking about the strange times we are living in. In our nation and province, we are facing unique challenges as we choose new political leaders for the times we are in. In the political and economic realm, we share new concerns that at one time we might have considered unthinkable, as our old friend and ally in that great nation to the south seemingly turns its back on old friends, raises the spectre of annexation, and promises economic hostilities. As if awakening from a dream, we have been motivated to buy Canadian, to wave our red Maple Leaf flags, and to watch a hockey game as though the future of our world depended upon it. (Okay, as Canadians we have always watched hockey games that way.)
These concerns now lay on top of the several anxieties that many people have now been carrying with them for many years. Whether it is the growing threat of the climate crisis, or just the increasing cost of groceries, there seems to be much to perplex us.
All of this raises the question about how we should respond. This is a very human question, and almost as old as time. The beginning of the biblical story tells us that the God whom we worship and serve created the heavens and the earth and created humankind in God’s own image. That story tells us, not only about our identity as God’s creatures, but also our vocation as God’s people in the world. That we were created in God’s image means that we are meant to reflect God’s character: God’s abundant love, creativity, generosity, mercy, forgiveness, and hospitality. These are the things that we were made for.
That same biblical story also tells us that the world became a scary place. Our ancient ancestors left the garden God had prepared for them. One child murdered the other and things went from bad to worse. Instead of spreading out through the earth to live the life God had called them to, our ancestors were eventually found hunkering down in one place. In their hubris and ambition they sought to make a name for themselves, to build a tower that would reach up to heaven. In an act of mercy, God confused their language, so they could no longer plot together, and they were forced to fill the earth. That inability to speak the same language, and the fragmentation of life that results, are apt descriptions of political life in our world today.
Today’s Gospel reading speaks about the alternative way in which we, as followers of Jesus, are called to follow. Jesus begins,
‘But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you. (Luke 6:27-30).
In the passage immediately preceding—which we would have read on our snow day last Sunday—Jesus has spoken to those excluded, reviled, and defamed on his account. He offered them blessings and encouraged them toward joy. Now he encourages all who hear him to live out of that same joy, regardless of what others are directing toward them. When they do, they will be resisting hate, curses, abuse, theft, and judgment by responding to those things with love, mercy, nonviolence, generosity, and forgiveness.
Jesus knows how different the ethic that he commends is from that which is widely acceptable and the normal practice in the world. He asks, “If you love those who love you, what is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them” (Luke 6:32). That is the acceptable ethic, the conventional wisdom: if you are going to love anyone, it should only be those who love you. Anyone can love those who love them. Anyone can lend to someone from whom they expect repayment. That kind of love and lending is a transaction. You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours. It all has a certain logic which we can understand.
‘Transactional,’ is a word that has been widely used to describe a certain president’s new foreign policy. What can you do for me? Foreign aid to some of the poorest nations in the world doesn’t make sense when they can’t do anything in return. Where is the payback? What’s in it for us? Don’t get me wrong, President Trump is not unique in this. It is the way of the world. Jesus recognizes the transactional nature of relationships in his world, and we can see it at work in our own.
A closer look at such transaction-based ethics and behavior reveals the problem: In such a world, what you do dictates what I do. If you love, maybe I will love. But when you hate, you can bet I’m going to hate. I might even ‘boo’ when your national anthem is sung at the opening of a sports event. When we return hate with hate, the original hate has won! It inspires and directs our actions.
Jesus teaches us here that this is not to be. In the reign of God, what we do is not directed by what others do to us. In the reign of God, what we do is a response to the God who alone fills us, the God who, as Jesus says in our reading, “is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked” (v. 35).
Briefly, I just want us to notice three more things about this ethic that Jesus calls us to. First, we should note that Jesus is speaking to all those who are listening to him. He is speaking throughout this Sermon on the Plain to the people gathered as a group. Only in a couple of places, does Jesus address us as individuals, and this may be because cheeks, coats, goods, and specks in eyes are normally possessed by individuals.
The great majority of the Sermon on the Plain, however, including its exhortations to love enemies and show mercy like that of the Most High God, is spoken to the community of those listening to Jesus. This ethic that Jesus is teaching is not meant to be tried alone.
The fact is that some of the behavior Jesus commends could be dangerous if not understood and interpreted in a community discerning together what faithful action looks like in a particular instance. This text is not a directive, for instance, to an individual suffering spousal abuse to bear up under it while the rest of her Christian congregation looks the other way. In the reign of God, we live and act in community, which means, bluntly, that we concern ourselves with each other’s business more than the transaction ethic might suggest we should.
Historical and contemporary expressions of Christianity offer examples. One may think of the ‘classes,’ or ‘bands,’ that were part of John Wesley’s work to reform our Anglican church, or the kind small-group ministry in many churches today. This is why many of our St. Jude’s people gather in fellowship groups and Bible studies to build relationships that support our faithful living. The goal of such groups is to support one another in Christian life and witness. The lifestyle commended by Jesus in the Sermon on the Plain is a life lived in such a community.
This same lifestyle is supported by our various service-oriented groups here at St. Jude’s, which support our vulnerable neighbours. Our groups that cook meals and deliver them, or serve them in homeless shelters, do so in support of the life Jesus calls us to, where we, as Jesus says, “love [others and] do good, … expecting nothing in return” (v. 35). In the Annual Report prepared for our Vestry Meeting later today, you will read about all we do that supports our life together in the ethic of God’s realm. It’s described throughout that report, from front to back—in the ministry and financial reports—and is what it takes for us as the family of God here at St. Jude’s to fulfil our calling as God’s people.
The second point to be made is that Jesus offers his ethic as a way for the community of his followers to resist the tit-for-tat of the present age, not to be passive in the face of it. In her commentary on this passage, Mary Hinkle Shore, says,
When we live the ethic of this Sermon in the face of this world’s violence, we are collectively saying to those who hate, abuse, strike, judge, and condemn, “You are not the boss of me.” We are demonstrating that bad behaviour cannot goad us into reacting in kind. We are resisting the evils we deplore.
In his passion, Jesus will perform the ethic he commends. He resists by praying for the one who will deny him three times. When he speaks on the cross, it is to forgive and to commend his spirit to the merciful Father. He resists violence with self-giving love.
Finally, let us notice that Jesus does not tell us that living in the ethic of God’s realm is without reward. What he does promise is a “good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over” (v. 38b). To be clear, this is not a reference to success in the transactional economy that Jesus calls his followers to resist settling for and living into. Rather, the claim is that our giving is indeed met with God’s giving, but that is because it is in the nature of God to give, not because we have found some secret key that we can use to manipulate God, but because we are participants in God’s realm.
“Not as the world gives do I give to you,” Jesus says elsewhere (John 14:27). We might imagine the pressed-down, shaken-together, running-over measure as the measure of God’s promise to fill us precisely at those times when, by all worldly measures, the life is being drained out of us. Jesus dies on the cross. In resistance and response, the Father raises the Son from the dead. Following this pattern, the Most High continues to fill those who are empty and call to life those as good as dead.
As we share in Holy Eucharist this morning and stretch out our empty hands, let us give thanks again, for the ways that God fills us with God’s own divine life, love, creativity, generosity, mercy, kindness, and welcome. And may our lives overflow with the same. +
