Love to the Second Power (Love squared)

Love to the Second Power   (Love squared)

Good Morning!  I am so very grateful to be preaching on Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday.  The title of my sermon is “Love to the Second Power.”  My text is Matthew 5:43-48; 7:3-5.  I will be using as primary resources for my sermon Dr. King’s sermon on Matthew 5:43-44, “Loving Your Enemies” and John Wesley’s sermon on Mark 1:15, “The Repentance of Believers.”

Dr. King made it a practice of preaching on the theme of “Loving Your Enemies” at least three times a year in every church he served.  So I want to honor this great man of God today by preaching on that theme.  Because I, like Dr. King believe that loving your enemies is at the heart of Jesus’ life, and teachings; and that God in Christ empowers us for this life of love for all the world. So to quote Dr. King, “Let me turn your attention to the subject of loving your enemies.”

Matthew 5: 43-45

“You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbors and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”

Loving your enemies (love squared) is a love so great that it not only loves those that love you, look like you, and think like you; but goes beyond that to love the enemy. Love to the second power.  Dr. King gives us a clear and focused framework of the how and why of this great work of the love of God in our lives in his sermon, “Loving your enemies.”  He focuses first on the practical question of how do you love your enemies?  Then on the theoretical question of why do we love our enemies?

Dr. King surprises us in his first point on how to love your enemies by directing us to focus on ourselves.  He learns this from Jesus, who teaches us that we need to get the log out of our own eye before we worry about the spec in our neighbor’s eye. Dr. King points out that there might be something in us, deep down that is prompting the enemy relationship.  This looking at ourselves first is what John Wesley talks about in his sermon, “The Repentance of Believers.”

Wesley speaks of repentance in this sense as a kind of self-knowledge, the knowing ourselves as sinners even though we also know ourselves as children of God.  King and Wesley want us to have a conviction of the sin that remains in our heart; feelings of dislike so strong that may be causing us to discriminate against others, deep feelings of anger and ill will, feelings that we have a need to make others suffer or the desire to take action to return an injury or an offense against us with injury, returning evil for evil.

King and Wesley also know that we have the power of God in Christ Jesus to overcome the world, the devil, and our own evil nature, that we can be human beings free to love as confident children of God. 

That is why Dr. King’s first point in the how to love our enemy is to take a good look at ourselves.  So that under the umbrella of the cross, without casting away our confidence as children of God, under the merits of the cross and resurrection of Jesus to see if there is any hate, bitterness, malice, resentment or revenge that is still clinging to our thoughts, words or actions, that we might not even be aware of; so that through the mighty power of God, through the blood of the eternal covenant we might be cleansed of these sources of enmity by faith in the operation of God they might be taken out by the root, so that we have the power of love squared to meet every situation of life with an abounding love as children of our Father in heaven!

The second thing Dr. King teaches us about how to love our enemy is to discover the element of good in your enemy and focus your attention there.

I found these teachings of Dr. King about how to love your enemy to be invaluable in my ministry on the streets in downtown Birmingham as pastor and pastor emeritus of Church of the Reconciler.  I remember one day this guy came in to our storefront when we were located on 18^th Street and announced to all in a loud voice, “I am the devil!”  I walked up to him and said in a kind voice, “No your not, you are a human being just like me, created in the image and likeness of God.”  I extended an open hand for him to shake and said, “My name is Lawton, what is yours?”  He shaked my hand, told me his name and I said, “Come on in and have a cup of coffee and we will talk about what is hurting you.”

Human beings participate in a lot of bad behavior and I have done my share of that;  but every human being is created good and Dr. King reminds us that we are called to focus our attention there.  Dr. C.T. Vivian, one of the great teachers and leaders of the Civil Rights Movement taught us not to categorize, generalize and discriminate because as Dr. King says, “ in the best of us there is some evil and in the worst of us there is some good.”

Very infrequently at the Reconciler we would have an act of violence break out into a fight.  One day that happened and my wife Nancy and Mrs. Vinnie Paulk, who is now in the more immediate presence of God, were standing nearby.  Mrs. Vinnie Paulk was a very powerful, loving, spiritually alive Black woman who helped us work toward an inclusive congregation at the McCoy United Methodist Church before it closed and was a founding member of the Church of the Reconciler.  As the fight broke out that day, Nancy said, “We need to pray!”  Mrs. Vinnie said, “No we don’t need to pray, we need to get out of here!”  Sometimes the best that love can do is to walk or run away to keep from getting hurt or hurting somebody else and then call the God ordained authorities to restrain the evil until a more appropriate time to focus on the good for transformation.

The third thing Dr. King taught us about the practical how of loving your enemy is that when the opportunity presents it’s self for you to defeat your enemy you must not do it. 

Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners not to kill them.  As the scripture says he could have called ten thousand angels and destroyed all humanity, instead he bore our sins on the cross for our salvation.  John Wesley defined love this way:  Love is an inflamed passionate desire to remove evil, misery and suffering from; and to procure every possible good, physical, mental and spiritual for every person born of a woman, even your enemy.  Love saves it does not destroy!

You may have heard the old Methodist Church story about the church that continued to have appointed to their congregation hell fire and damnation preachers.  They complained and complained to the District Superintendent.  They became so intense in there complaining that the Superintendent got fed up with it.  He said to himself, “I will fix them.” So he appointed the most intense hell fire and damnation preacher he knew of in the Annual Conference to their church the next year.   After the first Sunday the Superintendent didn’t hear anything, months went by and no word from the Pastor Parish Relations Committee.  The next year the Superintendent couldn’t stand it any longer so he called up the chair of the PPR Committee and said “How are things going? “Ok.”  “Is the new preacher preaching hell fire and damnation?” Yes, but he is not like the others, he preaches hell fire and damnation in hopes that we won’t go to hell, The others wanted us to go to hell!”  In loving our enemy all the means we use are for their salvation not their destruction.

 

For the remaining few minutes let’s move from the practical how to love our enemies to the theoretical why of loving our enemies.  Why should we love our enemies?

First, hate for hate only intensives the existence of evil in the universe.  We must see that force begets force, hate begets hate, and toughness begets toughness.  This leads to a descending spiral, ultimately ending in the destruction for all and everybody.  Dr. King tells us that somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and evil in the universe.  You can do this by love.  The strong person is the person who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil.  This was the very center of Jesus’ thinking and doing, especially in the cross.  Dr. King’s definition of love came out of this way of thinking.  He defined love as a healing, reconciling, understanding goodwill that works and suffers for life for all people.

I can remember that when the Reconciler first began, when members of the homeless community would act out in disruptive behavior, I was quick to call the police and have them arrested.  I soon discovered however that I would have them arrested one morning and guess where they were the next morning?  They were right back on my door step, angrier than before, more disrespectful, more hateful than ever before.  So I decided that I had better try to understand these guys instead of escalating the hate.  So we started the Coalition of the Homeless and sat around a table with a cup of coffee to discover why they were homeless and what kept them homeless.  We discovered that at the root of their homelessness was some kind of death experience, the death of a parent, the death of a spouse, the death of a child, the loss of a job, illness, a divorce.  We began to build a community to address the grief and loss, cutting of the chain of hate.  We discovered that love can do this.

 

The next reason you should love your enemies, Dr. King taught was that hate distorts the personality of the hater.  We usually think about what hate does to the individual hated, or the individuals hated, or the groups hated.  But hate is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates.  Hate blinds the person who hates.  The center of objectivity is lost and the true becomes false and the false becomes true.  Hate is a dislike so strong that it demands irrational action that segregates, punishes, removes or kills the hated.  This hate destroys the hater as well as the hated.

 

There was an agency downtown near the Reconciler that held such hatred for the homeless.  On Sunday they would refuse to allow anyone attending the Reconciler to use their parking lot.  The amazing thing was that it was the very people they wanted downtown, the middle and upper middle class people from Trinity United Methodist Church, Vestavia Hills United Methodist Church, Canterbury United Methodist Church and other suburban congregations who were run off from their parking lot and given a bad taste of downtown.  It was not the homeless who were affected, but the agency’s own image that was diminished in the eyes of those they hoped would come downtown.

Another business owner, that hated the homeless, had a business that was located near the Reconciler who called the police to have me arrested for feeding and clothing the homeless.  What he couldn’t see was the number of offensive panhandling encounters and petty thefts we prevented by feeding and clothing the homeless and giving them a place to rest off of the street.  I tried to convince him to help me to get the city of Birmingham to implement their Ten Year Plan to Prevent and End Chronic Homelessness, but he like the majority of downtown business leaders were so blinded by their haterd of the homeless that they could not see or act on the truth that it cost less to put a chronic homeless person in permanent supportive housing than to keep them on the street.

 

The final reason Dr. King says, “Love your Enemies” is that love has with in it a redemptive power.  If you love your enemies you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption.  There is something about love that builds up and is creative.  We discovered this truth at the Reconciler that love expressed in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich can transform a raging lion into a peaceful lamb.

When we would open the big green door the first thing we would do, would be to make all the coffee you wanted and make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for an hour before serving a big breakfast because the redemptive power of love expressed in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich would lead an addicted, suffering, homeless person to the place where they would seek recovery, work and home.

Love is redemptive, it has with in it the power to take this old world and make of it a new world.  God so loved the world, the beloved enemy, that he gave His only Son that through him the world might be saved.  God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but that through Him the world might be saved.

So may we live life constantly turning our attention to the subject of loving our enemies!

 

Preached at Central Park United Methodist Mission

January 23, 2013     

R. Lawton Higgs, Sr.