By: Dana Cassell

Luke 6:27-38

Did you know that there’s an influx of Amish moving into south and central Virginia? In fact, Virginia and West Virginia are the sites of the fastest-growing Amish populations in the country. Farmland, it turns out, is a lot cheaper here than it is around Lancaster, PA, and hundreds of Amish have migrated to Virginia in the last decade.

One of the implications of that influx of people living simply is on traffic: Amish drive horse-drawn buggies, and car drivers are not always alert or aware of the buggies on rural highways. There have been several fatal accidents, with cars rear-ending buggies. Several Amish people have died in these wrecks, and the VA legislature is trying to pass laws requiring more safety features on buggies. It’s not going well. The Amish hold what they understand as God’s law of simplicity above the law of the state. 

The Cumberland County Sheriff found himself at the site of one of these horrific crashes last summer. As he and his deputies were trying to get help for the injured and block off traffic, a bunch of Amish arrived at the scene in their buggies. “We want to talk to the driver of the truck,” they told him, the man who had rear-ended this particular buggy full of children. “You can’t do that,” the Sheriff told them, trying to keep parties separate and get through his order of operations. But he was busy with other, more immediate concerns and when he looked up, the Amish farmers had surrounded his squad car, where the driver of the pick-up truck was sitting in the passenger seat.

The Sheriff ran over, expecting to have to break up a confrontation or pull angry bearded men out of the car, but he was flabbergasted to discover that the men were offering the driver *forgiveness.* They were telling him that the crash wasn’t his fault. 

You’ve probably heard these stories of Amish forgiveness, before. It is grounded both in the commandment from Jesus’ sermon that we heard this morning, to love your enemies, but also in the Amish’s theological conviction that God ordains everything that happens. Later on in the article I read about this issue, one Amish man explains the reluctance to add more safety features this way:

“If somebody should die, maybe we come to the conclusion that God was ready to call them home,” he said. “Maybe it is a test for the people left behind to motivate them to reach out and bring people together.”

“Love your enemies,” Jesus preaches. “Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you.”

This is a really hard practice. Loving our enemies is 500 level spirituality. The Amish have learned to do it out of their conviction that God is in control of everything that happens. But what about those of us who can’t quite get behind that kind of theology?

I’m participating, with a few other folks in Roanoke,  in Mennonite Action’s Winter Peace School this month, a weekly course in organizing to end the genocide in Palestine and confront the Christian Nationalism that’s doing so much damage all around us these days. I appreciate what Mennonite Action is doing because their work is grounded in the same kind of theology and faith commitments that I have. Their approach feels familiar and *right* to me.

But this week, as my small group watched the weekly Zoom meeting together, our conversation turned to how hard it might be to invite or include other people we know into this kind of work that is based on ideas like “love your enemies” and “no one is irredeemable.” Those are theological concepts that we mostly agree with ourselves, but we know that in the current political climate, asking people to act from a place where, in the MA words, “no one is beyond redemption and everyone is deserving of love” is often a non-starter.

It’s a tough sell to get people on board with the idea that Elon Musk is deserving of love. A couple of weeks ago, the MA conversations led me to suggest on social media that we should stop being angry at our neighbors and direct our anger at the unimaginably rich people who have it out for all of us, and the comments made clear that not many folks in my networks are ready to do that.

Loving our enemies is not an intuitive thing. Believing that everyone – really, truly, every. one. – is deserving of love is not necessarily the natural inclination of our human hearts. What a rough thing for Jesus to ask of us!

Maybe, if I believed that God ordained every thing that happens here in the human realm, forgiveness and enemy love would be easier for me to practice. I can see how it would help: if God ordained the current political order and has some secret purpose in it, I could understand its leaders and the people enabling it as incapable of doing anything else, and have compassion for them.

But I don’t believe that. Humans have so much free will, and scripture is filled with situations where the people do exactly the opposite of what God asked or commanded them to do, and then are forced to live with the inevitable consequences of those choices. God doesn’t ordain cruelty or human suffering. That’s not God’s will for Her creation.

So I can’t be like the Amish.

I totally get the reaction of friends who aren’t Anabaptist or Christian or otherwise oriented toward lives built on mercy. The command to love our enemies is irrational. It’s absurd. I completely understand the refusal to even entertain the possibility. I get why my little group of Mennonite Action participants struggles to invite others into the work: because what we’re asking sounds absurd to the regular American.

LOVE enemies? Like perpetrators of genocide and destroyers of democracy and builders of concentration camps and architects of segregation? Love THOSE people? Are you kidding?

But I was raised in this worldview where Jesus’ words are of utmost importance, particularly this little sermon where the command to love our enemies features prominently, and it’s impossible for me to abandon that part of my faith.

So I also can’t be like my friends who reject the premise entirely.

Which leaves me struggling to figure out how to love my enemies. I can’t do it wholesale, and I can’t reject it entirely. I’m stuck here in this weird, gray area where I want to be able to practice it, but I’m not entirely sure where to begin.

I suspect that Jesus knew what a hard command he was issuing. Jesus knew people – Jesus WAS people – so he wouldn’t have been surprised that loving our enemies would feel like a counter-intuitive, even irresponsible thing to do. And I wonder if that is why he kept going in the sermon, why he follows up that astonishing command with an entire paragraph of step-by-step instructions on HOW to do it.

Jesus doesn’t just say “love your enemies,” drop the mic and leave the stage. He keeps going.

It’s almost like the punctuation in this passage should be “love your enemies,” COLON, and then a list of bullet points listed below:

• Do good to those who hate you
• Bless those who curse you
• Pray for those who mistreat you
• Turn the other cheek
• If anybody asks for your cloak, give them your shirt, too
• Give to everyone who asks of you
• Do unto others as you would have them do unto you

That list is still a little intense, isn’t it? But it is a LOT more specific than “love your enemies.” Do good to the people who hate you. Okay, I’m not exactly sure that I’m capable of that, but I can definitely imagine what that would look like. I can see how “we go high” makes sense, here. Do good, even when the person you have in mind is trying to undermine you.

Bless the people who curse you. OOOh, I don’t like this one, but I can see myself doing it. Maybe you’ve seen some spiritually advanced people do it online: a genuine reply of concern for a troll’s well-being after they post something filled with hate, a legitimate engagement with boundaries and blessings on a comment of curses.

Pray for those who mistreat you. I confess that I usually take to the imprecatory psalms for this one, the ones where the psalmist does indeed pray for their enemies but the prayer consists mostly of begging God to judge them and punish them. That’s probably not what Jesus had in mind, but it *technically* meets the requirements, right? And I can also see how with a little more room in my heart, I could pray for a tormentor’s heart to be changed, their power to be limited, their path to be shifted so that they can do less harm.

The one I really like is the last one: the golden rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, Jesus says. But the golden rule is in the context of how we are supposed to treat the people who are abusing and cursing and mistreating us. It’s not just a fairness rule, like it often gets interpreted; it’s asking us to imagine OURSELVES as the perpetrators. It’s asking us to consider how we would like to be treated if and when we have harmed or mistreated or cursed someone else. What would we want for ourselves in that moment?

Probably some grace.

I don’t think Jesus expects us to love our enemies completely, immediately, with zero hesitation and zero ethical qualm. I think Jesus knows how hard this ask is. I think the rest of the passage, the rest of the sermon, is a step-by-step guide, a way to break down a big, hard thing, an entryway into the practice of loving our enemies for those of us who are, like me, stuck somewhere between the skepticism of our friends and the determinism of the Amish.

We could just…try, you know? Attempt it. Start small. Do it reluctantly. Give it a go. See how much we can stand. 

Maybe we don’t start with Netanyahu or Elon. Maybe we start with the driver who cuts us off or the loud talker on the bus. Maybe we start by offering small graces, one at a time, because we know that small graces are what we’d want if we were the loud talker or the distracted driver. Maybe the small graces pile up and maybe we will, someday, find ourselves in the place where grace covers all of it, everything, where our enemies have been loved into submission – no, into mutuality. Maybe it’s possible. I pray that it might be.