Transforming Love

Scripture:        Genesis 45:3-11, 15                 Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40

I Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50              Luke 6:27-38

Today’s Gospel reading gives us some of the most difficult of Jesus’ teachings:  to not only refuse to retaliate when someone hurts us, but to love that person and pray for them and even do good to them – to be willing to lend money without expectation of return – and to refuse to judge others.   These are the teachings that have caused many to walk away from Jesus, saying, “This would make me too weak and vulnerable.  People will take advantage of me.  They’ll treat me like a doormat.”

Jesus is not asking us to be doormats – and we can know this, because Jesus himself was not a doormat.  Jesus helped many people, but it was of his own will, not because of the coercion of others. 

We may ask – what is the purpose of these teachings of Jesus?  Why would he ask this of his disciples – and why does he ask this of us? What’s the point? 

Anger is a universal fact of human life.  Everybody without exception gets angry at one thing or another.  We  may be angry because someone directly attacked us or took advantage of us.  Or we may be angry with the many injustices of society – seeing people sleeping under bridges, for example, may make us angry.  Or we may not be able to pin down any particular reason for our anger – maybe anger from a number of different causes has been building up inside us, and at some point we can’t hold it in any longer. 

Anger, in and of itself, is not a bad thing.  In fact, in and of itself, anger is not bad or good, it just is.   It’s a sign that something is not right, in the world around us, or in the interior world we carry with us, or both.  Physical pain is a useful if unpleasant sign of illness or injury.  If we didn’t feel physical pain, we might walk around with infected teeth and infected limbs or heart disease or any number of life-threatening conditions, oblivious to the threat facing us.  So pain is like the body’s fire alarm or smoke detector, warning us of imminent danger.  Anger serves a similar “fire alarm” function as a sign of mental or emotional or spiritual illness or injury or threat.  And in the most primal part of our minds are instinctive responses to anger and pain – fight or flight.  These instincts kept our long-ago ancestors alive when chased by wild beasts or hostile tribes.  But they are not always useful in the world we live in, as they were not always useful in the world of Jesus’ day.

So I don’t believe Jesus was telling his disciples – or telling us – that we are never allowed to be angry.  To be incapable of anger would render us not divine, but would turn us into something less than human – the Old Testament prophets spoke of God’s anger at Israel over and over again, so even God gets angry.  By contrast, we have no way to measure whether plants and amoebas become angry. The point of Jesus’ teaching, then, is not about denying the existence of anger, but rather of telling us what to do with our anger, or more broadly with other forms of emotional pain, such as fear, or guilt – and that we may need to find ways to overcome our instincts to fight or flee from outside threats.

Anger exists in everyone, and like physical energy, anger won’t stay still in one place – inevitably it will go somewhere.  Kind of like the flow of water, which civil engineers take lots of courses to learn how to redirect around homes and roads or bridges or such.  Now, I’m not a civil engineer, nor do I play one on TV, but a close friend who works as a draftsman for PennDot tells me that dealing with water is one of his department’s main challenges.  He tells me that the civil engineers he works for don’t try to stop the flow of water, because it’s not possible to stop the flow of water entirely.  Water inevitably will go somewhere, eventually either to the sea or by evaporation into the atmosphere or under constant cold temperature into ice masses.  What civil engineers can do is block the water in certain directions and create channels in different directions, so that it flows in a direction that minimizes destruction.  And anger is like that – it inevitably will go somewhere, but we can direct it in destructive or constructive ways.  Or, perhaps, anger is more like the flow of electricity, which in its natural form such as lightning can be incredibly destructive, but which if it is generated under controlled conditions, channeled, and harnessed, will bless our lives in countless ways.

So Jesus was asking his followers to redirect their anger in ways that were beneficial or at least neutral rather than destructive.  The specific examples he gives – turning the other cheek, giving one’s shirt if asked for one’s cloak – in that culture could have functioned as forms of non-violent resistance, to embarrass the offender into reconsidering his actions.  For example, giving one’s shirt and one’s cloak would have left a person naked, perhaps embarrassing and shaming the person who took the cloak.  Backhanding someone across one side of the face was how persons of status treated slaves and others they considered underlings; to turn the other cheek would render a back of the hand slap less effective.  The specifics Jesus mentions may not be as important as the imperative to respond nonviolently if at all possible – and if possible creatively, seeking some way to call the offender back to their own humanity. 

I spoke of anger and other painful emotions – which I’ll put under the general heading of mental, emotional and spiritual pain – as a kind of energy, similar to electricity.  And before I go any further, I’ll stipulate that I’m also not an electrician, nor do I play one on TV – in fact, if you want an electrician, talk to Tim, not to me.  But from a layperson’s point of view:  Lightning in the atmosphere, if it strikes a building or a tree in a forest where there has been drought, can cause a fire that can quickly turn the building to rubble and a forest to ashes.  A very wise man named Benjamin Franklin got the idea of equipping buildings with lightning rods that channel the energy from lightning strikes in ways that keep the building intact.  Similarly, electricity in the wires of a building can follow the wiring and provide heat or light or any number of other wonderful things.  But if it is beyond the capacity of the wiring, it will create heat that can potentially burn down a building.  To prevent that, buildings are equipped with fuses and circuit breakers to cut off the overflow of electricity before it can cause harm.  A few weeks ago, when our oil burner wasn’t working and the temperature in our social hall was 42 degrees and falling, I panicked at the possibility of the temperature in the building dropping so low that the pipes might freeze.  And so I picked up three space heaters, and they were all plugged in to various outlets around the social hall.  And it wasn’t long before we discovered that the wiring in our church can’t handle three space heaters at one time.  One of the circuit breakers tripped, preventing our aging wiring from overheating.  Similarly, the transformers that are on electrical poles can, among other things step down the amount of electricity from the very strong currents in the electrical lines to the lower energy demands of light bulbs, refrigerators, air conditioners, and countless other labor-saving devices in our homes.

Franciscan priest Richard Rohr teaches that pain – emotional pain, spiritual pain – unless it is transformed, it will inevitably be transmitted.  That is to say, unless we find some other way to channel our pain, we will pass it on to others – perhaps back to the person who hurt us, or perhaps to some person we see as weaker than us – like the old cartoon of the boss who chews out his flunkee who then goes home and screams at his wife, who yells at her kid, who kicks the dog.  Pain, in the form of broken relationships, addictions, abuse, can be passed down through generations of a family, until someone finds it within themselves to say “No more!” and break the cycle of pain.   Jesus challenged his disciples – and challenges us – to act, not as transmitters, but as circuit breakers and transformers, ending the cycle of pain or channeling or transforming the pain into something harmless or even beneficial.  God’s love becomes the transformer that converts pain into blessing – if we let it.

What does this look like?  Joseph in our Old Testament reading is one example.  Joseph’s brothers, jealous that their father Jacob favored Joseph over his other brothers, threw him down a well, first intending that he die, and later that he be sold as a slave in Egypt.   They took their anger out on their brother Joseph.  Joseph goes through various adventures and eventually becomes a high official in Egypt, second only to Pharoah himself.   Later, there was a famine where Jacob and Joseph’s brothers lived, and they heard that there was grain in Egypt.  What they didn’t know was that it was Joseph who was in charge of the grain, who indeed had prepared for famine by storing enough grain to last for the seven years of the drought.  They came to Egypt seeking grain, and while Joseph toyed with them a bit, he eventually revealed himself to his brothers and saved his family from starvation.  He could just as easily held onto his anger and refused assistance to his brothers.  But Joseph saw God’s hand even in the actions of his brothers.  Later, after his father Jacob’s death, his brothers feared that Joseph might be holding a grudge, but Joseph reassured them: “What you meant for evil, God meant for good.” 

Since Black History month is drawing near to a close, we might also mention the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his followers who channeled their anger, responding with love to the hate and violence they experienced.  In a 1966 speech, just two years from the end of his life, King spoke these words about his program of nonviolent resistance:

“Somehow, we’ve lived with it at its best and been able to look into the face of our most violent opponent and say we will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Threaten our children and bomb our churches and our homes and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and beat us and leave us half dead and we will still love you. But be assured we will wear you down with all the lashings that we suffer. One day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process. And our victory will be a double victory.”

Finally, of course, we have the example of our Savior who experienced the full gamut of human emotion, including anger, to the point in one case of turning over tables and whipping money changers as they fled from the Temple.  But as Christians we believe that through his ministry, and on the cross, Jesus took upon himself all the sin, all the brokenness, all the basic ugliness and meanness of humanity, and responded with love.  In words from I Peter 2:23:    “When he was reviled, he reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judges righteously.”  Jesus not only spoke words about loving one’s enemies, he lived them.  This is the love that God has for us.  This is the love God asks of us for others.

In a few moments we’ll sing those famous words, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.  I once was lost but now am found, was blind, but now I see.”  This is the grace that God has shown us.  This is the grace God desires from us for others.  May we who are receivers of God’s grace be givers as well.  Amen.