For the next three weeks our sermons are going to focus on what we’re calling “The Way of Love.” This brief series emerged from a good, hard question put to me by someone in our church. “I notice that you end the services by challenging us to go into the world to love and serve all people,” she said, “but there are people who are impossible for me to love. What do I do with that?”
It’s a really good question because we all have tricky people in our lives. A neighbor who got upset about where exactly the property line was and has spent years silently squabbling with you. A relative who talks about you behind your back. Someone you thought was a friend who ghosted you. There are even those we may never meet who are in positions of authority where actions they take hurt you or hurt people you love.
How do we love all people when some people are so hard to love?
I do think it’s our responsibility as Christians — as people trying to learn from Jesus how to live our lives as though he were living them — to learn this way of love that is strong enough to overcome those tricky relationships, that is steely enough to strongly disagree with someone else’s actions and still be able to see them through the lens of love.
Friends, this is not easy, but we’re OK with doing hard things, aren’t we?
And, even before we really dive into this, let me say clearly that none of us will ever perfect this. People will get our goat. We’ll read the paper or see something online that will make steam blow out of our ears. That’s life.
It’s how you harness that and bring that back into the love of Christ that really matters. It’s also a battle all of us will face all of our lives. Making the choice to love — to surrender our wills to the way of the God who loves the world sacrificially — is a hard way. It’s also the way of Jesus.
Over the past couple of years, several of us went through the One Anothering curriculum, and we’ll use some of that group’s insights to guide us in this.
We all approach life with various postures, which is our way of being in the world. What we think and how we behave reinforce those postures. To put it another way, our posture is the combination of our mindset and our habits. To change our posture — our way of being — requires a change in our mindsets and habits.
One of the postures of our culture is contempt. We live in a culture that embraces contempt. Arthur Brooks describes it this way, it’s “a habit of seeing people who disagree with us not as merely incorrect or misguided but as worthless.” Put another way, contempt is “anger paired with disgust.”
Our culture has embraced this posture of contempt. We cancel people. We name-call. We dox. We SWAT. We attack each other online. Our media and culture have done an amazing job forming us into people who easily slide into contempt.
This is not the way of Jesus.
The way of Jesus moves us from contempt to love.
The longer I’ve been in ministry, the more I’ve come to see Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as the summary of how we could be if we really listened to Jesus. Early in it, Jesus asserts that he has come to fulfill the law and the prophets (that is what we call the Old Testament), not to toss it out. What does fulfillment look like? It’s far more extreme than following the letter of the law. “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not murder,’” Jesus begins, quoting one of the Ten Commandments. “But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or a sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the fire of hell.”
In other words, Jesus is addressing contempt. Dallas Willard drives this home to us because “fool” doesn’t sound too horrible these days. For us, it would be any term that would dim the humanity of our neighbor. It’s a sermon, so I’m not going to swear, but it’s like calling someone a freaking idiot without using freaking. Willard writes, “To brand someone ‘fool’ in this biblical sense was a violation of the soul so devastating, of such great harm, that, as Jesus saw, it would be like consigning the offender to the smoldering garbage dump of existence, gehenna,” rendered “hell” in our passage.
Contempt or hatred for others reveals the very presence of the smoldering garbage dump of existence given real estate in our own hearts. It’s certainly revealed all over our culture and politics, where our leaders hurl insults at each other, in a world of “Dumacrats” and “Republi-can’ts.”
It’s sick. It’s gross. It’s a dying and diseased way to be, so let’s not conform to the pattern of this world.
Let’s renew our minds and follow Jesus in how we make this shift from contempt to love. It’s good for our souls, and frankly, it’s a needed healing balm for our community and country. And shame on us for indulging in those little dopamine hits that feel so good when we find someone else denigrated. We have to be better.
So, how do make this shift from contempt to love? We do it by seeking Jesus and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, striving to live his way in the world. We do this quietly and interpersonally, so beware of influencers who try to show you what is and is not Christian. Seeking fame and celebrity is another sickness in our culture.
In Philippians 2, we see this pattern of setting aside self-interest and turning towards others. Paul writes, “Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” Paul goes on to outline how Jesus — who is God — humbled himself. He set aside all he already had out of great love for a world that did not love him back. He set aside glory and took on the world’s hatred and violence on the cross.
Friends, it may feel good to sass back or to say cutting things to those who have hurt us, but that’s not the way of Jesus. Jesus’ way loves and serves even his enemies. Jesus’ way sees through the grossness of someone else’s words and actions and beholds the image of God buried deep down there. Jesus’ way does the hard work of loving those who offer contempt so that this love might be transformative to them too. It also guards us from becoming people guided by contempt.
The way of Jesus is beautifully overwhelming, and the words that describe it in the New Testament challenge us to a way of life that makes all of our other ambitions pale in comparison. Our other text from 2 Corinthians continues in that vein. “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view….If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!…[Christ] has given us the ministry of reconciliation, so we are ambassadors for Christ.”
Reconciliation means healing what is broken. In our culture, the way we see one another is broken. We’ve been trained to see others through the eyes of contempt. We boil down someone else’s complexities to something we can manage to confine to a box of “for me” or “against me.” To heal what is broken, we need to learn a new way of seeing one another.
The move from contempt to love means doing the work of beholding the other — your neighbor, your family, the person you’ve written off, the person you’re still mad at after all these years. Beholding is a special kind of seeing. It goes beyond skin deep. It is seeing that starts from the place of love, or in the words of the 12th century Scottish theologian, Richard of Saint Victor, “Where there is love, there is seeing.”
This is not some saccharine sentiment I’m trying to pass along to you. It’s the way of Jesus, who beheld every person he encountered through the eyes of love and offered them what they truly needed, whether it was welcome, forgiveness, or a hard word trying to set their life in a better direction.
Put in a clearer way by G. K. Chesterton, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”
I know this is asking a lot of you, but I’d love to see us try this for real. If not us, then who? Why can’t we be the ones who transform our community? Change begins with us.
That’s been the foundation of declaring Grand Haven to be Kind Haven this summer. It’s radical to be kind in our culture of contempt. I’m glad that some now know that we believe that’s true. And even as we wrap up this Kind Haven season, I pray that what has begun in small ways in your life will continue to grow and bear fruit. I know I may be putting my sign away for awhile, but I’ve got a new sense of purpose in how I approach this community. It’s radical to be kind. It’s radical to behold my neighbor and love them as I love myself.
To close I want to ask you to do something right here in worship. I know this is not comfortable for everyone, so I ask your grace and courage in trying this. To be kind and loving, we need to be the kind of community that can lean on each other in our joys and sorrows. The theme of today’s picnic is “you are home.” To feel at home, you have to feel safe and welcome. You have to feel wanted and known.
So, I’d like you to find a couple of people in the seats around you. If you’re seated solely next to your family, please shift around a little bit. Make groups of two, three, or four. (No one is counting.) Introduce yourselves, since, of course, you’ve found someone you don’t know well yet. Then share something that was great about your summer. It could be something connected to Kind Haven or something entirely different. But then also share something you’d like prayer for. It could be anything. When you’ve all shared, I’d like you to pray for one another. Again, I recognize this is massively uncomfortable for some, but knowing each other and learning to pray for one another is vital for our growth as a Christian community. So, here’s a prayer guide if you need it.
Dear God,
Thank you for [name]. I’m glad that they [great thing this summer]. I pray for you to be at work in [prayer request].
In Jesus’ name, Amen.