Begin by Praying for Your Enemies
Dear Friends,
This Sunday in church, we will be hearing some of Jesus’ most challenging teachings from his “Sermon on the Plain” in the Gospel of Luke.
“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” And again, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.”
No matter how spiritually evolved or loving you are, these words of Jesus are just plain hard to live into or live up to. Especially three years into a pandemic within a society that is splintered over everything from mask wearing, to reproductive rights, to what our children should be taught in school. As Jennifer Finney wrote in a recent New York Times article, “rudeness is on the rise”…whether in rush hour traffic, waiting rooms in hospitals, or lines in restaurants, “the guardrails of civility are gone, and it comes from both sides of our ideologically divided society.”
The point is, it’s getting even harder to “show the love” to people who don’t think are act like we want them to.
Some of you know that during our Wednesday evening programming, we have been reading reflections on community by Henri Nouwen and it is to him that I have turned this week for some fundamentals on forgiveness, especially for those whom we consider our “enemies.”
“If you wish to learn the love of God, you have to begin by praying for your enemies. That’s not as easy as it may sound. Prayers for people entail wanting to best for them, and that’s far from easy if it has to do with …someone who has spoken ill of you, a “friend” who gets you to do all those awkward little chores for him, or a colleague who’s trying her best to get your job. But each time you pray, really pray, for your enemies, you’ll notice that your heart is being made new. Within your payer you quickly discover that your enemies are in fact your fellow human beings loved by God just as much as yourself. The result is that the walls you’ve thrown up between “him and me,” “us and them,” “ours and theirs” disappear. Your heart grows deeper and broader and opens up more and more to all the human beings with whom God has peopled the earth.
I find it difficult to conceive of a more concrete way to love than by praying for one’s enemies. It makes you conscious of the hard fact that, in God’s eyes, you’re no more and no less worthy of being loved than any other person, and it creates an awareness of profound solidarity with all other human beings. It creates in you a world-embracing compassion and provides you in increasing measure with a heart free of the compulsive urge to coercion and violence. And you’ll be delighted to discover that you can no longer remain angry with people for whom you’ve really and truly prayed. You will find that you start speaking differently to them or about them, and that you’re actually willing to do well to those who’ve offended you in some way.”*
In the Love of Christ,
Amelie+
* Henri Nouwen, “Praying for Our Enemies” in The Only Necessary Thing (New York: The Crossroad Publishing company, 1999), 154.
