Love Your Enemies

On Sunday nights our community is working its way through the Gospel of Luke. The last few weeks we have been wrestling with Luke 6, the second half of the chapter, the red letter part. It contains the beatitudes and woes. It also contains this,

But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil.

Today we quote two few verses down, "Judge not, and you will not be judged..." However, we skip the verse above. We don't like it. Not even a little bit.

Thankfully, my friends comprise people who make up all aspects of the spectrum in our culture. I have gay friends and straight friends. I have conservative friends and liberal friends. I have Christian friends and non-Christian friends. My friends cross every color barrier.

As you can imagine my Facebook and Twitter feeds can be a little interesting. The views that are expressed by my friends are about as divergent as you can get. One post will declare the President is a Muslim Anti-Christ and the next will declare the Republican party as Nazis.

One thing I notice is the anger and hatred that both have for the other, yet espousing how people ought love one another and be nice. The caveat by both: As long as you agree with me. 

I am amazed by the hatred and lack of respect spewed out. There are so many half-truths or lies that roll through my social media feeds. Yet, when I sit down with these people they are not hateful or mean. But the words that are posted on their social media site are.

We have lost this sense of loving our enemies. In so doing we are losing our humanity. We are unable to separate our ideas from our person-hood. Our person-hood is lost in our ideas and therefore when our ideas are challenged it is a challenge to our very being.

Sadly, we don't love though. We don't extend love to those who are different from us, at least not in the public spectrum. We return hate with hate and evil with evil. When we do, we lose ourselves a little bit in the process.

I challenge you to look at your Facebook or Twitter stream and ask yourself: If my opponent wrote this about me, would I be angry? Before you post that pejorative and incendiary article or comment, ask yourself: If my opponent did this, how would I respond?

Let us move away from snark, anger, meanness, and hate. Maybe, just maybe, we could love our enemies for a bit and the world just might change.