These are dangerous words and those who attempt to
practice them don’t last very long. Evil doers not resisted are free to do evil
to those who fail to fight back. Giving away coat and cloak, going the extra
mile, giving to everyone who begs or wants to borrow means the giver goes
without. Loving your enemies and praying for those who persecute you means they
win and you lose and no one wants to be a capital L loser. We’d much rather
bring a world of hurt down on the head of those who mess with us and given the
opportunity we utterly destroy our enemies and turn the table on those who
persecute us making them rue the day they were born. We can always fall back on
“saved by grace” and confess like the apostle Paul that the good we would do we
don’t do and the evil we don’t want to do we do, although a more truthful
confession is that loving enemies is the last “good” thing we’d ever want to
do. Look at what being perfect and forgiving those who “know not what they do”
got Jesus. If that’s what perfection leads to I want no part of it and if you
are honest neither do you. So let’s resolve to be less than perfect and keep
the practice of our faith safely inside the four walls of our sanctuaries and
maybe a little charity on the side as long as it doesn't cost too much and the
people who benefit from our generosity are sufficiently grateful. I trust Jesus
will understand, after all he’s got to live by his own words and I’m begging I
can borrow a little slack and get a free pass on loving my enemies and if
that’s a slap in Jesus’ face I’m sorry, but I know he’ll turn the other cheek.
That just sounds wrong doesn't it? It even makes me uncomfortable and I wrote
it, but that’s what we do when we fail to take these words seriously and put
them into practice. We call that failure sin and sin is never more deceptive
than when it is practiced by the pious who insulate the life of faith from the
life in the world, the world that Jesus died to save by a perfection that got
him punished. So what do we do? Maybe perfection is a process and what I do
today is the foundation for what I might do tomorrow and slowly but surely the life
of faith has less to do with an hour on Sunday morning, as important as that is
to many of us, and more to do with using the other waking hours of the days of
our week to practice the perfection of mercy and kindness and love. God knows
there are plenty of opportunities in a week to get it right. And all sarcasm
aside we can always rely on grace without slapping Jesus in the face because Jesus
has a robe of righteousness he’s more than willing to lend us.
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