I have spent this time of lock-down listening to the news with one ear and to scripture passages with the other ear, trying to hear and speak a Word that’s not just more of the same words we keep hearing over and over again.
Of course, I have my political opinions, people I admire and people I get disgusted with, people I love and people I tend to hate if I don’t watch out. As we get more and more polarized among ourselves, our world becomes more and more a division between the good ones and the evil ones, between Good, which is better than just good, and Evil, which is a lot worse than just bad or stupid.
My temptation is to imagine that it’s a struggle between my good and their (your?) evil, and I’m betting that it’s your temptation, too. So, if we aren’t going to just add to the evil out there, there has to be an inner struggle, a spiritual struggle between the good in us and our own evil possibilities
I’ve been haunted by this statement by the philosopher A.N. Whitehead: “It is the power of evil to cause the good to degrade itself.” To understand it fully, I’ve had to add the words, “fighting evil.” From meditating on this understanding of how evil works in us, it’s gotten clearer to me how possible it is for us to be right “wrongly,” to do good badly. The heating up of our righteous hatred convinces me of how important it is for us to think about this.
I listened again to Jesus’ commandment that we should love our enemies, and realized that he isn’t just telling us to be really, really nice, but that he’s revealing the spiritual discipline required for our rightness to be really right, for our goodness to really do good.
But this commandment is not just a rule to be followed, because it’s rooted in the reality of how we are loved by God and how it is for God to love us. If God didn’t love God’s enemies, God wouldn’t love us! This is the complicated reality of the divine love that the prophets wrestled with so that they could truly be prophets. and that we have wrestle with if we are to be truly prophetic in our own complex and difficult time.
The sin we need to talk about in this time of polarization, is the sin of our righteousness, which of course is our self-righteousness, the pleasure we take in the sinfulness we see in our political enemies, the hope we feel that it will somehow bring them down, or that they’ll get COVID (my heart first leapt and then sank in shame for the leaping at the news of the President’s diagnosis), and the realization that I will need to lead my congregation in sincere prayer for his and our, well being), the pleasure we take in the transformation of our critique into derision, not noticing that our derision degrades us more than it does them.
So it’s important that we hear this from the prophet, Ezekiel 2: “And you, mortal, say to your people, The righteousness of the righteous shall not save them when they transgress; and as for the wickedness of the wicked, it shall not make them stumble when they turn from their wickedness; and the righteous shall not be able to live by their righteousness when they sin.”
We see in this passage the reality that, whether we are righteous or whether we are wicked, God holds us all in his love, which is our only hope. This is why we say each week in our church after Confession that “we are judged by One who loves us.”
And it’s why, when Peter asked how many times he should forgive the one who sinned against him, Jesus answered, “Seventy times seven times.” That’s because we must be for our enemies as God is for them and for us, and then go out to fight them.
The Montague Center Congregational church, Trinitarian, is a United Church of Christ congregation located on the green in Montague Center. It was founded in 1751, a year before the town was founded. It is a thriving congregation with 65 members. They are currently holding public worship at 10 a.m. on Sundays, masked and safely distanced, hearing the hymns but not singing them. They also are continuing to worship via email.