Readings for the Day:
Sermon:
There's a movie series that has come out in recent years that has gained some popularity. If you're familiar with it, it's probably not from the main character, though. It's probably from his little yellow helpers with their squeaky voices and pill shaped bodies. Some of them have one eye, some two. And they all wear blue overalls and safety goggles.
If you haven't figured it out yet, I mean the movie Despicable Me. And instead of focusing on the Minion characters, I do want to talk about the main character, Gru.
Gru, played by Steve Carrell, is a villain. A mad scientist. The kind that comes up with new inventions to try and take over the world.
To pull off one of his plans, he discovers 3 little girls who can get into anywhere because they are selling Girl Scout cookies. He decides that for his plan to work, he needs to adopt these girls and use them for his evil schemes.
Gru doesn't want much else to do with these girls. He just wants to use them for his plans and then get rid of them. But these girls are very grateful to him. They haven't had anyone who cared enough to adopt them. And so they try to show how much they appreciate what he has done for them. They show him they love him. They show him they care.
Eventually, their love has an affect on Gru. He finds that he has come to care about these girls. And it changes his life. He no longer wants to be a villain. So he gives up scheming and decides to try on being a father to these 3 girls.
Love can have a powerful affect on people. It can change us from being vile and vicious. It can change us from being villains to being the good guys we really all want to be.
And that's a hard thing for us to remember. That people that are villains to us can slowly become friends. It's often easier for us to focus on just caring for the people that we care and love for already. After all, aren't they the ones who deserve our affection?
In the Gospel today, Jesus notes how much easier it is to love those who know and care for us. How much easier it is to love our neighbor. But as we saw last week, Jesus calls to a higher standard in His Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. He calls us not to just follow the letter of the law, but to go deeper. To look at what our motivations are. To go for the further, often harder step and let the law penetrate to our hearts. To our very being.
And this week, Jesus gives us one of the most difficult tasks of all. The task of loving not just our loved ones but our enemies as well. The ones who hate us. The ones who work against us.
And there are two main reasons for us to follow Jesus' call to us. Jesus says "pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven." We are children in this sense because we are following the example of Jesus.
Because Jesus was persecuted. He came down to try to show us the way. He came down to try to help reconcile us to God. And as we see repeatedly in Scripture, the very people who should be on Jesus' side are against Him. The very people who should've been glad to see Him are the ones who orchestrated His death.
And yet even in the midst of persecution and torture, even from the depths of despair and the cross, Jesus says "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Jesus calls us to a difficult task. But it isn't one that He Himself shies away from. It is one that He Himself gives us the example of how we are to live out this task. Jesus is, in essence, calling us to be Christ-like.
And in the call to be Christ-like, we see the second reason to follow Jesus' example to love all, even our enemies. And it is in the very reason we are here today.
Because you are all here, presumably, because your lives have been transformed by Christ Jesus coming into your hearts, or at the very least you are seeking that kind of transformation in your lives. Because when we experience love from someone, especially from someone we have reviled or hated, it causes us to pause. And wonder. And question our ways.
And that is what Jesus does with us. We have gone against God, in one way or another in our lives, and followed our own ways. And still, He has loved us. He has loved us to the point that He was willing to come down as Jesus and die on the cross to reconcile us to Him.
We can't but look at that kind of love with anything but amazement. Amazement that for all our flaws, Jesus would still love us enough to die for us. And when we do pause to wonder at that love, we find that it seeps into our very being. And it causes us to want to share that love and that message. And so Jesus' love is able to bring us back to love God with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind. And as a result, that love also transforms us to more fully love our neighbor, and even our enemy, as ourself.
Loving our enemies is hard. It is not an easy thing for any of us to do. It is often not something that we want to do.
But that is what we see Jesus do. We see Him love and care for us, even though we revile Him and put Him on the cross. Even in the midst of all that we do, we see Jesus still loving us and willing to die for us.
That kind of love is infectious. It causes us to pause and turn back around to follow the One who would give us such love, even when we don't deserve it. And it is a call to us to turn around, and in turn infect others, even though they may hate us, with the same love that Jesus shows us.