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Forgive and
be free
Reflections on the
lessons for the Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany
18 February 2001
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
Genesis 45:3-11,21-28 / Psalm
37:3-10
1 Corinthians 15:35-38,42-50 / Luke 6:27-38
Epiphany 7, Year C 18 February 2001 Luke 6:27-38 Our Saviour
I started working on this week's lessons on Wednesday of last week. Valentine's Day. And stories about loving your worst enemies. I had a pretty good time thinking up Hallmark cards based on the lessons, lacy, hearts-and-flowers things with verses like "If you love someone who loves you back, where's the credit in that for you?" and "Happy Valentine's Day to a terrific brother who sold me into slavery."
It'll never catch on. Because the kind of love the Bible talks about isn't the same kind that sells red-foiled, heart-shaped boxes of candy or double-priced roses. Valentine's Day focuses on a very instinctual and understandable kind of love. Most people know a little something about the original Valentine. Fewer -- and I was among those who didn't know this -- realize that there are two Valentines that the church finally jammed together and set up on the same holy day.
Which is the patron saint of romantic love? Take your choice. One Valentine, was a priest in Rome who was martyred on the Flamian Way during the persecution under Claudius II in 269 or so, on February 14. Some few details are known of him. Tradition has it he was badly beaten, and although he restored the sight of a jailer's blind daughter (or maybe because he did so?) he was beheaded. Legend says his last letter from the slammer to a pal -- not a girlfriend -- was signed, "from your Valentine."
The other Valentine, a bishop from the town of Terni in Italy, was martyred a few years later in the same persecution. And that's all anyone seems to know about him. The two Valentines were assigned this day until fairly recently when the Roman Catholic Church did some housecleaning in its calendar. One has been dumped (the bishop). The other has been reduced to the rank of a pious legend.
It's a curious holiday. Some people love it. Some hate it. Some just ignore it. The most elaborate celebration of the day I see each year takes place downstairs here in the nursery school where each child is carefully coached and regulated to give a valentine card to every other child in the class. That's actually one of the oldest traditions around the day. Older even, that the patronage of Valentine himself.
In Pre-Christian Britain the Anglo-Saxon natives had a festival this time of year. The Ides of February (the 15th) was for centuries a country festival in honor of Februata Juno. The Roman goddess of "feverish" love. Febrile. February. Blindfolded boys picked love notes out of a hat and promised to go steady with whichever girl wrote the one they drew -- to try the match on for size -- beginning March 1st, New Year's Day in those times. Sooner or later, a wedding would come out of it all.
Another source of fun and games was the Lupercalia in mid-February as well. It honored the wolf that raised the infants Romulus and Remus -- the founders of the City of Rome. Later, the festival more directly honored the god Pan, who protected flocks from the Lupus, the wolf. In England, birds were said to pick their mate for the season on February 14. Chaucer mentions St. Valentine's Day "when every fowl cometh to choose her mate."
But the readings today aren't about romance. They set an unreasonably -- even impossibly -- high standard for love. Luke's Jesus is talking about a love that Hallmark has no card for, a weighty love that paper lace cannot bear. I tremble to talk about it. I flounder around in the readings looking for something that helps me think I can live up to even the bottom rung of the kind of love the Bible holds out for our salvation.
We are called to love by treating others -- all kinds of others -- as we are treated by God. An extraordinary way of behaving. And only possible with God's help -- only possible for those who are aware of God's love to begin with. It's a challenge to work with Jesus to transform anger into a way of living that more closely reflects what Paul calls "the image of the heavenly One."
The Bible scholar Stanley Hauerwas wrote "Christianity is not beliefs about God plus behavior. To become a Christian is to step away from the so-called reasonable world and become part of a different community with a different set of practices."
And that includes the amazing stipulation Jesus makes: To love our enemies. "Love your enemies" Jesus says it outright. And you know he isn't being metaphorical. He's talking about people who treat us badly us, and whom we can't abide. And that goes for everyone from the bothersome neighbors to the long list of perfectly hateful people published in the newspaper every single morning.
One of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott, in her collection of essays Travelling Mercies, quotes C. S. Lewis on enemies:
"If we really want to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo."
She goes on to tell how the parent of a fellow pupil with her son, in first grade, was "warm and friendly" but in her "I had an enemy -- an Enemy Lite . She did not have an ounce of fat on her body -- and I completely hate that in a person." And she still had a Ronald Reagan bumper sticker on her Volvo seven years after he left office.
Like Lamott, most of us confine our loathing to Enemies Lite. But that doesn't make it any less detructive. "Refusing to forgive," she writes, "is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die." She thought awful things about her "Enemy Lite," things so bad that "I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish."
Joseph was sold into Egypt by his brothers. He was betrayed into slavery by the very people he thought he could trust completely. He had every reason to keep his brothers on a list of Enemies Lite, at least. But when they came to him for help, not knowing who he was, he lost control and wept. Then he showed himself to them and said, "I am your brother Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt."
More Lamott: "The Christian mystique is essentially liberating: it liberates us so that we in turn may liberate others. In the message of the Bible, inner slavery and outer bondage are deeply linked."
Toward the end of his life, Martin Luther heard a rumor that the Pope's attitude towards him was softening. Luther wrote Leo an apology, but in it he blamed the Pope's advisers for all the evil in the church, and urged the Pope to quit the papacy and go back to being a simple parish priest. The letter was published as the preface to Luther's essay "The Freedom of a Christian." Where Luther says, "The Christian is utterly free, master of all, slave to none; this is best shown when the Christian is the willing slave of all. "
Paradoxical, yes. But Jesus' teachings are soaked in paradox and seeming irrationalities. When we forgive, we really don't forget, as God is able to do. But when we forgive a kind of magic happens. When forgiveness is real, it bestows freedom, not only on the offender, but on the offended.
That's what enabled Joseph then to do good for his brothers, indeed to save the future of the people of God, if we read the family tree. It frees us all to bless, it frees us to do good, it stays the judgement, it lifts the condemnation, it is God's permission to go on Loving, to go on reflecting the image of the Heavenly One.
-- Mark Lewis
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.
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