An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Enemies of God?

A sermon on John 3: 14-21 & Ephesians 2: 1-10 by Nathan Nettleton

Last week the Prime Minister announced that Australia will be expanding its military role in Iraq with a further 300 soldiers soon to be heading there. Since 2001, more than 350,000 lives have been sacrificed in the the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than 220,000 of them have been civilians, yet the western coalition forces seem further from achieving their stated goals now than they were at the beginning. Because the overwhelming majority of the deaths have been have been Iraqi and Afghani civilians, it would be easy to portray them as the only victims and the coalition troops as dying in the course of their own actions, but I don’t think that is fair. The coalition troops who are being killed are not the decision makers who called this war. Many of them don’t even agree with it and are unwilling participants in it. Tens of thousands of people on both sides are being sacrificed by the nations, including ours, which decided this war needed to be fought. Many people would contend that this is a purely political issue, but I put it to you that it is an intensely religious issue, and not just because the American president used God’s name to justify it. The recent emergence of Islamic State has made it clearer that this is about both sides offering up their children as a sacrifice to destroy those who they deem to be the enemies of their gods.

Images of both sacrifice and dealing with enemies come up in our readings this evening, and I think they have a lot to say to questions about this war, and also to questions about how we deal with people in our own immediate circles who we might perceive as enemies of God. However, the readings don’t say anything directly about how we treat anybody. We didn’t have a “love your enemies” reading. What we have got is two New Testament passages which speak of how God deals with those who have turned against him, and with what God is willing to sacrifice in dealing with them. And since Jesus calls us to imitate him in his imitation of God the Father, we will take our cues for how to deal with enemies and what sacrifices to make from God, and from no other, whether our political leaders like it or not.

The passage we heard from the letter to the Ephesians begins with a description which is intended to be a picture of us before we were saved by Christ. It is quite clear in saying that it is talking about “all of us”. And part of why I am seeing a connection to the themes of the war is that it doesn’t just describe us as cut off from God, but as enlisted in the service of an enemy ruler. Paul says, “you were dead because of the sins you were living in, you were following the course of this world, you were following the ruler of the power of the present atmosphere, that is the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. We were by nature, children of wrath.”

Now it doesn’t take too much imagination to see that the same ideas with a few words tweaked could sound like the rationale for the government’s increasingly harsh measures against anyone who can be portrayed as a terrorism danger. “They are as good as dead because of the evil and anti-freedom activities they have been involved in. They were following the slippery slope to terrorism, following the ruler of this present evil regime, the one who inspires and authorises those who hate and reject our freedom and our way of life. By their very nature they are deserving of our wrath.”

Or if we bring it a bit closer to home, it still doesn’t take much imagination to see it sound like something you might hear some Christians saying about homosexuals or abortionists, or some other Christians saying about right-wing Christian fundamentalists. “They are spiritually dead because of the hateful and sinful things they are doing. They are on the slippery slope, following the ruler of this evil age, the one who inspires the disobedience that destroys the values we hold to be good and true. By their very nature they deserve the wrath of God and exclusion from the church.”

Now if the things that the Bible says about us are so similar to the things that are often said about those who are regarded as our enemies, then the question for those who would follow Jesus in his imitation of the Father is are we able to treat our enemies the way that God has treated us when that description fitted us? For our salvation and our ethics are tied together. Indeed, at the end of the passage it says that we are what we are now because God has created us in Christ Jesus for good works. We were saved from enmity with God, for good works, the works that come when we love as Christ has loved us.

So how did God treat us when we were the enemies of God; when we were following the ruling spirit that is leading the world into disobedience and corruption? Did God send in the armies of heaven to wage a shock and awe campaign and blast out the regime that enslaved us, and blast out 330,000 of us in the process? Did God shut the doors of the churches to us and lobby the politicians to write laws denying us normal civil liberties and encourage good people to shun us until we brought our orientation into line with traditional family values? Did God ridicule us and call us hypocritical literalists and narrow-minded bigots and seek to purge the churches of the likes of us?

Well no actually. What does Ephesians say? “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our sins, made us alive together with Christ – by grace you have been saved – and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” Hear that? The great love with which God loved us, even when we were enemies of God. And does it say that only when we had amended our ways sufficiently, then God got over his anger at us and let us off without punishment? Well no actually. It says that it had nothing to do with what we managed to do, but that God saved us by grace, that is by reckless undeserved extravagant generosity, and that God’s saving of us isn’t just some sort of royal pardon, but that it is lifting us up from the filth we’d got ourselves bogged in and seating us with Christ Jesus at the table of life in the heavenly places. And here we are, once enemies of God and now gathered here around the table with Christ, not because any of us deserve it, but because God welcomes us here anyway, because that is who God is and what God is like and what God would have us learn to be like by imitating him. Our reading from the gospel according to John reiterates the same point: “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

The gospel reading also raises the issue of the sacrifices offered up in dealing with enemies. Our society is willing to sacrifice its sons and daughters in the name of its gods, in the name of the flag and democracy and freedom. It is willing to sacrifice them in destroying those who are deemed to be the enemies of those gods. Well actually, we usually sacrifice someone else’s sons and daughters: how many members of our parliament, or the US congress have their own sons or daughters enlisted to fight in Iraq? But God gives his own son, his only son. And why? In order to destroy his enemies? No! For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. And it is interesting to note that if you study John’s gospel, the term “the world” is almost always a negative one. It almost always means something like it did in our reading from Ephesians when it said that we were following the ways of the world. So it is not too far fetched to say that we could read this as saying “for God so loved his enemies that he gave his only Son, so that whoever puts their trust in him may not perish but have life without limit.”

When we act in imitation of God, sacrifices still have to be made in the quest for peace and reconciliation. This is no naive dreaming that thinks that if we lay down our weapons and love, our enemies will reciprocate and no one will get hurt. On the contrary, this is a following of Christ in his giving of himself in love, and he got hurt. He got killed. So have 330,000 people in Iraq. But who sacrificed them, and for what? They are being sacrificed by nations that believe that the only way to defend what they hold dear is to destroy their enemies.

But of course it is easy for us to sit here and say that, and our saying of it may just end up in a hatred of a new enemy, the politicians who start wars and sacrifice our children, and we may just end up resolving to destroy those politicians at the first electoral opportunity we get. And we may be no freer of the cycle of hostility and vengeance than the warmongers themselves. Indeed, as peace activist Rose Marie Berger said, just as there are soldiers who serve the poor and vulnerable in Iraq, so there are peacemakers who thrive more on their own anger, self-righteousness, and personal purity, than on authentic deeply rooted sacrificial love.

Unless we are going to be on peace making teams in war zones ourselves, then the real test of our willingness to embrace the way of Christ will not come in our analysis of the rights and wrongs of the war, important though that undoubtedly is. For us it will come more in the politics of our own table fellowship. Both here around the table we name as the Lord’s, and in our homes as we share meals together and with others, who will we include and who will we exclude? We who were enemies of God have been saved and welcomed to the table. And this not because we had begun to deserve it, but by sheer grace when we were still lost in our old ways. And since Jesus was inviting all sorts of people who were still lost in their old ways, we find ourselves in very strange company at the banqueting table of heaven. All sorts of enemies of God: tax collectors and prostitutes, fishermen and taxi drivers, unionists and economic rationalists, drag queens and tele-evangelists, fundamentalists and freemasons, small ‘l’ liberals and big ‘L’ Liberals, arms dealers and folk singers. And the only thing that will exclude us, or any of those others from the table, is our willingness to “come to the light” as our reading from John put it. For in the light of Christ’s reconciliation, we recognise that such scandalous hospitality is indeed the salvation of the world; but if we are simply scandalised and insist that some of those at the table be cast into outer darkness, we will find that we have pushed the light away and that we ourselves are now in the shadows.

If we can welcome the light, as awkward as it may make us feel; if we can welcome it, and with Christ recklessly love our enemies and welcome them to the table, even though they may respond with still more hatred and hostility; and if we can keep on loving and holding open the welcome to this table of scandalous grace, then the table where the risen crucified one pours out the cup of mercy may yet be the place of healing and salvation for the whole world.

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