July 20, 2025 – Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
Deuteronomy 7.6-8
Matthew 5.43-48
I John, selected vv.
Love Them? I Don’t Even Like Them!
Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
This morning I’m beginning a summer series of sermons based on questions you folks have asked me to speak about. Some of them come from our Spontaneous Sermon Sunday back in March, when I took questions from the congregation, others come from requests that followed later in the Spring. Among the topics we’ll be talking about are inclusive language in the Lord’s Prayer, a deep dive into the book of Job – and yes, somebody asked me for that one! – and what the future holds for the church, our own and the church as a whole.
This morning’s topic comes from an email I received from one of you in the weeks following the Spontaneous Sermon which in a way called me out, gently, and rightfully so, for something I said that morning. Here is part of the email:
“Hi Alan… In response to someone’s question about surviving the current administration, you responded something to the effect of, ‘You need to love even those you don’t like.’ To be honest, that answer seems facile to me: easy to say, not so easy to do. I don’t know how to like (let alone love) someone who speaks falsehoods, commits acts of casual cruelty, humiliates those who struggle and those who serve alike. That’s the guidance I need, that’s the sermon I would particularly like to hear. PS. Sorry I couldn’t toss you an easy one!’
The writer is 100% correct. My response could have and should have been much meatier, even if I was thinking on my feet, which is why I decided to lead with it today. How can you love somebody you don’t even like?
A good place to begin is with some of the verses we looked at several weeks ago, the “love your neighbor” bits from John’s first letter. We’ve heard them many times before, but I find in them a helpful starting line for this morning’s subject, because it is all about love. “This is the message you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another… [and] let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and in action… because love is from God.” And if this is our starting line, here is our goal: “We love because God first loved us.” I think this is our finish line, and here at least one way to get there.
You may not know her by name, but you have seen her photo, and you remember her vividly. You met her in June 1972 in the heat of the Viet Nam War. Phan Thi Kim Phuc was nine years old when a pilot for the South Vietnamese Air Force dropped napalm on her village. She still remembers the blast, seeing the flames appear as if from nowhere, watching her village incinerate, and her neighbors burn to death. The photo of nine-year-old Kim running down the street, naked, with tears in her eyes and terror on her face, won the Pulitzer Prize that year, and was credited with helping turn public opinion against the war. Of that day, she recalls, “I lost my future. I lost my freedom. I lost my dream. I lost my hope.”
Today Kim is 63 years old. She was raised in the Cao Dai faith, a combination of Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism; ironically, and sadly, she was sheltering in a Cao Dai temple when the napalm was dropped on her village. She has since converted to Christianity, attends a Baptist church outside of Toronto, and works as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. She founded the Kim Foundation International, a nonprofit that offers medical, living and educational assistance to young victims of trauma around the world. Kim has since learned the identity of the squadron that attacked her village, and although she does not know the pilot’s name, she has learned he now resides in America and is deeply ashamed of his actions. Kim voiced the desire to meet him, “not because I’m angry,” she says. “I want to tell him I survived. I forgave him a long time ago. I don’t hate [him]. I would give him a hug. He changed my life without knowing it.” Today she is a mother and a grandmother who refuses to let her trauma define her. Phan Thi Kim Phuc has rejected the path of resentment and hatred and has instead chosen the path of forgiveness.
“If you love those who love you,” Jesus asked in the Sermon on the Mount, “what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? I say to you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of God in heaven.” If we take these words seriously, then our reaction may well be similar to my email writer’s: “Easy to say, not so easy to do.” I agree. There are people in this world we simply do not like, as hard as we try, and if we don’t like them, we certainly can’t love them. Some of them fall into the category my questioner described, people who commit acts of casual cruelty, who seem to enjoy humiliating others and demean those unlike them. How do we love them if we cannot even like them? Then there are those who just rub us the wrong way. In a previous community, Debbie and I had a group of friends who often went out to dinner together, and attended parties at each other’s homes, and there was one person in that group I just did not want to be around. They spoke with a sneer of superiority, acted a little too self-assured of their own opinion, started petty arguments and then got mean about it. And I accept responsibility for letting them get under my skin, because I don’t think this is ever just a one-way street, but I would just as soon steer clear of them whenever we found ourselves in the same room. And I feel bad about it. And I tried – maybe not as hard as I could, but I tried. I just could not and did not like them.
But could I love them? This is the question. I think this is what powered my comment that morning in church, that it is possible to love someone you don’t like. Because I do not wish this person ill – I just wish they would keep quiet and stay away from me. Because they too are a beloved child of God. And God loves them. And I don’t understand how God can love them, but then again, I don’t have to understand. That is between God and them. After all, I don’t always understand how God can love me. But there it is.
Daphne read a brief but pivotal passage from Deuteronomy this morning, three verses that both describe and underpin God’s ongoing compassion and commitment toward Israel. Here is the heart of the passage: “The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be God’s people and treasured possession. It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that the Lord’s heart has set upon you and chosen you, for you were the fewest… It was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath that was sworn to your ancestors…” Allow me to rephrase this in two different, and I hope authentic, ways. First, there is nothing Israel had done to earn or merit the love of God. They are not great, they are not powerful, they are certainly not always faithful, in fact they are the least and the fewest. Second, there is nothing Israel can do to earn or merit the love of God, because God loves them freely – there is no quid pro quo, there is nothing provisional about it. It just is. Now God is God and we are, well, we’re who we are. But is it the nature of God than enables one to love without its having to be earned or deserved? Or is it the nature of love that it can be freely given without being earned or deserved? If God is love, as John writes, then the answer is: both.
Two weeks ago I worshiped at St Paul’s United Church of Christ in Chicago where Matt Fitzgerald is Senior Minister. Matt’s sermon that morning was about baptism in particular and the sacraments in general, and it was a terrific sermon. He said something that struck a chord in me, and maybe it was because I was already thinking about this morning’s sermon about loving those you don’t like, but it has followed me for the past two weeks and it may follow you as well. He spoke about God’s abundant love being poured into us as the water was poured into the font that morning. God’s love would be as though the cistern that filled the font was endless and just kept flowing and flowing and flowing so that it spilled out onto the floor and down into the aisles and soaked every one in the sanctuary and it just kept pouring and flowing until it pushed out the big oaken doors of St Paul’s and covered the streets of Chicago. It was a compelling image, but then he said something that compelled me all the more. After stating the obvious, that this is how God’s love can work through us, he said that even in those times when all the love of God just does not get us to the point of loving others, God is able to love them through us. God is able to love others through us. In spite of us. In spite of our ability to love that person we just don’t like God still loves them and God can love them through us. Matt did not go into the How that morning, only the That; but as I reflected on it, he didn’t need to. It just is. God loves others through us, sometimes because of us, sometimes in spite of us. But if nothing can restrain the love of God, then my measly mortal attempts and failures are of no matter to the Almighty.
Here, I think, is the finish line: “We love, because God first loved us.” Because God loves us, we love – God is loving through us, so that in those times, and we know we have them, when we just cannot muster love for another, God will do it for us. We don’t even have to like them for God to be able to love them through us, because God’s love is not bound by our inabilities. Would God like us to like them? Yes. Would God like us to love them? Yes, so much so that God makes certain they are loved even in our weakness. In our weakness, God’s strength makes certain that the love that is poured into the font of the human heart keeps flowing and overflowing until it pours out our sanctuary doors and down into the village of Chester and from there to all creation.
And yes, my friend, even into the White House – whether we like it – or not.