Fifty years ago, in a sermon on this morning’s gospel lesson from Matthew, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. related a story about Abraham Lincoln. When Lincoln was running for president, he had a sharp and abusive critic in a political opponent named Edwin Stanton. Stanton was Attorney General under Lincoln’s predecessor, James Buchanan, and he stood to lose his job if Lincoln were elected president. But Stanton’s criticisms of Lincoln were not just political; they crossed the line into the personal. “You don’t want a tall, lanky, ignorant man like this as the president of the United States,” Stanton told people.

Despite Stanton’s criticism, Lincoln won the presidential election, and it came time for him to choose a Secretary of War. He looked across the nation, and decided to choose – Edwin Stanton. Lincoln’s advisors were incredulous. "Mr. Lincoln, do you know what Mr. Stanton has been saying about you? Do you know what he has tried to do to you? Do you know all the derogatory statements he has made about you?"

Abraham Lincoln stood before the advisors around him and said: "Oh yes, I know about it; I’ve read about it; I’ve heard him myself. But after looking over the country, I find that he is the best man for the job." Stanton became Lincoln’s Secretary of War, and on the evening of April 15, 1865, Lincoln was shot. As the president drew his last breath in the early hours of the next morning, Stanton famously said: "Now he belongs to the ages," a statement which said as much about the transformation of Stanton’s relationship with Lincoln as it did about the character and stature of the fallen president.

In his sermon, Dr. King made this observation. “If Abraham Lincoln had hated Stanton, if Abraham Lincoln had answered everything Stanton said, Abraham Lincoln would have not transformed and redeemed Stanton. Stanton would have gone to his grave hating Lincoln, and Lincoln would have gone to his grave hating Stanton. But through the power of love, Abraham Lincoln was able to redeem Stanton.

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Today’s Gospel message is tough. It’s tough to preach on, it’s a tough message to hear, and I suspect that for most of us here, it’s the toughest of all the gospel messages to live out.

We might be tempted to dismiss these words of Jesus as being out of touch with reality, impractical in a world like ours with its murderers, rapists, abusers, and terrorists; a world that has people like Osama bin Laden. And these teachings go so against the grain of our culture. This is not the tit-for-tat mentality that is the foundation of our society, and to read these words of Jesus, one might get the feeling that to be a Christian is to be a doormat, a pushover.

But the Jesus we read about in the gospels is not someone who let others walk all over him. He was not a weak, submissive figure -- just the opposite, in fact – and he did not simply proclaim unattainable ideals, he lived them out; he “walked the talk.” And Jesus indeed had enemies. Once he intentionally broke the Sabbath traditions and proclaimed himself to be the Messiah, the religious leaders sought to kill him. And yet, he reached out to and broke bread with those same people who were out to get him. In the Gospel of Luke, at the moment of his arrest, Jesus healed the wounded servant of the high priest and called for an end to any violent resistance [22:50]. And it is in Luke that the dying Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” [23:34].

So what are we to make of Jesus’ radical words of peace and love and grace, and how do we live them out in a society that is built on an ethic of reciprocity and in a world that is violent and dangerous?

Now, let me be clear. Jesus’ words are not to be twisted in order that the powerful can exploit the weak, or to support the further victimization of oppressed, abused and battered people. This passage can be dangerously distorted when heard or applied out of context, because to stay in an abusive relationship totally misses the point of Jesus’ teachings.

Throughout the gospels [Luke 9:5, 10:5-10, Matthew 10:13], Jesus says that when we come to others in love and peace, and are not received in welcome, we are to distance ourselves. Far from calling us to a passive acceptance of the way things are, Jesus tells us to get ourselves out of harm’s way, because to stay in the situation only serves to condone and perpetuate the maltreatment.

So how do we follow Jesus’ command? How can we love people who have hurt us or scarred us or oppressed us or just made us angry? How can we love our enemies when everything we feel inside about them makes us want to get back at them?

First, let’s look at what it means to love our enemy. Jesus is not talking about the romantic, sentimental feeling we celebrate on Valentine’s Day. The kind of love Jesus is talking about is not a feeling, it is an act of will. Loving our enemies does not mean being soft on them, or condoning their behavior. In fact, to love our enemy, we don’t even have to like them.

Instead, the kind of love that Jesus is commanding us to show is a love that seeks the best for the other person. It can be a tough love, a love that brings people to self-awareness so that they can take steps to change. It might sometimes mean rebuking, or encouraging, or restraining, or disciplining. And it always means praying -- praying that God’s Spirit might work in them and work in our hearts, too.

For a woman to “love” her batterer, it may mean having him arrested, because that action will bring the situation into the open, it will get the courts involved, and it can get him into a therapy group for batterers. Jesus’ way seeks to break the cycle of violence and hatred.

In this morning’s Gospel lesson, Jesus offers a vision of what the Kingdom of God will be like, and a vision of how we are to live. It is difficult, and we fall short, but we are “Kingdom Subjects,” and we can witness and be part of “Kingdom Moments” on this earth in which people live out this teaching of Jesus and show the rest of the world that loving your enemies is not just an impossible dream.

Bishop Desmond Tutu, who chaired the “Truth and Justice Commission” in South Africa, wept with both victims of apartheid and those accused of practicing it, and he said these words: “Goodness, love, compassion, caring, these will always ultimately prevail over their ghastly counterparts.”

Nelson Mandela was locked away in prison in South Africa for twenty-eight years. It would have been easy for him to walk out of his prison cell a seething cauldron of vengeance. But Mandela tells how, after he was put in jail, he knew he had to make a decision. As he saw it, he could either spend his time in jail hating all the people who put him there, or he could choose something else, a “more excellent way” [1 Corinthians 12:31b]. He chose instead to respect those he came into contact with each day, and it made all the difference. Mandela wrote about the many kindnesses of his white prison guards. And because of the suffering he endured and his ability to love his enemies, Mandela gained moral authority that enabled him to lead his country peacefully out of apartheid when almost everyone had anticipated a bloodbath. At his inauguration as the first democratically elected president of South Africa, one of those prison guards was Mandela’s special guest. Mandela found that loving one’s enemies actually works.

And so did Martin Luther King. Dr. King was a person who tried to live by the gospel of Jesus Christ, and his preaching, teaching, and actions in the Civil Rights Movement embodied the non-violent resistance advocated by Jesus in this scripture passage. Dr. King believed with all his heart in a new society in which white and black, Protestant and Catholic, Jew and Muslim, could live together in peace. He knew that such a society could not be build by violent means, because violence only begets violence and hate only fosters more hate; he knew that such a society could come only if one responded to one enemy with love.

Here is how he concludes his sermon on this morning’s lesson from Matthew:

“History unfortunately leaves some people oppressed and some people oppressors. And there are three ways that individuals who are oppressed can deal with their oppression. One of them is to rise up against their oppressors with physical violence and corroding hatred. But oh this isn’t the way. For the danger and the weakness of this method is its futility. Violence creates many more social problems than it solves. And I’ve said, in so many instances, that as the Negro, in particular, and colored peoples all over the world struggle for freedom, if they succumb to the temptation of using violence in their struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. Violence isn’t the way.

Another way is to acquiesce and to give in, to resign yourself to the oppression. Some people do that. They discover the difficulties of the wilderness moving into the promised land, and they would rather go back to the despots of Egypt because it’s difficult to get in the promised land. And so they resign themselves to the fate of oppression; they somehow acquiesce to this thing. But that too isn’t the way because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.

But there is another way. And that is to organize mass non-violent resistance based on the principle of love. It seems to me that this is the only way as our eyes look to the future. As we look out across the years and across the generations, let us develop and move right here. We must discover the power of love, the power, the redemptive power of love. And when we discover that we will be able to make of this old world a new world. We will be able to make men better. Love is the only way.”

We do hope you will join us here tomorrow evening to hear more of Dr. King’s words and how his love for his enemies changed a nation.

Christ’s gospel command remains an immense challenge. It’s tough to love our enemies; it’s hard work to love and to forgive and to begin again. But we do not do it alone, for God is with us. Christ is telling us to let the Spirit of God move in our lives, and to pray that it moves in the lives our enemies. The Tutus and the Mandelas and the Martin Luther Kings of this world have given us a sign of hope that Christ’s vision for this world can become a reality. As The Message puts it, we are “kingdom subjects;” and we are to live like it. We are to live out our God-created identity, to live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward us

Others have shown us the way. May God give us, God’s kingdom subjects, the courage to follow. Amen.

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