Praying for our Enemies - Thanksgiving Eve
Author: Pastor Scott Schul
November 27, 2024
Surveys
suggest that only about half of the people gathered around the table tomorrow
at Thanksgiving dinner will pray. Some
families who don’t engage in a traditional prayer will instead take turns naming
a few things they’re thankful for. If we
treat that practice as a sort of prayer, then maybe our number bumps up to 70
or 80 percent.
But of all
the people who will pray tomorrow at Thanksgiving dinner or, for that matter,
any other day of the year, how many will pray for their enemies? I don’t have a statistic for you, but I’d be
willing to wager that it’s a much smaller number. And in any event, the real question each
of us must consider is this: when is the last time I prayed for my enemies?
It seems
like a timely topic, doesn’t it? We may
not feel moved to pray for our enemies, but I bet we can all easily name a
few. We might even be able to list our enemies more easily than we can list our blessings and thanksgivings. That’s how the world has conditioned us to
live and act. There are winners and
losers. Good and bad. Friends and enemies. You know as well as I that here in the US we
are as polarized today as we’ve ever been. And in the midst of that polarization, the notion of praying for our
enemies is about as counter cultural as it gets.
If we do pray for our enemies, that prayer often turns into an accusation against our
enemy, and a sort of complaint to God. “Dear God, so-and-so is an awful person, and you need to get him to
change his ways and come over to my way of thinking.” Human beings haven’t really changed all that
much over the centuries. In Luke’s
Gospel we read about a religious authority who went into the temple and offered
a prayer like that: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves,
rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.”1 And maybe you’ve heard this old Irish prayer:
“May those who love us love us. And
those that don't love us, may God turn their hearts. And if He doesn't turn their hearts, may he
turn their ankles, so we'll know them by their limping.”
With all
this in mind, perhaps it caught your attention, as it caught mine,
that in our second lesson Paul is urging the Christian community to pray for everyone,
without exceptions, even “kings and all who are in high positions.” I want you to realize how incredibly
significant and even frightening this idea would’ve been. That letter was written sometime in the
60s. Who was in charge at that time? The Roman Emperor Nero, who was one of the
most merciless and violent tyrants ever to rule. He especially hated Christians, because he
questioned their loyalty. Nero could not
tolerate a people who worshiped anything more than him. So he routinely arrested and tortured
Christians in Rome, “before executing them with lavish publicity. Some were
crucified, some were thrown to wild animals and others were burned alive as
living torches.”2
Why in the
world would people pray for someone like that? Well, at some level it was for practical reasons of
self-preservation. A rag tag collection
of Christians was no match for the sheer power and might of the Roman Empire. So as we read in our second lesson, these
prayers for enemies were a request for God to do something to soften the hearts
of those leaders in the hope that the Christians could be left alone in peace.
But this
call to pray for our enemies runs deeper than self-interest. It’s ultimately rooted in love and obedience. In the Gospels of both Matthew and Luke,
Jesus explicitly instructs his followers that the way of a Christian is to pray
for our enemies and to love them. Jesus’s teaching is even more radical than what we find in 1 Timothy,
because it doesn’t rationalize those prayers and that love with any degree of
self-interest or practicality. We do it
because it’s what God does, and our aim as Christians is to be
transformed into an image of God’s perfect love.3
Believe me,
friends, I know this isn’t easy. I’m not
preaching this sermon because I’m particularly skilled at praying for my
enemies. I struggle with it too. I’m sharing this because it’s the kind of
people Jesus desires all of us to be, because it is only through our
relentless, illogical love and mercy as a Christian community that our violent,
divided world will be reconciled and transformed. If we Christians don’t commit to praying for
our enemies, I worry there may not be anyone else who will fill that void.
Sometimes
when we engage a challenging Bible text like this, we’re tempted to dismiss it
as the product of a time so different from our own that it doesn’t have
relevance for us. So let’s avoid that
mistake by moving from the letter’s original 1st century context to the 20th century.
You may have
heard that there’s a new movie out about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was an important German Lutheran
theologian who in the 1930s and 40s heroically stood against the Nazis and paid
with his life. But as is often the case
with martyrs, groups compete to tell their story in order to cast those heroes
in their own image. Be aware that lately,
some who I believe Bonhoeffer would have opposed have tried to reshape his
legacy in ways I believe are inaccurate. But that’s a discussion for another day.
For now,
it’s enough to note that Bonhoeffer was part of a group of German Protestants
called the “Confessing Church.” They
made a brave and sacrificial effort to try to prevent the Church from being
co-opted and warped by the Nazis. Hitler
was no fonder of them than Nero was of the Christians in his day. And so according to Charles Marsh, one of
Bonhoeffer’s recent biographers, one of the Nazi tactics to disable the
Confessing Church was to prohibit them from praying for others. They effectively banned intercessory prayer.4 That’s how dictatorships work. Divide and conquer. Keep people separated because it’s easier to
control and manipulate them. If you allow
people to pray for others – even enemies – they might end up growing closer and
maybe even learn to love each other. That’s
the last thing a dictatorship wants, because in the end, it’s love that
brings all dictatorships to ruin. Are
you beginning to see Jesus’s wisdom in asking us to pray for our enemies?
I’ll close
tonight with a few words from Bonhoeffer himself about intercessory prayer,
because he didn’t cease praying for others – even his enemies – just because
the Nazis told him to stop. I think one
of the reasons Bonhoeffer remains so popular now, roughly 80 years after the
Nazi’s executed him, is that he’s such an honest and vulnerable theologian. He freely admits his limitations when it
comes to forgiving and praying for enemies. He writes, “I cannot forgive the enemies of God by myself, only the
crucified Christ can; and I can forgive through him.”5
When we
pray for others, Bonhoeffer observes that “it means nothing other than
Christians bringing others into the presence of God, seeing each other under
the cross of Jesus as poor human beings and sinners in need of grace.” It means “granting other Christians the same
right we have received, namely, the right to stand before Christ and to share
in Christ’s mercy.”6 Take a
moment and imagine you and your enemy standing together before Jesus. How long would it take in the presence of Jesus’s
love before you stop pointing fingers and start holding hands?
Friends, praying
for our enemies is the gift Jesus is calling us to give to ourselves and to our
divided world. It’s a reminder that we
cannot begin to transform the world until we ourselves are transformed. What better time to start than tomorrow, at
Thanksgiving dinner. Amen.
Copyright Rev. Scott E. Schul, 2024 All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission.
Sermon Text: 1 Timothy 2:1-7
Sources:
1 Luke 18:11
2 https://www.pbs.org/empires/romans/empire/christians.html
3 See Matthew 5:43-48 and Luke 6:27-36
4 Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2014 Alfred A. Knopf), p. 257.
5 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together & Prayerbook of the
Bible (2005 Fortress Press), p. 175.
6 Ibid., pp. 90-91.
Gospel Text: Matthew 6:25-33
[Jesus
said,] 25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life,
what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will
wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look
at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and
yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And
can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? 28 And
why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they
grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even
Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30 But
if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is
thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little
faith? 31 Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’
or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ 32 For it is
the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father
knows that you need all these things. 33 But strive first for
the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to
you as well.”
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