Called to a Cosmic Love (A Sermon on Luke 6:27-38)

Hey y'all! This is a sermon I preached at Lake Grove Presbyterian Church on February 23, 2025. You can scroll down to the bottom to view the sermon instead. I hope God speaks through it!

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Introduction - Call Series

So we’ve been in this series on Call - Discerning God’s Voice since the beginning of February and today we continue it with a reading from Luke’s Gospel. On the one hand, we’ve been talking about the stories of God calling specific people like the prophet Isaiah and the prophet Jeremiah. On the other, we’ve been talking more generally about how God calls all of us to a way of life. Because, ultimately, Jesus good news, which is what the word “gospel” means, wasn’t just news. It wasn’t just an announcement. It was also an invitation to a way of life. Back in 1999, the rock band Switchfoot released a song called “New Way to Be Human.” I was 10 years old at the time, which makes me feel old. Anyways, I want to read some of the lyrics to you:

Everyday it’s the same thing

Another trend has begun

Hey kids, this might be the one

It’s a race to be noticed

And it’s leaving us numb

Hey kids, we can be the ones

With all of our fashion

We’re still incomplete

The God of redemption

Could break our routine

There’s a new way to be human

It’s nothing we’ve ever been

There’s a new way to be human

It’s spreading under my skin

There’s a new way to be human

Where divinity blends

With a new way to be human

Over my years of trying to listen to God’s call in my own life, with much stumbling and wrestling, I’ve come to understand the Gospel of Jesus Christ - the good news - primarily as an invitation into this new way to be human. And, Luke 6, our scripture today, talks about this new humanity. It’s an invitation to live a different way than the patterns of living we see all around us and we get sucked into ourselves. So, with that, let’s listen for the call God has for us this morning in Luke 6:27-38.

Friends, hear the word of the Lord:

27 “But I say to you who are listening: Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; 28 bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. 30 Give to everyone who asks of you, and if anyone takes away what is yours, do not ask for it back again. 31 Do to others as you would have them do to you.

32 “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. 33 If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. 34 If you lend to those from whom you expect to receive payment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. 35 Instead, love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.[a] Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

37 “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; 38 give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap, for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

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Before we can start to wrestle with what Jesus says to us today, we need to backtrack a couple chapters to Luke 4 where Jesus issues his inaugural address and reads from Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” If you know the story, you remember how Jesus is immediately met with rejection and in fact “all in the synagogue were filled with rage,” got up out of their seats, and tried to hurl him off a cliff to kill him. As the person who is preaching in church today, that scares me a little, not going to lie…

Anyways, Jesus by some miracle escapes the angry crowd, and we learn a couple things about who he is and what he’s come to do. The first thing we learn from Luke 4 is that Jesus has a mission specifically aimed at helping the downtrodden, the oppressed, the marginalized and forgotten. Jesus is not primarily concerned about some faraway spiritual reality that has nothing to do with the lived realities of those around him.

A saying I grew up hearing was “they’re so heavenly-minded, they’re of no earthly good.” It criticized those “holy rollers” who had their noses buried in their bibles, but were not actually concerned with the needs of their community and world. They were not invested in the lives of those around them; they were not “living for the Kingdom,” even though they thought they were with all their religious activity.

Jesus, in contrast, is concerned about people and the hardships they’re experiencing. He cares deeply about injustice. God-in-flesh is not “heavenly-minded” in a way that he avoids or ignores the real problems the people around him are facing. His claim that the kingdom of God is coming and is now here is a declaration that God cares about the needs of the poor and is busy doing something about it.

The second thing we learn from Luke 4 is that, from the beginning, Jesus had enemies, people opposed to what he had come to do. People wanted to kill him for saying what he said and doing what he did. And, when Jesus starts calling disciples to follow him in Luke 5, they inherit those same dangers, those same enemies, because now they represent the movement of Jesus.

In Luke 5, Jesus calls his first disciples and in Luke 6 he chooses “apostles.” In the ancient world, apostles were special representatives of a leader, often a king, who could “do business” on behalf of the one who sent them. So, when Jesus chooses his twelve apostles, he’s picking twelve special messengers who will carry his message and do business on behalf of Jesus in the world.

As we continue on in the Gospel of Luke, we also learn that no one is excluded from the Jesus movement, no matter their status or social position. Whether they were a sex worker, a criminal, demon-possessed, the hated tax collector, lowly fishermen, they were called into the Kingdom of God. So, remember if you ever question your own calling or if you’re questioning the call of someone else: Anyone and everyone can be called into the way of Jesus. Jesus calls everybody. And, what is he calling them to? It’s true that we have particular calls on our lives as we are each unique in our personality, strengths, and giftedness, but as disciples of Jesus we are all called into the mission of Jesus, spelled out in his inaugural address and in his descriptions of the “kingdom of God” throughout the gospels.

The Kingdom of God

We learn that Jesus wants to do business on behalf of the poor, the oppressed, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized. The Kingdom of God, which is Jesus primary way of talking about what he’s doing, is not like other kingdoms that value the strong over the weak, the rich over the poor, the haves over the have nots. And, when we think about that being his primary concern, it makes more sense to us that Jesus would have enemies. He’s not here to perpetuate the way things are, the domination so common in human affairs of one group over another. 

We know from watching our own politics unfold before us in America that those who are dominating others do not want a change in the status quo. They’re enjoying the benefits of the way things are. They’re not hungering for a new vision, they’re getting fat and happy off of the old one. They do not value the immigrant, the refugee, the LGBTQ community, those receiving food stamps or WIC benefits, and many others. No, they see them as a “parasite class.” Yet, Jesus is giving us a radically different vision of what it means to live together.

In Jesus economy, the least of these are the greatest. In God’s Country, extravagant generosity is commonplace. In the Society of Jesus, loving your enemies is a command. In the Kingdom of God, praying for those who hate you is expected. And, living so generously, so humbly, so radically actually draws the aggression of the world. In my study of Luke 6, I came across a sermon from the Reverend Martin Luther King called “Loving Your Enemies,” which he preached in 1957 about a decade before his assassination in 1968.

I’d like to share a couple snippets of it with you:

“Jesus was very serious when he gave the command [to love your enemies]; he wasn’t playing. He realized that it’s hard to love your enemies. He realized that it’s difficult to love those persons who seek to defeat you, those people who say evil things about you. He realized it was painfully hard, pressingly hard. But he wasn’t playing…[and so] we have the Christian and moral responsibility to discover the meaning of these words, and to discover how we can live out this command, and why we should live by this command.”

Later in the sermon, he arrives at a final reason why Jesus says to love our enemies. He says, “that love has within it a redemptive power. And there in love is a power that eventually transforms individuals. If you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption…”

King famously said that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Elsewhere, he talks about how “love is something strong, that organizes itself in powerful direct action.” The Black community in America is familiar with how the verses we read today were used by slave owners in our country’s history to subdue any resistance, to keep slaves oppressed and used. This can’t be the type of “loving one’s enemies” that Jesus was talking about, a way that slave owners would feel comfortable with. No, that can’t be it.

Instead, there must be a power in love that Jesus discovered, that others over the course of history have discovered. And, frankly, we need to discover anew. King ends his sermon with these words:

“There is a little tree planted on a little hill and on that tree hangs the most influential character that ever came in this world. But never feel that that tree is a meaningless drama that took place on the stages of history. Oh no, it is a telescope through which we look out into the long view of eternity, and see the love of God breaking forth into time. It is an eternal reminder to a power-drunk generation that love is the only way. It is an eternal reminder to a generation depending on nuclear and atomic energy, a generation depending on physical violence, that love is the only creative, redemptive, transforming power in the universe. And I’m foolish enough to believe that through the power of this love somewhere, men of the most recalcitrant bent will be transformed. And then we will be in God’s kingdom.”

God’s Very Character as the Animating Force 

That tree King talked about is the cross, where Jesus in love died for his enemies. And the cross undoes all pride, all ego, all selfish conceit, because at the cross, we see the strength of God in the weakness of Christ. After all, we see in Jesus what God really looks like.

Throughout the gospels of Jesus, we hear him talk about his Father, the Creator. In our passage today, it says, “be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” For the last 4 years, I’ve been continuously realizing what it means to be a father, to be a parent. In raising two little girls, I continue to learn that whatever I do, I always have a couple sets of little eyes watching me, learning from me. My little kids, for better or worse, follow in my footsteps. The words I say I soon find echoed out of their mouths; the things I do I see my children doing soon enough.

Jesus knows that children follow their parents. And, he says to his own followers that we have a Parent in Heaven, one who loves extravagantly, who is abundantly generous, one who is willing to even suffer and die on behalf of those who curse him and hate him. What do you do when you see a love like that? A love that raises the dead, shows mercy in the face of cruelty and selfishness, a love that is bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice. This cosmic love, a love that breaks into and encompasses the whole world is calling to us too. It is the example set by the One who calls us his children. Jesus says that we should go and do likewise.

In the gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, two biblical books that were written together as a part 1 and part 2 by Luke, we see the Holy Spirit guiding, empowering, and giving strength to the disciples and even to Jesus himself. This is the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead at Easter, the same Spirit at work in those early disciples who loved their enemies and offered radical generosity in the face of the world’s stinginess and greed.

It is the same Spirit in those peacemaking troublemakers who marched for civil rights in Martin Luther King’s day, and, God-willing, it is the same Spirit we believe is here among us today, calling us to a strong love that does not ignore the cry of the oppressed, but hastens to it. 

We are called to a strong love that is willing to suffer on the behalf of the poor, the imprisoned, the forgotten, the mistreated, the deported. God’s love continues to “break into time” today, as we by the Spirit muster our courage to live into the Kingdom call of Jesus, where we find a new way to be human, where the God of redemption breaks our routine, and we find our own humanity transformed by the power of divine love.

I don’t know what this will look like exactly for each of us in this room, but I do know that when Jesus called Peter in Luke 5, Peter first fell to his knees and said, “Lord, depart from me, because I am a sinful man.” Then Jesus insisted, “Don’t be afraid. From now on, you will fish for people.”

And I don’t know, this passage almost feels whimsical because Jesus has this “you ain’t seen nothing yet, kid” vibe to him. And, I just feel like Jesus is genuinely funny here. Like did he wink? Did he do a funny walk? And then, the amazing thing, Peter the fisherman left his boat behind him on the shore, turned from it, and began to follow Jesus. He turned and walked into a whole new life. He dropped everything he knew, his livelihood, to follow Jesus into the Kingdom of God.

With that in mind, these are questions that I am wrestling with, and I hope you will join me in the wrestling as well:

• What thing are you holding onto that keeps you from following Jesus fully?

• Who are you turning your back on to maintain your status quo?

• What would your life look like if you risked what you have to embody the lavish and generous love we see in Jesus?

Amen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSdHqGTLVMk