From late 1935 into 1936, the Rev. Howard Thurman, years before he was as mentor to Dr. King, took a trip to India. Along with three other Black ministers, he spent six months on the subcontinent. The pastors had been invited by the Indian Student Christian Movement, to be representatives of Christianity. Representatives crucially not from the religious tradition of the British colonizers against whom Gandhi and his followers were resisting. You know, the same church from which we descend. Thurman and his fellow ministers were invited to speak about Christianity from the side of the oppressed.
I share that detail to make you laugh, but also to make you question. Christianity is a faith where we get to choose our spiritual ancestors. If I ever sit down with Henry Louis Gates, I imagine I won’t hear I share much DNA with Abraham and Sarah, or Moses, or Jesus. But, as a Christian these are my spiritual ancestors. The same is true within the church. We have to choose, among the diverse expressions of Christianity, who will be our spiritual great great grandparents. Whose faith do we look to for a model?
Howard Thurman agreed to come to India because he wanted to learn about Gandhi’s method of nonviolent resistance. For his part, Gandhi admitted deep curiosity about the Black Church leaders. Why would a people who had been enslaved by Christians choose to follow the Christian religion?
Gandhi had coined the term “nonviolence.” But as he spoke with Thurman, Gandhi lamented that he had to frame the word in the negative. In Hinduism, ahimsa, nonviolence is not negative. It is a positive force, “a force superior to all the forces put together. One person who can express Ahimsa in life exercises a force superior to all the forces of brutality.”
For Thurman, Gandhi’s nonviolence resonated. This force sounded like his experience of God. Thurman had been raised by his grandmother, a formerly enslaved woman, deep in the Jim Crow South. Thurman knew what it was to face systemized oppression. And from his grandmother, he knew what it was to face that oppression with fierce dignity, and grace, and love. It was from his grandmother that Howard Thurman had learned his own Christianity. It was from her he learned a faith that “results in a new courage, fearlessness and power.” Thurman was a mystic. He had firsthand experience with God. Nonviolence added a new dimension to his sense of the divine at work all around him.
I bring up Howard Thurman this morning not just because I’m going to lead a retreat about him next month, but because I know Jesus is asking a lot in this Gospel. We live in a world ready to hate. In our time, as in Howard Thurman’s, as in Jesus’, practicing nonviolence requires us to push back on the systems of violence which are actively harming far too many of our fellow human beings. Practicing nonviolence means resisting policies which dehumanize. But persisting in this work means learning to resist in a way which does not cause us to lose our humanity. It’s not just about outwardly peaceful protests. Nonviolence asks us to do deep inner work.
Jesus tells his hearers, “Love your enemies.”
Jesus says by loving your enemies “you will be [acting as] children of the Most High…for [God] is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. [Therefore] Be merciful, just as [God] is merciful.” Our God is not a God of retribution, not a God of revenge. Not a God of violence. We are made in the image of a God who is loving, intentional, powerful, nonviolent.
Episcopalians aren’t exactly known for quoting Scripture by chapter and verse, but these days Luke chapter 6 might be a good chapter to keep in your back pocket. When engaging with other Christians, being able to quote Jesus when he says, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned.” Luke 6:37 might be a handy verse to memorize.
How different would our world be if Christians lived these words from Jesus, if Christians were less judgmental, if we were less ready to condemn? How different would our world be if Christians practiced loving their enemies and doing good to those who cursed us? How much different would our world be if Christians acted as if we believed that God is merciful?
Jesus says it plainly: the Christian way is not to seek vengeance. The Christian way is not to seek to embarrass your enemies, not to intentionally cause suffering and pain. The Christian way is a way of loving, of doing good, of blessing, and praying for those with whom we disagree.
The Way of Love and the Way of Hate
Our former presiding bishop, Michael Curry, called this the “way of love.” This practice of faith, Jesus’ way of life, is so distinctive in this world, it can be called the “way of love.”
The way of love is a practice, but the reality is that hate is also practice. And hate is ready for you. People practice hate all the time. How many of us regularly practice the angry speech we’d like to give our boss, our co-worker, our family member, the politician on television? How many times have we run through that anger in our head? We can find ourselves, pretty naturally, rehearsing our hatred, busy repeating it to ourselves. That inner monologue, especially toward the people with whom we disagree, can take up a lot of time and energy.
Jesus’s words today are so simple, but they don’t make love any simpler. Love also takes practice. How many times do you suppose Joseph had to rehearse to himself exactly what he would say when he saw his brothers again? These brothers, who years before, jealous over his relationship with his father, stole his beloved coat and sold Joseph into slavery in Egypt. How many times do you think Joseph had to rehearse what he says here in Genesis?
Choosing to practice love means that we can dare to believe in a world without winners and losers. It means we can dare to believe that there is enough food to feed all the hungry people of the world, enough medicine to care for all the sick, enough love to heal the broken hearts.
Why love your enemies? Because practicing love, in the end costs you less than practicing hate. Hate consumes us. Hate embitters. Spending your energy practicing hate will not help you to grow as a person. Hate shrinks us. God does not want you to be smaller. You were made not for hate, but for love.
Politics as Unusual
In the winter of 2013, I had a couple of opportunities to hear a professor of epidemiology talk about gun violence. These were the months after the murders and Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown Massachusetts. I was angry. I had been a high school student in the same Colorado county as Columbine. I had friends from Elementary school in the building. Every school shooting hits too close to home. That winter of 2013 I was looking for answers.
And I went to listen to Dr. Arthur Kellerman. An Episcopalian, Kellerman had authored a famous study showing that a gun kept in the home is statistically far more likely to be used to harm someone in the home than it is to stop an intruder. Kellerman’s study, which has solid peer reviews and has held up to scientific scrutiny, also became deeply politicized. There are political forces that do not want studies published showing the dangers of gun ownership.
I was expecting Dr. Kellerman to be a voice that would echo what I heard from politicians. He didn’t. In a question and answer session, an obviously distraught woman came to the microphone and asked, “what is one thing I can do, really what is the one most important thing I can do to stop gun violence?” Do you know what Dr. Kellerman said?
“Read to your kids.”
Kids who are read to each night are far less likely to be involved in violence. Kellerman surprised me. He talked about being a member of the NRA. He was a hunter, a gun owner. As he spoke, it was clear that the author of the most controversial study on firearms, the evidence against owning guns, was good friends with people who thought very differently than he did.
In a short simple answer, he re-humanized the debate. He helped us to take a step back from all the angry politics and to look at the wider picture. All of us hope for a world where every kid has someone to read with. His answer invited us to see one another, to realize that we won’t ever solve the problem by drawing the same lines in the sand again and again. We won’t win by demonizing our enemies. Most of us won’t be in the room someday when a law is written that will make a real change to the culture of gun violence, but all of us, all of us, can make a decision to move from love.
Leaving India
As Howard Thurman and his fellow pastors were preparing to leave India, Gandhi confessed to them that he wasn’t sure whether ahimsa, nonviolence, was being fully communicated by his movement. He wasn’t sure that the message was getting across. In 1936 Gandhi told Howard Thurman, “it may be through the [Black Community] that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.”
Nonviolence, the word coined by Gandhi, famously echoes throughout the writing of Thurman’s student Dr. King. When he wrote from a Birmingham jail King said, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” From his mentor Howard Thurman, Dr. King learned that work of love is inner work. Today this teaching remains as difficult as it is important. Resisting brutality in a way that keeps us living, and loving and whole is crucial. As Christians, we don’t pray that our enemies be defeated. We pray that both the oppressor and the oppressed might be liberated.
Jesus said, “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” This doesn’t make Jesus weak. Moving from love, moving from nonviolence, is not weakness. Nonviolence isn’t a failure to act, but an intentional way of acting. This kind of love, this kind of turning the other cheek takes deep strength. Resisting brutality with love, it takes a huge heart. This way requires patience and self-control. This kind of love takes faith, that God is a nonviolent God. And that the force of nonviolence is fundamentally part of who we are called to be in this world.
Mike Angell 