A Good Measure
A sermon on Luke 6:27-38 and Genesis 45:3-11, 15
Preached Sunday, February 23, 2025 at First UMC Schenectady.
Video available here.
Would you pray with me?
God, God, God. Thank you for bringing us together in this time and this place, no matter the time and the place. Make your Spirit known to us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
I once received feedback that my sermons were too self-focused, and while I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of all of my sermons, it might be for this one. So I ask your forgiveness in advance.
I’d like to start off this sermon with a story, and this story starts on Twitter.
I know, I know, preaching from a tablet? Using a sermon illustration from my personal experience of Twitter? And the early days of Twitter at that? Could I be any more millennial?
Yes. Yes, I could.
A decade ago, back before Twitter changed management, back before COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd, back before Brexit and the 2016 election, the Black Lives Matter hashtag and movement was picking up in the wake of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri after the murder of Michael Brown. I was a few years out of college and somehow still naive, because here I was, getting an education on Twitter. For the first time, I was really working through my understanding of the police and privilege and bias, benefitting from the work that Black activists were sharing on the platform. Through the retweets and quote tweets, I started to build a list of voices who have shaped how I see the world, many of whom I rediscovered after migrating to Bluesky just a few weeks ago.
This is a long windup to give you context for a quote that I think is absolutely crucial for folks like us today, especially when reading passages like the ones we read this morning, but there’s something important here too: Twitter, back then, was my school. I hit that space at just the right time, when people were connecting and sharing ideas and I received blessing upon blessing as Black people, Indigenous people, Latino and Latina folks, Hispanic people, Asian people, migrants and immigrants, people of color with all sexualities and genders and from all religious and faith backgrounds, from a wide swath of classes and experiences, from across the US and the world shared their experiences, perspective, and knowledge for free in a space where I could read and listen and learn and change and grow. Spaces like that can happen in person and virtually, I’m not trying to limit our capacity for connection, but I do want to affirm for you today that spaces like that are precious and they need cultivation. That is part of our work in this world today, to cultivate these kinds of spaces, wherever they may be.
It was on Twitter in this heady time that I got lucky enough to follow Mariame Kaba, an abolitionist, author, and organizer who I have followed for years now and who has probably had the single biggest impact on my understanding of justice outside of Jesus himself. Through Mariame, I found fellow abolitionist, organizer, and author Kelly Hayes and it was through Kelly Hayes that I first heard this quote this week from author, podcaster, and trans activist Margaret Killjoy. She says:
“We really need to challenge ourselves to be ready to let people be better. …If we’re going to make people pick sides, we have to let them pick our side. That includes people who don’t look like you, who look like people that you don’t like… We need to let the enemy quit being the enemy. Otherwise, all we’ve done is try and create some weird scene of purity.”
We need “to be ready to let people be better. …We need to let the enemy quit being the enemy.”
The minute I heard this quote, I knew I had to preach on it, because goodness, Magpie convicted me with this one.
And don’t get me wrong. This quote could very, very easily become an excuse for quietism, for “peacemaking” centrism. In the wrong hands, in the hands of the powerful, this quote could rob any revolution of its fervor, asking us to wait on those who are actively harming us to change their minds. No, this quote is convicting specifically because of who it’s coming from, and who it’s for.
Much like our gospel reading today.
See, it’s easy, especially for white folks like me, to think that when Jesus tells us to love our enemies, he means that we should be nice to Republicans. Or Democrats. Jesus must mean that we have to live and let live, and living and letting people live means that we must accept things as they are and wait for our turn in power and try and make changes then. Be peaceful. Make peace. Build bridges. That’s where the blessing lies.
Right. That’s what Jesus means.
And longtime NAACP organizer and strike leader Rosa Parks sat in a seat on the front of the bus just because she was tired.
“But I say to you who are listening: Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you.”
See, these words are convicting specifically because of who’s saying them and who they’re for. They’re convicting because it’s Jesus who’s saying them. Jesus, who is speaking here to the twelve disciples, his core band of followers, who he has gathered together from the discontented in lower class and working class. Jesus, who just verses ago called the rich and the authorities cursed. Jesus, who will be crucified for being a Jewish, anti-Roman revolutionary in a land controlled by Rome. Jesus, who did not stay dead and buried like the authorities hoped, but in an act of eternal defiance against the powers of sin and death rose again on the third day to proclaim life and freedom and abundance to the rebellion that Rome just tried to kill.
It is Jesus, who will later tell his followers to take up their crosses and follow him to their own executions, who told the world that he came not to bring peace but a sword, who is telling his band of revolutionaries now that if we’re going to make it in this world, you have to be willing to let the enemy stop being the enemy. In fact, you have to go the next step: Do good to the enemy. Pray for them. And when they hit you, ask for more. When they take your coat, give them your shirt. When they make you walk a mile, you walk a second.
It's the same with Joseph, from our reading from Genesis today. God, I have struggled with this passage. I have wished it was not in the Bible, or, if it had to stay, I wish it was different. I wish there was clean and true repentance, I wish that Joseph didn’t declare God’s role in this, I wish that it didn’t set the stage for a conquest narrative and theodicy with millennia of consequences. I wish it were different. But what is important for us this morning is that it is Joseph, the queer-coded favorite son, once sold into slavery and falsely imprisoned, who used the skill he was once despised for to save as many people as he could, it is Joseph who is choosing of his own accord to forgive his brothers and to make sense of his own trials. He has thought long and hard and when faced with his abusers, he says, “You did not love me, but I love you. You judged me, and condemned me, but I won’t do that. I forgive you. I welcome you. I give to you a good measure, asking for nothing in return, but trusting that overflow will come back to me one day. I choose mercy.”
Friends, I have not learned this lesson yet.
Friends, I struggle.
Because I didn’t stop learning back in 2014. I didn’t stop with unpacking the backpack of white privilege. I didn’t stop with condemning individual acts of police brutality or one-off racist statements made by public figures. I learned my history. I learned the horrors. I studied them. I learned about the systems, the water we swim in, and how it was all designed to perpetuate the falsehood of the supremacy of the colonizer. I chased those precious spaces of learning and sharing and growth across platforms, through books, through the gospels, to protests, to organizing and back again. I keep on trying, keep on learning.
And through it all, through the pain of unlearning and the joy of relearning, through the victories and losses, through the discovery and the backtracking and trying again, my anger and disgust at the enemy has only deepened. My anger has grown complicated, because, as theologian and Civil Rights activist William Stringfellow once wrote, the enemy is my people. The enemy looks like me. I went to high school with the enemy, I went to church with the enemy, I went to seminary with the enemy, I worked with the enemy, I am related to the enemy. I, on bad days and good, am the enemy, and I cannot fathom offering forgiveness to myself.
Friends, we all know that there are forces at work in this world who must be stopped.
We all know that there are precious, vulnerable lives at stake and we lose more every day.
In the face of this world, this broken, woe-ridden world, it is tempting, it is more than tempting, to hate your enemies and, if you’re like me, to hate the enemy within.
But friends, it is Jesus who tells us that this is not the way.
It is Jesus, our Savior, who tells us that this is not the way.
It is Jesus, the deep, unending Love of the universe made flesh, who lived and died and rose again as one of us, who tells us that if we are to survive, we need everyone. No matter how angry or hurt or devasted or betrayed you are, it remains true that we need everyone. And I’m not saying that we lay down in the face of injustice. I’m not saying that we stop the fight. In order for you to have an enemy to love, you must choose a side. You must choose a fight.
But when anger overwhelms you and the powers of death whisper that you cannot survive while your enemy lives, Jesus tells us to be merciful. Forgive. Lend. Bless. We all need each other. Be ready to let people be better. Let people pick our side. Let the enemy quit being an enemy. Let them become a sibling, a sister, a brother. Give them a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over.
And when you do this, when you take this risk, when you choose to love with abundant good measure, I promise you, friends, I promise you: you’ll get it back.
Amen.