Today’s author is Intentional Interim Pastor, Steve Sylvester.
Charlie Kirk. For those of you who don’t know him, Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, was a right-wing provocateur who cloaked his mean spiritedness in a Christianity I simply don’t recognize. He was killed by a gunman on Thursday at a university event in Utah. I did not like Charlie Kirk. At all. I was, however, called to love him.
Being created for relationship with others does not mean I am created to have buddies. It means there is a bond not of my own making that I am called to accept and embrace. It means I am to struggle to seek the good for people, even and especially when I disagree with or dislike them. And that is a very difficult thing, especially during these times when I disagree with so much and dislike so many.
In Jesus’ sermon on the mount in Matthew’s Gospel, he did not tell us we would not have enemies. He did not tell us to pretend that our enemies were actually friends in disguise. He told us that we are to love our enemies. I don’t think we understand just how astonishing a statement that is. On the one hand, “good” Christians want to say that we aren’t “really” enemies, that deep down we all want the same thing. On the other hand are those who say that we do indeed have enemies, and enemies belong under the boot. What Jesus is saying is that both are wrong. “Yes,” he says, “we DO have enemies, actual enemies, but rather than ostracize or exterminate them, we are to love them.”
And this brings us back to Charlie Kirk, whom I did not like, with whom I vehemently disagreed, who was truly my enemy. I grieve his death. I grieve his death because it shows, yet again, that we have not learned to love our enemies. I deplore gun violence. I wish to God we could take all the non-hunting guns out of private hands and maybe put the rest in locked boxes on shooting ranges for the entertainment of those who aren’t satisfied with video games and need to have the feel of a real trigger. But even if we were to get rid of guns, and with them the ability to murder our enemies from a distance, we would still need to learn how to love our enemies, because I do not doubt that we would find some other way to maim and kill.
The very hard thing about being created for relationship is that we will always be grouped in with enemies. Always. There is simply no avoiding it. So, we need, with God’s guidance, to figure out what it means to seek good for all people. My prayer for us this day is that we will learn how to do that.