Devotion - Wednesday, October 26

I want to refer, once more, to the experience of Monday evening. I sat with a group of students engaged in interfaith dialogue. The wisdom of the model, developed by the students, was to ask "What does your religion say about the topic, but also share with us how you feel."

There are a number of places where our practice does not match our doctrine. We don't often examine these. It is when we try to explain the foundations of our faith that we bump up against the practice of our faith.

Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in Matthew, continues to serve as content for my prayers. Today, I read "You have heard it said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.'"

We stumbled over Sunday's lesson on loving neighbor. This is itself a challenge. Remembering that Jesus had something to say about who all is to be included in the category of "neighbor," we realize that he means for us to love all those we encounter, not merely those who belong to the same social clubs as we.

Now, he tells us to love our enemy; to pray for those who persecute us.

The crisis in Libya is horrific. The murder of Gaddafi has exposed the world's blood thirst. Can our response stand the test of Jesus' Sermon?

Loving our neighbors gets reduced to loving those who are in our family or members of our congregation. This is a lessening of what Jesus teaches. Celebrating the death of another, even one who was a tyrant, cannot be considered an act in line with the words of Jesus.

We sometimes hide behind comments like, "The world now is so different from when it was when Jesus was here." That is certainly true. But Jesus knew the world would change, he only hoped and prayed (served and died) so that the change which was to come might result in a world more aligned with God's vision of what the world might be like.