Satyagraha. Luke 6:27-36

February 23, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y. 

I have led a Forrest Gump life.

As a church magazine editor, I never did anything important. But I got to stand next to some amazing people.

I have shaken hands with Dr. Jonas Salk. I have schmoozed with Jimmy Carter. I have watched the tall, august figure of Civil Rights icon Dorothy Height stroll the corridors of the United Nations. I have smelled the aroma of cigar smoke clinging to burley form of Teddy Kennedy. I have sat in a meeting with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict, though I was not sure I really knew which of the white-haired red-capped cardinals in the room was him.

I have led a Forrest Gump life.

In 1982 Columbia Pictures invited church communicators to preview Gandhi, the epic biographical film of the great Indian leader. I was among the privileged few to view the film from luxuriously padded chairs in a small screening room. And although our hosts never let our wine glasses go dry, I stayed awake throughout all the 191 minutes of the film.

I was deeply impressed by the story of Gandhi and his confrontation with the British empire. The next morning I went to the Columbia bookstore and bought every book on Gandhi they had, about five books. Over the next several days I devoured them as if they were brain candy. I learned the details of Gandhi’s life that couldn’t fit in the film. In particular I learned about Satyagraha.

Satyagraha, which means “truth force,” is a policy of nonviolent political resistance against oppressors. Without firing a shot, Gandhi led a massive movement that led to India’s independence in 1948.

Here, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., used satyagraha to show the evils of Jim Crow and racial abuse by white oppressors.

And, if you look closely at today’s scripture, Jesus is advocating a form of satyagraha to his listeners, a satyagraha based on love and forgiveness.

“Love your enemies,” Jesus said.  “Do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you.” (Lk 6:27-28)

These are not easy commandments.

My three older daughters, now adults, are mixed race or Black, and for many years we attended a Baptist church in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. I taught a Sunday School class of seventh grade girls.

There were, granted, some tiny cultural differences between them and me. Like we were speaking different languages.

I didn’t realize how different until I tried to teach the passage we read today.

“Jesus,” I began confidently, “said to love your enemies.”

I thought I heard a gasp so I paused. The girls were staring at me with gaping mouths and horrified eyes.

“He what?” said one.

“Naw, he didn’t say that,” said another.

“Stupid,” said a third.

I hesitated. These girls had good and loving parents who made sure their hair was braided with colorful ribbons and they wore Sunday dresses and patent leather shoes. They were in church every Sunday. How could they miss this essential teaching of Jesus?

“Well,” I said, “you can see where he said it in the Bible …”

“Then he was wrong,” said one of the older girls, no amused at my ignorance. “Jesus tried loving bullies in the seventh grade, he’d be beaten to a pulp.”

The other girls nodded.

After class, I realized the girls were teaching me.

Jesus may have been telling us to turn the other cheek. But surely he wasn’t advocating being beaten to a pulp.

In some churches, Jesus’ commandment to love those who persecute has been taken to an extreme. Wives who tell their pastors that their husbands have beaten them are told it’s because they aren’t showing their husbands enough love. They are sent home with instructions to be more loving and more submissive.

And certainly there are episodes in scripture where Jesus did submit and allow himself to be beaten. But there was also the Jesus who rose up against the abuse of power and tossed the tables of the money changers while flailing a whip.

Scholar Mary Hinkle Shore writes, “The great majority of the Sermon on the Plain …  including its exhortations to love enemies and show mercy like that of the Most High, is spoken to the community of those listening to Jesus. This ethic is not meant to be tried alone. The text is not a directive, for instance, to an individual suffering spousal abuse to bear up under it while the rest of her Christian congregation looks the other way. In the reign of God, we live and act in community, which means, bluntly, that we concern ourselves with each other’s business more than the transaction ethic might suggest we should.”

This is where the concept of Satyagraha takes on a Christian aura.

“Jesus offers his ethic as a way for the community of his followers to resist the tit-for-tat of the present age, not to be passive in the face of it,” Shore writes. “When we live the ethic of this Sermon in the face of this world’s violence, we are collectively saying to those who hate, abuse, strike, judge, and condemn, ‘You are not the boss of me.’ We are demonstrating that bad behavior cannot goad us into reacting in kind. We are resisting the evils we deplore.”

When I look back on my life, I am appalled by the times I allowed evil to be the boss of me.

I grew up in a tiny hamlet in Central New York State. Madison County is rural and predominantly white. However, Peterboro, N.Y., was an outpost of the Underground Railroad and in the 1860s several African American escapees settled there. I knew many of their descendants, and I also observed how they were insulted, belittled, and mistreated by my fellow white folks. I did not participate in the abuse. I ignored it, to my shame.

When I was growing up in the fifties and sixties, many persons had to struggle in solitude with their sexual orientation. This was decades before the Stonewall uprising or Act-Up of Pride, and for many their sexuality was a cause of shame. It wasn’t until I attended class reunions decades later that some classmates showed up with partners of the same gender. They were welcomed, of course, with love. But I cringe to think what it must have been like for them as teenagers when they hid their truth in silence because their contemporaries were not ready to hear it.

When we consider times when we allowed evil to be the boss of us, it is good to revisit the portion of the Sermon on the Plain that we read last week, and update the context:

Blessed are you suffer racism, for you will be free.

Blessed are you who are gay or lesbian or trans, for you will be loved.

Blessed are you when you suffer domestic abuse, for you will find safety.

Blessed are you who feel the darkness now, for you see the light.

Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you, for you are to be counted in the beloved community of the most high.

Love is the thread interwoven throughout the Sermon on the Plain. Love is the thread interwoven thought all scripture and Holy Writ. Love is the thread interwoven through all the mountains and valleys of our lives.

“Love,” said Zora Neale Hurston, is like the sea. It’s a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”

“Love,” said Zora Neale Hurston, “makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.”

“I believe,” said Martin Luther King, Jr., “that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality … Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

May love and light and justice embrace us all.

Amen.