Are We Still Friends If We Fight? – A Sermon

I Corinthians 13 and Luke 6:27-36

OOPS
When I told my wife what I was preaching on this week, 
she called me a hypocrite.
She is right, the first thing I need to say is 
that I am not filled with love for my enemies.
Love for those beyond my family 
       is not something I can claim much; 
I can only aspire to it.
I think I can explain some of my difficulty.

I have two stories I would like to tell.
That’s how we are supposed to spice up a sermon, 
        with stories from real life.
Unfortunately, I asked my preacher friends on the internet
whether it is ethical to tell stories about real people, 
even if you don’t name them, or if they live miles away.
I was told by several people not to do it without their permission.
They are probably right, so I pulled a whole page from this sermon.

The stories were about disputes I had with two different people;
Each one of them accused people of a different nationality 
of being less than worthy of our respect.
Each dispute was about politics.
In the first one I responded badly.
I did better in the second.

UGH
I’ll bet most of you could tell similar stories.
My life isn’t the only one that has been made difficult 
by our political and social divisions.
Maybe yours has been, too.
I am not saying anything you don’t know,
about how divided people are from each other.
Many people report losing friends in the past year 
        because of political differences.

Family disputes have risen, too.
Fear of this year’s Thanksgiving dinner has risen
because in too many families there is someone 
who is going to say something 
        that causes others to explode in anger.

It isn’t just families; it’s churches, too.
We might think that Christians would all see the world 
        in similar ways, and share the same values, but it is not so.
There is not one church of Jesus. 
Churches are as fractured as political parties.
Churches don’t have the membership or influence they once had.
And all the other institutions in society are declining 
        or changing drastically 
from what they used to be in our lifetimes.

Each of us is influenced more and more
by values we adopt from sources other than the church.
Our values have changed.
In 201l, the Public Religion Research Institutes asked in a poll 
whether elected officials "could fulfill their public duties 
if they committed immoral acts in their private lives.” 
61% of white evangelical Protestants said "no.”
In October of 2016, PRRI repeated the poll. 
This time, only 20% said immoral personal acts 
disqualified a politician from public office.

AHA
What is going on? My friend says we have different worldviews.
A dictionary tells me that 
“A worldview is the set of beliefs 
about the fundamental nature of Reality.
  These beliefs ground and influence 
all our perceiving, thinking, knowing, and doing. 
  Our worldview is our philosophy, mindset, set of values,
                outlook on life, ideology, faith, or even religion.”

So Worldview is about values, many of them grounded in religion.
Jesus and Paul taught values.
Here they are in our readings today.
To be a Christian is to value love so highly 
that we are asked to love our enemies.
We are asked to be generous and forgiving, welcoming, patient, 
and compassionate, and many other good things.
  
WHEE
The last time I was here, as everyone remembers really well (!),
I spoke of values and how they are key to understanding God.
I said God is whatever lies behind or underneath or above 
our deep symbols and values.
That’s pretty abstract, but this thought is carried to an extreme 
in the Bible itself, in the 1st letter of John, where we read that 
“God is love.”
Such a statement invites us to say then that “love is God,” 
although the Bible won’t go that far, 
        and the church hasn’t either, but recently some of us have. 

If we have been in a Christian church for very long,
we have learned the golden rule, 
included in the passage from Luke this morning: 
“Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

What is the street version, the cynical version of this teaching,
[“Do to others before they do to you.”]
What is the cynical idea of what “golden rule” means:
[“Whoever has the gold, rules.”]
These alternative rules tell us how the world really works:
Helping others doesn’t help you get ahead.
Thinking of others first just puts you behind.
These rules imply that Jesus is a wimp.
      His teachings are for losers.
The value here is not love, but survival, and dominance.
The way to survival and dominance here 
      is not the value of giving, but greed.
The goal here is not compassion, but competition.
The values underlying competition are animosity, 
even meanness, and cruelty, if they are necessary to get ahead.

Note that the famous love chapter extols love, 
but does not tell us what it is.
Instead it tells what love is not.
These things are not included in love: 
envy, boasting, arrogance or bluster, 
rudeness or making a scene, 
insisting on our own way, 
being irritable or throwing fits, 
resentfulness or negativity, and injustice.

So what are the opposite, positive values which are preferable?
I looked up the antonym, the opposite of each word.
They are: Charitableness, peacefulness, humility, and patience, 
kindness, positivity, and doing justice.
These are the positive values that make up "love."

Many church members have told me over the years 
that their favorite verse in the Bible is Micah 6:8:
“He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
    and what does the Lord require of you
  but to do justice, and to love kindness,
  and to walk humbly with your God?”

We were supposed to learn such things in Sunday School,
or hear them in Sunday sermons, 
        enough for them to inspire us.
But we seem to be learning from Jesus or God less 
than from other role models.

YEAH
So how do we deal with family and friends, and co-workers?
When someone says something shocking to you –
it might be prejudice against another group of people.
it might be contrary to what you think 
                are good Christian values.
It might be a different political opinion than you hold.

The first thing is to be silent. I did not do this.
Only thinking about afterward can I say: Stop and think. 
Maybe count to ten.
Do not respond from the emotional region of your brain.
Respond calmly and without raising your voice.

You might say “I disagree with you on that.”
Or, “I don’t believe that.”

Maybe the best thing to say is “Tell me why you think that.”
Or, “How does that make our lives better.”

If the fight occurs anyway, 
follow the advice in the letter to the Ephesians,
“Do not let the sun set on your anger.”
That was my rule always, when I was a pastor.
Apologize for your part of the dispute.
Saying you are sorry is not a sign of weakness.
Apologies tend to make us gain respect and strength.
But apologies have to be real:
 “I’m sorry if you were offended” is not an apology.

Another helpful strategy is to turn the conversation to something
the two of you have in common, and build from that.

Or to say “I value you as a friend, 
        and I don’t want to fight with you.”
This gives permission to the other person to back off, too.
Or respond to the other person’s need as I did last week:
“Tell me about your shoulder pain. 
          I had shoulder surgery last March.”
In that case we both talked at length about 
        what had happened to us, 
we found that he knew my doctor,
and wanted to know about the doctor that did my surgery.

Am I going to do better in such situations in the future?
Maybe, but maybe not.
I have studied conflict management in at least three, heavy courses.
I have a fair track record at managing groups 
and working with congregations in conflict.
One on one is a different matter. 
A large group is easier.
Christians can learn to fight fair in a group.
But the risk that one party of two will leave 
and break the bond between them is huge.

Even the possibility of losing friends 
        isn’t the biggest problem before us.
My friend says we should agree to disagree.
I do not like that.
It means that there is an ocean of topics and important issues 
that we cannot talk about with each other.

If friends cannot speak about issues facing the entire nation,
there can be no genuine representative democracy,
which requires citizen participation, 
                not only in the voting booth,
but in dialogue with each other.
The ancient Greeks and Romans devised ways to do that.
But worked for them only for a short period of human history.

If we cannot have difficult conversations in our churches,
that will be the end of the teaching of Christian values.
BTW, Congress voted recently in their budget bill (not yet passed)
to end IRS enforcement of the rule 
that prevents churches from preaching politics 
and raising money for political causes.
  If you don’t like that, write your Congressman and Senators.

So I am working up courage to open a conversation with a friend
about something that we both care about 
                but about which we disagree.
We cannot continue in this country 
                to ignore the great issues of our time
by only speaking of them with those with whom we agree.

I’ll bet there are issues that cannot be spoken of 
        in your congregation.
Too sensitive, too difficult, too controversial.

I would like to think that there is hope in returning 
        to the basic values we learned from the Bible and the church.
Do you think there is hope?
And will you do something about it?


May we all strive for the highest kind of love,
in which we do for others what we would want, 
Even when we do not want to do it for the other.