Epiphany 7, Year C | Luke 6:27-38
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
February 23, 2025
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
“…you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind…” – Luke 6:35[1]
We’ve had quite a few funerals here at St. Andrew’s recently—three in eight days, to be precise. As two of those were for people I had never met, my backup funeral sermon has been getting a bit of a workout. In it I ask people to consider the possibility of a literal interpretation of the Apostle John’s statement that “God is love”[2]—not just an emotion or feeling, but “love-made-action,” a practical and physical expression of care and support for someone else. I explain that if that’s the case, God is active and present among us while we express and act upon our concerns for one another. As we support those who grieve, we manifest God in the here and now.
Shortly after yesterday’s service concluded, one of the family members had a wheelchair accident that required outside medical attention. Everyone sprung into surprisingly concerted action. The grandson, a nursing student, began first aid. As the daughter called 911, I went to get medical supplies. Virginia Beckworth happened to be in the Sacristy where the first aid kit resides, and being an experienced nurse, she rushed to take over for the grandson. Others checked in with the other party involved and made sure they were physically okay. Even Tommy, our facilities guy, hurried over from his work at the Hospitality House to clean up the ensuing mess.
Once help arrived and things had calmed a bit, Nancy McMillan, who’s a friend of the family, commented on how the situation had become a great example of the sermon I had just given, a network of community taking action to the best of each of our abilities to care for one another in a time of need—God, as Love, manifesting Godself as present among us.
Later, after I had a little more space to think, Nancy’s comment began to bump into and mix itself with some other ideas I’ve been pondering over the last few weeks, including some questions I’ve been mulling regarding our understanding of certain of God’s characteristics.
Monotheism asserts three primary attributes to God: omnipresence—God is everywhere; omniscience—God knows everything; and omnipotence—God is all-powerful. As Westerners, we tend to interpret those ideas through a lens honed on individualism, which often leads us into the concept of an all-knowing God just waiting for the moment we mess up so they can smite us. But I’ve been wondering if we haven’t been misinterpreting those terms. When we think of God as an expression of the Ultimate Individual, not only do we invent a vengeful and vicious God, we also find ourselves stuck with the very real question, if God is all-powerful and all-loving, why do bad things continue to happen? Why doesn’t God just fix it all or prevent it from ever coming to be in the first place?
But shifting our idea of God from the Primary Self to something more along the lines of God being the Consummate Source and Provider forces our perception of the “omni”s to change as well. If God’s primary identity is more along the lines of being the Basis and Sustainer of Reality, omnipresence moves from God being a sort of cosmic Big Brother watching everything everywhere all at once to “everywhere” itself rising from and existing within God, “in [whom] we live and move and have our being.”[3] Omniscience drifts from God possessing the concentrated mass of all information and intelligence to God being the root behind and provider of all that can be known. And omnipotence makes what might be the biggest jump, swinging from the concept of God being able to do anything God pleases to God being the infinitely generous wellspring of power to all that is, God freely sharing and distributing all that power among the various aspects of Creation, allowing and sustaining its continued existence and, in the case of living beings, offering us full agency to interact with all the strange opportunities that self-awareness provides.
Thinking of that in terms of Nancy’s comment and yesterday’s accident, what would the situation have been had our injured friend been alone? Without anyone else there to witness, God, as Love, would still have been present, continuing to provide life and sustain physical existence. But with no one to help, the injury would have remained untreated and been left to run its natural course, which might ultimately have led to tragedy. However, along with God-as-Love, people were present, which allowed that Love to move from potential or desire or intent into substantive action. The Love that surrounded and maintained the injured person’s own existence was able to physically manifest and alter outcomes through the other people present in that moment.
I’m still having some trouble wrapping my mind around these ideas. However, they do seem to fit with a lot of the ways that Jesus himself talks about God and God’s Kingdom.
Consider our Gospel reading. It’s easy to assume these verses are isolated instructions, but in context, they’re a continuation of the text we heard last Sunday. So Jesus’ broader thought opens with Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, which contain four statements extolling the status of the most miserable among us followed by four despairing wails over the kinds of people most of us wish we could become. I suggested this might be Jesus’ attempt to help us unlearn some of our more corrupt conceptions of what exactly God’s Kingdom is like.
We tend to think of Heaven in terms of excess and overflow or, to call it by its English name, Gluttony—an earned opportunity for everlasting indulgence in one of the seven deadly sins. Questioning that assumption, I wondered if God’s Kingdom isn’t actually a realm of “enough”—a place where everyone has everything they need but without necessarily having everything we might want. For those who’ve spent their lives in lack, “enough” might just allow them to experience true bliss. For those of us used to exercising our privilege of gathering—and wasting—more than we actually use, being limited to “enough” might just feel like Hell.
And that’s where this week’s reading picks up—not as an entirely new subject but as a corrective to those of us who might find ourselves headed for the previous “woes.” We need to change direction, and Jesus is offering us practical steps of how to do so: act lovingly toward our enemies, behave well toward those who hate us, speak kindly to those cursing us, and pray regarding[4] those threatening us. Act with preemptive generosity. This is how we can reveal God’s presence not simply to ourselves or to one another but to everyone around us.
That’s important stuff, but what if Jesus is trying to communicate something even bigger than that? What if he isn’t simply telling us how children of God “ought” to behave but is trying to expand our understanding of the nature of who God is and how God “works”? If God freely and generously gives rise to all that exists, if God provides each of us with the energy or power to live and choose and act but by nature doesn’t necessarily interfere with how we direct that energy, then we—each of us as individuals and all of us as a community—are responsible to do God’s work. We become—in a very direct fashion!—God’s own hands throughout society. Maybe that’s what the Body of Christ is—God’s presence manifest not through some concentrated supernatural display shining outward from a single point but through the combined everyday choices and actions of those attempting to follow the pathways God has laid out and to embody the reality of God’s bountiful and creative nature as we walk those paths.
Maybe we treat our enemies with love not because we expect them to change but because God continues to provide even for those who oppose God’s nature. Maybe we behave well toward those who hate us because God continues to be generous with those who might reject God. Maybe we speak kindly to those who curse us not to prove ourselves morally worthy or superior but because God acts kindly to those who continue to curse God. Maybe we offer and share and go the second mile for others not because of our own desire for reciprocity but because God continually gives and sustains and provides comfort and help to those in need. Maybe we can be merciful not simply because God is merciful but because we can embrace the reality that our existence is greater than just a metaphor of being God’s people or God’s Image. Maybe Jesus is right. Maybe we can step past our fear and greed and dread of scarcity into the bounty and abundance of God’s Kingdom—we can celebrate and even enjoy “enough”—not to avoid condemnation or punishment or the “woes” that might otherwise await us, but because we each—and all—discover ourselves to be God’s living Presence in this world.
“…you will be children of the Most High[, who] is kind…”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] I John 4:8
[3] Acts 17:28 | Edit mine
[4] Not “for,” as our translation states. The preposition is a clear “about” and is structured as an accusative rather than the dative “for” would more naturally require.