Au nom de la sainte et indivise Trinité, un seul Dieu, maintenant et pour toujours.  Amen.

I want to begin by expressing my warmest heartfelt gratitude for the multiple ways in which you have supported and nourished me during this especially trying time: through your prayers, your messages of support and hope, your generous offers of care.  I am grateful to each and every one of you.  I have felt your love surround me, and it has meant a great deal.  Merci de m’avoir gardé dans vos prières et dans vos bonnes pensées.  Tout cela contribue à ma guérison.  C’est un long processus de récupération, mais je vais de nouveau me tenir debout parmi vous.  I will once again stand with and among you, and I thank God for that.

Today’s reading from the gospel of Matthew is a familiar one on many levels, perhaps too much so.  It follows from the sequence of the Beatitudes, where Jesus radically reverses our traditional cultural understandings of where real power lies in our world.  It’s a lesson that we too often tend to forget, but that rings especially true at this particular time when haughty political arrogance stalks the world stage.  It’s easy to become blasé or smug about the counter-cultural message of Christianity.  Its sharp critical view of the world’s values can certainly make us uneasy.  Yet the more difficult question that is raised by Matthew is a central Christian imperative: the love of one’s enemies, and the duty we have to pray for them.  That’s an especially tough one for us.  I was reading a sermon prepared by preacher Elizabeth Palmer on this gospel passage, and she asked the one really hard question: “Who are my enemies?”  Really, when we think about it, which one of us has real-live enemies, people who would willingly and deliberately harm us?  We undoubtedly know people who dislike us, perhaps even intensely—or we may perceive certain types of individuals who are fundamentally opposed to our way of thinking about the world as “enemies” in a sort of moral or ethical way—but would they really want to harm us, or we them?  Do we perhaps invent or see enemies where there are none?  And what is more important: How does loving our enemies make us more like God?

C’est facile de se construire des ennemis de toutes pièces, et c’est même un peu réconfortant.  C’est sûr que cela nous simplifie la vie.  Il y a ceux-ci et ceux-là qui sont de notre côté, et les autres qui ne le sont pas.  Nous le faisons tous, soit délibérément, soit plus subtilement. Mais l’enseignement du Christ est assez clair.  Il faut aimer et pardonner à nos ennemis, peu importe qui ils sont, et même prier pour eux.  Il faut que nous essayions d’aller au-delà des apparences, au-delà de nos propres sentiments, même au-delà de ce qui peut nous sembler logique à première vue.  On peut se demander pourquoi.  Le Christ lui-même nous le dit : afin que nous soyons aussi saints et aussi parfaits que Dieu l’est. Donc, cette exigence est fondamentale ; elle est basée sur ce que Dieu est de par sa nature : Dieu est saint, et Dieu est parfait.  Mais nous savons très bien que nous ne sommes pas Dieu, et que nous ne pourrons jamais l’être.  Pourquoi donc vouloir agir à sa façon ?  C’est précisément parce qu’il n’y a pas d’autre exemple aussi bon, aussi sûr, aussi  authentique, et aussi juste.  Nous nous devons d’agir comme Dieu, parce que Dieu nous trace la vraie voie de la perfection et de la sainteté.

          Be as perfect and holy as God is perfect and holy.  The core teaching about loving one’s enemies is an indispensable element of this fundamental requirement.  Being as perfect and holy as God is does not mean that we necessarily are, or that we will become so.  We may even think it sets up an impossible standard for us, one that humans are incapable of attaining.  But, in fact, it frees us.  One could say that, paradoxically, it frees us to behave like God.  Because if we re-read today’s gospel text as well as the passage from Leviticus with care, what strikes us is how God so carefully models how we are to behave as humans.  Amazingly, God’s concerns are in fact quite ordinary, almost mundane:  “You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien.”  “You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor.”  “Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.”  Why?  Because you need to be perfect as God is perfect.  One would think Godly perfection has to do with spiritual and religious works.  But no!  It is not prayer, or acts of intense devotion, or gestures of extravagant piety that make the tangible difference.  It is material acts of social justice that help make us sharers in God’s perfection.  How we behave towards others is the real mark of our partaking in God’s holiness.  C’est la façon dont nous nous comportons envers les autres qui fait que nous devenons un peu comme Dieu.  Car Dieu est tout ce qu’il y a de plus généreux, tout ce qu’il y a de plus bienfaisant, tout ce qu’il y a de plus ouvert à la misère et aux besoins des autres.  D’une certaine façon, ce travail de Dieu n’est jamais complété ; Dieu a besoin de nous pour l’achever, pour mener les choses à bien.  Dieu ne peut se passer de nous lorsqu’il est question de subvenir aux besoins des autres.  Dieu nous indique les standards qu’il faut respecter, et Dieu nous dit que nous partageons sa perfection lorsque nous les suivons.

What I find especially perceptive, even hopeful, about these passages from scripture is how God seems to say that we are very much necessary and essential to help make manifest God’s perfection and holiness.  In reality, we are specifically commanded to leave things “incomplete” so as to provide for the needs of others.  “Do not reap; do not gather; do not strip; leave the fallen grapes for the poor and the alien; do not keep wages; do not defer to the great; go also the second mile; be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  It all seems overwhelming.  Yet there is something liberating about this notion of “incompleteness.”  It implies that we must do our part, that we must act deliberately and with intention, and that we must, as it were, behave like God.  God’s requirement that we maintain a sense of incompleteness or openness in our dealings with others, including our enemies, is what marks us as being counter-culturally Christian.

We live in a time where, increasingly, we like things to be closed off, sealed up and hidden away, all in a vain attempt to keep the poor and the alien at bay, to forbid them access to the fruits of the vineyard.  We will build walls and issue executive orders to keep you out.  We will imagine enemies where there are none.  We will ridicule and mock you, and we will call you names.  We will proclaim our power and our might, and we will call it the work of God.  But God mocks such human arrogance, as God has always done.  This is not holiness; this is the stuff of which human gullibility and human pride are made.  And we need to name it.

Ces temps nous interpellent.  Les temps sont dangereux.  De plus en plus, nous nous trouvons face à un monde qui exige des réponses claires, nettes et précises.  En un mot, des réponses simplistes.  Et nous mettons notre foi et notre avenir entre les mains de ceux pour qui la vie ne présente aucune ambiguïté, et qui refusent de voir et d’accepter un monde rempli de diversité et de différence.  Dieu nous dit de laisser le surplus des fruits de la terre pour le pauvre et l’étranger.  Dieu dit de ne pas se laisser séduire par les pouvoirs terrestres.  Dieu nous dit d’aimer notre ennemi, car Dieu ne fait aucune distinction entre les personnes.  Ce sont des appels à la résistance.  Ce sont des appels à construire un monde selon de nouveaux critères—selon les valeurs de Dieu.  En bout de ligne, c’est à nous de décider si nous voulons partager la perfection et la sainteté de Dieu.  C’est certain que c’est toujours un défi, mais c’est un défi qui, en nous rapprochant de Dieu, nous rendra encore plus humains et plus vulnérables.  Et en ces temps difficiles et remplis de craintes, c’est une source d’espoir et de décence humaine et divine.

          As a Cathedral community, I believe we can witness strongly to the need for our world to remain “open, unfinished and incomplete” in God’s eyes, precisely because that is the way of God.  It is a call to live in a state of sacred ambiguity and receptivity, and it is not easy.  We might find it uncomfortable, perhaps even destabilizing.  At this unique time, there is a particular relevance to Jesus’ words—no, his command—that we love our enemies and pray for them.  We can witness to the fact that the world’s enemies are not always and everywhere our enemies; that the very definition of an enemy is problematic and risky; and that all are called to share in the surplus fruits of the land and the vineyard, which we have been told to leave fallow for those from afar.  We can—we must—indeed strive to be holy and perfect as God is holy and perfect.  That is the great challenge and unique beauty of the Christian way.  Jesus does not ask us to be implacable, or unduly rash, or even naïve about the world’s ways.  We are not asked to leave our intelligence and our acumen behind.  We are simply asked to bear confident witness to a different set of values about how God wants us to behave in this world.  Amen.