Something has emerged in the book publishing industry of late that seems curious, and it has book publishers perplexed.  According to data from the book tracker Circana Bookscan, we’re in what they are calling a golden age of Bible publishing.  Bible sales increased by 22 percent in the US through the end of October 2024 compared to the year before, while total US print book sales increased by less than 1 percent, in the same time.  A whopping 13.7 million copies of the Bible were sold in the US in the first 10 months of 2024, compared to 9.7 million sold five years ago, in 2019.

It seems that demand has increased for pricier Bibles, Bibles for women, Bibles for kids, and study Bibles, along with an increase in sales for Bibles across multiple languages.  And now regular Bible readers are adding a journaling Bible, a wide-margin Bible, or a large-print Bible to their collection.

There are many ways to think of the Bible – its meaning and purpose in our lives. Some people see it as a source of lofty vision, and ethical ideals.  Others, no doubt, see it as a source of justification for what they already think.  Sometimes, I suppose, it’s words to live by, words to guide a decent and kind life.  But, passages like the one Chuck has read for us force our hand a bit.  What if we took Jesus’ words to heart – and lived them?

People have warily circled these words of Jesus for centuries, aware that they are at the centre of his whole message somehow.  And yet they are explosive.  People just like us – over and over – have tried to ignore them, overlook them, or interpret them to be less edgy, or impractical.  But, again and again we are drawn back – with a kind of fascination – to their stark, raw, haunting call to us.

Jesus’ “Sermon on the Plain” continues with teachings so countercultural and difficult, and yet unavoidable, that we don’t know what to do with them.  We feel guilty, knowing what’s coming – I mean this is Jesus speaking!  And yet it’s all so unreasonable.  What are we to do with this?  I mean he throws this stuff out there, and then what?  “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.”  I am not saying that to victims of domestic abuse and assault, to children from residential schools. “From anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt…” Like Phyllis Webstad’s orange shirt, you mean, Jesus?  “Be merciful.  Forgive.” It’s not so simple.

Where do we even start?

Well, one starting point is to realize that our view of the individual as an isolated actor – each of us expressing our values, our choices in life – is foreign to the world Jesus lived in.  Society, community for him is woven together in ways that do not start from an individual’s isolated actions.  Jesus’ words are pointing to actions that have the capacity to shake up the social fabric, to undo the structures of oppression – actions that might indeed make God’s way of things in the world possible, or more real.

The actions he speaks of are not passive.  Passivity would mean doing nothing. Offering the other cheek is doing something provocative.  It risks greater harm by making a statement – in not reacting.  It requires the aggressor to actually notice the one who is being victimized, with the possibility of a change in the dynamic – for better or worse.

His examples are real-life situations of injustice.  But Jesus doesn’t call our response “social justice.”  He simply calls it love.  If we could love our neighbours beyond comfort, borders, race, religion and other differences that we’ve allowed to be barriers, “social justice” would be a result.  Love makes justice happen.

Luke translates Jesus, who spoke in Aramaic, as speaking in Greek of agapé – an unconditional, giving, fixed on the good of the other, kind of love.  There is no reciprocity in this love.  No transaction.  We are called to act from faith in God who loves unreservedly, without measure… as much as we possibly can, and then some.  Towards even those who threaten, or attack us, or take advantage. Or perhaps the enemies we must love like that are within our immediate family. Maybe even within the depths of our own soul, our self.

And I’m very aware of the occasions when I am the enemy that others are commanded to love.  And I am grateful for Jesus’ words from that side of the human equation.

When Jesus says, “Agapé your enemies,” he is saying – act toward your enemies in the ways that will create justice, kindness, mercy, and well-being for all of creation.

To desire the well-being of the other for the good of the world might well mean that you don’t like the other.  You may oppose some of their behaviours… speak and act against things that they stand for.  It’s more than likely in fact.

Do good.  Bless.  Pray for.  These three things are all focused on restoring right relationships.  Unlike our modern concern with individual rights and personal well-being, Jesus is totally focused on collective well-being.  He uses the plural, “enemies,” not the singular “enemy” – this isn’t my personal gripe with my neighbour who throws all the snow on my side of the driveway… Jesus is focused on creating community.  A world where everyone and everything is working to sustain relationships of just, mutual well-being which God desires. So, again – loving your enemies can mean standing in complete opposition to their behaviours, in a way that your own behaviours and attitudes are agape.  This is a radical call.  As it has been said, “There is no way to justice.  Justice is the way.”  It could get you killed.  Jesus calls us to agapé.  So that we might become the world that God desires.

Jesus’ words subvert normal human behaviour for many of us, and – let’s be clear – they are open to dangers.  There is a need for flexibility to respond differently in different situations.  Jesus’ words may help us to free hardened patterns of hatred and revenge.  But sometimes they will be inappropriate.

One of the gifts of Christianity (at its best) is that it takes sin – human brokenness – and its consequences dead seriously.  Sin wounds.  Sin breaks.  Sin echoes down the ages, and across generations.  Healing, forgiveness, transformation… this isn’t an escalator; it’s a spiral staircase.  We circle, circle, and circle again, trying to create distance between the pain we’ve suffered and the new life we seek.  Slowly, slowly, slowly, our perspective changes.  Slowly, slowly, slowly, the pain falls away.  Slowly, slowly, slowly, we rise together.  Other times, like a drawing by the Dutch graphic artist Escher, the up staircase is seen to be going down – something many of us are experiencing in these times.

Even so, if I am consumed with my own pain, if I’ve made injury my identity, if I insist on weaponizing my well-deserved anger, my interactions with people who hurt me, then as Anne Lamott writes, my refusal to forgive is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.  I’m drinking the poison.  And the poison will kill me long before it does anything to my abusers.  To choose forgiveness is to release myself from the tyranny of bitterness.

Perhaps another way of stating this is that we will not let the other person determine our actions.  This is similar to mediators, therapists – and transition ministers like me – being trained in and practicing “non-anxious presence” and working to remain self-differentiated in the face of conflict and anger, when my primitive wiring is to fight back or flee.

In the face of threat, self-preservation has more relevance for survival than self-awareness.  Survival instincts act faster than our thinking processes.  When we are anxious, we act before we think.  In those moments what is most needed to allow the situation to have a different outcome is what is most unavailable.

So, Jesus’ words invite us to live into a practice – to live our lives out of an alternative vision of reality.  To live our lives in ways that reverse our wiring –  and that reverse the values of this culture.  Not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s how we live a new kind of life in this world – and make a new world possible.

Where we humans make love and judgment mutually exclusive — where we cry out for revenge, retribution, and punishment — God holds out for restorative justice. A kind of justice we can barely imagine.  A kind of justice that has the power to heal both the oppressed and the oppressor.

Lutheran theologian and pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber writes, “Maybe retaliation or holding onto anger about the harm done to me doesn’t actually combat evil. Maybe it feeds it.  Because in the end, if we’re not careful, we can actually absorb the worst of our enemy, and at some level, start to become them.  So, what if forgiveness; rather than being a pansy way to say, “It’s okay,” is actually a way of wielding bolt-cutters, and snapping the chains that link us?  What if it’s saying, “What you did was so not okay, I refuse to be connected to it anymore.”? Forgiveness is about being a freedom fighter.  And free people are dangerous people.  Free people aren’t controlled by the past.  Free people laugh more than others.  Free people see beauty where others do not.  Free people are not easily offended.  Free people are unafraid to speak truth to stupid.  Free people are not chained to resentments.  And that’s worth fighting for.”

And, I would add, it may be the most important work we can do for the life of the world.

But even more than that… Jesus is doing something kind of stunning here.  He’s standing on this level place, talking to this crowd of people from all over the region, and he is… Jesus is… handing their relationship with God, our relationship with God’s Spirit, in the world, in life – to them, to us.  He hands it back to the people.

What he is saying, standing there, is – this does not happen in the Temple.  This does not happen in the cathedral.  It does not happen on Sunday.  It is not mediated by priests.  This complicated process of living faithfully, loving courageously, dealing with enemies and violence… This is about you, and how you live, and how God loves you and is available to your own experience, in your own life.  This is about what you do when someone borrows money and doesn’t pay it back.  When someone mistreats you.  When a foreign army sends drones in the night and rockets to destroy your home, your city.  He hands them the information they need, the tools they need, the examples to be able to imagine how to live into that… in their lives.  Directly.

So, also for us here – speaking specifically to Bloor Street for just a moment, but it applies to St. Matthew’s and to every church.  Bloor Street’s mission, our ministry, isn’t something the church does for us.  That the staff do for us.  That Council decides for us.  The Transition Team is at work moulding and shaping our life together for a new day, a new building, a changed world – and that Transition work is ours.  All of us.  The budget that we will discuss in a couple of weeks at a congregational meeting – it’s ours.  It’s about what we all feel called to be doing in faith in the world… What we think is important.  What we – you, me – want to be a part of, to make an actual difference in the world.  Because we have faith in a God of love who, in love, hands it back to us and says – join me.

What we do in love can and does go a long way to remaking the world.  Mostly, it allows for the possibility of letting love have the last word.  May it be so.