Persuaded by Love--November 10, 2020

 Persuaded by Love--November 10, 2020

"Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect. Keep your conscience clear, so that when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God's will than to suffer for doing evil." [1 Peter 3:15-17]

To put it simply, when others go low, we will go high.

Always.  As a rule.  Not just when it is easy (it rarely is), but especially when it is difficult.  We will respond to meanness with kindness and we will treat others with the respect we would wish from them, but whether or not they have shown it to us first.

I have been thinking a great deal lately about these words from what we call First Peter, and what it means that the first Christians understood that their witness was made more powerful by their commitment to do good even to those who regarded them as enemies.  It was that kindness in the face of meanness, that showing of decency and dignity even to those who treated our ancestors in the faith with disrespect, that drew people to faith in Jesus, more than demolishing people with arguments.  Nobody gets yelled at into love, and Christianity is about being captivated by Love himself.  Our calling, then, is to persuade by our love, rather than to demand we are right or to smugly refuse to extend decency to others because we imagine that "they were mean to us first."  We are not children on the playground, after all--we are called to be the grown-ups in the room... in any room we walk into.

We need this kind of reminder these days, especially in the lingering aftermath of a brutal election season and the interminable campaign season before that.  Already there is that arrogant and self-righteous impulse to tell "the other side" (who, of course, everybody assumes is the "wrong" side while claiming God for theirs) some version of, "Well, you weren't very respectful to me, so why should I show respect to you?"  We look for ways to justify our bitterness, and we end up trying to make it sound like a virtue:  "I remember all the times you and your group were mean to me, so now it's my turn to be mean right back. Fair is fair."  Of course, we sound like absolute babies when we talk like that, but we tell ourselves it's actually righteous indignation.

No.  No, First Peter says.  We are called to be better than that.  Our witness to the Love that has captivated us calls for better than an endless game of "They did it first."

We need the reminder that there is no permission given in the Scriptures for "They started being mean, so I am allowed to be mean back," and there is no excuse of "But the people I disagree with haven't been respectful to what I think--why should I show respect to them?"  At least as far as First Peter is concerned, the answer is simply "Because you're supposed to be the grown-up."  Other people being jerks doesn't give us permission to be jerks, and other people being nice is not the pre-requisite for us to show kindness.  All of that tit-for-tat transactional thinking is the graceless attitude of toddlers and traders, and the followers of Jesus are neither.  Part of our witness is the way we respond to the folks from whom we receive the greatest hostility.  Part of the way of Jesus is to break the cycle of endlessly trying to get even, which is not only exhausting, but also completely ineffective.

Honestly, in the times in my own life where I have had a really significant change in my thinking, or an inflection point in my faith--and there have been some doozies--it has never come because someone's meanness finally bullied me into thinking their way.  The very pettiness of that kind of behavior itself pushes me away.  What has gotten through to me--even this dense mind and often hardened heart of mine--has been the persuasion of love.  It has been people who showed love to me without the condition that I had done it first.  It was people who risked kindness to me, even when they knew at the time that I thought or believed things that belittled them.

I think about the conversations I have had over coffees or lunches with folks who risked telling me their stories, even knowing they were opening themselves up to me judging them, and whose acts of vulnerable love got through to me.  I think about the woman who told me her life story and about how being honest about who she really was inside and about how she loved enabled her to stop lying to other people... and how her faith journey made me re-examine my assumptions about people I was used to labeling as "those people."  I think about the man who had been burned too many times by religion and religious institutions, who still extended enough respect and care for me to ask me sincere questions about what I believed and why, and invited me to listen to his own faith as well--and it occurs to me that he shaped the direction of my life and my faith without calling me a single name or lobbing a single insult, even though he knew we started our conversation from different perspectives at the time.  I think about the teachers of faith who convinced me of the immenseness and the relentlessness of God's love, and how it wasn't yelling or intimidation or bitterly indignant arm-crossing that got through to me.  It was the witness of love itself.

In other words, in my own life at least, not once has someone persuaded me to think their way by some form of getting even with me.  Not once has someone said to me "People who think the way you do have been mean to me before, so I will be mean to you in response," and then produced a change in my thinking or heart.  Meanness doesn't change anybody else's heart--it just corrodes your own.

And I think that is just what First Peter has been saying for the last two thousand years.  If we see the world just divided into "My Side" and "Their Side" and assume that the only outcome between the two is to destroy the other team, we will not only alienate everybody else Jesus has sent us to share our faith with, but we will have abandoned the way of Jesus.  If we see people we disagree with as enemies to be destroyed rather than people to be reasoned with, we will have consigned ourselves to being children rather than adults.  And if we insist on living our lives with the guiding principle of "I think you and your side have not been sufficiently nice to me and my side, so I will not show respect to you," we will not only find we don't persuade anybody else to grow in their thinking, but we will reveal just how badly the bitterness has corroded our own hearts.

Look, showing someone else decency even when you don't think they have shown it to you doesn't mean you agree with their position.  It means you won't sink to their level--you won't let them have that kind of power over you.  And it means you would rather use the opportunity to embody the non-transactional, unconditional love we have been given in Jesus than be a jerk about it.  It means we see every moment as an opportunity to be a witness to the grace that has saved us.

So today, wherever that "You weren't nice enough to me so I'll show you by being rotten to you" thinking is still sputtering around in our hearts, let's give it a rest.  Today is a chance to be a grown-up rather than a child, and part of being a grown-up is being willing to extend goodness even when you have been met only with rottenness so far.  When they go low, we go high.  

Because nobody was ever convinced by being yelled at more, but plenty of folks have been moved to new ways of thinking and acting because they were persuaded by love.

Lord Jesus, give us the grace to answer meanness and pettiness with your kind of love and honor to others.  Let our actions be a witness that gives us the right for our words to be heard.