Turning Cheeks and Punching Nazis

2-19-17 (Epiphany 7A)

Leviticus 19:1-2. 9-18; Matthew 5:38-48

Turning Cheeks and Punching Nazis

If you thought my sermon was on the weird side last week, I’m going to apologize in advance for what you’re about to hear this week.  It starts with just one question:  Is it OK to punch a Nazi?  It’s the kind of question that seems straightforward, but when we really start digging down into how we feel, how we want to answer, and how we think we’re supposed to answer… well, perhaps it’s not such an easy question after all.  

  Strangely enough, it’s a question that has actually warranted genuine discussion within the last month.  It came up after Richard Spencer, a prominent white nationalist, was punched in the face by an anonymous protester while giving an on-camera interview on the day of the Presidential Inauguration.  It’s the kind of news you can’t make up - and while these kind of headlines are seeming to be more and more common these days, it caused a lot of people to raise the question and debate its merits.  Is it OK to punch a Nazi?

It’s this question that has been wracking my brain this week as I came to the lectionary texts.  We’ve heard the Sermon on the Mount so many times, and it’s so achingly familiar to us each time we hear it that it’s entirely too easy to just nod our heads in agreement, let the verses speak for themselves, and move on to other more pressing matters, like what color the new carpet in the basement needs to be.  Jesus says to turn the other cheek.  Jesus says to love your enemies and pray for the people that persecute you.  Jesus says to go the extra mile, to give the shirt off your back when asked.  To not resist evil-doers.  OK - sounds good.  What’s for dinner?

But what is it that happens when we suddenly find ourselves having to put those principles into practice?  When was the last time you actively found yourself turning the other cheek, or responding to someone you viewed as your enemy with nothing but pure love?  When was the last time you prayed for someone that you couldn’t stand and genuinely prayed for them and for their wellbeing without it sounding like “Dear God, please help this knucklehead to realize that I’m right and he’s an idiot?”

Jesus says a lot of challenging things in the Sermon on the Mount.  He says a lot of incredibly difficult things all throughout the Scriptures.  But if I’m to be truly honest with myself, I think that both this week’s readings and the readings from last week are quite possibly the most difficult passages to live into in the entirety of the Scriptures.  Jesus sets the bar high - impossibly high, in a lot of ways, and yet all the same, there it is.  Last week, we heard Jesus say that even thinking bad things about another person was grounds for damnation.  This week, he continues that line of thinking and demonstrates the actions we should be taking in addition to the thoughts we should be thinking, or not thinking as the case may be.  Our unwillingness to think bad thoughts about another person should be so concrete and unswerving that we turn the other cheek when someone comes and slaps us across the face.

I don’t know about anyone else in this sanctuary today, but I’ll be honest - I don’t know if I could turn the other cheek all that easily.  I can get a little hotheaded at times, and it really gets under my skin to feel like I’m being bullied or taken advantage of.  I don’t like to just willingly put my tail between my legs and accept whatever my situation is.  So this passage is really challenging for me to wrestle with, because no matter how many times I read it, no matter how much I might agree with the concept, there’s a part of me that ultimately wants to just keep on ignoring those verses.  All that loving your enemies stuff is great for Jesus, but for me, there are just too many people that I can’t do that with.

It’s a dilemma that has plagued Christians for centuries - perhaps the greatest example of this being during World War II with the German church.  One of the great Christian thinkers that we lift up still today in the church was a man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  His book, Life Together, is often required reading for most religion students, both in colleges and in seminaries.  Bonhoeffer’s writings on the grace of Christ, the call to discipleship, and the ways in which we live out our faith are still pertinent, still powerful, and worth taking the time to read for anyone who wants to grow just that much more in their faith.  And yet Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote in his own exploration of the Sermon on the Mount that “Christian love draws no distinction between one enemy and another, except that the more bitter our enemy's hatred, the greater his need of love” and that “No sacrifice which a lover would make for his beloved is too great for us to make for our enemy,” was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 for being a member of the German resistance movement and had been implicated in plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler.  While most suggest that Bonhoeffer hadn’t been directly involved in any assassination plots, his writings from that time seem to suggest that he may have at the very least known about them and wrestled with that knowledge.  In some of his final writings, as he acknowledges his own impending execution, he writes in a kind of confessional manner that speaks to his own knowledge that his actions were going against what he knew that his faith required of him, and yet the need to stand up against such horrific forms of evil and injustice in the world nevertheless called him to take on that kind of sinfulness for himself in the hopes that the generations that followed him had a chance at surviving and thriving.

As we look at the kind of struggle that Bonhoeffer had to have undergone, perhaps the question becomes a little harder for us to answer: Is it OK to punch a Nazi?  Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, to not resist an evildoer… but is there a point somewhere along the line of human action where we’re called as Christians to abandon that commandment and to take a stand?  Didn’t Jesus himself draw a line somewhere in there, given that it was Jesus who uses a whip to drive out the money-changers from the temple?  At what point does loving our enemy become an excuse for not taking action?  Or is there a way to somehow love our enemies while still agreeing that it’s OK to punch them in the face?

It’s a conversation we’ve had in the church for centuries, and one whose answers are still yet to be forthcoming.  Some argue that there are times when it’s OK to punch Nazis - and if you look at our culture, even just in the pictures here that I’ve used with my sermon title, you’ll see that we tend to glorify the image of punching Nazis - and particularly Nazis, since they’re such an easily agreed-upon enemy and image of absolute evil in our culture.  Others argue that war and violence are never justified, and that there is never a point where Jesus would suggest anything to the contrary.  And in the midst of all of the discussion, we nevertheless find ourselves seeing the images of white nationalists being punched in the face and wondering: do we cheer?  Do we feel sorry for both people?  Do we get angry and denounce the thing we’ve seen happen?  And what is our own role in this fraught and turbulent time, not to mention the question of how we carry that role out?  Do we find ways to resist?  Do we join the marches, protest at the town hall meetings?  Do we call our Senators and Congressmen and women to let them know where we stand and what our concerns are?  Do we click the “share” button on that particularly inflammatory news article and engage with people online in argument after argument?  How do we balance our lives right now when Christ tells us to turn the other cheek, but the world tells us that we can’t let the other guy get the upper hand?  How do we carry out our calling to be voices for justice and compassion in this world and yet not resist evildoers at the same time?  And is it OK to punch a Nazi?!

Ultimately, I think Jesus would still tell us that it’s not OK, but that it doesn’t mean we should stop pursuing justice, either.  What we see in Jesus throughout the Gospels is that it’s often more about what’s in our hearts as we pursue the goals of the Kingdom.  When we bristle at things we see as unjust, we have to ask ourselves what it is that we’re bristling at and why we care - is it about genuinely caring for the oppressed, the widow, the orphan, the refugee, and the others that Jesus lifts up in his ministry, or is it about seeking something specific for us and wanting our own victories, our own tribe to succeed?  Is it about justice, or is it about just us?  As our General Assembly co-moderator preached at Presbytery on Thursday, it’s a difference between going out in faith or going out in fear.

My prayer for each of us is that we can be bold enough to go out always in faith.  We won’t always go out perfectly - we can’t all be the Mother Teresa's of the world.  We can’t even all be the Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s of the world, for that matter.  But what we can do is to do our best to live faithfully into that tension into which we each are called.  We can live in this world of people punching Nazis and be bold enough to say that, while we don’t agree with what someone says, Christ would nevertheless not call us to punch them in the face.  We can stand up and work to put an end to the unceasing cycles of violence that plague our world.  And we can entrust ourselves to the care of Christ, praying that Christ gives us the strength each day to live out our calling as faithfully as possible.  To God be the Glory.  Amen.