THE KISS OF PEACE
A sermon by the Rev. Dr. James G. Kirk
Harundale Presbyterian Church
Glen Burnie, Maryland
February 18, 2001
Text: "Love your enemies." (Luke 6:27)
First Reading: Genesis 45:3-11, 15
Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50
All of you know that this past Wednesday was the most romantic day of the year. I was quite taken by an article that appeared in The Sun that day, with the title "Is there love after Valentine’s Day?" Michael Alvear, its author, had this to say: "It’s Valentine’s Day, the annual rite of cringing for the single and dateless. This year none of my single girlfriends will get asked February’s famous question, ‘Wilt thou be mine?’ There will be no asking, but there will be a lot of wilting. Nothing can make you feel more like Love’s orphan than that winged, pudgy brat with the bow and arrow.
"Some of my friends get around the annual cringefest by sending cards to friends and family, but I don’t. I refuse to participate in the dumbing down of Love. St. Valentine was the patron saint of love, not friendship. He didn’t die defending our right to trade business cards; he died defending our right to exchange vows. There really was a guy named Valentine. And he died at the hands of Roman Emperor Claudius II. Here’s how:
"About 269 A.D., the emperor couldn’t figure out why so few of his citizenry volunteered for his bloody, endless and unnecessary wars. In a fit of intemperate brilliance, Claudius seized on the notion that men weren’t volunteering because they didn’t want to leave their wives and girlfriends. True to his nickname, Claudius the Cruel banned all marriages and engagements. This was distressing economic news to wedding planners, florists, and assorted banquet room managers. But no one was more distressed than a priest named Valentine. Claudius could rule the people, but Valentine wasn’t going to let him rule their hearts. So the priest conducted marriages in secret.
"Unfortunately being a friend to the people made him an enemy of the state. Emperors don’t like being told they’re wearing no clothes by men of the cloth. Claudius arrested Valentine and threw him in jail, where he died like my friends do annually, on February 14. Before his death, the priest had fallen in love with the jailer’s daughter. Legend has it he left the daughter a note and signed it, ‘From your Valentine.’
"Those three words set off a stampede of cheap sentiment through the next 20 centuries. Gradually, Feb. 14th became the date for exchanging love messages, and by the looks on the faces of my friends, the date when you are reminded you have no date… Last Valentine’s Day, a single girlfriend called me, heaving her annual sighs over the line. Dateless again, she still believed in love. ‘Omnia vincit Amor’ she croaked unconvincingly in Latin (which means ‘Love conquers all’)" (The Sun, February 14, 2001, page 19A)
Essentially, that’s exactly what Luke wants us to hear this morning, not necessarily the commercialization of love we saw masquerading last Wednesday, but the deep down, non-sentimentalized version of caring for someone with the same focus that God cares for us. "Love conquers all!" That’s the kind of love that when we look at our most loathsome enemies we still see God looking right back at us. That’s the kind of love that prompts us out of our shells of pre-meditated, know it all, opinionated prejudices. That’s the kind of love that bids us walk the walk of the homeless. That’s the kind of love that pleads us to put ourselves for a moment in the place of those who have to beg for a living, and momentarily consider ourselves no better nor any worse than those we have a habit of relocating to the garbage heaps of society.
George MacLeod of the Iona Community in Scotland has said it well: "I simply argue that the cross be raised again at the center of the market place as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves, on the town garbage heap, on a crossroads so cosmopolitan that they had to write his title in Hebrew and Latin and Greek. At the kind of place where cynics talk smut and thieves curse and soldiers gamble. Because that is where he died and that is what he died about and that is where church-people should be and what church people should be about…"
Most people around Glen Burnie know him as "Stump." His girlfriend Karen would rather call him Mike. He’s one of the regulars at the free lunch program, a kind of unsavory person, quite rough around the edges, a classic sociopath. He lives in the woods beside Crain Highway. We share a birthday, which is one of the reasons I like Stump. More often than not we need a room deodorizer after his visit. The last time he was in was a week ago when he needed some money to visit his mother, who, according to him, lives in Baltimore. His pattern is usually the same. He’ll come into the office, bypass LaVerne, head straight for my office and begin making small talk. After about five minutes worth he’ll ask for a couple of bucks, which I usually give him. One day, about a month ago, he did his usual thing, but I had no money on me, which I told him. He said, "that’s no problem, Pastor, let me give you a couple!" He then took a fist full of money out of his pocket and handed me two dollars, which I gladly put into my wallet.
That’s the point that Luke is trying to make. It’s the same point that MacLeod would have us consider. What Jesus teaches is not the love we sentimentalized last Wednesday. It’s the love that may just take us to the garbage dumps "where cynics talk smut and thieves curse and soldiers gamble." It’s the love that may mean we have to deodorize the office and let people get away with a couple of bucks now and then. But it is also the kind of love that tells us there are very unsuspecting characters out there who’ll be there for us when we need it as well. All of our pre-existing characterizations and prejudices come crashing down, because Jesus is preaching about how it’ll be with God’s kingdom, where we are to "judge not and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive and you will be forgiven."
Do you remember the first time you kissed your soul mate? A neighboring article to Alvear’s likewise caught my eye last Wednesday. Its title was, "The Mark of True Love is found in the Kiss." In it Tim Baker wrote: ""Is there a more magical moment? Well, of course we have to practice the proper techniques before anything works right. But once you got the hang of it, or at least once you get your braces off, wasn’t kissing wonderful?
"Honestly now, doesn’t a kiss still tell you more about how you really feel about someone than anything other than holding hands? Especially when you discover you like even more kisses with that person and when you still get a kick out of kissing the one you love after years and years…There’s simply much more to love and romance than any mere physical experience can create because extreme physicality provides no connection to the sublime, metaphysical, and even spiritual realm which opens up before you when you touch lips with the one you love." (Tim Baker, The Sun, Wednesday, February 14, 2001, Page 19A)
Jesus teaches us today how it’s time we got our braces off and began to practice the proper techniques of the kiss of peace. That is those kisses that take us to the sublime heights of the spiritual realm not just with the ones we love, but our enemies as well. It’s time we began to show the world that we take our example from a higher order, the order of God’s kingdom, where even God graces the garbage heaps of life. After all, God chose the garbage dump in Golgotha to crown with three crosses, two on which thieves died and the one in the middle, adorned with God’s son, who set the example once and for all what it really means to love and be loved in return.
Thanks be to God,
Amen