Wish That Ol’ Boy Well

Turn the Other Cheek by Dyanne Fiorucci

Luke 6:27-38

‘But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

‘If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

‘Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.’

If we’re totally honest with ourselves, this is a tough subject right now… loving our enemies. Love those who hate us… those who abuse us… those who wish the worst upon us… give to any beggar and don’t try to get your stuff back even when it’s stolen. 

As always, Jesus is going above and beyond what the rules were before. The command to be kind of one’s enemies wasn’t new— Exodus 23 tells us that if we find our enemy’s donkey lost, we must return it to them. Proverbs 24 tells us not to rejoice when our enemies fail. Proverbs 25 tells us to give our enemies food and whatever help they may need, for it’s ultimately God’s place to judge them, not ours. But nowhere does it say to love your enemy. This was brand new and this was shocking, and it was probably just as hard for Jesus’ listeners to hear it in his day as it is for us to hear and abide by now.

So— I think I’ve brought this up in half a dozen sermons, and I’m going to bring it up again, because it just continues to be so relevant, it continues to speak to the Bible and our world—and that would be sitcom The Good Place, an afterlife sitcom in which the characters are actually in The Bad Place, and they’re trying to figure out how they wound up there and how to get out. They find at one point that it’s been hundreds of years since anyone has been accepted into The Good Place, and as it turns out, it’s because the world has evolved in all the worst ways and by the criteria the powers that be have had for thousands of years, it’s impossible to be a good enough person to get into Heaven.

And I think about this all the time because it feel so true—the economic system we live under, the constant war we witness around the world, the glib saying “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism,” saying it’s literally impossible to be a good, ethical, moral person, and in our case, a good Christian, in our world today.

Because of my kind of… obsession with bringing community life back, and believing that is one of the answers to a better, kinder place, I’ve been reading a lot about what technology has done in terms of making it more difficult to connect; which is ironic, because social media, email, texting, it technically makes it easier to be in touch, right? But it’s all had the opposite effect, which is what Nicholas Carr’s new book Superbloom is all about—in fact it’s subtitle is “How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart.”

Last month on MLK Sunday, I quoted from Martin Luther King’s sermon “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” and at one point he says—

You have allowed your civilization to outdistance your culture, and through your scientific genius you have made of the world a neighborhood. But through your moral and spiritual genius, you have failed to make of it a brotherhood. And so, America, I would urge you to bring your moral advances in line with your scientific advances.[i]

As is typical with King, he was ahead of his time. We live in a world where we can text someone who lives across the world and be in contact with them immediately. We can see people’s updates online and know exactly what they’re doing with their lives. We know where a friend of a friend of a friend works, we know how many kids your high school nemesis has, we know our fifth grade teacher got divorced—and look where all this knowledge has gotten us. Indeed, we have made a neighborhood out of the world. But what good is a neighborhood if everyone hates each other?

In Superbloom, Carr writes about the fact that numerous studies show that when people display their lives to the public, it creates more opportunity for bad feelings—the more time we spend with people, the more opportunity there is to realize peoples… quirks—to recognize their differences and really latch onto those, and think in terms of what pushes us apart rather than what brings us together— in fact, when I read this, it brought to mind someone I went to divinity school with whose social media presence I absolutely despised. On the surface we had plenty in common—our values and politics aligned, we were in the same graduate program, we both enjoyed a good cocktail; but the more I saw of her presence online the more aggravated I became. I remember thinking “this is crazy, I have all this anger around someone I ostensibly agree with on just about everything!” So this anecdotal example of mine is apparently sadly a pretty common experience. But additionally, social media and our lives on display to the public leaves room for envy, anger, frustration… and ultimately, it destroys empathy.

Last week we talked about the dangers of extreme wealth and what that can do to the brain, that it destroys our empathy muscle. As it turns out, social media does the same thing. In one study Carr cites, MIT social psychologist Sherry Turkle calls social media an

‘anti-empathy machine.’ She argues that we suppress our capacity for empathy by ‘putting ourselves in environments where we’re not looking at each other in the eye, not sticking with the other person long enough or hard enough to follow what they’re feeling.’ She continues to note that a dependency on online communication can reduce people’s ability to feel empathy in general, making them less empathetic even when they’re not on their phone or computer.’”[ii]

So—at the risk of sounding like a downer for a minute, we have a lot going against us. Those in power right now are those whose extreme wealth has killed any empathy they once had. And some of the most ubiquitous technologies right now—the internet and social media, are destroying the empathy of normal people. It’s no wonder it feels like people have gotten meaner, that it’s increasingly harder to be a good Christian, a good person in this harsh world.

Now, last week I made sure to point out that in preaching against extreme wealth, I wasn’t suggesting that anyone in this congregation was so wealthy that they risked losing their sense of empathy and the urge to care for and love others. Similarly this week, I can’t imagine that many of you here in the pews and watching on Zoom are going to go home and be internet trolls, arguing with people online, sit there and doom scroll for hours becoming jealous of your peers— but I know for me personally, hearing these statistics, reading about these studies, it helps me to feel a little less overwhelmed in the sense that it helps me to make sense of a world that feels so chaotic. It helps me to recognize, ‘okay, this is one of the reasons we are where we are now.’ And then we can in turn look at ways of combatting these issues, one at a time, rather than becoming completely paralyzed at all the things wrong with the world.

And this maybe is why I’m so obsessed with building and re-building community—because it strikes me that this is something this church offers in spades, and can continue to offer in new and creative ways. Because I’ve seen people get meaner with the advent of the internet and social media. I’m part of the last generation that didn’t always the internet. I saw the internet be born, and I’ve watched it evolve, and I’ve watched it make people meaner. I’ve watched it make the world worse when it was supposed to make everything better. Now, I’m no luddite, I’m as addicted to my smartphone as the average millennial— but being at this church, and being at Bud Vogel’s memorial yesterday, I can see the type of community that once was. I can see the type of togetherness that existed in generations before mine. And I see that loving your neighbor was once a given, and loving your enemy was once a possibility. And I don’t mean to wax poetic about the past, I certainly do not long for the days of segregation or when women couldn’t open a credit card without their husband’s permission, or when queer people weren’t allowed to be themselves in public. But the fact remains that really being physically with each other, looking each other in the eye, is just not the norm anymore.

Yesterday John Dumas made an absolutely beautiful, hilarious and heartfelt speech about Bud, and he talked about how they met and became friends. With the other firefighters one day, John randomly asked if anyone wanted to go rabbit hunting. Bud gave an enthusiastic yes, and a fast friendship was born. It’s finding ways of being together, volunteering and in turn making friends, relationships that last decades.

It's being with each other that works our empathy muscle—that helps us to understand someone else’s pain or point of view. And empathy helps us practice mercy. “Be merciful, just as God is merciful.” We are called to imitate God. We are called to be unconditionally loving.  We are called to love people, not because they will love us back, not because we’ll get something in return. We are called to love people. Period. We are called to love people simply for being people. We are called to look at what has brought people to where they are in life give them some grace.

There’s a song by the country-folk singer Willi Carlisle who I’ve quoted before—but the song that I’m thinking of is called Vanlife, and it’s this sort of tongue in cheek song about the class issues and what living in a van is truly like, and there’s one verse that reads like this—

…a guy with a house and a big old lawn
Thinks his block's too good for
Me to park on
And bangs on my door with a letter that tells
About a thousand ways he can
Make my life hell
And he's worse than the guy who
Put a brick through my glass
And robbed me blind and siphoned the gas
At least I know that guy needed it bad
Oh, I wish that old boy well.[iii]

It's kind of a funny verse, but… it’s really exactly what Jesus preaches here isn’t it? It’s showing mercy. Because I obviously don’t do the song justice, you can hear in Carlisle’s voice, this is not sarcastic. “Oh, I wish that old boy well.” Talk about blessing our enemies. Talk about not judging others. Talk about someone taking your goods and not asking for them back. I mean, this is it, this is how we’re called to be in the world.  

That is to say—it’s hard. It’s hard to love someone who robs us. Someone who tries to harm us. Someone who doesn’t think of us as human… someone who doesn’t think of us at all. It is hard. And in this day and age, it is harder than ever. We have so much working against us.

It seems a little contradictory what Jesus is saying at the end here— “give, and it will be given to you…for the measure you give will be the measure you get back,” after he talks about not expecting anything back when you give. Ultimately though, I believe this is more preaching of keeping our faith strong in difficult times. Yes, things are rough now. Yes, we live under an unjust empire, yes people may hate you and wish harm upon you because you’re speaking truth to power, but this is all for a better world— an earth as it is in heaven. And we only get that if we can overcome division and that temptation that is harder to escape than it ever was of wishing ill on our enemies. We only get there if we can truly overcome hate that is rampant and being spread faster and faster thanks to technologies that, to paraphrase MLK, have outpaced our own morality.

So let’s slow it down a little—not our sense of urgency for a better world, which should now feel more urgent than ever—but the temptation to doom-scroll, to internet stalk our enemies, to get that fleeting serotonin hit when we see someone we don’t like has gotten what we have judged them to have deserved. Let’s give a little grace to people, as hard as that may be sometimes. And let’s make it easier to give that grace by unplugging a little and seeing people face to face, eye to eye, by seeing their humanity. And above all, be merciful. Be merciful, as God is merciful. Amen.

[i] https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/pauls-letter-american-christians-sermon-delivered-commission-ecumenical

[ii] Carr, Nicholas. 2025. Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. W.W. Norton & Company. Pg 110

[iii] Carlisle, Willi. “Vanlife” https://open.spotify.com/track/2vKpBFaxyX49o0MdkJHjrr?si=251984e0b31b4511