Sermon Text(s): Matthew 5:38-48, Baptismal Covenant Question #4
In this final week of our preaching series on baptism, we consider the fourth question in the Baptismal Covenant:
“Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?”
Our readings today invite us to consider what it means to love our neighbor, a common instruction in both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian scriptures. Our passage from Leviticus includes this instruction:
“You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin… You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Leviticus 19:17-18)
Jesus takes this even a step further in our Gospel passage for the day:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you… For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?... And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others?” (Matthew 5:43-48)
For much of my life, I would hear passages like these and throw my hands up with exasperation.
“You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge?”
“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you?”
“Be perfect, as God is perfect?”
Yeah, right!! Thanks a lot, God. There you go again, setting your standards so impossibly high that we could never reach them.
And then, in my study of world religions in college and graduate school, I discovered lovingkindness meditation, which comes out of the Buddhist tradition. For me, a lightbulb went on when I encountered this ancient practice. Jesus taught us to love our enemies, but he didn’t teach us HOW – at least, not in the records that were preserved and passed down to us. Just saying, “Love your enemies” without giving any practical instructions as to how to do that, especially since it is so contrary to the instincts of human nature, was, for me, not helpful at all. Reading and hearing these biblical passages did nothing for me except frustrate me and induce feelings of guilt and shame over how poorly I did at trying to follow these instructions. But when I discovered lovingkindness meditation, I felt like FINALLY, here was a set of practices that gave me tools to actually change my behavior and follow the teachings of Jesus more closely.
Robert Thurman, the first American to be ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk by the Dalai Lama, has noted the similarities between the teachings of Jesus and the Buddha on loving one’s enemies, but he points out that Jesus was only able to teach for about three years before he was crucified. The Buddha, on the other hand,
“had to slave away [teaching] for 46 years after his enlightenment,” Thurman says. “So he had time to provide more practical methodologies to underlie these sort of high moral-sounding slogans like ‘love your enemy.’” [1]Discovering those “practical methodologies” has been an incredible blessing to me, and I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned with you all, in the hopes that it will be useful to you, too, as you strive to “love your neighbor as yourself” and “seek and serve Christ in ALL persons,” even your enemies.
At its most basic, lovingkindness meditation is the act of sending goodwill and well-wishes into the world. It involves repeating a certain set of phrases silently during meditation that express a wish for the person, people, or beings you are directing these wishes toward to be free from danger, to have mental and physical happiness, and to be content and at peace in the world.
The word translated into English as “lovingkindness” is the Pali word metta. (Pali is the language in which most of the Buddhist scriptures are written, a language that originated in ancient India.) Sharon Salzburg, a prominent American Buddhist teacher, writes about how metta differs from what Americans normally think of when we use the word “love:”
“In our culture, when we talk about love, we usually mean either passion or sentimentality,” she says. “It is crucial to distinguish metta from both of these states. Passion is enmeshed with feelings of desire, of wanting, or of owning and possessing. Passion gets entangled with needing things to be a certain way, with having our expectations met… By contrast, the spirit of metta is unconditional: open and unobstructed… When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life. Metta – the sense of love that is not bound to desire, that does not have to pretend things are other than the way they are – overcomes the illusion of separateness… and all of the states that accompany this fundamental error of separateness – fear, alienation, loneliness, and despair – all of the feelings of fragmentation. In place of these, the genuine realization of connectedness brings unification, confidence, and safety.” [2]
It is interesting to note that the Hebrew word hesed, often translated as “lovingkindness” in English, also refers to this kind of unconditional love, the kind of love God offers to humankind. It is this kind of love that Jesus commands us to have for our enemies. Not passion or desire or sentimentality, not a feeling of liking or being drawn toward them, but that kind of unconditional acceptance of what is, a love that sees all things and accepts them as they are. This kind of love recognizes the common humanity of all people and genuinely seeks the happiness of all, rather than nurturing resentments and wishing ill upon those who have harmed us.
In traditional Buddhist lovingkindness practice, the meditator moves through a series of six categories of beings in a set order. One begins by directing metta -- lovingkindness, well-wishes -- towards oneself, then moves on to a benefactor or mentor, someone who has supported you in your life or work in such a way that feeling gratitude toward this person and wishing him or her well is easy. Then, you consider a beloved friend, then a neutral person, then an enemy, and finally, all beings.
There is a wisdom to the order of this structure. First, we have to be able to love ourselves before we can truly love others, which is why metta starts with a focus on self. And finally, we can only say we love all people when we have been able to send love toward our enemies, toward those we find it most difficult to love.
You may see different translations or expressions of the metta phrases, but they all convey those basic sentiments: that the person you are focusing on be free from danger, be mentally and physically well, and have ease of well-being – be content and at peace in the world. The set of phrases I use that express these wishes is:
May you be safe.
May you be happy.
May you be healthy.
May you live with ease.
Ideally, you would spend a good deal of time with each category before moving on to the next one, but for the purposes of illustration today, I want to focus on just the “friend” and the “enemy” categories, to show you how this works and how you might use this practice to help work with the feelings of anger or pain that may come up for you when you think about a “difficult person” or enemy in your life.
So now I’m going to walk you through a guided metta meditation.
Take a moment to find a comfortable sitting position. Ideally, you’d sit with your spine straight, so that the air can flow unobstructed in and out of your lungs. Close your eyes and take a deep breath in, hold it for a moment, and exhale all the way out. Then let your breathing return to normal, and just watch it as it settles in to a regular rhythm.
Traditionally we always start by directing metta toward ourselves, but since that can be somewhat of a complex practice in and of itself, today we’ll start by focusing on a good friend, someone it is easy for you to love, someone you naturally wish well. It is best to pick someone who is not a family member, and not a romantic partner, since we want to generate a feeling of pure, unattached love and goodwill, not love that is mixed up with feelings of desire, whether that be sexual desire or a sense of needing that person’s approval or attention. Think of a friend with whom you have a relatively uncomplicated, positive relationship, and bring up an image of that person in your mind.
Now say these phrases silently, directing them toward that friend:
May you be safe.
May you be happy.
May you be healthy.
May you live with ease.
Now shift your attention toward someone it is difficult for you to love. You might think of this person as your enemy, or it just might be someone who you find difficult or annoying, someone you do not naturally feel positively toward. As you work with this practice, it is best to start with someone with whom the dislike or difficulty is relatively mild. Don’t start by trying to love the person who has caused you more pain than anyone else in the world! (Over time you can gradually work yourself up toward being able to direct goodwill toward that person, but for now, pick someone you just mildly dislike.)
Think of that difficult person or enemy in your mind, and then direct the metta phrases toward them:
May you be safe.
May you be happy.
May you be healthy.
May you live with ease.
Notice if your interior landscape changes when you send positive wishes toward this difficult person. Do you feel areas of tightness loosening? Do you feel a relaxation or sense of relief?
If not, if you still find yourself angry and tight and clenched toward your difficult person, try playing with different visualizations to help you feel some sense of kindness and compassion toward them. You might imagine that person as a baby, as an innocent child. Or you might think of them in another situation where they are vulnerable or in pain – gravely ill, or on their deathbed – although be careful not to nurture any feelings of vengefulness or celebration at imagining this person suffering – that is not the point. The point is to open a door for you to connect with them, to see in their shared suffering your common humanity.
Sharon Salzburg says “you should allow yourself to be creative, daring, even humorous, in imagining situations where you can more readily feel kindness toward a difficult person.” One of Sharon’s students chose a difficult person who was extremely talkative and annoying, and it helped her send lovingkindness to that person if she imaged her sitting bound and gagged in a chair. Another student could only send lovingkindness toward his difficult person if he imagined him locked up in jail. Take some time to think of images or visualizations that would help you feel compassion toward this difficult person, situations that would soften your heart toward them.
Now with that image in mind, direct the metta phrases toward your difficult person again:
May you be safe.
May you be happy.
May you be healthy.
May you live with ease.
Notice if anything changes in your body as you sit with that image of your difficult person as you repeat these phrases.
May you be safe.
May you be happy.
May you be healthy.
May you live with ease.
Go ahead and open your eyes.
Now, if that was difficult, or if you didn’t feel or see any immediate changes in your feelings or attitude toward this person, it’s important to remember that it’s called spiritual practice for a reason! It takes practice! It doesn’t always happen overnight. It’s important to go easy on yourself, to not set expectations too high in terms of what the results of the practice will be. Ideally, you’d spend 30 minutes in silent meditation each day, working with this or any other meditation techniques. People do this for a lifetime and are still working at it, so don’t expect to be the perfect example of “loving your neighbor” after only trying this a few times.
When Jesus says, “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” he doesn’t mean you should never make any mistakes. The Greek word translated as “perfect” is teleios, which doesn’t mean “without flaws or mistakes,” but “complete, whole, having reached its end, full-grown, or mature.” Jesus is calling us to be mature Christians, to be grown-up Christians, to put the effort in to work on our faith and develop it over time. That means not being content to stay in that frustrated, exasperated state – “yeah, right, Jesus, how can I ever live up to what you’re asking of me!” – but to actively search for tools and techniques to help you work toward making those commandments a reality. Maybe lovingkindness meditation will help you as it has helped me, maybe not. But in any case, we’re called to make an effort, using whatever tools are most effective for us. Because at our baptism, we made a vow to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves. There is much wisdom in the teachings of the world’s religions about how to do that, and taking the time to find a practice that works for us is part of the way we keep our baptismal vows.
We’ll close with our 3 minutes of silent meditation that normally comes before the sermon. During that time, I invite you to try out these techniques more extensively, directing the phrases first toward a friend and then toward an enemy.
REFERENCE SHEET:
Metta (Lovingkindness) Phrases:
May you be safe.
May you be happy.
May you be healthy.
May you live with ease.
Metta Sequence:
1. Yourself
2. Benefactor or mentor
3. Friend
4. Neutral person – someone for whom you do not feel an immediate attraction or repulsion, someone who you do not like or dislike
5. Enemy or difficult person
6. All people/all beings
[1] “Sharon Salzburg & Robert Thurman: Meeting Our Enemies and Our Suffering,” On Being with Krista Tippett, 15 December 2016, http://onbeing.org/programs/sharon-salzberg-robert-thurman-embracing-enemies-suffering-2/ Accessed 17 February 2017.
[2] Sharon Salzburg, Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1995): 18-19, 21.
No comments:
Post a Comment