March 29, 2023
Rev. Mary Erickson
Hope Lutheran Church
Luke 6:27-28
Praying for Your Enemy
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
During the previous Wednesday evening services, we’ve been exploring various prayer techniques. We’ve looked at praying with the scriptures; we’ve considered tools such as the Examen to review our day. These and other methods of praying expand our base for spirituality.
But tonight, we don’t look at HOW to pray; we consider WHAT to pray. Tonight we meditate on our Lord’s directive to pray for our enemies.
It’s not an intuitive thing, to pray for our enemies. It’s pretty much the last thing on our minds! So let us consider the benefits of praying for our enemies.
First and foremost, we pray for our enemies because Jesus commands us to do so. He directs us to LOVE them. We are to return their curse with a blessing. These actions benefit us at least as much as it does to those for whom we pray.
I remember at my first parish when our church was broken into. We had a very, very old safe in the church office. It dated back to the 1800’s, literally. It may have been an oldie, but it was still a goodie. It was built like a brick.
When the burglars cased the church, they found the safe and focused their time on busting it open. Fortunately for us, there was no money in the safe that night. When they finally got it open, the frustrated burglars threw the empty safe outdoors into a bush and left.
In the morning when we arrived, we found the church broken into. Besides our small church staff, a member of the church was also there. A dear lady, she had been an anchor of the church.
If you’ve ever had your house or a building broken into, you know it’s a real feeling of violation. We were standing around, pretty much in shock. It was Betty who said, “We need to pray for the people who did this.”
It was a powerful moment and it jarred us all into reality. It reminded us of our center in Christ. Her call to prayer put the whole situation into a new perspective. It took the wind out of the sails of the violation.
When we pray for our enemies, it produces an inner peace within us. It’s akin to Jesus commanding his disciples to shake the dust off their feet when they’ve been rejected. In praying for those who have wronged us, we shake off some of the pain, some of the crud that has attached itself to us. It lightens our load.
St. Paul said to the church in Rome: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” When we’ve been wronged, the danger is that we totally fixate on it. It dominates our thoughts, our emotions continually circle about it. That evil takes root in our center. It overtakes us.
Praying for our enemy breaks that evil spiral. It’s something of an exorcism. That prayer helps break the grip which the evil of the situation has on us. It displaces it from our center and returns divine goodness to its rightful place. We invite Christ’s light to enter in and dispel the darkness.
Peter wrote: “Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing. It is for this that you were called – that you might inherit a blessing.”
We have been called to bless, not to curse. When we pray for our enemies, the inner desire for revenge diminishes. Repaying evil for evil only multiplies the amount of evil in this world. As the old saying goes, “An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind.” Returning blessing for curse stops the cascade of evil.
When we pray for our enemies, we are calling upon the power of the Holy Spirit. We’re inviting the Spirit to surround our foes. We commend them to God. We pray that the great depths of God’s wisdom will work in and through them. We pray for everything that we would want for ourselves: mercy, personal transformation, hope, salvation, blessing and healing.
When our Lord Jesus was dying on his cross, he also prayed for his enemies. “Father, forgive them,” he prayed, “They don’t know what they’re doing.” That prayer of blessing included ourselves. He pronounced forgiveness for us, in our limited nature, bound by sin. He prayed healing upon us. And in his prayer, we receive an example for our own prayer.
