United Methodist Church Westlake Village

What Should Christians Do When We Disagree With Each Other?

• United Methodist Church Westlake Village

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We explore the challenge of loving our enemies through the lens of Les Misérables, wrestling with how Christians can fight injustice while still loving those who oppose us. Jesus' radical command to love enemies confronts us with perhaps our most difficult spiritual challenge, especially when facing those who actively work against what we believe is right.

• The French rebellion in Les Misérables represents the ongoing struggle between empowering institutions versus respecting human dignity
• Students building barricades symbolize ordinary people standing against injustice with whatever resources they have
• Jesus' teaching to "love your enemies" presents a counterintuitive challenge that goes against our natural instincts
• We struggle with loving truly terrible people while still opposing their harmful actions
• Christians often create exceptions to the love command, deciding when God's wisdom does and doesn't apply
• Historical figures like Gandhi and MLK demonstrate that love-centered resistance can achieve remarkable justice
• Our calling may be to ensure the loving voice remains present in a world guided by money and power

We invite you to join us Sunday mornings at 10 o'clock as we continue exploring how to live out God's love in a complex world.


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Pastor Darren:

We continue in our theme with Les Miserables and this one. The chapter in the book is called Building the Barricade and it's talking more specifically about the French resistance. That's kind of in the background of the whole story of Les Miserables. In the history of it all, this story is occurring after the French Revolution, but it's still a time of revolution. It's still a time of rebellion. They're still trying to figure everything out. They're wrestling over whether or not they want monarchy or if they're going to turn to something like a republic similar to our democratic understanding, representative government, in which people have some say in what happens and what gets decided. And undergirding a lot of that is this idea of human rights and treating humans respectfully. What has lingered in all this history is that you actually have two sides here. You have two camps, shall we say. There are loyalists who stick to this monarchy understanding of having a king and that being the best way to organize principles, having somebody in charge who makes all the decisions, and this other understanding, which they call a First Republic understanding, and those are people who are arguing for more of those human rights and much more of that respect. Our group, in the story of Les Miserables, the students are part of that rebellion. They're the ones who have that human right understanding, trying to have some power for people amidst other powers that can control things governments, corporations, institutions, those kinds of things and so they are aligning with the poor in Les Miserables. So this probably we should claim as a human issue to me and not just a French issue in the 1800s, because we seem always to be wrestling with that polarity between is it best to be treating our regular folks with some of that respect, some of that human dignity, or do we need to empower the corporations and other institutions that are growing society? We're always seen to be wrestling with that and whom we want to empower, and I imagine we always will be. But this, if you haven't understood so far, explains our barricade Because the students, as they were rebelling, put together a barricade, because they are the ones trying to rebel against the current government, the monarchy. And the barricade that they were able to create because they were regular folks like you and me, were things right from their homes, the chairs, the tables, the whatever was out there. And if you saw the movie, you saw them throwing them out the windows as they create this barricade to hold off the National Guard in this story. So that is the main conflict, that is the backdrop for the story itself.

Pastor Darren:

What it poses for us as Christians is this question about conflict, this question about disagreement. What do we do when we disagree with each other? What do we do when we're in conflict? Is there room for us Christians for rebellion, those of us called to love our enemies? Is there room for that rebellion? How do we do that rebellion in the most Christian way? So we look to our deep wisdom from our scriptures, 2,000-year-old wisdom coming from Jesus, the gospel of Matthew, chapter 5. We look to that deep, deep wisdom and if you were looking for some comfort, you will not find it here brings I'm sorry, you realize I was sick this week, yeah, my head's a little bit foggy. It brings with it potentially our most challenging instruction, yet no comfort here. Challenge Love your enemies.

Pastor Darren:

The summary of the passage kind of goes like this Basically, anyone can love the good ones, Loving those who love us, liking those who treat us well. That's the easy stuff. We can all do that. Even the tax collectors do that. For gosh sakes, do we have tax collectors in this church? Sometimes you got to be careful. I don't want to insult anybody. They weren't well thought of 2,000 years ago, not like today. I tell you, if you really want to try something difficult, if you really want to challenge yourself, try loving those who aren't good, who don't treat you well.

Pastor Darren:

I talk about being counterintuitive against all our human instincts. Loving those who don't treat us well cuts us off on the freeway. Love you, you're great. You're great over there Talking behind our back. I love you too. You're so good for the way you talk about me when I'm not around. Lays us off when they know we need the paycheck. Love you. Votes against your personal values and your rights. Love you. Right. It's challenging. It goes against so much of just our existence and how our body is inclined to move, how our mind is intended to go. And I'll tell you. The kicker comes here in the rest of the passage when he says For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. In other words, god loves everyone. Why can't you love everyone? Are you ready?

Pastor Darren:

for that.

Pastor Darren:

Are you ready for that challenge and the added challenge that comes too when we start thinking about how do we love someone while seeking change of something that we see as wrong? Right now we see there's a social justice issue at stake. Something needs to be fixed. Somebody is not being treated in the way God would want them treated. We need to fix this thing. How do I do that against the people who I am enemies with and still love them? There's that huge challenge. Can we work against others while still loving them, others while still loving them? I would argue in our current political and social dialogue of today that we're seeing what it looks like when we choose not to love our enemies, that this is the reality we're living in now. We are not holding ourselves to that belief from God, that teaching from Jesus. So I wrestle with this and my head started turning to the other side of things and I enjoy talking to your all really good friend, charlie Pember, back here in let's see pew 12, seat 17. You can hunt him down and chat him up. He is a very good conversation and he asks a very good question now and again, right, and sometimes he even gives me some time to answer, to figure out what exactly what comes to my brain. I do remind him that some of these questions are big, big questions. But he asks this time in the series. He's been talking a lot about love, he's been talking a lot about grace, and the question is what do we do with love and grace when we're talking about the darkest of us? And you know folks, folks I'm talking about let's just take it right to number 10 here. You know those genocidal leaders, those dictators who don't seem to have any heart or compassion for humanity, much less their own people. You know who I'm talking about. How are we going to love those people? What do we do about loving the worst of us? It's a tough one, right? That is a tough question. I told Charlie. I said we've been wrestling with this question really since we've existed as a species, so I'm going to need a couple days, you know, to figure what my answer is. More than a few days. I hope you understand I wasn't being arrogant on that.

Pastor Darren:

It's a hard question to figure out. It's tough because we don't think God's asking us to lay down our arms right Just to hope that we aren't overrun or even worse. But we are called to love everyone, even our enemies. Where does this leave us? When is there a time that, with integrity, we can say to ourselves Jesus, this situation is different. This situation is different. I'm going to need to suspend the whole loving thing here. My experiential wisdom of living in this world lo, these, however many years has told me I need to suspend the loving thing here. It puts it into a different realm of understanding, doesn't it To think about it in that way? Now it's us deciding when we follow God's wisdom, when we follow Jesus' teaching and when we don't. We follow Jesus' teaching and when we don't. It's also tough, because that's not the end of those kinds of conversations. That's just the beginning of those kinds of conversations. Now we've put ourselves in a position where we have to establish this boundary for when we believe God's wisdom applies and when God's wisdom doesn't apply, when love is the proper response and when love isn't the proper response. How long does it take before that part of the process, that decision about whether to follow godly wisdom or not, is part of every single conflict, every single decision that we are making.

Pastor Darren:

I've heard my Christians and brothers and sisters. They'll say things like you know what that guy if he wanted to work, he'd be working. I don't owe him anything. And I've heard other Christians, brothers and sisters say that guy right there wouldn't give a single thing to another child of God to make sure he had what he needed. I don't owe him anything. I've heard Christians and brothers and sisters say, oh, they are affirming of LGBTQ people, lgbtq lifestyles, we owe them nothing. And I've heard other Christian brothers and sisters say they are oppressing LGBTQ people in this world. I owe them nothing. I trust that you have heard those same statements from our Christian brothers and sisters.

Pastor Darren:

Clearly, we are allowing ourselves a certain amount of latitude today, latitude on this issue of following this mandate to love our enemies. In many ways, we empower ourselves to live out of this godly love daily. This godly love daily. Where are the new boundaries to adhere to in this beyond Jesus world? If you're like me, it starts getting a bit murky. The more liberties we take, the more we venture away from that grounding understanding, the murkier it gets. It is a tough calling for us Christians for sure. Loving enemies amidst inevitable disagreement and even conflict in this world. It is a difficult challenge and in this world which, for my eye, seems to be increasingly less moralizing, in the sense that we're trying to live out what is right and wrong. To understand what is right and wrong and to live it out. We have other meters, money and power that tend to make those decisions. Maybe our call, our call as Christians, is to continue to make the loving option our option. Maybe our calling is to make sure, in a world that clearly isn't always leaning in that direction, that at least that voice is getting spoken, at least Jesus' teaching is in the room and being defended.

Pastor Darren:

I mean loving action. It's an essential part of a life lived well. It's an essential part of knowing God's abundance. We've learned this. That's why we're here on Sunday mornings at 10 o'clock, some of you even every week. He teases and we know there's value to living the godly life, the loving life. That is why we are here. It's also a mindset that has brought about social justice on a very, very large scale. Gandhi was able to bring a sense of humanity to India. Martin Luther King helped deconstruct socially acceptable racism in the United States.

Pastor Darren:

We are following a man who lived 2,000 years ago. The work he did was 2,000 years ago and yet we still follow. Love definitely still has some success stories, crucifixion has brought resurrection. So maybe we aren't just wasting our time living out this loving thing. We should also remember that the alternative has its cost, has its price too.

Pastor Darren:

I'll remind you of the, the story in les mis. The story leading to this battle is the culmination in the story of the battle of the those rebelling, those students who are rebelling, and the National Guard coming in and just conquering them. And you might remember in the story that Jean Valjean rescues Marius, who was in the battle, gets fatally well, I shouldn't say fatally injured. He could have died from his injuries until Jean Valjean rescues him, takes him to where he can heal, to where he can get better.

Pastor Darren:

But in that moment, where he wasn't sure if Marius was going to live, if he was going to be killed in this battle, this conflict in which humanity couldn't figure out how to live together, he speaks with deep, deep love, in a plea to God to let Marius live, to let Marius continue to live despite the conflict, despite our inability as humans to be able to get along. I'm going to invite Billy Parrish to come forward. He's going to be singing one of the most well-known songs from Les Mis Bring Him Home. And I invite you to listen for that plea, a plea to God to let Marius not be a victim to a world who couldn't figure out how to love each other.

Billy Parrish:

God on high, hear my prayer. In my need you have always been there. He is young, he is afraid. Let him rest, heaven blessed. Bring him home, bring him home. Bring him home. Bring him home. He's like the sun. I might have known If God had granted me a son. The summers die one by one, how soon they fly on and on and I am old and will be gone. Bring him, bring him peace, bring him joy. He is young, he is only a boy. Let him be. Let him live. If I die, let me die. Let him live. Bring him home, bring him home. Bring him home. Thank you.