Biography
Dr. Bob Edgar is General Secretary of the National Council of Churches. Bob is a former six-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives from the seventh district of Pennsylvania. He's an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church and the former President of Claremont School of Theology in California. As General Secretary of the NCC, Dr. Edgar travels throughout the world, building bridges between faith traditions and promoting peace. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Loving Enemies is Hard Work – But Somebody's Got to Do It!" 
The scripture that I want us to focus on today is I Corinthians 13, a familiar one. It's often read at weddings and other events as a love story, but it takes place in jail. That's where Paul wrote it. Listen carefully to these words because I think they are helpful to all of us as we struggle with this question of how do we love one's neighbor and how do we love our enemies.

"If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mystery and al knowledge, but have not love, I am nothing."

Paul goes on to say, "Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful. Love is not arrogant or rude. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."

I like the ending of the passage where he says, "When we were children we acted like children. But as we become adults we put away childish things. These three last: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."

Before sharing a few words, let me tell you a joke. It just helps me to get this bad sense of humor out! It's the story of the mother mouse that's walking across the field. The mother mouse has behind her, her babies, all the little ones that she loves so dearly. Everything is going great. It's a beautiful day. The mother mouse gets about half way across the field and, you guessed it, a large cat comes in the other direction. So the mother mouse gets up on her haunches to protect the little ones from this cat. She looks the cat in the eye and she says, "Bow wow!" The cat runs off. Then the mother mouse turns to her little ones and says, "Now you know the value of a second language!"

When we talk about love of neighbor and love of enemy, we're really talking about two separate languages. The love of neighbor is a familiar language. It's one that we all know something about. Love of neighborhood is sometimes very simplistic in our thinking. We can challenge our neighbors, but we all know, yes, we can love them despite some of their idiosyncrasies.

Maya Angelou had a good comment about love in her book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She said that to really love someone is to know the song their heart sings and to hum it back to them on the days they forget how it goes. To hear their melodies, to learn first hand how to love someone is to learn the melody that plays within them. We need to figure out how to do unto others what we would have done unto us in a strong and compassionate way

Love of neighbor is a familiar language. We love our wives, we love our spouses, we love our friends, we love our children. We love. But Jesus tells us it is important to go deeper than simply a surface love. You know who you love, but to love that person you must love yourself in a very deep and compassionate way. You must learn what melodies are inside of you. You must find out how you can love yourself and then reach out to lift the hand of a child who is hurting, to love that elderly person who rocks on her porch and knows the pain and agony of loneliness, to love that person who walks with a ragged coat and lives part of the time in a homeless shelter and part of the time in the street. That is what Jesus talks about when he says love of neighbor.

About a year ago I had the opportunity to go to Baghdad with a group of religious leaders before the war. We went to mosques, to hospitals, to schools and to churches. Yes, churches in Baghdad. We went not for a weapons inspection but for a humanitarian inspection. On that New Year's Eve in Baghdad I went to three different Christian worship services. At six o'clock I was worshiping at the Syrian Orthodox Church, where the bishop of the church was so proud of his new senior center. At eight o'clock I was at the Caldean Catholic Church where one of our delegation, Bishop Mel Talbert, was asked to preach. At the end of his preaching he sang "We Shall Overcome." The whole congregation, in Arabic and in English, sang "We Shall Overcome" together.

But the highlight of that evening was at ten o'clock, gathered at the Presbyterian Church of Baghdad with 400 persons, bringing in the new year, praying for peace and asking for wisdom as we were approaching those dark days of war. There was a little child. Her name was Caroline. She was about four years old, all dressed in red with a red hat, and on her backside were the words, Let It Snow. She flirted with all of us from the religious delegation, bringing to us a cracker or a pretzel. Just as it got to our face she would take it away and eat it herself. That little Caroline is the picture that I have of true love: a little child not knowing what was going to happen in the next few weeks as she faced war, turbulence and pain.

God is calling us, I believe, to find a way to love our neighbors even when our neighbors are Muslim or Buddhist or Jewish and even our other Christian neighbors, some of whom may be Evangelical and some who may be Liberal. Jesus calls us to love everyone as we would love ourselves. Neighbors learn to love each other's song and you must know your neighbor's heart. God so loved the world that he gave his only son so that everyone who believes in God and in God's son may not perish but have eternal life. I love the way my friend and mentor, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, said it. "God loves you the way you are, but knows you can do better."

The second aspect of love that I want to focus on is not just the easy part, the familiar love of neighbor, but the hard test: the test of loving enemy. God calls us through the words of Jesus to love our enemies. What does that mean in the years 2004, 2005 and 2006? What does it mean in this century and in this decade to clearly love our enemies? How do we share the Gospel's demand to really tell the story? The challenge is to break down the walls, the barriers of loving our enemies.

A little while ago, I was a at spiritual reflection and the speaker, who was reminding us of the importance of what it means to be a Christian, said that sometimes we stand too close to a wall and when we do so it limits our vision. I think often our vision of love, particularly of enemy, is so close because of our anger, because of our fear, because of our unknowing. We stand so close to that enemy that we're able to feel a sense of hatred. We're not able to back off and find a way to love those who are different, those who are unlovable. Jesus had a remarkable ability to love the leper, to love the prostitute, to love the least of these, our brothers and sisters on planet Earth. In Matthew's scripture, Jesus talks about those that will, in fact, share the reward of heaven and it's those who care about the least of these, our brothers and sisters, that make it.

I recently traveled to North Korea and sang hymns with Christians there who are struggling with the poverty of North Korea. I've spent time in Columbia, in Palestine, in Israel, and around the world, finding ways to seek not just peace and reconciliation, but for our brothers and sisters on this planet to learn the lessons of love. Jesus knew how to love both neighbor and enemy.

My mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., also understood what Jesus' message of love really meant. Listen to these words that are the last paragraph in his book, Where Do We Go from Here, Chaos or Community? Dr. King said this:

"We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us bear, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The ‘tide in the affairs of humanity' does not remain at the flood, it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.' There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. ‘The moving finger writes and having written, moves on...' We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. This may well be (human)kind's last chance to choose between chaos and community."1

Dr. King calls us to choose between chaos and community by loving both neighbor and enemy. Let me close by sharing a benediction that is an important Franciscan benediction that I think will penetrate all of our hearts:

May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that, through your love, you can make a difference in this world so that you can do what others claim cannot be done. Amen.
1 King, Jr., Martin L., "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community," Harper & Row, Bantam Edition, June 1968.

Interview with Bob Edgar
Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot: Bob, a compelling message on loving our enemies. Yet we live in a culture in which Manichean messages of "us against them" or "we, they" are the name of the game. How can we as people of faith begin to see the face of Christ in the faces of the least of these or our enemies?

Bob Edgar: I think Jesus came as an unexpected Messiah, preaching "blessed are the peace makers" and care for brothers and sisters as well as enemies. It's very difficult for contemporary society. We have this opinion that we can solve the issue of terrorism by bombing capitals, that we somehow can be arrogant enough to decide who lives and who dies. They can't have the weapons, but we can. The fact of life is all of us should melt our nuclear weapons down and find a way to live in this century and in the foreseeable future in peace and justice. I'm helped by reading the Old Testament, where the prophets never had a majority and never took a vote; never thought God's will was what more than half of us think it is. If we look carefully at his message, I believe that Jesus is really challenging us today to think differently than the larger society that thinks it can handle its problems with the use of force.

Talbot:  If we all belong to God, then we all belong to each other. It's a concept that some people have trouble grasping. I must ask you, Bob. You have a reputation as a coalition builder in your years as Congressman from Pennsylvania and, of course, your years as an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church, and now head of the historic National Council of Churches. Tell us what you're going to do in Cuba.

Edgar: We are trying to build relationships with Cuba. As you recall, a few years ago I, along with Joan Brown Campbell and others at the National Council of Churches, helped to get Elian Gonzalez, the little boy lost at sea, back home. For the last thirty years we've had a humanitarian relationship with Cuba through the Cuban Council of Churches and a license from our own government to work in Cuba. It's time now for us to lift the embargo with Cuba. I'm taking delegations there throughout this year; particularly, conservative and evangelical persons, persons who normally would support the embargo. I think they've realized that after forty years the embargo isn't working and perhaps the best thing to do is to build bridges of love, compassion, and relationship with the people in Cuba. The churches are growing in Cuba, people of faith are there, and we're dedicating a new Greek Orthodox Church in Cuba in the near future. So I believe this is the time to change the way we think about Cuba and to build friendship rather than hostility.

Talbot: You are wearing a green ribbon that has great meaning and passion for you. Can you tell us what it means?

Edgar: The green ribbon represents "Peaceful Earth." The National Council of Churches works on poverty issues, environmental issues, and peace with justice. This symbolizes that for us.