Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 1: Going Where We Do Not Wish to Go (Psalm 14 & John 21:15-19)

Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 1: Going Where We Do Not Wish to Go

July 20, 2025

Psalm 14 & John 21:15-19

By Pastor Mike

***

With all the cruelty and deception at work in our country right now, I’ve been thinking about you. I’m concerned for those of you whose vocations are increasingly under threat, those of you whose safety and livelihoods feel less secure with each passing day. I grieve for those of you who are losing friends and family to politics, and for those of you struggling to hold onto a sense that life is a bright and beautiful gift. I’m also worried about those of you at risk of becoming grumblers and grousers at home with your screens rather than agents of justice walking alongside your neighbors.

And I don’t exempt myself from the temptations and agonies of our historical moment. It’s terribly difficult to be an American Christian right now who wants neither to “take the power back” for my own ideological victory nor to turn away and abandon the world. How can I, how can we be fully present to this life with all its conflict and pain while guarding our hearts from bitterness, resignation, or hatred? How can we step into the freedom of God, which is a freedom for forgiveness and for costly love?

Today I’m beginning a seven-week sermon series on our relationships with our enemies.  We live in a world marred by enmity and division, and Jesus calls us to be people of prayer in and for this world, not some other world. Having enemies is not something we can hold out here away from our discipleship; we must learn from Jesus, the Prince of Peace, so that we can become a people who break the enemy-making cycle, the cycle of grievance and retribution.

But as with so many things, the first step in breaking that cycle is naming and confessing that the problem is real and that we’re tangled up in it. So let’s do that:

First, we live in a world in which we are, in which we have enemies.

Second, we live in a world where it is profitable for a few to keep the enemy-making cycle up and running among the many.

Third, we live a world that wants us to believe that the label “enemy” is a fixed identity, a way of seeing another that cannot be transformed.

These are at least three strands in the knot of sin that we must allow Jesus to untangle. Let’s look at each strand a bit more closely.

We live in a world of enemies. That is the blunt, honest reality – and the Scriptures don’t shy away from that reality at all. But “enemy” is not word we typically use in our day-to-day life, so I invite you to translate it into your own experience. You might have an opponent, an oppressor, or an abuser. Maybe you have felt cheated, robbed, lied to, or lied about. Your enemy might have a very specific face, might meet you in a highly particular situation, or maybe you feel like the weight of the whole world is against you. The enemy might even be a person from your past whose hurtful words or actions continue to have power over you. Sometimes the phrase “those people” helps crystallize who the enemy is in our lives.

Take a moment to notice who is coming to mind as you consider your enemies.

At some point, we each cry out with the Psalmist: “They have all turned aside, / They have together become corrupt; / There is none who does good, / No, not one (Ps 14:2-3, NKJV).” That bleak feeling, that sense that humanity has completely lost its way, is as honest a place as any to enter into this prayerful relationship with God about our enemies. It’s not a place to stay. I wouldn’t even say it’s fully accurate. But prayer doesn’t have to be accurate – it has to be honest. So let us admit that we have enemies, and that having them hurts, confuses, consumes, and deflates our tender hearts.

Let us also name that we live in a world where those with the most resources profit from the enemy-making cycle. This is nothing new. On the American scene, it’s as old as politicians, tycoons, and preachers pitting poor white people against newly freed African Americans in order to oppose Reconstruction policies and racial integration in the South. But today this strategy is amped up to an extreme. You and I have constant access to a portal, designed to be addictive, that schools us in bitterness, nastiness, and rage. The powers that work upon our minds through these devices want to ensnare our attention and poison our imagination – for literal profit. The longer you and I scroll, the more we keep clicking on the inflammatory, the more someone somewhere is getting paid.

I know I often bring up our screens in a critical light. It’s not my intention to say that all media technology is evil or that we should just put our heads in the sand. But when we sit and scroll, we are passively selling our attention, siphoning our energy, and giving away our powers of discernment to something that is not human. The algorithms are designed to make us more and more sure of who our enemies are even as they immobilize us. This is not of God. God calls us to keep our actual neighbors in view, to respond what our bodies feel and what our spirits sense in response to the beauty and brokenness immediately around us. I’m not going to stop talking about the spiritual threats of our devices, and I hope you’re talking to one another about them, too. I hope you’ll talk to me, since I’m continually refining my own thinking about this.

And let’s be clear, it’s not just the apps, or the billionaires behind the apps, who profit from enemy making.  It’s the funders of wars, the corporations purchasing public policy, even the parent who sows discord among his or her children to escape responsibility for their own behavior. Whenever we find ourselves utterly convinced about who we are against, we would do well to pause and ask: Who is benefiting from the fact that I have this enemy?

So we’ve acknowledged that we have enemies, and we’ve named that our having enemies is as much something done to us as it is something that arises in us. Let us confess again that third strand, which is that we often believe that the label “enemy” is an absolute, fixed, essential identity – something that cannot change. Once an enemy, always an enemy.

From the perspective of the Gospel, “enemy” – however we have defined that for ourselves – is not an absolute definition. In Ephesians, Paul writes, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph 6:12, NIV). And the Psalmist says, “Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge, / Who eat up my people as they eat bread, / And do not call on the Lord?” (Ps 14:4, NKJV). Biblically speaking, true enemies are possessed by lies; they have given their lives over to deception. The name for the great enemy in the Biblical narrative, “Satan,” means accuser or deceiver. Those who eat up the poor as they eat bread believe in the lie of scarcity that causes them to hoard and control; they believe in the lie of self-sufficiency that causes them to insulate themselves from the sufferings of the disempowered; they believe in the lie of their invulnerability and forget that they, too, are mortal, finite, fragile.

Jesus came to exorcise – to cast out – these deceptions, and to save people from false identities. Jesus died on the cross and reconciled the cosmos to God; it’s a reconciliation that is available to everyone – to us and to our enemies. We are called to long for their healing and to want their conversion. Jesus’ work is to turn enemies into friends, whether that looks like two people making peace on their way to court, like Jews and Gentiles eating together, or like Zaccheus repaying fourfold all the people he had defrauded as a tax collector. Experiencing hostility in this life may be inescapable, but investing in the reality of enemies is a choice.

We are embarking on this series asking God to help us choose a better way, the way of Jesus.

Hear again the words of the Psalmist:

“The Lord looks down from heaven upon the children of men,

To see if there are any who understand, who seek God.

They have all turned aside,

They have together become corrupt;

There is none who does good,

No, not one.” (Ps 14:2-3, NKJV)

The issue here is with agency. The Psalmist is experiencing depression, as spirit of defeat, because she looks out upon the world and does not see anyone exercising their personal agency for the wellbeing and happiness of anyone else. What she does see are many people exercise their agency for their own gain, to the neglect of God’s will and at the expense of others. There is nothing inspiring, nothing beautiful. The bad are active; the good are paralyzed. Trying to see as God sees – “the Lord looks down from heaven” – the moral paralysis has even infected the psalmist.

Jesus came as an answer to this prayer, both in the sense that he became the Son of Man who sought God wholeheartedly, and in sense that he liberates our agency through the free and definitive exercise of his own. He is God, and who has more agency than God? And yet Jesus uses his free and powerful agency to come to us, to enter our world of enemies, and to liberate the world through the pouring out of his life and love on behalf of the poor and oppressed.

Here's how Paul puts it in Philippians chapter 2:

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

Jesus exercises his divine agency in order to set us free from our sins – to make peace between God and a world that had grown hostile to God.

We see this peacemaking in poignant form in the story of Peter’s encounter with the risen Christ from John chapter 21. Peter had made himself an enemy of Jesus. He had denied him three times and abandoned him on the night of his arrest. But Jesus reclaims Peter, and heals his three denials by inviting him into three affirmations of love.  

Jesus then teaches Peter something about discipleship. As Peter matures in his faith, he will use his agency – his powers of choice and consent – to say Yes to the path of love. He will say Yes to the ways that Jesus wants to use him, Yes to the places Jesus wants to take him, Yes to the people Jesus wants to give him to love. His agency will be fully exercised in surrendering to God’s agency, and this will mean that Peter will both follow the one he loves and be led where he does not wish to go. This is the way of the cross; and for Peter, as the tradition holds, that cross became literal.

Like Peter, you and I are called to follow Jesus into a world of enemies. Jesus wants to restore our agency to us, to unlock the power of our Yes to God and our Yes to others. When you’re living in right relationship with God, living against the grain of the evil in the universe with purpose; when you’re doing what you can, what you are called to do, you can experience happiness and peace. This is the promise of the Church. The Church is a community of people standing where they stand, moving against the grain through their Yes to God, and, together, becoming a force. None of us has to know or do everything. But together, in Christ, we overcome all things.

This morning, the call is simply to follow him, even if it means following him into a world where it seems like “there is none who does good. No, not one.” That following is itself an act of profound freedom, and act of humanity, and it sets the stage for an exercise of powerful love, love that is generous, love that forgives, love that stretches out to touch even our enemies.

            We begin today by seeing the situation clearly, with our honest cries of confoundment.

            We begin today simply by saying Yes.

            “Yes. I have decided to follow Jesus.”

            Amen.