"No, thank you": How to love your enemy, work for justice, and speak of God

The following sermon was given at an Interfaith Thanksgiving service for Santa Barbara faith communities. Due to the diverse audience, this talk was a bit different from a usual sermon but I learned a lot even as I wrestled with how to address such a delightfully, motley group while being myself. 

In the book of Matthew in what Christians refer to as the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said, “Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or “No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.” Well, Jesus didn’t have my Texan mother. I could have never gotten away with such advice. An only yes or only no would never work.  She would have given me a quick elbow to the ribs and said, “Excuse me. Show some respect, be grateful.” You say “yes, ma’am or no, ma’am” “yes please or no thank you.” These habits have stuck with me as most do. But as I have lived into them, been chastised or mocked for them, they have never the less communicated to me some valuable lessons that merge quite nicely with Jesus’ teachings. Jesus’s words remind us that “no” is okay, even an important part of the spiritual life. Saying “no” thankfully bears spiritual gifts and deserves recognition and respect. So “no, thank you” is not an oxymoron nor a selfish thing but a belief that “no” is a positive element of our spiritual lives and we can grow by saying it. Saying yes and saying no are companions in the process of constituting a whole and holy life. Without a “no” there can be no “yes” and we say “thank you” to acknowledge that. I think there are three “nos” that deserve our particular attention and purposeful “thanks.”

We need to learn “no, thank you” in order to love our enemies.

We are increasingly confronting a culture of shrill “nos” and a world supposedly filled with enemies. As a society we can sense a loss of civility and the capacity to even imagine that we might be wrong, might be missing something. And so when in doubt, we surmise, yell louder! And our “no” becomes less a remark toward any ideology but becomes the extinction of the person who stands against us. They are no longer one with whom we disagree but disagreement itself and we must remove them, get rid of them. “Thank you” is a humanizing tendency to help us challenge this sickness, it is the recognition that everyone has gifts to bear, even our enemies. Jesus will later tell us that while we might say “no” to our enemies the “thank you” is discovered in the demand to love them. Likewise, the Dalai Lama has often remarked that “our enemies are our greatest teachers.” Enemies show us the faults our friends would spare us from and reveal our own hypocrisies that we otherwise might miss when we surround ourselves with a ghettoized “yes” culture of those who agree with us, dress like us, think like us. 

 The great Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas remarked, “We must love them both – those whose opinions we reject and those whose opinions we accept. For both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in the finding of it.” 

That doesn’t mean that we don’t need to say “no” and there is plenty in this world and plenty of folk that should be told as such and they will, of course, tell us in return. And we should say, “thank you.” But maybe I’m saying something even deeper – that meeting the world with a loving and grateful heart will determine what we find there. We mistakenly place our trust, too often, in the righteousness of our “no.” Maybe, just maybe, our “no, thank you” is meant to signal that we refuse be someone’s enemy. It becomes impossible to demonize someone you are thankful for. Jesus reminds us that you can disagree with an enemy, challenge him forcefully, even with strong language – but you nevertheless should also be willing to love her, to give your life for her. “No thank you” is a refusal to let your enemy determine your response. Clarence Jordan reminds us of the creativity of “no, thank you” and nonviolence when he talks about his oldest daughter’s response to the son of Klu Klux Klan members (tell the story) Our “no thank you” to violence is a creative response, a divine joke, a loving and grateful “yes.”

We need to learn “no, thank you” to address our injustice

In the face of increasingly invasive and gigantic corporations let us be thankful for the ability to say “no” to ourselves by the power of the Spirit. Ours is a time of the unlimited choice of a global marketplace where advertisements are quite adept at coaxing us with religious language to shed our “nos” of enough in order to buy, possess, and to accumulate more – but even worse they convince us that in buying, possessing, and accumulating more, we ourselves are more, are become something bigger. Illus. few weeks ago I heard an announcer on the radio say, “Sometimes you’ve just got to believe. Believe in a miracle. Believe in a leap of faith. Believe that there’s something bigger than yourself. Believe in a second chance.” I was expecting it to end as an ad for a new church and felt the need to repent until I heard, “California Lottery Powerball. You just gotta believe.” In light of this infinite commercial “yes” where goods have become gods, market decisions aim to inflate our ego and capture our devotion, and global corporations exists like the Titans of ancient Greek mythology, we need to be grateful for our seemingly insignificant personal “nos.”

The temptation for many of us is to engage them on their own turf, to talk about global change, to become as big as they are. Yet, I have come to see in part that I will never be able to participate fully in broader social change without gratefully starting small. To do so is to recognize the spiritual power of the double diminutive -  Illus. Jesus feeding the 5,000 with the double diminutive (little boy, little sardines) John 6, Jesus’ disciple want to focus on the magnanimity of the problem while Jesus uses the small offering of a seemingly insignificant child to address the issue – small change alters the world.

“No thank you” reminds us that our world is small and that what is required is the gracious ability to say “no, thank you” to that purchase, those stores, that addiction. Some of you may be leaders in broader change, most of us will not, but all of us can contribute to turn our lives into the work of water rather than a hammer of spiritual energy. The hammer will only leave us angry, tired and out of breath with a lot of broken pieces; the former will bring life even as it wears down the rocks of injustices. It’s like the child’s riddle: Would you rather have a million dollars or a penny doubled every day for thirty days? The pennies come to 5.3 million in thirty days. “No, thank you is to recognize the spiritual power of the penny and revel in its patience and humility that brings peace while it is practiced.

We need to learn to say “no, thank you” to speak of God; that is, to love God and to pray.

“No, thank you” in this case is the recognition that we need a little less clarity to speak truthfully of God – a clearly defined thing is not a mystery and yet the Bible and most sacred religious texts assure us that God is mysterious. Many of us should adopt a way of speaking about God like the economic forecasts of the former Fed. Chairman Alan Greenspan who said, ““I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I said.” 1988 speech, Alan Greenspan as quoted in The New York Times, October 28, 2005

The Christian saint Augustine said it this way: “If you understand it is not God you understand.”

The danger of words and concepts for God is that we may soon begin to focus on these human constructs as “god” rather than on the living God. We may be tempted, for our own selfish ends, to domesticate the Divine, who is beyond all human symbols or imagery or to fashion a “god” out of our own fragile souls.

This way of doing theology is referred to as “apophatic theology” the way of unknowing, a theology of negation in which we unmasks or at least admit the inadequacies of all words not simply sacred ones. I heard a survivor of Auschwitz say that all words have become for her suspect or ridiculous – not just the calculated rhetoric of political camoflauge but ordinary expressions that seem to require no thought at all like, “I’m dying for a cup of tea.” Apophatic theology acknowledges that all words are too small, too fragile and that we are simply too broken to feel totally secure without divine help. It’s a beggar’s theology and many of us don’t like to beg.

I am convinced that we need a spirited and respectful debate about the nature of God. But, the truly important reason for such a discussion is not so that we can share something critical about our faith. Its gift is that might realize that we have become too comfortable with what we already know – we might think that’s all there is to know about God. We need apophatic language to remind us that God cannot be reduced to a checklist of explanations, a moral code, a life plan, a theological scheme. We need “no, thank you” so that any person who stands up and says “God is . . .” stops and thinks very, very carefully. We need it because I am more and more of the belief that we need to be left spiritually speechless and theological beggars.

There is an interesting story in the Gospel of Luke – the two on the road to Emmaus - a stranger comes along chides them – “How foolish you are” – and then the text says a curious thing, “As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on.” And it’s only when they beg that he sits down with them, takes a simple loaf of bread, offers a prayer of thanks at which point they see him and he disappears from their sight. That’s apophatic theology – it’s the belief that we need to beg the stranger to stay with us, implore the one who challenges our vision, who says “no” to us, to beseech the stranger to sit down with as at table to eat. Only then will our “no, thank you” become the divine “yes” of hospitality and we might catch a quick glimpse of God before he disappears from our sight.