February 23, 2025:Love Invites the Highest Good

Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

Love Invites the Highest Good

Homily for St. John’s Episcopal Church by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn given February 23, 2025

Genesis 45:3-11,15; Luke 6:27-38

The story of Joseph in today’s reading from Genesis is one of the most famous in the Bible. Did any of you watch Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Coat musical all those years ago with Donny Osmond? Maybe Millennials and younger don’t know about it. For those of you who can’t quite remember the story, let me briefly retell it to you. Jacob has twelve sons and at least one daughter from four different mothers. Because Jacob only really loves one of the mothers, he also only really loves the two sons from that mother, the oldest of which is Joseph. This of course does not make for happy family dynamics. Joseph’s brothers hate him because their father Jacob plays favorites and Joseph is his favorite. Eventually Jacob’s brothers beat him up and sell him as a slave to Egypt. Long story short Joseph ends up becoming the second most powerful person in Egypt, right under Pharaoh, and he ends up predicting a worldwide famine that Egypt prepares for by storing a lot of grain. Of course Joseph’s brothers eventually come to Egypt to get some of that grain to prevent their families from starving, and they come before their brother Joseph whom they don’t recognize. But Joseph recognizes his brothers. The story actually goes on for eight chapters. It gets very involved and goes back and forth, and ultimately the brothers are forced to tell a lot of the story of their lives to Joseph including about the grief of having lost Joseph all those years ago. And that is the scene that we heard a few minutes ago. Joseph finally says to his brothers, “I am Joseph.” And they are so dismayed they can’t even talk. Can you imagine? I mean, they must have been terrified. They are 100% in Joseph’s power, and he has a lot of power. He can do anything at all that he wants to them.  And they fully know that they would deserve whatever he would do to them.

And I’m sure Joseph was sorely tempted. But in the end he kills them with kindness, as the saying goes. In the end the terrible things they did to him, and the years of suffering they put him through, could not prevent him from living his soul’s purpose in the world. He ended up using his gift for dreaming and interpreting dreams to predict the famine and thereby save so many lives. He creatively interprets the events of the world and the harm in the family as God’s way of saving life. It’s one of the most profound and dramatic examples of loving your enemies as there is in all of scripture.

And of course I’m talking about this because in today’s gospel reading, that’s what Jesus tells us to do. “Love your enemies,” he says. At St. John’s, we’ve adopted the motto “learning to embody love.” Love is not optional, for us who understand Jesus as being all about love, as teaching us the Way of Love. But loving, in today’s world, is hard. Loving, for Joseph, was hard. I imagine loving, for Jesus, was also supremely hard—he lost his life for it. But do you know what love does?

Love is the power that enables us to stop playing the world’s game. The world’s game is the cancel culture. If you do something wrong or that I disagree with, you are written off, demonized and hated. The world’s game is an either/or game, an us vs. them game, a win or lose, zero sum equation. But in the world of love, the highest and best good of all parties is made possible. How in the world do we accomplish that?

Matt Linn wrote a beautiful book called Don’t Forgive Too Soon: Extending the Two Hands that Heal. In it he talks about Jesus’ command to love our enemies and uses the insights of the phases of grief to describe what real forgiveness looks like. He says that to truly forgive, and to truly love one’s enemies, one needs to go through all the phases—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—to get to the place where one can forgive. One has to face the full reality of the harm that happened over time, letting in a little at a time through the tool of denial until we can bear to look at the whole thing. Then our natural response is anger, which we have to feel in its totality. Then we get to bargaining, trying to offer quid pro quos about what we think would make us feel better, but that don’t work. Then we feel depressed because we realize there is absolutely nothing we can do to go back in time and take the harm away. Finally we come to a place of accepting that it happened, and it is there that we become able to do what Matt Linn describes as true forgiveness, which is to offer two hands to the enemy: the one hand that says stop, you cannot continue to be violent toward me; and the other hand that says I see you, you are a child of God made of light and this violence is not your truest self, so I am inviting better from you.

Recently I learned some things about my grandfather that were really hard. My grandfather was a complicated man. I remember him as being gregarious and funny, warm and loving to me, but also wildly eccentric among other things. For 25 years he was the protestant chaplain at the maximum-security penitentiary in Santa Fe, New Mexico, including at the time when it had the most violent riot in United States prison history. I won’t go into detail about what I learned, but for me it was a punch in the gut.

I told my spiritual director about this, and she said to me that ultimately, I would not come to peace about him until I was able to find compassion for him, without excusing what he had done. You see, the way the world works, I could simply write him off as the cause of some challenging things in my family. As I said, today’s world is full of either-or, us and them, good or evil thinking. But the power of love is not like that. The power of love enables us to see and speak the truth but invite the highest good of oneself and the other at the same time. The highest good doesn’t involve allowing cruelty or violence to continue. But it also doesn’t involve demonizing or hatred. Now, my grandfather passed away a long time ago. But my spiritual director suggested that one way to come to compassion for him would be to find out where the energy of perpetration exists within me, and why it is there; to have compassion for myself about that; and then to extend that compassion to my grandfather. And then, to offer my grandfather unconditional blessing. Blessing for the child of God that he was. Blessing for the goodness that existed in his life. Blessing because I can heal from the negative legacies that he left behind, and in that way free him as well. In fact we can offer our own healing as a form of blessing to those who have harmed us, which can flow back in time and change the energy of their legacy.

Now as we know it’s tempting to just cut our enemies off, and certainly it’s very important to prevent harm. It is sometimes very necessary to create boundaries between ourselves and others. But as we know, for example from the great talks Mike Walters gave at the community forum about quantum physics, everything is truly interrelated no matter how many boundaries we create. Everything impacts everything else. In fact there is a whole theology based on this interrelationship called process theology, which says that God does not so much create the world as that God creates with the world, and that in the creative freedom of God’s relationship with the world God is always inviting possibilities for us to co-create future goodness from whatever is true in the present. So when Jesus tells us to love our enemies, he is saying that we are already in relationship with so-called “enemies,” because everything that everyone does impacts everyone else. “Love” is the name of the quality of the relationship with our enemies that invites the highest good that is possible at the time.

Loving our enemies means reversing the flow of negative harm coming from them to us, and instead infusing the quality of the relationship with the possibility for good. Joseph interpreted the whole story of his life with the creative freedom he had at his disposal, to say that goodness came out of his experience despite his brothers’ worst intentions and actions. His brothers did have to face the truth of what they had done. But then freedom and love suffused their relationship and healed it.

If God offers us possibilities for goodness in the future based on everything that exists in the present, how might we find and co-create that goodness from whatever is true in our lives right now? It starts by facing the full reality of what is true right now, and coming to a place of acceptance about it. What has happened has happened, and there is nothing we can do to change the past.

We have ultimate freedom and power to create goodness in the future, with God’s help, and it arises from the power of healing and the power of love. Amen.

10am Service