Pastor Darren: We continue in our theme with Les Miserables and this one.
Pastor Darren: The chapter in the book is called Building the Barricade and it's talking more specifically about the French resistance.
Pastor Darren: That's kind of in the background of the whole story of Les Miserables.
Pastor Darren: In the history of it all, this story is occurring after the French Revolution, but it's still a time of revolution.
Pastor Darren: It's still a time of rebellion.
Pastor Darren: They're still trying to figure everything out.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: And undergirding a lot of that is this idea of human rights and treating humans respectfully.
Pastor Darren: What has lingered in all this history is that you actually have two sides here.
Pastor Darren: You have two camps, shall we say.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: Our group, in the story of Les Miserables, the students are part of that rebellion.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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?
Pastor Darren: We're always seen to be wrestling with that and whom we want to empower, and I imagine we always will be.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: What do we do when we disagree with each other?
Pastor Darren: What do we do when we're in conflict?
Pastor Darren: Is there room for us Christians for rebellion, those of us called to love our enemies?
Pastor Darren: Is there room for that rebellion?
Pastor Darren: How do we do that rebellion in the most Christian way?
Pastor Darren: So we look to our deep wisdom from our scriptures, 2,000-year-old wisdom coming from Jesus, the gospel of Matthew, chapter 5.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: It brings with it potentially our most challenging instruction, yet no comfort here.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: That's the easy stuff.
Pastor Darren: We can all do that.
Pastor Darren: Even the tax collectors do that.
Pastor Darren: For gosh sakes, do we have tax collectors in this church?
Pastor Darren: Sometimes you got to be careful.
Pastor Darren: I don't want to insult anybody.
Pastor Darren: They weren't well thought of 2,000 years ago, not like today.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: Loving those who don't treat us well cuts us off on the freeway.
Pastor Darren: Love you, you're great.
Pastor Darren: You're great over there Talking behind our back.
Pastor Darren: I love you too.
Pastor Darren: You're so good for the way you talk about me when I'm not around.
Pastor Darren: Lays us off when they know we need the paycheck.
Pastor Darren: Love you.
Pastor Darren: Votes against your personal values and your rights.
Pastor Darren: Love you.
Pastor Darren: Right.
Pastor Darren: It's challenging.
Pastor Darren: It goes against so much of just our existence and how our body is inclined to move, how our mind is intended to go.
Pastor Darren: And I'll tell you.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: In other words, god loves everyone.
Pastor Darren: Why can't you love everyone?
Pastor Darren: 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?
Pastor Darren: Right now we see there's a social justice issue at stake.
Pastor Darren: Something needs to be fixed.
Pastor Darren: Somebody is not being treated in the way God would want them treated.
Pastor Darren: We need to fix this thing.
Pastor Darren: How do I do that against the people who I am enemies with and still love them?
Pastor Darren: There's that huge challenge.
Pastor Darren: Can we work against others while still loving them, others while still loving them?
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: We are not holding ourselves to that belief from God, that teaching from Jesus.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: You can hunt him down and chat him up.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: I do remind him that some of these questions are big, big questions.
Pastor Darren: But he asks this time in the series.
Pastor Darren: 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?
Pastor Darren: And you know folks, folks I'm talking about let's just take it right to number 10 here.
Pastor Darren: You know those genocidal leaders, those dictators who don't seem to have any heart or compassion for humanity, much less their own people.
Pastor Darren: You know who I'm talking about.
Pastor Darren: How are we going to love those people?
Pastor Darren: What do we do about loving the worst of us?
Pastor Darren: It's a tough one, right?
Pastor Darren: That is a tough question.
Pastor Darren: I told Charlie.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: More than a few days.
Pastor Darren: I hope you understand I wasn't being arrogant on that.
Pastor Darren: It's a hard question to figure out.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: But we are called to love everyone, even our enemies.
Pastor Darren: Where does this leave us?
Pastor Darren: When is there a time that, with integrity, we can say to ourselves Jesus, this situation is different.
Pastor Darren: This situation is different.
Pastor Darren: I'm going to need to suspend the whole loving thing here.
Pastor Darren: My experiential wisdom of living in this world lo, these, however many years has told me I need to suspend the loving thing here.
Pastor Darren: It puts it into a different realm of understanding, doesn't it To think about it in that way?
Pastor Darren: Now it's us deciding when we follow God's wisdom, when we follow Jesus' teaching and when we don't.
Pastor Darren: We follow Jesus' teaching and when we don't.
Pastor Darren: It's also tough, because that's not the end of those kinds of conversations.
Pastor Darren: That's just the beginning of those kinds of conversations.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: They'll say things like you know what that guy if he wanted to work, he'd be working.
Pastor Darren: I don't owe him anything.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: I don't owe him anything.
Pastor Darren: I've heard Christians and brothers and sisters say, oh, they are affirming of LGBTQ people, lgbtq lifestyles, we owe them nothing.
Pastor Darren: And I've heard other Christian brothers and sisters say they are oppressing LGBTQ people in this world.
Pastor Darren: I owe them nothing.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: In many ways, we empower ourselves to live out of this godly love daily.
Pastor Darren: This godly love daily.
Pastor Darren: Where are the new boundaries to adhere to in this beyond Jesus world?
Pastor Darren: If you're like me, it starts getting a bit murky.
Pastor Darren: The more liberties we take, the more we venture away from that grounding understanding, the murkier it gets.
Pastor Darren: It is a tough calling for us Christians for sure.
Pastor Darren: Loving enemies amidst inevitable disagreement and even conflict in this world.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: To understand what is right and wrong and to live it out.
Pastor Darren: We have other meters, money and power that tend to make those decisions.
Pastor Darren: Maybe our call, our call as Christians, is to continue to make the loving option our option.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: It's an essential part of a life lived well.
Pastor Darren: It's an essential part of knowing God's abundance.
Pastor Darren: We've learned this.
Pastor Darren: That's why we're here on Sunday mornings at 10 o'clock, some of you even every week.
Pastor Darren: He teases and we know there's value to living the godly life, the loving life.
Pastor Darren: That is why we are here.
Pastor Darren: It's also a mindset that has brought about social justice on a very, very large scale.
Pastor Darren: Gandhi was able to bring a sense of humanity to India.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: The work he did was 2,000 years ago and yet we still follow.
Pastor Darren: Love definitely still has some success stories, crucifixion has brought resurrection.
Pastor Darren: So maybe we aren't just wasting our time living out this loving thing.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: I'm going to invite Billy Parrish to come forward.
Pastor Darren: He's going to be singing one of the most well-known songs from Les Mis Bring Him Home.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Billy Parrish: In my need you have always been there.
Billy Parrish: He is young, he is afraid.
Billy Parrish: Let him rest, heaven blessed.
Billy Parrish: Bring him home, bring him home.
Billy Parrish: Bring him home.
Billy Parrish: He's like the sun.
Billy Parrish: I might have known If God had granted me a son.
Billy Parrish: The summers die one by one, how soon they fly on and on and I am old and will be gone.
Billy Parrish: Bring him, bring him peace, bring him joy.
Billy Parrish: He is young, he is only a boy.
Billy Parrish: Let him be.
Billy Parrish: Let him live.
Billy Parrish: If I die, let me die.
Billy Parrish: Let him live.
Billy Parrish: Bring him home, bring him home.
Billy Parrish: Bring him home.
Billy Parrish: Thank you.