What it Ain’t
Listen Now
Our Guests
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Author of Fire By Night: Finding God in the Pages of the Old Testament and How To Have An Enemy: Righteous Anger and the Work of Peace. Pastor, parent, and pollinator gardner
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Carol Penner teaches and writes in the area of practical theology and after many years as a pastor in various Mennonite congregations, she joined the faculty at Grebel. Her research interests include feminist theology and Mennonite peace theology, and abuse issues. She has a popular blog of her worship resources at www.leadinginworship.com.
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Betty is a Conflict, Change, and Leadership Specialist at Credence and Co., with over 28 years of experience as a coach, mediator, trainer, facilitator, consultant and writer. Betty specializes in working with complex challenges, supporting leaders and their organizations to be at their best. Betty’s capacity to care deeply, listen well, and provide wise and thoughtful support allows her to help her clients engage in tough, meaningful, and important conversations, set directions, and achieve positive organizational change. Betty’s PhD (Free University Amsterdam) considers the intersection between conflict transformation and contemplative spirituality.
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Brian Zahnd is the founding pastor of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri, and the author of ten books. His most recent book is “When Everything’s on Fire.”
Links and Resources
Books
How to Have an Enemy, by Melissa Florer-Bixler
The Space Between Us, by Dr. Betty Pries
When Everything’s On Fire, by Brian Zahnd
Music
First Communion, Dane Joneshill
(Spotify | YouTube Music)
Different From Me, Kevin Aron
Other Links
Notable Quotes
What does loving our enemies NOT mean?
Loving our enemies is about taking care of ourselves, replenishing our tank and when the person around us is doing harm, it's also about having the capacity to say “No, that's not okay.” ~Betty Pries
I often think about loving our enemies as involving two hands. One is an open hand of grace. This is goodness, generosity, grace, love, all those good things. One is a hand that looks more like a stop sign, which is the hand of boundaries that says, “Hang on, there are some limitations here in terms of what's acceptable in our relationship.” If we have both hands open, we open ourselves too much, if we have both hands closed, we have no relationship. ~Betty Pries
But there's something about how Jesus preaches in Matthew about turning the other cheek that we have to be paying attention to. We often think about turning of the cheek as sort of give and give and give and give. But if you look at Middle Eastern culture and you look at the construction of the text, turning the other cheek was actually both being loving and holding accountable at the very same time… Because they were forced to either hit the person as an equal, or they're forced to use their hand in a way that shamed them…the way that works invites the person to either treat you as an equal or to be self-reflective about why they're doing what they're doing. ~Betty Pries
Ignoring those questions doesn't make them go away. It just creates a sort of seething that happens underneath. And I think a lot of what we're seeing in our communities now is the eruption of that, and the sort of thing that we've wanted to push down for so long that now it's coming out in really unhealthy and problematic ways. ~Melissa Florer-Bixler
I think Jesus’ call to love our enemies is really important because we make enemies. It's not just that we have bad things done to us and now we have enemies because they're hurting us. Sometimes we are hurting other people and we are treating them as enemies. And so they are our enemies because we have made them such, and so Jesus wants us to love our enemies, which means don't make enemies, don't do violence to other people. ~Dr. Carol Penner
Sometimes there's sacrifice involved when we love someone who's hurting us, but sometimes it's faithful to walk away and say I'm not going to let you keep hurting me. We're leaving. ~Dr. Carol Penner
One of the things that we have to understand is the distinction between the church as an alternative society and the civil function of the larger society… forgiveness is not saying that it was right or all right, or it is alright. Forgiveness is saying, “I, on my part, am going to turn this over to God,” but that also may involve, in healthy societies, turning it over to the wider society through criminal justice to handle the matter, this is why the church doesn't want to be the state. Or it shouldn't. ~Brian Zahnd
As someone who has more exposure to [the Anabaptist] community, that's one of those things that we've been exposed to, where we would have seen some of these things play out a little bit more, where with all of this language about loving our enemies and forgiveness where it can sometimes be used almost as a weapon against those who have been hurt. ~Kevin Wiebe
Where do we need to be careful? Where is it easy for us to go wrong with Jesus’ teaching?
Understanding that we can have enemies that have been assigned to us by the wider culture. And they just tell you, these are your enemies. To be a part of our club, our society, our nation, whatever, you have to hate these people. We have lots of enemies that may not at all even be evil. They might even be right… And I'm going to say I don't even know if that's a healthy way to approach it. And then when it falls down into the church, this is where it's terrible. Where we allow our church to be formed by a wider society that says, if you red you got to hate the blues, if you're blue you got to hate the reds. ~Brian Zahnd
Too often when we say we must love our enemies, it means we must let them just walk all over us and not resist, but nonviolence can also be nonviolent resistance, and so you can resist the enemy, but that doesn't mean you have to harm them. ~Dr. Carol Penner
Church history is just a lesson of people taking the teachings of Jesus and you know, finding ways to use those for their own power, for conquering, for domination and also, for retribution and revenge… We're also given this invitation to start building a world that is also good for even those who harm us, that starts to dismantle systems and forms of life that keep us locked into forms of oppression. ~Melissa Florer-Bixler
When we are deeply committed to nonviolence, what can happen is that we end up denying our anger and our pain… But once we externalize our anger and our lament, we are no longer under their power. ~Betty Pries
