Enemy

Two weeks ago I preached about Jesus saying, "But I say to you that listen, 'love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.'" Usually I manage to get things out of my system when I preach a sermon on them, but this one is really bugging me.  The gist of my sermon was that we don't take Jesus seriously on this point, and I was challenging the congregation to do just that.  In the name of not being a hypocrite, I have been noticing all the people I hold in those categories.
Honestly, very few of them are people I actually know.  I guess it's a good thing that I just don't have many people in my life that I consider enemies.  I can not think of too many people I actually know hate me or curse me or abuse me.  I found myself having to stretch a bit, to people I disagree with, or people I think are generally bad folks, but who haven't really hurt me personally. I mean, I can imagine all sorts of enemies and I can create them around every corner if I want, but I have a very real chance that on most days I will not encounter anyone who is seriously my enemy.
I think also, that some people may hate me, or at least the idea of me.  They may hate me because I'm American (sometimes I figure we deserve it), they may hate me because I'm a white male, because I'm educated, because I'm Christian (meaning that I bear that religious label not because of my mystical identity as one who is "in Christ," but I will get to that), because I'm a pastor, because I'm liberal, because... well you get the idea, but none of those things is really me.  I hope the number of people that I have actually hurt or offended, at least since I left my adolescence, is rather small, and so I don't think I have many enemies in any real sense.
That's a luxury that very few in the history of the world could really claim.  Which is why I think we are getting so carried away with trying to make or just imagine enemies.  Because I think we don't really understand what it's like to live in peril.  The closest we come is when some lunatic decides to commit a so called "random" act of violence, or we become the victim of a crime of some sort, then maybe we have a chance to see our enemy clearly.  Jesus had serious enemies all around him.  He had the religious authorities who really didn't smell what he was cooking, he had the Romans who would just as soon put him to a brutal death as look at him, he even had a friend who was ready to betray him.
Am I living too safe? Should I be making more people angry at me? I mean so that I can love them?
Look, we've all had people hurt us, and forgiving is hard to say the least, but what I've been thinking about for the past two weeks is why I seem to want enemies in the first place.  Yes, people irritate me, sometimes very prominent people.  I really dislike Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump and Mike Pence, I can't help it, the sight of them makes me irritated, but I don't hate them.  If they were in a ditch bleeding I would help them.  I disagree profoundly with most of the things that come out of their mouths, but I don't want to see them come to harm, I just want them to lose their jobs (I don't think Trump even wants his job anyway).
Maybe if I believed that there really was a border crisis and our actual enemies were at this moment streaming across the border to come rape and pillage our world, I would feel differently about the hawks and white nationalists (I hope not, but maybe I would) who are vainly offering to keep us safe.
But the thing is that I am growing in this awareness that I am "In Christ," not just a Christian in the sense that I go to church (that I preach in a church), but that I am a part of this creation which is made according to the pattern of Christ, the Word, who was in the beginning.  As I get more and more towards that understanding (and it's not always a slam dunk) I am becoming aware that not only must I love my enemies, I really just need to stop inventing them in the first place.  I am so very fortunate that I live in a time and a place where the Vikings, the Huns or the Visigoths are not about to appear on the horizon and kill me and enslave my children.  That lowers the stakes on loving my enemy, makes it rather easy comparably speaking.
It may seem less dramatic to say, "love people who disagree with you," or "pray for those who make you cringe," but the challenge is the same,