Sabbath Day Thoughts — “Beyond Measure” Luke 6:27-38
Claiborne “CP” Ellis grew up in poverty in Durham, NC, the son of a mill worker. He married at seventeen and quickly fathered three children. The youngest was born blind and developmentally disabled. Despite working two jobs, he could rarely pay his bills. In an interview with journalist Studs Terkel, CP remembered, “I worked my butt off and never seemed to break even. They say abide by the law, go to church, do right and live for the Lord and everything will work out. It didn’t work out. It kept gettin’ worse and worse. I began to get bitter.”
CP joined the Ku Klux Klan. His father told him it was the savior of the white race. The night he first put on the white robe and hood, was led through a crowd of fellow clansmen, and knelt before an illuminated cross, CP felt that he finally belonged. He rose through the ranks, eventually becoming the Grand Exalted Cyclops.
Ann Atwater was one of nine children born to a Black sharecropping family in rural North Carolina. Her mother died when she was six. Her father earned five cents an hour in the fields, all the children working right alongside him. As a child laborer on a white owner’s farm, Ann recalled her family being given food only through the back door, after white workers had already eaten. She was taught that White people were better and that their needs came before hers.
That changed when Ann moved to Durham as a young mother with two daughters. There she became a community organizer with Operation Breakthrough, a program to help Black people escape generational poverty. Ann’s deep, powerful voice could energize a crowd, and she wasn’t afraid to share her opinions loudly and proudly. She concluded that the most effective method of getting people to listen to her was to “holler at them.” When she called a meeting, she meant business.
It should come as no surprise that CP Ellis and Ann Atwater were enemies. At town council meetings, Ann passionately advocated before the all-White board for her Black neighbors. She called for housing improvements and better schools. At the same meetings, CP made provocative and inaccurate statements, expressing his fear and resentment of Black people. “Blacks are taking over the city. They got all the good jobs, and you’re all sittin’ here letting ‘em do it.” Ann and CP were such bitter foes that she once almost pulled the penknife she kept in her purse on him at a Durham City Council meeting when he proposed Apartheid-like restrictions for Blacks. Ann remembered, “As soon as he got close to me, I was going to grab his head from behind and cut him from ear to ear.” But her pastor grabbed her hand and said, “Don’t give them the satisfaction.”
We all have enemies: those who have hurt us, worked against us, and made our lives hard. We all have enemies, those who have talked us down, disrespected our gender, or laughed at our best efforts. In this desperately partisan time, we all have enemies, who label us as “them,” advocate for candidates we can’t abide, envision an America where we are left behind or the vulnerable are victimized. We all have enemies.
In today’s reading from the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus gave his friends guidance on how to relate to enemies. The Ancient Near East was a world driven by retributive violence. An accidental death could readily explode into the murder of an entire family. Blood feuds pit neighbor against neighbor and nation against nation for generations. Jewish law tried to limit this escalating cycle of bloody revenge by teaching a tit-for-tat justice—“life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe (Exodus 21:23-25). Yet Jesus broke even with this moderate teaching of measured retaliation. Jesus insisted that his followers exceed the righteousness of the Torah. Instead of pulling out their opponent’s teeth and blacking their eyes, Jesus’ followers were to love.
Jesus taught that we love our enemies by praying for them. That doesn’t mean we are to pray, “Lord, remove my enemy from my life.” Or, “Lord, give my enemy the comeuppance that he deserves!” Rather, we are to prayerfully bring our enemy before the Lord with the intention of agape love—the sort of unselfish love that impartially wishes the best for others. Agape for our enemies? Really Jesus? If you expect that, we may need to begin by praying for ourselves. We may need to ask God to soften the hardness of our hearts and help us with our anger, vulnerability, and hurt feelings. Once we have made the choice for agape instead of retribution and asked the Lord for the help we need, we can begin to imagine our enemy in the circle of God’s love. We can begin to pray for an enemy who is transformed by love.
I suspect that Jesus taught his followers to pray for their enemies because he knew that prayer would change them. When we turn to God in prayer, we acknowledge our powerlessness. We accept that we cannot change what others feel or do. We begin to see that we can only control ourselves, and we can choose to not fuel that endless cycle of retribution. As we pray, we find healing for our pain, our hard hearts soften, and we cultivate compassion and empathy. By bringing our enemy into God’s loving regard in prayer, we participate in God’s mercy. We move beyond measuring who deserves what. We learn to be merciful as God is merciful. In praying for those who have wronged us, we join God in the healing and redemption of our world, one enemy at a time.
Imagine the animosity that Ann Atwater and CP Ellis felt for one another in 1971 when a court order finally forced the city of Durham to integrate its public schools. Many in the community vehemently opposed desegregation. Racial tensions among students ran high. Fights broke out in classrooms and hallways. In an effort to forestall more school violence, the town council called for a charette, an intense collaborative process to come up with new school policies. For ten days community members would meet twelve-hours-a-day to find a way forward. The council appointed two community members to chair the process: Ann Atwater and CP Ellis. Neither liked the idea. CP said, “It was impossible. How could I work with her? Her and I, up to that point, cussed each other, bawled each other [out], we hated each other.” Things got off to a rough start when CP brought a machine gun to the first meeting. He was dead set on sabotaging any progress that the charette might make.
According to Ann, the first breakthrough with CP happened when a gospel choir came in to sing for the charette. CP, who had never attended a black church, was unfamiliar with the lively music, but he liked it. He started clapping to the wrong beat. Ann looked over, grabbed his hands, and in her words “learned him how to clap.”
As Ann and CP worked together, they began to see that they had much in common. They both had endured terrible poverty, withering hardship, and limited opportunity. They both loved their children and wanted them to have possibilities for the future that they had been denied. They wanted their kids to attend schools free of violence. CP later said, “Here we are, two people from the far end of the fence, having identical problems, except her being black and me being white…The amazing thing about it, her and I, up to that point, we hated each other. Up to that point, we didn’t know each other. We didn’t know we had things in common.” Ann and CP realized that if they didn’t overcome their animosity, they would ruin the possibility of helping any children. They cried together and set aside their differences.
At the conclusion of the charette, CP and Ann presented the School Board with a list of recommendations, including giving students a larger say on education issues by expanding the board to include two students, one Black, one White. They also proposed major changes in the school curriculum, like more instruction on dealing with racial violence, creation of a group to discuss and resolve problems before they escalated, and expansion in choices of textbooks to include African-American authors.
After their work together, CP stepped down from his position as Exalted Grand Cyclops and left the KKK. He and Ann worked to desegregate the Durham school system and continued to speak jointly at civil rights seminars and meetings for three decades. CP went back to school, earned his High School diploma, and became a successful union organizer in an AFL-CIO chapter with a majority of black members. CP said of the experience, “When you walk into a plant with those Black women and butt heads with professional union busters, college men. And we hold our own against them. Now I feel like somebody for real.”
At CP’s funeral in 2005, Ann sat with family. She had come to see CP as her friend and brother. She was invited to share the eulogy. In her deep, powerful voice, Ann Atwater said of her thirty-year friendship with CP, “God had a plan for both of us, for us to get together.”
May we go forth to love our enemies.
Ann and CP’s story has been told in the 1996 book and 2016 film, both entitled “Best of Enemies,”
as well as the PBS documentary “An Unlikely Friendship.”
Resources:
Virginia Bridges. “Durham civil rights activist Ann Atwater dies at 80” in The News & Observer, April 4, 2019.
Myrna Oliver. “C.P. Ellis, 78; Once a Ku Klux Klan Leader, He Became a Civil Rights Activist” in The Los Angeles Times, Nov. 9, 2005.
Facing History & Ourselves, “Breaking Isolation”, last updated August 2, 2016. Accessed online at https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/breaking-isolation
Sarah Henrich. “Commentary on Luke 6:27-38” in Preaching this Week, Feb. 20, 2022. Accessed online at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/seventh-sunday-after-epiphany-3/commentary-on-luke-627-38-2
Mary Hinkle Shore. “Commentary on Luke 6:27-38” in Preaching this Week, Feb. 23, 2025. Accessed online at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/seventh-sunday-after-epiphany-3/commentary-on-luke-627-38-3
William Loyd Allen. “Theological Perspective on Luke 6:27-38” in Feasting on the Word: Luke, Volume 1. Westminster John Knox Press, 2014.
Charon Ringe. “Exegetical Perspective on Luke 6:27-38” in Feasting on the Word: Luke, Volume 1. Westminster John Knox Press, 2014.
Luke 6:27-38
27 “But I say to you who are listening: Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; 28 bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. 30 Give to everyone who asks of you, and if anyone takes away what is yours, do not ask for it back again. 31 Do to others as you would have them do to you.
32 “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. 33 If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. 34 If you lend to those from whom you expect to receive payment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. 35 Instead, love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
37 “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; 38 give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap, for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”
Photo source: https://www.dncr.nc.gov/blog/2020/01/28/activist-ann-atwater
Joann White 