Bishop Mariann Budde on Loving (All) Your Neighbors

It can be tough to love your neighbor. Especially in this town. And especially in these times.

But, as Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde points out to Washingtonian magazine, Jesus actually takes it one step further — we also have to love our enemies.

Bishop Mariann sat down with the magazine following her viral sermon at the interfaith Service of Prayer for the Nation in January, and it just hit newsstands:

Jesus tells us to love our neighbor, and many of our neighbors are MAGA now. How do you think about that?

In fact, if you come to an Episcopal church this Sunday, [Jesus] is not going to tell you to love your neighbor—he’s going to tell you to love your enemies. I mean, he just keeps upping the ante. So love is a practice, love is an orientation. Love is a way of treating people as worthy of their innate dignity as fellow human beings and children of God.

Now, not every person is necessarily worthy of our respect, because respect needs to be earned. Not everyone is somebody that I would like. But the people who have come into our communities and into our churches who are thrilled with the changes that are happening—they’re still human beings. They’re still worthy of kindness. If they were to seek pastoral support, they are to receive it in the same way as anyone else. If they were to come into our hospitals, the doctors wouldn’t ask who they voted for. We don’t ask those questions of each other when we’re just treating each other with the common decency of one human being to another.

Are there limits to this?

I would say that the boundaries are around behavior—acceptable manners of speech, the ways that we treat one another—not opinions and beliefs. We are all sinners in the sight of God. None of us is perfect, we all have our capacities for harm. But where the boundaries need to be drawn are in our actions. We are all guilty of that—you can be a really obnoxious liberal and say very harmful things, so it’s not a partisan thing, it’s a human thing. We all need to be reminded of some basic practices of decency and kindness.