Preach as Though We Had Enemies

21 March 2026  Jeremiah 11:18-20

Saturday of the Fourth Week in Lent

“I did not know it was against me they devised schemes….” (Jeremiah 11:19)

The besetting sin of the Church in our time is that we have been seduced by the canons of conformity. Our tireless work is simply to meet the expectations of a society whose philosophy, economics, and politics don’t give a rip that we are here.

So, we need to preach as though we had enemies.

To those who think that the Church’s mission begins and ends with soup kitchens, food pantries, and homeless shelters, this is shocking news. To be fair, they have been taught, for several generations now, that our “social witness” is, and only ever has been, the service of the poor.

To be sure, service of the poor is a vital part of our mission, but so is the worship of God. So is evangelization. Our mission is not accomplished when everyone has an address and a full belly. Our mission is accomplished in heaven…..

They have been taught that, however, not by the Gospel, but by a secular world that doesn’t really care that we are here. To be sure, service of the poor is a vital part of our mission, but so is the worship of God. So is evangelization. Our mission is not accomplished when everyone has an address and a full belly. Our mission is accomplished in heaven, and from the beginning there have been forces, diabolical ones, obstructing the path to heaven. Part of the obstruction is limiting our vision to soup kitchens, food pantries and homeless shelters.

That’s why we need to preach as though we had enemies.

Stanley Hauerwas hopes that God is using these days to remind the Church that Christianity is unintelligible without enemies:

“Indeed, the whole point of Christianity is to produce the right kind of enemies. We have been beguiled by our established status to forget that to be a Christian is to be made part of an army against armies….I am suggesting that our preaching should presume that we are preaching to a Church in the midst of a war…. I need to have a sense of where the battle is, what the stakes are, and what the long-term strategy might be.” (First Things, I May 1995)

Most preaching does not help us to do that. It does not help us to identify or locate our enemy because it does not believe that Christians should even have enemies. We cannot recognize the wars that are already occurring, or the ones that ought to be occurring, because we cannot imagine that there is anything actually worth fighting for, metaphorically or otherwise. Nihilism is now the normal condition of many lives. Should we ever draw a line in the sand and say, “This far and no farther”? The vacuous expression on the faces of many believers hearing that question is answer enough.

The first thing that happened when Jesus began his public ministry was a war with the devil. After tempting Jesus three times, the devil withdrew till a “more opportune” time (cf. Luke 4:13). That time was Gethsemane on Holy Thursday. “You know what’s going to happen now, right?” the devil whispered to Jesus. “It doesn’t have to be this way. One word from you, and I will make it all go away.” Jesus said, “Not my will but Thine be done” – and He wasn’t talking to the devil. The devil thought the war was over, and that he had won. In actuality, however, it was the devil who had swallowed the grenade, and the explosion rolled the stone away.

That’s the fight we are really in. Soup kitchens, food pantries, and homeless shelters are not enough. We need evangelization to build an army, too, and the Eucharist to feed it.

That only makes sense if we know we have enemies.