People Are Not Problems

Rev. JT Smiedendorf

August 17, 2025

Text: Matthew 5:43-48

CENTRAL FOCUS:

That people are not, in their essence, problems and that to view them so constrains our ability to love and bring peace and justice into our collective and individual lives.

⁴³“You have heard that it was said, You must love your neighbor[a] and hate your enemy. ⁴⁴But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who harass you ⁴⁵so that you will be acting as children of God who is in heaven. God makes the sun rise on both the evil and the good and sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous. ⁴⁶If you love only those who love you, what reward do you have? Don’t even the tax collectors do the same? ⁴⁷And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing? Don’t even the Gentiles do the same? ⁴⁸Therefore, just as God is complete in showing love to everyone, so also you must be complete.

In 1982, I was a senior in high school and went on a tour of New York and Washington DC that the United Methodist Church offered annually. The trip was one part youth leadership development and one-part cultural experience. We went to the United Nations and a Broadway show. We went to the policy advocacy offices of the church in Washington D.C. and talked about the social gospel. And we went to a melodrama play at Ford’s Theatre in DC.

Have you ever been to one, to a melodrama play? It’s a lot of fun! It’s a little bit cartoonish with audience participation. When the bad guy walks on stage the audience enthusiastically boos and hisses. When the hero comes on stage, there is cheering. Almost like an old spaghetti Western, the characters are simple, clear, and distinct. It’s a kind of simple morality play; good and bad characters who are easily identifiable. And the hero always wins, good triumphs.

Such melodramas are fun and entertaining. It’s almost like playing a child’s game in a child’s world of relational simplicity. Characters are two-dimensional. The bad guy is vanquished usually by going to jail or worse and all is well. The problem in the plot is solved by getting rid of the bad character. Person and problem are the same. Get rid of the bad person and the problem is solved.

That works in a children’s story, but it doesn’t quite work in the complexity of adult life. And it doesn’t work because people are not problems.

People are not problems. The phrase “people are not problems” comes from something called narrative theory, which births narrative therapy and narrative theology. I heard it first from a UCC clergy colleague who helped out a group of folks at a former congregation I served when we were trying to find healing from a past that was experienced as trauma. My colleague brought his toolbox of narrative counseling. One of the most striking principles from that toolbox was simply “people are not problems.” Rather, people are people and problems are problems.

People are not problems in their essence. In their essence, they are people, complex imperfect humans with the image of God placed in them. We are, all of us, that: imperfect, yet containing somewhere the image of the Divine. Indeed, there are problems that need addressing, perhaps many. It is wise and necessary to do so, yet somehow unwise to equate the person with the problem.

Our Scripture reading featured today has something to say about this. It is from chapter 5 of Matthew’s Gospel. We have Jesus teaching on the mountain so we know it as the Sermon on the Mount. We are focusing on verses 43-48 in chapter 5, the “loving the enemy” passage, one of the most important to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s teaching. Dr. King wanted to preach from it every year at least once. To King, loving the enemy was the ultimate expression of God’s love and the ultimate practice of peace and justice-making at the heart of the Divine Spirit and the nonviolent resistance movement to which he gave his life. In Dr. King’s 1957 sermon on this passage given at his Dexter Avenue church in Montgomery, he said “Love is the only creative, redemptive, transforming power in the universe.”

One important way to get in this flow of creative, redemptive, transforming love energy to which King referred is to remember that people are not problems. For when we make people the problem, we project onto them, we label them, we objectify them, we make them into two-dimensional cardboard cut outs, like in a melodrama. That draws forth not the best in us or them, but the worst. We limit them and ourselves. We limit our options and simply continue in the old story of conflict and opposition, thinking if we just get rid of that person, all will be well. Moreover, we can project out onto the other some part of the problem we might be bringing to the situation.

When we drift into making people a problem we make our own two-dimensional melodrama. It’s the step right before making enemies of others and closing our hearts to them. The founder of nonviolent communication, Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, said that this move to see our solutions in the removal of other “bad” persons is the beginning of violence. That’s why the separation of people and problems is crucial for our ability to be a peace and justice-making community, to be a co-operating community, and to be a resilient and healing community.

Dr. King knew that this old story of opposition to people just keeps feeding the cycle of emotional, physical, political, and spiritual violence. We leave no room for the birth of the new pattern of relationship, no room for light to appear amidst the darkness in ourselves or others. Dr. King knew that the dream of the God of Jesus was individual AND collective liberation from violent cycles of indignity and injustice, freedom from the bondage of never-ending resentment toward and retribution against others.

That is not to say that we don’t have plenty of examples where it would seem that the person is the problem. The current president of the United States may be the most dramatic example of that in recent memory. Yet, the people in our collective or individual story can change, but problematic cycles of relating can still continue in our collective and individual realms. We know it has been so before. The Russian revolutionaries imagined that if only the Czar and his family were eliminated that they would know freedom and justice. Then came the domination of the Communist Party. The French Revolution sought liberty, equality, and solidarity. And then came The Reign of Terror. Some of us are old enough to remember the British rock band, The Who, who sang “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

The Apostle Paul said that we are up against “principalities and powers.” This could be understood as people are not problems, that problems and the invisible energies and forces that drive problems are what need addressing.

After one Christmas Eve at a former congregation, sick days and vacation time had me away from the office for some days and away from the work that church leadership was doing to deal with an unexpected projected budget shortfall and what it might mean for our congregation and its staff. Upon return, from different sources, I heard the same story many times: that the discernment process, while dealing with difficult and consequential problems, felt good. People were working together to work the problem. That means they were not seeing each other as problems, but were, together, working the problem.

I sense that we, too, can separate people from problems here at Plymouth, that we can work the problems we face together. I’ve seen it already. Let’s celebrate that. And, we need to do so. We are facing significant budget challenges in the short and long term as our smaller-than-we-used-to-be congregation tries to maintain a still-the-same-size-building and right size our staff. We are facing a federal administration captured by the idolatry of power and polarization, and unable to see its own cruelty or find a moral compass. There are challenges that need us to come together.

And…. I’ve been in other churches and even here at Plymouth long enough to know that coming together is not always the story. If you feel stuck or frustrated with someone here in our congregation, or at work, or in your family, look to see if you are making that person the problem. We know this is happening when we think if that certain person would just go away or if we could just defeat them or silence them, life would be all better.

The Sermon on the Mount is one of the most profound spiritual teachings I know of. It is advanced spiritual practice. People are not problems is not an easy practice to live into, but it is a deep love practice that moves us toward the Beloved Community.

I invite us now into an experiment in this teaching; to know that people are not problems. Imagine a person you think is a problem. Now, can you imagine setting a place for that “problem person” at God’s Communion Table or serving them the communion elements. Can you imagine wishing them wellness, wholeness, healing, joy? Can you bring them to mind and then breath fully and easily, sending them blessing, knowing that they are another imperfect child of God?

Not because you like them or like what they have done, but because this is a practice of love that keeps us on the nonviolent path to God’s Realm of Peace and Justice, because this is a Beloved Community practice that keeps opening our heart and soul to love and to new life-giving possibilities, because it’s liberating for your soul.

On our long journey following Jesus, I invite us into living out the teaching of our Master Teacher, our exemplar of what it looks like to lead a Spirit-led life. In this case, engaging a spiritual practice that moves us into experiencing the deep love of the Divine where transformation happens by knowing that people are not problems. In that place, we are all at God’s Table, imperfect as we are, yet working together on the problems that come with life and community.

May this be so. AMEN