Scripture Romans 12:9-21
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal; be ardent in spirit; serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope; be patient in affliction; persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; pursue hospitality to strangers.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be arrogant, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.” Instead, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink, for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Sermon “Genuine Love”
The letter to the Romans is the closest thing the apostle Paul writes to a full-on theological treatise. Paul is seeking to summarize the gospel for the people of the Christian community in Rome, a group made up of both Jews and Gentiles who are followers of Jesus’ Way. That’s what they called it, in those days. You weren’t a Christian. You were a follower of the Way. Paul has not, as yet, met these folks face-to-face. This letter is his introduction to this community. It is his longest, and most far-reaching, and least conflict-driven. He intends to visit, and he hopes the community will help him in a planned trip to Spain—a trip he never makes, as best we can tell. Paul has plans! And a big part of this plan is for Paul to share some spiritual blessing with the Romans. In my Bible this passage is called “Marks of the True Christian.” Or, if you like, Marks of a True Follower of the Way. This passage is the answer to anyone who asks, “How do I follow in the Way of Christ?”
Heard all at once, as you have heard it this morning, it feels like a wide-ranging, almost improvised list of all the ways we are called to love one another. But there is method here. The list addresses four different levels of relationship, four concentric circles, if you like, which New Testament Scholar Mary Hinkle Shore describes this way:
(1) kinship within one’s own Christian community, (2) hospitality to “the saints,” that is the Christian community beyond one’s own closest brother and sisters in Christ, and to strangers, (3) blessing directed to one’s enemies, and (4) peaceable interactions with everyone.[i]
We start with our own, immediate community. Imagine Paul is speaking to us, here at UPC, because he is.
“Let love be genuine,” we read in our Bibles, but that is a paraphrase. Paul’s original words read literally as “Let love be un-hypocritical.” Don’t do loving things only for the sake of appearance, do them for the right reason—to be genuinely loving. Of course, this is the kind of thing that would be easier to spot in a close-knit community than any of the wider circles. And it makes me wonder: is it ever possible to have entirely pure motives? For example: I don’t mind bragging all over town about our Food Pantry, because I’m so proud of your amazing good work there—it is a genuinely loving outreach to our community. If that pantry is the image our church has to the world outside our doors, I think that is a good thing. Paul adds: hate what is evil, and cling to what is good. That first part is tricky. We see a lot of hate in our society, hate that people feel perfectly justified in expressing, not just verbally, but physically as well. Violently. Can we hate what is evil without attacking others? Can we distance ourselves from what is evil, stand against it, without ourselves being pulled into hateful actions, or even a hateful mindset? This is a challenge for everyone. On the other hand, clinging to what is good with all of our strength may be the very thing that enables us to hate evil without becoming infected by hatred.
Love one another with mutual affection, Paul writes. Outdo one another in showing honor [12:10]. Paul is no-so-subtly encouraging a bit of competition here: Who can do the best at showing honor to their siblings in Christ? Do we go full-on Mr. Collins, that obsequious clergyman from “Pride and Prejudice,” who all but climbs up onto Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s lap to show his intense devotion to her? What does showing honor to one another look like? Probably not like bowing and scraping. Instead, maybe, showing honor boils down to treating others as we would like to be treated… the Golden Rule strikes again.
Do not lag in zeal; be ardent in spirit; serve the Lord. Paul envisions a community that is positively on fire with its desire to serve. I see that here. Even just naming what I see on Sunday mornings overwhelms me: You sing, you play, and you line up cameras for our livestream and adjust the sound. You welcome people at the door and lay the table for them and serve them the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation. You set another table for further conversation and fellowship, and you clean it all up and are ready to do it all again in seven days’ time.
At the same time, I see how you rejoice in hope; how you are patient in affliction; how you persevere in prayer. All these Paul calls upon for our relationships in this community. All these are marks of followers of Jesus’ Way. All these are the ways we show our love for God and one another.
The broader community of Christians outside our doors get just a single verse, but I believe that is because all the above is assumed. These are practices we will take into all our life’s interactions. New for the broader community of siblings in Christ? Contribute to the needs of the saints; pursue hospitality to strangers. In other words, we don’t limit our care and concern to this particular fellowship. We care for our siblings in Christ everywhere, whether we’re talking of the Ignite Church down the street, or our sister Presbyterian congregations, or the people of God who are suffering in Florida and Hawaii. We are a connectional church. We can do so much more together than we can on our own.
Side by side with the “saints” we also have an entreaty to welcome strangers. To pursue hospitality to them. This is a basic biblical value that we see from the book of Genesis through the book of Revelation. It is a cold, hard world, and the least we can do is to offer a warm welcome to any who might need it.
The third circle of connection is with our enemies. It sounds funny to talk about having enemies. I imagine most of us don’t feel that we have any. I saw a T-shirt for sale as I was scrolling through Instagram one Saturday. It read, “Super Leftist Villain.” Yes, I checked the website. Sadly, it was sold out. But it seems that we no longer live in a “Let’s work together despite our differences” world. We’re in more of a “We must annihilate them, because they are wrong” world. This is a problem only we can solve. Paul, to no one’s surprise, recommends that we love our enemies. He is almost exactly quoting Jesus, who told us love them and to pray for them, too. Paul gives our enemies the bulk of the attention here, staying with them for a full seven verses, contrasted with six verses for everyone else.
Paul envisions a kind of closeness with our enemies, not in the “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” sense, but in a way that may well lead to all of us finding our way to our shared humanity. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. He tells us to live in harmony with one another, not once, but twice, adding the second time, insofar as it depends on you. We can only do what we can do. Arrogance is never a good strategy with anyone, and it’s particularly bad with enemies. Paul tells us to step outside our usual circles, to not allow ourselves to be divided on the basis of wealth, or race, or education, or religion. I would add gender, and sexuality, and political differences. Get to know all kinds of people, Paul recommends. That is still excellent advice, for all of us. Sunday morning is still known in the United States as the most segregated hour of the week—ironically, as we try to worship the one God who made us all.
Do not repay anyone evil for evil, Paul, writes but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. This goes right to the heart of a real division in the larger church today—probably one that has been with us from the beginning. For some, “an eye for an eye” IS what is considered noble. It’s clear Paul has a different belief about that. Jesus is clear, too, even from the cross: “Father, forgive them,” he prays, “for they do not know what they are doing.” Jesus opposes evil at every turn—even in retribution for his terrible, unjust death.
What is noble in the sight of all? If we are using the words of Jesus as our guide, we find they dovetails nicely with this list of “Marks of the True Followers of the Way.” In the gospel of Matthew, some of Jesus’ co-religionists ask him,
“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
Love—genuine love, non-hypocritical love—is the fulfillment of the law. Love that sees our honoring of God as the first priority in our lives, and our honoring of one another as a close second. We love God, and we love God again by loving one another. These, like Paul’s wonderful list, are the true marks of what it is to be Christian. Doing these, in theory, in the best of all possible worlds, would be what is honorable in the sight of all.
But then, Paul throws us a curve ball. He writes,
Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.” Instead, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink, for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” [12:19-20]
What?
The first thing to notice about this is, that last part is a direct quote from Proverbs 25:21-22. Feeding the hungry and giving drink to the thirsty is also a direct quote from the parable of judgement that serves as the basis for the Matthew 25 movement. But are Proverbs and Paul really telling us to be kind to our enemies because it will drive them to distraction?
There are two theories about this. The first is literal. Paul may be referring to some kind of ritual of repentance that has been, mercifully, lost to us. But the other is metaphorical. Yes, this will absolutely make your enemies, at the very least, confused, but it may also shame them into changing their behavior. Don’t let evil overcome you. Overcome evil with good.
The fourth circle of connection is… the whole world. This one is actually tucked in among the instructions about enemies. If it is possible… live peaceably with everyone. That includes those who think you are a Super Leftist or a Super Rightist Villain. It includes the house full of college kids who have a habit of loud music until 3 AM some Saturday nights. (I’m not speaking from personal experience at all.) It includes your neighbor who starts mowing their lawn at 6:30 AM. (I am speaking from experience, but it was actually a chainsaw. I changed it to mowing to protect their identity.) It includes those new neighbors who are here after escaping war zones in Ukraine, or Syria, or Cameroon, or Colombia.
It's a big world, filled with beautiful children of God having every conceivable combination of characteristics, all of whom are unique, all of whom deserve dignity, and kindness, and love.
Let love be genuine. Let it be un-hypocritical. Let it be the entire point of our lives. Let it be.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] Mary Hinkle Shore, “Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost, Commentary on Romans 12:9-21,” August 28, 2011, Working Preacher Website, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-22/commentary-on-romans-129-21-2.