Today's Sermon

 

"The Measure of Love:  The Gifts of Paul 6"

 

Romans 12:1-21

            12 I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. ²Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

            3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgement, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. ⁴For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, ⁵so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. ⁶We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ⁷ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; ⁸the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

            9 Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; ¹⁰love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour. ¹¹Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. ¹²Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. ¹³Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

            14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. ¹⁵Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. ¹⁶Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. ¹⁷Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. ¹⁸If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. ¹⁹Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ ²⁰No, ‘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.’ ²¹Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

The Measure of Love:  The Gifts of Paul 6

            How do you measure love?  It’s a simple question.  We usually conceive of love in terms of sentiment, strength of feeling. The default in this culture is romantic love or familial love.  The Christian faith holds neither in the highest esteem.  Jesus says little about either.  In Christianity, love of neighbor is the concern.  I was struck by Krister Stendahl’s accounting of love in his commentary on the book of Romans.  Stendahl was a Swedish theologian, died in 2008, a New Testament Scholar, Bishop of Stockholm and professor at Harvard Divinity.  He wrote, “Love is measured by the amount of tension it can take, not by how it feels.”[1]You can tell how strong love is by the tension it can withstand.  Notice he said “tension” not abuse.  If you are in an abusive relationship, get out.  You will not fix your abuser.

            Have we lost the ability to withstand tension, perhaps because we have lost our sense of connection?  We fight or avoid.  My son was in a soccer game last year and the game got a little chippy; sportsmanship was not at its apex.  After the game, I noticed only some of our players greeted the opposing team.  When I asked my son about it, he said the coach told them if you don’t respect the way they played, you don’t have to shake their hand. Before we jump on the coach, there was a cultural difference at work.  Moreover, I don’t think this is about good vs. bad, but two competing goods – one is being a good sport regardless, and the other not tolerating disrespect.  Clearly the teams felt little connection to each other and thus their bond couldn’t take much tension.  It was an interesting lesson to unpack together. 

            How much tension can our love take?  It’s so easy to avoid it.  We seek out like-minded spaces in person and increasingly online. There is value in that, but it can’t be our entire existence.  You can tell a healthy community, a healthy organization, family, friendship, even church, by how it manages its tensions, not by whether it successfully avoids them. Does it acknowledge it, do something productive, creative, with it?  By Stendahl’s measure, you could argue our ability to love has grown quite weak.  Every topic is a hot-button and off-limits, every little decision some statement, every rail seems the 3^rdrail. When “don’t go there” becomes everywhere, we’re nowhere.  We cut bait faster than we can tie the lines. 

            Given we’ve said Paul has some gifts for us, that he is the definitive figure of early Christianity, that he is deeply concerned with the art of being community, let’s first explore what he has to say about how to be together in the way of Christ.  You may or may not know that Paul almost never cites a single teaching of Jesus.  He either did not know any of them or he knew them all too well and knew his followers did too so felt no need to quote him.  Paul remarkably never met Jesus during Jesus’ life, yet he deeply “got” him.

            Paul gave us the image of Jesus’ followers being the body of Christ on earth.  He offers rich imagery for what this community should look like, an image that challenges his people to live by a different ethic.  I thought I’d list the three or four qualities he describes in today’s passage, but when I went through it I was able to identify 20 distinguishing factors of community in Christ and I probably could have isolated a couple more.  I hesitate to simply enumerate them—I know you can read—but it’s powerful to list just how much guidance Paul packs into a small space.  Having never preached a 3-point sermon in 17 years, I’m due one 20-pointer.  Let’s just work right through the text:

1. Be a living sacrifice to God, which is to say live for something beyond yourself. This word sacrifice is not just subjecting yourself to pain.  What did a sacrifice do in ancient culture?  It set things right between estranged parties.  Look to be a social healer, a repairer of fissures in relationships and societies, not a peacemaker in the tension-intolerant sense, a peacemaker in helping the relationships be better arranged.  That’s what justice is, rearranging relationships. 
2. Be a critical thinker, not a conspiratorial one thanks to the algorithms of YouTube. This is not about questioning facts, but questioning norms, explicit or latent. Don’t conform to the norms of dominant culture without examination.  Not every culture is equally corrupt, but every culture deserves, demands scrutiny.
3. Renew your mind. Religion, and not just ours, can breed strange anti-intellectual sentiments.  The mind is a gift, maybe the best gift we have. Use it.  Cultivate it.  Connect it with your faith.  Don’t quarantine the spiritual life to the heart—that’s a trick people with power like to play on you.  Let it transform your thinking. 
4. Work to discern the will of God. That’s the goal, not our own personal agendas.  Remember these teachings are always addressed to communities. The people discern the will of God. We believe that we find, “what is good and acceptable and perfect” by accessing what is beyond us, or deep within us as a people.  The spiritual path is not a self-help scheme, though it will certainly have personal benefits.
5. Do not be conceded, thinking more highly of yourself than you ought. Paul says this more than once in this passage alone.  Arrogance so applauded by our culture is detestable to Paul.  It defies an understanding and appreciation for the necessity of diverse community because to think too highly of yourself is to devalue how much your neighbor brings to the table.  Remember the image of the body; the parts have to exist in proportion. 
6. Think with sober judgment. There’s knowledge, a collection of information, and then there’s knowing what to do in light of that information that will benefit the good.  That’s judgment.  That’s wisdom.  Paul connects judgment to the senses, being tuned in, exhibiting a sharpness, an awareness. When you’re drunk, your senses are dulled, your perception of the world around is distorted.
7. Recognize and affirm the various spiritual gifts in others and yourself.This is the blessing of the aforementioned diverse community.  Diversity is a Chrisitan value not just a trendy cultural buzzword.  Paul really believes that we have different God-given gifts and passions, and together we form a body where each part needs the others in order for the whole to function.  Know your gifts, bring out those in others, and remember this is a group project.
8. Let your love be genuine. Fake it till you make it has some value, but ultimately, you have to drill down and do the work of converting your heart because what we’re trying to birth in the world can only be conceived in love.  We love genuinely because we recognize that at the heart of reality is genuine kinship.
9. Grab what is good. Hold fast to it.  Reject what is evil.  Hate it, not them, but it, that which destroys.  Have some fire about it.  Show some passion.  We can equivocate ourselves right into relativism and irrelevance.  Paul is calling us to make moral judgments.  Proclaim what is helpful and call out what is causing hurt.  This is what we need for the wellbeing of the community.    
10. Compete in doing good. We live in a society where we are encouraged to outdo one another in making money, outdo one another in personal achievement and accumulation.  Paul says, no outdo one another in doing good.  The camp experience I had growing up that I have spoken about at length here was formative for me in part because what it was best to be good at there was being good. What if we valued goodness in our culture as much as we do sports or business?  Paul says outdo one another in showing honor.  We’ve cultivated a culture that fetishes humiliation. 
11. Have some zeal. Again, show some spirit.  The best way to control a people is rob them of their spirit.  Don’t let anyone take your joy.  Cultivate it like it’s your job. What else will you draw upon when you need to dig deep?  Why would you work to better a world for which you have no love.  Fall in love with the world again.  Then, you’ll have no choice but to care for it, fight for it.
12. Rejoice in hope. Party in what is possible.  Do not give up.  Everything that’s impossible is impossible right up until the moment it’s not.  Hope is not a strategy, but it is an engine.  Let it drive you. 
13. Be patient in suffering when your hope seems poorly founded.Martin Luther King, Jr. used to talk about wearing people out with the ability to suffer.  Become a righteous cause endurance athlete.   
14. Be prayerful. That’s what will give you both the guidance, the grounding, and the gumption to do all of the above and the below.  Pray, especially when you have no time.
15. Contribute to the needs of the saints. This is early church fundraising.  You can expand it.  Give your resources where they will make things better.  We call that bringing about the kingdom.  I assure you, “the other side” is well-funded.
16. Extend hospitality to strangers. It cannot only be a movement about itself, but one that extends grace and provision to outsiders who need it.  If historically dominant Christianity had been as invested in extending hospitality as was imposing its religiosity we would have a different world. 
17. Bless those who persecute you, bless and not curse them, which is not just saying or thinking nice things about people who have not been nice to you.Blessing is a more powerful posture. It reclaims agency by actively willing the persecutor toward enlightenment.  Bless them; don’t curse them to continued ignorance. 
18. Join in others’ feelings. Paul knew then the goal was not to fix other peoples’ feelings or experience of the world.  Rejoice with those who rejoice.  Weep with those who weep.  It’s the cartoon of someone sitting on a log and the other simply coming to sit alongside them. 
19. In so far as it is possible, live peaceably with others.Paul’s such a pragmatist.  Do your part and leave vengeance for someone else. It will get you nowhere.  If vengeance feels good, they’ve succeeded in making you like they are.
20. Don’t fall for the lie that you can defeat evil with the tools of evil. Once you’ve opened the spigot, you can’t change what comes out of it.  We are formed by our tactics.  We become them.  Overcome evil with good. 

            I can see how Stendahl came to his conclusion that love, as outlined by Paul, is about the ability to withstand tension.  It’s about the people’s ability to hold together.  It’s about deciding that strength is reaching out to and not denigrating the other.  I can understand why a coach would teach young people to stand up for their own dignity.  The reason I want my son to shake the other team’s hands is not based on how others have behaved or treated him, but because of who he is and what he stands for. I want him to practice not just skills in scoring or saving goals, but in withstanding the tension with those to whom he recognizes he is inextricably and blessedly connected.

            Amen.  

[1]Krister Stendahl, Final Account: Paul’s Letter to the Romans(Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 1995),