Romans 12:9-21
“Burning Love”
September 18, 2011 - Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

         After Johnny Cash during last Sunday’s sermon, I was tempted to inflict on you today the Elvis Presley song of our sermon title. But I couldn’t really figure out what “Just a hunk, a hunk of burning love,” might have to do with anything Paul is talking about here.

         The subject, though, is love. It’s where the text explicitly begins and where it implicitly ends, with love which Christians demonstrate both toward each other and to non-Christians. The first phrase in verse 9 says it’s to be “genuine,” or “sincere,” authentic love. Literally, it’s “un-hypocritical” love, love that is more than just an act.

         As pastors and leaders celebrated and debriefed our Project Hope ministry to schools and students Thursday morning, one told about a school where the staff had terrible conflicts last year. Coming into a building and grounds cleaned up, refreshed and painted by Project Hope volunteers lifted their spirits and encouraged them to try again. Their principal was encouraged enough to sit down in a staff meeting and say, “Listen to this,” and read, “Love is patient, love is kind, love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth…”

         Those words from I Corinthians 13 sound a lot like what Paul describes in more practical terms in Romans 12. The result of accepting what Romans has said up to now about righteousness, justification, forgiveness, Jews and Gentiles, and the grace of God poured out on the Cross in Jesus Christ is that love like God’s love starts happening in our own lives. We’re not to fake it. Real love, genuine love, is to come out of us.

         Paul immediately switches from love to hate, but, surprise, not to say “don’t hate,” but to tell us what to hate. We need to be humble as we say it and admit we are often confused, but Christians believe in a world where there are real absolutes, real opposites. There is good and there is evil. That’s part of our faith. If our love is real, we hate what is evil.

         As we prayed this morning, we need to hate the fact that we live in a world, in a country, where people are stilled sold into slavery. We need to hate the fact that we see men and women on our street corners begging. It may be they’re addicted to drugs or alcohol or because they genuinely have nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep. Either way we ought to hate it. We ought to hate every report of child abuse we hear on the news and every story of fraud stealing savings from the elderly. And on and on. Jesus calls us to love all the people involved, victims and perpetrators, but it’s right to hate evil being done.

         Yes, it’s all right to hate all that evil, but only as long as we do the rest of what Paul says here, that we “hold fast to what is good,” especially as verse 10 says, that we “love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.”

         I went out to lunch Friday with one of our members who is 91, 92 years old, I can’t remember. When we walked up to the restaurant, I started to open the door for him. Hey, I’m nearly forty years younger, more agile, and I wanted to show him respect. But he took hold of the door and said, “No, you go ahead, Steve.” I went on in and then he let me hold the next door for him. That in miniature is just what Paul is saying: mutual affection, back and forth in love. If there’s any competition, let us compete to honor each other.

         Verses 11 and 12 pick up an aspect of genuine love that is absolutely vital. Love keeps going. “Do not lag in zeal,” sums it up. We start out strong, but we get tired, even in love. It’s human. Isaiah and JoAnna have a new baby. Parental love for a new baby makes everything a joy, for awhile. There’s a glow of love at first making sleepless nights and dirty diapers O.K. But three weeks and two hundred diapers later, parents lag in zeal a bit. That’s when genuine love kicks in and keeps you getting up to nurse and wipe that little bottom one more time.

         I Corinthians 13:7 says love, “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Here Paul asks us to “be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.” Just that last goes a long way to keep us on track, keep us from lagging behind in love. Keep praying. I Thessalonians 5:17 says, “Pray without ceasing.” In Luke 18 Jesus taught us to keep coming back to God like a poor woman begging a judge for justice. Prayer is where day after day we get reminded how much God loves us and where day after day we find fresh strength to love each other.

         Right in the middle of the next verse, verse 13, Paul switches gear. He starts out, “Contribute to the needs of the saints.” He’s still thinking about how Christians love each other. Give to each other. Help each other out. You do that over and over. It’s as small as loaning each other tools and as big as giving thousands of dollars to cover medical bills. It’s taking care of each other’s kids and it’s helping each other move, like some of you will help Luke and Kayun next Sunday afternoon. Genuine love means mutual giving.

         But Paul notches it up. He wants love in a higher gear. Right after telling Christians to take care of each other, he says, “extend hospitality to strangers.” Genuine love is not just to folks we know and are comfortable with. It’s not just to friends in our small group or the person down the row from us in church. It’s loving strangers. That’s what the Greek word for hospitality literally means, “love of strangers.” That’s why we’re cooking hamburgers for our neighborhood today. It’s why we open our sanctuary to homeless folks on cold nights. It’s why you put money in our Love Offering to buy food or bus tickets or pay rent for people none of us even know.

         That’s all still fairly easy, though. Once he’s got us thinking about strangers, about people outside the Church, Paul is ready to shove love’s transmission into overdrive. Verse 14 starts us toward the really hard stuff by telling us, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.”

         Just think about the times you either want to or actually do curse someone even if just in your heart. For me it’s when I’m driving. Twice in the last week somebody who didn’t know the rules of right away at a four-way stop cut me off. How do you respond when that happens? Curse out loud? Get their attention with a certain hand gesture? Myself, I lean on the horn, letting a long blast convey all my thoughts about the other driver’s intelligence, parenting, and personal habits. But Paul says no to it all. No cursing, whether it’s with mouth or heart, hand or horn.

         Paul was writing to people who were and would be persecuted in much deeper ways than losing their turn at an intersection. He talked about not cursing neighbors who would refuse to associate with them, soldiers who would arrest them, officials who would take their jobs and their homes, rulers who would put them to death. “Bless and do not curse” those people.

         So at the very least, for you and me, genuine love means learning to bless the co-workers that spread rumors about us, the employer who fires us, the supposed friends who gossip about us, the bank official foreclosing on us, the spouse who betrayed us. Bless and do not curse. It’s a hard lesson of love, but it’s still not the hardest.

         In a little break in verses 15 and 16, Paul talks about living among non-Christians not in times of persecution, but in ordinary daily life. Verse 15 teaches us that genuine love means genuine sympathy with the feelings of people around us, whether joy or sorrow. It ranges from being happy for our neighbor about his new car or feeling sorrow with him because his wife’s got cancer. In the larger community, it could mean joining in the fun of the Eugene Celebration or a Ducks game on one hand, to coming alongside even non-Christian people who are sorrowing over pain. One of our Project Hope churches pushed the boundaries and instead of going to a school they went and helped do cleanup work for an HIV alliance clinic. That’s weeping with those who weep.

         The idea is to “live in harmony with one another” Paul says. Christian living in the world is not being in everyone’s face, constantly irritating and antagonizing those around us with condemnations of their beliefs and actions. No, verse 18 says, “If it is possible” and we all know that sometimes it’s not, but “If it is possible, live peaceably with all.”

         Paul takes that “with all” very seriously. The rest of verse 16 speaks to Christian attitudes toward non-Christians, toward people of different social standings. “Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are.”

         Christian faith may make us feel superior. Some of us came out of bad ways of living. It would be easy to look down on folks still caught up in the old habits, the old destructive patterns we used to have. Some of us grew up in Christian homes and were taught a good work ethic and good health habits. It would be easy to feel a little superior to people who just coast along or live in ways that ruin their bodies.

         So Paul tells us to get over ourselves, to come down off our mountain tops and hang out with other sorts of people. He doesn’t mean joining in their bad habits or sins, but he does mean being with them. When we house the homeless here, the most important thing we do is not the bed and the blanket, the sandwich and coffee, it’s the conversation. It’s sitting and talking with our guests as real people, as human beings whom God loves just as much He loves us.

         You may have a footnote to verse 16 in your Bible. There’s another possible translation here. Rather than associating with lowly people, Paul may be telling us to do lowly tasks. That’s genuine love as well. Whether it’s cleaning the toilets here at church or picking up poop from your neighbor’s dog, we show love like Jesus had when we quit thinking we’re too good to do the humble things that need doing in this world.

         Yet it’s not always possible to live in that harmony of love with people around us. It’s not always possible in society at large, in our own neighborhoods, or even in our own homes. What then? Paul starts weaving his answer to that with verse 17. It’s where our text ends up: with the most difficult and most genuine love of all, love like Jesus had.

         “Do not repay anyone evil for evil,” starts out verse 17, “but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.” Paul’s got in mind what it’s going to look like if Christians get mixed up in the business of what today we call “payback.” The uglier word is just “revenge.” We will never get anywhere near the true, authentic love of God as long as we are trying to pay back our hurts with more hurt.

         With this thought about not paying back evil with evil, we draw near to the heart of God. You see it even in the Old Testament. Our reading today showed us Jonah learning that God’s love was bigger and better than simple payback. Jonah wanted the evil people of Nineveh to get what they deserved. God wanted to give them mercy and love.

         It’s what Jesus taught and did. The parable we read today from Matthew 20 needs a sermon in itself, but at the least we can see that God is not in the business of paying what’s deserved, but in the business of handing out love and grace. If we believe in Jesus Christ and accept His love for ourselves, that puts us in the same business.

         In verse 19 the negative lesson is that vengeance or revenge is out of bounds. Whatever pleasure we get in watching Mel Gibson or Uma Thurman pay back the wrongs done to them is guilty pleasure. Those are not Christian feelings. The reason, Paul says, is not that wrongs should not be avenged, it’s who does it. “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” Our job is not to be avengers, but to “leave room for the wrath of God.”

         On September 15, 1963, Klu Klux Klan members planted a box of dynamite under the steps of 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four young girls were killed and twenty-two more people injured. Robert Chamblis was identified as one of the Klan members, and was arrested and charged with murder. But he was found not guilty and received a hundred dollar fine and six months in jail for possession of dynamite.

         Fourteen years later Chambliss was arrested and tried again with new evidence and at age 73 was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison in 1985. It took a long, long time before justice was finally done. Another one of the conspirators was tried and convicted in 2001.

         If the injured and grieving people of 16^th Street Baptist had taken their own revenge, they would have become like those who did the first wrong. Instead they left room for the wrath of God. There are many, many, many big and little wrongs in this world which are waiting on God’s justice, not ours.

         It doesn’t mean we don’t try to stop such evils. As Paul will say to us next week in the next chapter of Romans, God has given us governments to help deliver some justice. But as Christians, as churches, we leave vengeance to God. We let God do His work with those who do evil, just as He worked with us and dealt with our own evils.

         Geoffrey Wainwright tells a story which comes out the Armenian Church in the early twentieth century. A Turkish officer raided an Armenian home. He killed the aged parents and gave the daughters to his soldiers, keeping the eldest daughter for himself. Later she escaped and trained as a nurse. She found herself nursing in a ward of Turkish officers. One night, by the light of a lantern, she saw the face of the officer who invaded her home. He was gravely ill and she stayed by his side for days until he recovered. A doctor told the officer that but for her, he would be dead. Recognizing her, he asked her why she did it. She said, “I am a follower of him who said, ‘Love your enemies.’”

         For most of us, it’s not that dramatic. But when we receive an insult and offer kindness back, when we are hurt and give back help, when we are paid poorly and pay back hard work and sacrifice, then we are doing genuine love, burning love. Paul says it’s like heaping coals on someone’s head, not to hurt them, but to convict them, to singe their hearts and consciences and bring them along with us into God’s love for us in Christ.

         Paul already said in Romans 5 that when we were God’s enemies, God saved us through the death of His Son Jesus. Now he’s telling us what it means practically, how we will live in the same way, showing love to our enemies, burning and changing their hearts by doing them good.

         Our last verse today, verse 21, is a summary of God’s plan for the whole universe. It’s what He’s been up to since the beginning. We are part of it. “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” May you and I join our God in overcoming all the evil thrown at us with the good love of Jesus Christ our Savior.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2011 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj