Take out the trash.
Empty the dishwasher.
Change the airfilters.
Get the mail.
Walk the dog.
Do you keep a chore list on the fridge, with the days of the week and the names of each family member?
Make the bed.
Do the laundry.
Clean the fridge.
Rake the leaves.
Feed the dog.
Do you have a to-do-list on your phone, perhaps with daily, weekly, and monthly deadlines?
Grade the papers.
Register to vote.
Order pizza.
Wash the dog.
Do you think Paul was a listmaker? The portion of his letter to the Romans we read today certainly sounds like it.
Let love be genuine.
Hold fast to what is good.
Serve the Lord. Rejoice. Persevere. Contribute. Bless. Weep. Feed. Overcome. I count thirty-one imperatives in that short passage. That’s quite a list; but it’s not a to-do-list of recurring chores. It doesn’t come with a box for each item we can check off and move on to the next. It’s something like a to-become-habitual-list. And everything on it is about how to extend to each other, in small and ever widening circles, the love of God who embraces us all. It’s about becoming a community entirely transformed and renewed by the love of God, a community whose life together in the world shines with the likeness of Christ.
“Let love be genuine” it begins — and everything that follows unfolds layer after layer of that initial statement and its radical implications. In Greek, that opening declaration consists of just two words, two drumbeats, the heart of hearts of our life with Christ: Love – unhypocritical! That’s it. The heart of hearts of the beloved community. No pretending or play acting. No counterfeit niceness. No honey on your lips and acid in your soul. Love without pretense. Love as tangible and true as Jesus having dinner with sinners. Love as real and vulnerable as divine mercy’s embrace of every last one of us.
That’s huge, and so Paul unfolds it for us: “Love one another with mutual affection.” The word he uses is philadelphia: love one another like family, like brothers and sisters. You come from very different parts of town, different parts of the world even, and your daily lives may rarely overlap — love one another like family. Yes, all of you. Jews and Gentiles. Rich ladies and day laborers. Free citizens and slaves. Love one another like family, because Christ has made you kin. He has made them his sibling, and so they are yours. He has made her his sister, and so she is yours. Love one another like family, and your life together will proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ better than your best rhetoric. You will become a living, breathing argument for the dynamic of reconciliation God has set in motion in Jesus Christ.[1]
I have long wondered how they read Paul’s letters in those small house churches in Rome, capital of the Empire, and in cities around the Aegean Sea, from Ephesus to Corinth. Small congregations, meeting at the end of a long work day, folks from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and religious traditions, some more familiar with Israel’s scriptures than others, all of them touched by the Spirit of Christ.
Did they read the whole letter in one sitting? How much time did they have to perhaps make a copy before they had to send the letter to the congregation meeting in another part of the city? Was making a copy even an option for a congregation of some thirty or forty people, most of whom couldn’t read or afford to pay a copyist? Did they read the letter one verse at a time, allowing time for the person giving voice to the words to further comment what the Apostle had written? How did they discuss the implications of what they had just heard?
Love between Gentiles and Jews, slaves and free, poor and wealthy must have been at least as difficult to imagine, let alone live, as love between Fox viewers and fans of MSNBC. “Love one another with mutual affection.” I imagine them saying to each other, “We need to talk about these things. Don’t you think? One line tonight. Then let’s talk about the next one next Sunday. We can’t just let these words wash over us and nod, and sing another hymn and go home. These words make demands. We need to let them sink in so they can transform our doing and thinking.”
I wonder if perhaps the first Christians in Rome learned these words by heart. One phrase each. And every time they gathered to break bread, sing and pray together, just before the closing benediction, just before they all went home, one would shout, “Love – unhypocritical!” And from the other end of the room a voice would respond, “Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord.” And yet another voice would add, “Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.”
I wonder how they wove those encouragements and demands into the fabric of their life together in order to become what Christ had made them: a community of love. How did they, how do we, remind each other to persevere in prayer without just telling each other what to do? How do we encourage each other to serve the Lord in all that we do instead of compartmentalizing and adding more and more things to do to our days? How do we know, not just in our minds, but in our bones, that unhypocritical love is a whole new state of being, and not just a demanding way of doing?
I’m convinced it has a lot to do with reading scripture slowly and persevering in prayer, because in prayer we open ourselves to the Spirit of Christ, we visualize our being bathed in grace and light, and we let ourselves be grounded anew in the deep memory and hope of God’s people.
But loving one another with mutual affection is not about turning our focus inward in some kind of warm, fuzzy huddle. It’s about our capacity to be part of God’s church in our neighborhood, our city, our world. It’s about modeling, in any circumstance, community that is fully rooted in the boundary-crossing love of God.
Perhaps you noticed how Paul unfolds the encouragements and demands of love in a circle that extends further and further outward to include not only strangers, but even enemies. The small house churches that gathered in cities across the Roman Empire and in the city of Rome itself, were often viewed with suspicion by neighbors or openly attacked, as well as closely observed by government informants.
“Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them,” Paul writes, and we’re reminded of Jesus’ own words, "Bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.”[2] “Do not repay anyone evil for evil,” writes Paul, and “never avenge yourselves.” Why not? He’s certainly not talking about staying in an abusive relationship.
Earlier in his letter, Paul wrote, “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us; … while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son.”[3] And because God embraced us in great mercy “while we were enemies,” we are to align our actions with that reconciling love by not only not repaying evil for evil, but offering food to our enemies when they are hungry. Because we have been embraced in radical welcome by the love of God in Christ, we are to leave any thought of vengeance to God who did not repay evil for evil but overcame it with good.
Barbara Brown Taylor once wrote that “the only way to conquer evil is to absorb it. Take it into yourself and disarm it. Neutralize its acids. Serve as a charcoal filter for its smog. Suck it up, put a straitjacket on it and turn it over to God, so that when you breathe out again the air is pure.”[4] I count seven imperatives in that short paragraph. She sounds quite confident that you can do all that — take it into yourself, disarm it, neutralize it — all of it between breathing in and breathing out.
Paul’s take is similar, but different. He reminds us that it’s the love of God that conquers evil by absorbing it. It is Jesus who in boundless love takes evil into God-self and disarms it. Outside of that love we can do nothing, but fully rooted in that love, we simply live it, our lives are a participation in it.
Paul doesn’t tell us to do stuff. He calls us to give ourselves to the love that has found us in Christ. He urges us to let this love unfold between us. And he reminds us that neither death, nor life, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from this love.
Thanks be to God.
[1] With thanks to Sally Brown, Connections, Year A, Vol. 3, 273.
[2] Luke 6:28; see also Matthew 5:44.
[3] Romans 5:8, 10
[4] https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1999/january11/9t1074.html