Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
10 September 2017
Romans
12.9-21
Amos
5.14-15; Proverbs 10.11-12; 12.15-20; 25.21-22
Do you have a motto for life?
You know, one
of those phrases or mantras
that
you find yourself repeating, over and over,
despite
the fact that you already know it?
Winston Churchill’s was famously abbreviated to ‘KBO’,
which I’ll
leave you to look up for yourself
because I
don’t want to get into trouble on a Sunday morning. Again.
But there are lots of other options to choose from.
When I was at school, I was frequently told that,
‘You can’t
win if you don’t play the game’,
which as a Rugby-hating pupil I swiftly amended,
to the much
more pragmatic and enduring personal mantra
of ‘If you
can’t win, don’t play the game’.
And then there’s the calls to perseverance, such as,
‘If at
first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again’;
which sits nicely alongside,
‘Don’t let
the whatsits grind you down’;
which I’m modifying, in accordance with that other personal
favourite of mine,
‘Don’t get
into trouble on a Sunday morning. Again.’
And so I could go on with any number of further mottos
that
inspire us to ‘keep putting one foot in front of another’, as the saying goes.
But there’s a downside to this as well:
some of us
here will have taken deep into ourselves
far
more destructive messages,
which
surface in our psyches with monotonous regularity.
‘I’m
not good enough’; ‘I’m so useless’;
‘They
don’t like me’; ‘Nobody loves me’; ‘Everybody hates me’.
Sometimes, the voice in our head does us no favours,
dressing up
lies as truth and tormenting us from within.
Well, one of the most destructive mantras of our society,
which
permeates all of our lives one way or another,
is the assertion that we have an absolute right to revenge.
Often dressed up as talk of justice,
the deep
desire to have our wrongs righted
lies at the
heart of so much of our communal narrative.
We live for, we long for, the outworking
of what
seems like a universal and unquestionable truth:
that
‘Someone, somewhere, must be made to pay’.
From the criminal justice system,
to the
witch hunt and the lynch mob,
the mantra that, ‘someone must be made to pay’,
has become
the bedrock of so much that we hold dear.
And it is against this that I want to draw our attention
to Paul’s
words in the last verse of our reading this morning
from
his letter to the Romans.
‘Do not be
overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good’ (v.21).
Interestingly, for a passage which doesn’t actually mention
Jesus,
these few
verses from Romans 12 are one of the closest places Paul gets
to
referencing the words of Jesus as we know them from the Gospels.
The parallels with the sermon on the mount are striking,
and this
final verse could pretty much stand alone
as a
one-sentence summary of the life and teaching of Jesus.
‘Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.’
This is radical stuff,
and it was
every bit as counter-cultural in the first century
as
it is in the twenty-first.
Humans are well practiced at trying to overcome evil with
evil,
and we are
very good at convincing ourselves
that,
contrary to the popular saying, two wrongs do indeed make a right.
The ideology of, ‘You’ve hurt me, so you must pay’, is very
compelling,
and
determines everything from our interpersonal relationships
to
our international politics.
Meeting evil with good is perceived as weakness and
foolishness.
At school, we’re told that,
‘The
bullies only understand one language: their own’,
and so in self-defence we learn to speak their language
well,
but then we
carry that conviction into our adult lives,
and
so we vote for a nuclear deterrent,
and
for a strong defensive military capability,
and
for proactive strikes on rogue nations
who
rattle their sabres a bit too loudly.
Well, if we are to listen to Paul on this one,
we might
need a re-think.
‘Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good’.
Of course, Paul isn’t speaking in a vacuum here,
and neither
was Jesus, when he suggested to his disciples
that those who are merciful
peacemakers
are those blessed by God
(Mt 5.7,9).
The Jewish
wisdom tradition had a long history
of wrestling with the futility of
violence,
and of trying to work out what the
appropriate response to aggression should be;
and Paul,
highly educated Pharisee that he was,
consciously echoes that Jewish
tradition
in the way he shapes the passage
we’re looking at this morning.
The little
miscellany of verses we heard earlier from Amos and Proverbs
give us an example of the kind of
thing I’m talking about,
and so we
hear the precursors to Paul’s own motto,
in statements like: ‘Seek good and
not evil, that you may live’ (Amos 5.14);
‘Hate evil and love
good’ (Amos 5.15);
‘Hatred stirs up strife, but love
covers all offenses’ (Prov. 10.12);
‘Fools show their anger
at once, but the fools ignore an insult’ (Prov. 12.16);
‘Deceit is in the mind of those who
plan evil,
but those who counsel
peace have joy’ (Prov. 12.20).
This is an
ancient call to another way of living,
where the narratives of retributive
violence are challenged and rejected,
where the right to
revenge is forgone,
and where payment for
wrongdoing is released.
So my
challenge for us this morning is deceptively simple,
because it is incredibly demanding.
It is for
us to commit ourselves, individually and communally,
to living our lives by Paul’s series
of statements, mottos, and aphorisms;
and to
allow the Spirit of Christ
to bring those words of life to life
in our lives.
And it
starts, of course, with love.
‘Let love be genuine… love one
another with mutual affection’ (12.9-10)
Paul begins
his great call to a new way of living
by grounding himself in the one
force on earth
capable of instigating the kind of
transformation he has in mind:
Genuine love which
extends beyond the self to embrace the other.
Just as
Jesus paired love of God with love of neighbour,
so Paul pairs the genuineness of
love,
with genuine affection
and honour for the other.
It isn’t
until we internalize the truth that God loves all his children equally
that we are able to begin to loosen
our grip
on the inner conviction
that there is something unique or special
about our own place in
the heart of the divine;
but once we dispel the myth that God
loves ‘us’ more than ‘them’,
the path is opened for
the radical reorientation of behavior that is to come.
But Paul
knows that, even with genuine love in our hearts,
this will not be an easy path,
so in a
biblical precursor to Churchill’s famous injunction
to ‘Keep Buggering On’ (oops!),
Paul tells
his readers to be zealous, ardent, patient, and perseverant.
This is the
task we are called to, but as my father often says to me,
‘Simon, no-one said it was going to
be easy!’
Remaining
hopeful in the face of suffering;
being zealous in serving others,
and persevering in ardent prayer,
are not easy tasks.
And neither
is the topic Paul addresses next: financial generosity.
It takes a conscious decision
to review our giving to
the community of God’s people,
but Paul is clear that we have a
responsibility before God
to contribute to, as he
calls it, ‘the needs of the saints’.
In a church
like Bloomsbury, the need is always before us;
from the homeless and the vulnerable
that we welcome day-by-day,
to the more structural needs that
are met through this place,
if we do
not share between us the responsibility
of keeping the project going, it’ll
fail.
But of
course it’s not just about money,
because Paul pairs money with
hospitality.
If money is
the mechanism, hospitality is the method.
Whether it
is welcoming people into our own homes,
or to the meal table downstairs in
the Friendship Centre,
whether at a
Sunday lunch, a Tuesday lunch,
the Evening Centre, the Night
Shelter, or whatever…
our
commitment to hospitality is a spiritual discipline
and a sacrificial calling every bit
as demanding
as the call to ardent prayer or
financial giving.
One of our
issues that we’re facing with our Sunday lunches
is that the number of people
attending from the church community is declining:
to the
extent that on some Sundays,
those who have been given a free
ticket
make up the majority of those who
attend.
And I do
get it, I really do.
I mean, who wouldn’t want to go to a
nearby restaurant
with their close friends
for a nice meal after church on a Sunday?
Who wouldn’t rather get on with
their day,
already carved out of a
busy life with too many pressures and not enough time.
And I do get it that the food isn’t
always everyone’s cup of tea.
But I don’t
think these are the point.
If we are to offer hospitality that
welcomes the stranger
and speaks to them of
their inherent value as dearly loved children of God,
then that involves
actually extending hospitality;
which is more than just paying for
them to have a meal,
and it’s more than just
cooking them a meal.
I mean, we
wouldn’t invite someone to dinner at our house,
serve them their food, and then
leave them to it while we went elsewhere.
That’s not
hospitality.
It might be charity, but as I argued
in my series of sermons
on Toxic Charity earlier
this summer,
we’re not called to charity, we’re
called to sacrificial hospitality.
Which means
extending a loving welcome to those we find difficult.
As Paul says, ‘do not be haughty,
but associate with the lowly’ (v.16)
But Paul then
goes even further than this.
Loving the other means loving those
who we would think of as our enemies.
‘Bless those who
persecute you, bless and do not curse’ (v.14),
‘live in
harmony with one another’ (v.16),
‘do not repay anyone
evil for evil’ (v.18),
‘live
peaceably with all’ (v.19).
This is
where we start to find ourselves
at that most difficult of Paul’s
challenges in this passage:
the call to nonviolence.
Sometimes
people characterize nonviolence
as the easy, passive, or even
cowardly response to conflict.
Nothing
could be further from the truth.
Choosing to not ‘bite back’ is one
of the most difficult choices we can make.
It is so
utterly counter-intuitive
to all that we think we know about
how to live in human society.
We can only
get to the point of proactive nonviolence
once we have fully internalized all
that has gone before.
We have to
follow this passage through
to get to the end with conviction.
Only once
we have learned to love the other as we love ourselves,
and learned to persevere in
prayerful service of the other
through persecution and
opposition,
and learned to hold lightly to our
money, time, and status;
only then
are we ready to hear the command:
‘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.”’ (v.19)
And here I have my big problem, and it’s this:
the
vengeance of God doesn't look much like vengeance as I understand it
or
as I want to see it.
Leaving room for the wrath of God is intensely problematic
because God's
wrath is not like my wrath,
and he is
not angry at the same things that attract my personal fury.
I want to take my revenge,
but God
takes the liberty of forgiveness.
I want to hate those who do evil,
but God
hates the effect that evil has,
not
only on those to whom it is done,
but
also on those who do it.
The great scandal of God's wrath and vengeance
is that they
end up looking a lot like forgiveness.
But nonetheless, Paul tell his readers very clearly,
that
revenge is not theirs to take.
This short passage is a one paragraph summons
to an
entirely alternative way of being human.
I find it very interesting that this is primarily a passage
that
emphasises orthopraxy, rather than orthodoxy.
For those whose Greek is a bit sketchy,
orthopraxy is about right action,
whereas
orthodoxy is about right belief.
And the central message of this passage is not, ‘believe in
Christ’;
it is more
practical than that, it is ‘live like Christ’
So as we close, I want to come back to the observation I
made earlier
that our
passage from Romans doesn't actually mention Jesus.
I have a kind of rule of preaching,
which is
that a church sermon really ought to mention Jesus
at
least somewhere along the line,
which is
probably why I feel the need to return to this again at the end.
I think that Jesus, both his life, and his teaching,
firmly lie
behind Paul's re-invention of the Jewish wisdom tradition.
There are echoes here of the sermon on the mount,
and the
life Paul is calling his readers to
is one
firmly patterned after that of Jesus.
But he doesn't need to spell this out.
Here is a
call to living Christianly,
which
is accessible to all,
including
those who don't consider themselves to be disciples of Jesus.
It's as if the person and example of Jesus
has opened,
for Paul, a doorway to a better way of being human
which then transcends
cultic and cultural boundaries.
So here's the thing, and don’t take this the wrong way:
I don't
really care what you believe.
Rather, it's what you do that matters.
As Jesus himself said in the sermon on the mount,
a good tree
will bear good fruit,
and
a bad tree will bear bad fruit,
and a good
tree cannot bear bad fruit,
nor
can a bad tree bear good fruit,
and by your
fruit you shall be known.
Little Christianity has spent far too long
defending
what people think and believe about the guy who started it all,
to
the point where we have all too frequently lost sight
of
the message he left us,
which is
that the door is now open to a different way of living,
a
new way of being,
which is
good news for those who hear it
because
it releases us from those ultimately destructive
mantras,
mottos, compulsions, and convictions
that
drive us into patterns of violence and retribution.
The call is very clear, it is to live like Jesus,
it is to
not be overcome by evil,
but to
overcome evil with good.
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