Today, I wrap up my month-long reflection on faith. Over the last few weeks, we have seen Peter called a man of weak faith, we have seen an outsider called a woman of great faith, and we have heard Paul’s suggestion that we see ourselves as a single, united body of faith.
In all of this, as Paul reminds us, we rely on God’s mercy, for God is the one that provides all that we have. God is the author of faith, the mover behind both Peter’s faith and the faith of the Canaanite woman. It is God’s Spirit that imbues us with the different gifts that we have. In each of these ways, God is providing us with exactly what is needed. No matter how weak or great we may feel a particular gift is, God has provided it and God can work with it.
As we turn to our reading from Romans today (Romans 12:9-21), you may notice that I am picking up right where we left off last week. This is because Paul continues his argument about our unity with another metaphor he uses often. “Love each other like the members of your family” (Romans 12:10, CEB). Paul’s concern here is not only our unity, but also the ways in which we live together with one another. What is it that should unite us? What does the Christian life look like? For Paul, it looks like a family, or at the very least what he thinks a family should look like.
Now, I’m sure most of us have had experiences of disagreements in our families. Not everyone has had a happy home life. Some people have needed to escape their families. Families can be a source of great pain. In a novel I have been reading the last couple of weeks, a disagreement has arisen between the main character and his grandfather. The main character keeps returning to the idea that family fights always hurt worse than any other kind.
And the reason why is because we all have this same idea in our hearts that Paul does -- family is supposed to be a source of mutual love and respect. At the heart of this verse is a Greek word that draws on both the idea of the love between friends and the idea of the protective love that parents have for their children and that spouses have toward one another. This is what Paul tells us the Christian life should look like.
Looking beyond the Bible, we find this theme present at times in our popular culture. In Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker relies on this model of family when he turns himself over to Darth Vader. He tells Vader that he knows of their family connection and that he believes that Vader will not turn him over to the Emperor because of it. We see the look of defeat on Luke’s face when Vader says he must obey the Emperor. We see the pain when Vader threatens Luke’s sister. But, in the end, we see that Vader does in fact turn against the Emperor in order to protect his son.
We know this is not always the case in real life. We know that families can be sources of both joy and pain, of strength and weakness. We know that Paul is not unaware of this dynamic. After all, as we have discussed before, his letters are full of admonitions against the types of problems the early Christian communities were having, problems that might sound to our ears like family disagreements. These communities were having disagreements about the status and standing of members, about the sharing of resources, about who is included at family gatherings. But this is not how it has to be.
When we join together as a worshiping community, we are united by God into the body of Christ. We are given various gifts and types of faith as the community needs. And we are expected to love one another as brothers and sisters. We become family.
Sometimes that means we disagree, and we know the pain that comes with that. But Paul also points us to what that should look like; what does it mean to love one another as family?
“Love...without pretending. Hate evil, and hold on to what is good” (Romans 12:9, CEB). Paul returns over and over to love. As some of you may know, Greek philosophy recognizes several different types of love. C.S. Lewis famously wrote about The Four Loves that he identifies at the center of Christian life and teaching. Paul refers to three of them here in this passage today -- ἀγάπη (agape), love that desires good for another, φίλος (philos), the type of love shared between companions and friends, and στοργή (storge), the love shared between family members.
The interplay of these different types of love is obviously important to the concept Paul has of what it means for us to live together with one another as Christians. Paul wants us to see what it means to take the concepts of this world, but to shift them so that we are living into what God intends for us. He uses the concepts common to the culture of the time to show what it was that Jesus had been teaching. As followers of Christ, we are meant to love one another, to hold on to the goodness that exists within each of us, and to hate that which is evil in our world and in our lives.
This can be difficult as we know from our own experience and as we see in other places in Paul’s letters. We know how hard it is to simply love one another as we find ourselves without falling into the worldly habit of comparing ourselves to one another. But Paul urges us to resist this temptation. He tells us that the only competition that should exist between us is to strive to outdo one another in showing honor to one another.
Rather than trying to outdo one another in possessions or physical strength or beauty as the world of his time and our world still today might do, Paul tells us to outdo one another in loving one another. Our only competition is in striving to raise others up rather than seeking to advance our own selves. Over and over, Paul makes it clear that our purpose is to love, serve, and provide for others, just as Jesus did. We are called to bless those who are against us. We are called to contribute to the needs of God’s people. We are called to welcome strangers into our homes and our lives. We are called to associate with the marginalized and the outcast.
To be a follower of Christ is to seek the well-being of those in need. This does not mean we ignore our own needs. But it does mean the needs of others are equal to our own needs. We are no better or worse than others.
As we look around our world today, we see that there are those that are not being treated equally. Paul reminds us that these are exactly the ones we should be lifting up.
When we look around our world, we see that there are those that are hurting. Paul reminds us that these are exactly the ones we should be supporting.
Through the news and through our connections to friends and family, we know that there are places of devastation where people have immediate needs. Paul reminds us that these are exactly the ones that we should be providing for.
I think all of this is summed up well in the verse at the very center of today’s reading -- “Be happy with those who are happy, and cry with those who are crying” (Romans 12:15, CEB). I think we can all agree that this is at the heart of what we think of as family, and it is also central to what we expect from our family of faith. Think about your experience of family and your experience of church. Is this what you expect in these relationships?
The challenge here, though, is that as Jesus points out in the parable commonly known as the Good Samaritan story, there are no limits on who is our neighbor. There is no limit on who we are called to love. So in the same way there are no limits on who we are called to celebrate joys with, and there are no limits on who we are called to stand with when they are in pain.
As we go through our lives in the coming days, I invite you to look on the world with newly opened eyes. Look for those who are happy that you can share joy with. But I also want you to look for those who are crying, those who are in need, those who are in pain. Consider how it is that you can stand with them in the midst of whatever crisis they are going through. What can you do to share in the load they are carrying?
There is a song that I think highlights what this looks like. Some of you may remember the artist, James Taylor. While not originally written and performed by him, one of the songs for which he is best known is “You’ve Got a Friend.” This song speaks to the ways in which we expect friends to support one another in times of trouble and doubt, in times of fear, and in times of despair. And it sounds an awful lot like what Paul tells us it means to be a family of faith, to be a follower of Christ who offers loving gestures to those around us.
So I invite you to listen to this song now and consider what it means for us to be a family together, what it means for us to be united as a single body, what it means for us to be guided by our faith to better the world around us.