Today will be my last day as a member of the congregation of St Marks which has been our spiritual home for a good 20 years and so it will be interesting to leave.
I’ve kindly been given the preaching slot for the morning and have chosen a passage from the lectionary (what a good Anglican I have become!!) I shall be sharing some thoughts on Romans 12: 9-21 as well as saying goodbye, thanking people and sharing a little of what I hope to do as an ordained pioneer minister.
As I’ve been reflecting on Paul’s words I believe God hit me with something yesterday. Yesterday I helped a friend called Keith buy a laptop. Keith is retired and was not entirely sure what he wanted and I offered to help him buy one and set it up. Keith got a great bargain of a 1MB RAM laptop with a printer and insurance. We brought it home to set up and had a choice, as with many electrical things, of looking through a big manual or using the quick set up guide.
To fully understand the computer and its possibilities, its range of port, sockets, capabilities and so on, you needed to read the manual (or play around to find things which is what I would do). But their was this option of the quick set up guide to enable Keith to start using his laptop immediately. The quick set up guide tells you the basics to get you up and running.
I’ve been challenged as I’ve been reading these few words. If the Bible is a manual (an illustration that many use which like any illustration is incomplete) then it strikes me that the letter to the Romans is the quick set up guide. In this letter you have everything you need to get you started and moving on and living a good Christian life, but if you want to experience more of God, see more of God’s wonders in your life then you will need to investigate other parts of the Bible.
These few verses which talk about living are incredibly challenging. They start with a clear command to be authentic – ‘don’t just pretend that you love others. Really love them.’ That opening verse could take all day to look at. I can think of people in my church that it is difficult for me to love. I’m being honest and guess that is a shortcoming, but it is reality for me. I could gloss over it and talk about the different types of love that there are, but the Greek word here is ‘agape’ and so this is the type of love that is used to describe the love that God has for Jesus. That’s an amazing ask, but it is an ask in the quick set up guide – this is part of the basics to get you going. Agape love is not an add on extra – it is part of genuine discipleship.
Paul moves on to hospitality asking the reader not just to invite people home or practice hospitality but to ‘get into the habit of inviting guests home’. That word ‘habit’ has never jumped out at me before. I have been thinking recently of breaking a bad habit and finding out how difficult that is to do. Habits are second nature, they are automatic, we do them without thinking, they are hard to break because they ahve found their way into our subconscious attitude. When we are relaxed and think others are not watching we fall into habit mode. Paul is saying we should be so into hospitality that it is a habit we cannot break.
Paul then moves to relationships and particularly at the area of justice and getting even. can’t help; but think of my children as I read these words. My chidren’s cries of ‘unfair’ or ‘she did thinks and so I did that’. We are built with a strong sense of justice in our DNA and we are wronged, our loved ones are wronged, we want to get even, we want to balance the scales, we like to take things into our own hands.
Paul tells us to leave this to God to sort and act in a way so that we bless those that do wrong to us. Ignoring and leaving to God is one thing, but going out of our way to bless those that bring harm is another tall order. It sounds bizarre, and it rips against my human desires to get even – but again, this behaviour is in the quick set up guide, this is part of the basics of discipleship, its not an add on extra. It’s part of the central deal.
These three parts of the set up guide for Christian discipleship are pretty amazing. They are a tall order but I have paused and though ‘what if…’
What if people in church acted like that? What if people in church genuinely loved each other? What if people in church had the habit of hospitality? What if people in church did not worry about getting even and left God to deal with things while they blessed people through their actions?
The result would be a radically alternative community. A community that grabbed the attention of others. A community that people would have to have an opinion on. Would people want to join a community like that? Would you want to join a community like that?
As you think about that … I’m off to preach!
This challenged me in the uncomfortable way that Pete Rollin’s has done in the past:
The Shiny Headed Prophet 