Heaping Coals And Virtues
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Reading
Series I, Cycle A
A French writer and historian once wrote, "We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity -- romantic love and gunpowder." While many people might be tempted to agree that gunpowder has been an invention which has caused many problems for humanity, it is the other item which is surprising to find on a list of the worst inventions of humanity, particularly on the very short list.
Even though this isn't the time of year when people think especially about thoughts of love, this is only a few months past spring, when young people's fancies are thought to turn to thoughts of love, and past June, when many people get married. So it might seem strange to hear about romantic love as one of the two worst inventions of humanity.
But there is certainly some evidence that romantic love is not quite as wonderful as the stories might make it seem. For one thing, there is the terrible rate of divorce in this country, which might be seen as the result of romantic love meeting the real world.
One old pastor used to tell every couple he spoke with during pre-marital counseling that romantic love, the love that is supposed to see a couple through the rough spots, was likely to be quite surprised the morning after the wedding, when both people woke up with bad breath, mussed hair, and all the other unlovely details of waking up and seeing someone for the first time without any effort to prepare for the encounter. No longer a vision of loveliness (or handsomeness) ready for a date, but now another person waking up, perhaps even a little cranky until that first cup of coffee.
Romantic love faces some serious challenges from the real world and all the unlovely details of life there. It is possible that elevating romantic love to a position of being the answer for all problems, as has sometimes been suggested, has contributed to some problems growing out of control. The lesson on this day begins with love, in fact, with two kinds of love. It is likely that taking either of these uses as romantic love would be very misleading.
In fact, this is more than simply two comments on two different types of love. This lesson begins with some rules for Christian behavior. In many ways this list is a sort of "Ten Commandments for Christians."
The list begins with "Let love be genuine." In many ways this injunction is also a summary of the entire list. The word used for love here is agape, a word which is difficult to translate fully. It means love, but that simple word hardly includes everything the word meant when Paul wrote it here.
Before Christians came along, the word agape was hardly used in Greek. It was one of the words used to mean love, and it had little meaning beyond that rather vague use. Christians took the word over and began using it to describe the activity of God, most particularly to describe the loving action of sending his only Son.
Genuine love, which is held up as the first and most important Christian Commandment, is parallel to the divine love, especially because both are best understood by looking at the actions which spring from the love. Paul has written famously about divine love and the nature of the actions that spring from divine love. Those same thoughts lie behind Paul's words here. The call to let the divine love be genuine is a call to us to let our entire lives be ruled by the model of divine love.
As people who live their lives by genuine divine love, we know that this divine love is not merely a matter of things to be avoided. Rather, genuine divine love is something that reaches out to help and support and manifest God's love to the people we meet. As George Bernard Shaw once stated it: "The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity." Genuine divine love is never indifferent.
The second in this list of Christian Commandments continues this theme: "Hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good." Far from being indifferent, this is an active approach to living. More than mere lip service, Paul uses very strong words. The word translated as hate appears only here in the New Testament. It is a very strong word, which means more than merely hate, more on the order of hate strongly or abhor. Not a matter of saying the words, simply expressing a distaste for, but taking an active stance against what is evil and also uniting with what is good.
The term used here to mean hold fast also has a translation which is not used in many texts, but one which is very evocative of what Paul is saying. The word can also be translated as glue together. More than hanging on, Paul is reminding Christians of the need to glue yourself to the good, attach yourself to the good, literally become a part of what is good.
The first thing that comes from gluing yourself to the good is to "love one another with mutual affection." This time the word translated as love is one which is familiar to most people -- philadelphia. While the word is more familiar as the name of a city, it is also a Greek word that describes brotherly love or affection. Rather than the divine love that underlies the entire Christian life, this word embodies the idea of affection for a brother or a sister, and in the New Testament, primarily an affection for a fellow believer.
Many congregations have, at some point in their past, faced issues of conflict. The conflict comes from many sources, and there are usually people who ask something like, "How can this happen in the church?" The answer is clearly that it can happen because the church is full of human beings, and conflict often occurs when people gather together.
Clearly conflict in congregations is not something that has only surfaced in recent years. We might reasonably suspect that Paul's comment, coming as the first result of gluing ourselves to the good, comes from a person experienced with conflict in congregations, from a person who recognizes the danger of such situations and the best way to deal with and prevent such situations. This is not to say all conflict in congregations will be entirely avoided. In fact, some conflict might even be healthy.
North Sea fishermen often face a problem. When they have a large catch of herring, the fish can become sluggish and lethargic and lose most of their value. To resolve this problem, the fishermen put a couple of catfish in the tanks to keep the herring stirred up so they flourish. It is quite likely that congregations can similarly find a few people who challenge the easy assumptions and remind the congregation of some hard facts to be quite important to the on-going life of the congregation. But even a congregational catfish is still bound to try to fulfill this injunction to "love one another with mutual affection."
The remaining items in the list continue to clarify the way that Christians are to live, particularly together. "Outdo one another in showing honor" sounds a little foreign to most people, but it seems that Paul is using a fancy way to remind Christians of the importance of humility. A noted scholar was once approaching the dais when a loud round of applause broke out from the audience. The eminent scholar immediately stepped back to allow the person following him to step up and accept the honor being done to him by the audience. It was simply impossible for the scholar even to consider that the applause might be meant for him.
"Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit." Christianity is, or should be, a passionate adventure. When Paul wrote, being a Christian was likely to cause a series of problems for believers, possibly even ending in death, as it did for Paul himself. Only those passionate about their belief need bother to participate.
While it seems as if this passionate level of participation has diminished greatly today, the fact that Paul includes such a comment in this list indicates that passion was something people in his day could have trouble sustaining, just as some people have problems with passionate Christianity today.
"Serve the Lord." This sounds like the simplest statement on this list to understand. Ironically, it is also one which presents a different problem. When scribes copied the New Testament in ancient times, they regularly used abbreviations to make the work go faster. One system of abbreviation commonly used dropped the vowels from words, much as written Hebrew does. From this system, there are two possible words that could be found here, one meaning Lord, the other meaning time or opportune time, as a footnote in the Bible translates the alternative.
Serve the time. In other words, seize your opportunities. Looking back, it is easy to see the chances and opportunities that have been presented to us, and to rejoice over the ones that were seized and led to great results. It is also possible, if less easy, to recognize the opportunities that were lost because they were ignored. It is likely that either reading of the text can be understood as embodying a central truth about the Christian life.
"Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering." Two statements that reverse each other. Within the Christian family it is easy to rejoice at the good news of another. It is also fairly simple to join in sympathy with others who are suffering. These reactions are natural and present everyone with opportunities to share with others at times of great joy and sorrow.
While the basic instinct to share with others is present in everyone, as Christians we need to be attentive to nurturing the tendency and helping it to grow into the strong ability to be helpful to others in both times of joy and sorrow.
"Persevere in prayer." It might be a surprise to find prayer listed so far down this catalogue of Christian Commandments. It could be that this lowly placement is a result of Paul's assumption that prayer is such a central part of a Christian's life that it needed only a passing reminder to persevere in it. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen once said, "I am not going to pray for you. There are certain things a man has to do for himself. He has to blow his own nose, make his own love, and say his own prayers." Paul certainly shared this perspective when he urged his listeners to persevere in prayer. And so should we, as individual Christians who actually do persevere in prayer.
"Contribute to the needs of the saints." Perhaps it should not be much of a surprise to find a comment about our contributions in a list of Commandments for Christians. There are those who think the only purpose of the church is to collect money to ensure that the church continues to exist. But Paul is not particularly concerned with the survival of the church. He is pointing out the need to contribute to support the needs of the saints. In his time, this was largely a matter of collecting funds to support the widows and orphans in Jerusalem who were the responsibility of the Christian congregation there. Not for the congregation itself, but for the people who depended on it for survival. The same thing is true today. Contributions to support and underwrite the projects of the church that provide for people and their needs are critically important. Often, in this world, it is only the church that provides for the poorest around the globe. It is our obligation to provide the contributions required to support those ministries meeting the needs of the saints.
"Extend hospitality to strangers." This is, perhaps, the comment that many people find to be the most difficult of all those in Paul's list. Strangers are a problem. Today, they might be violent, or ill, or something else. Hospitality sounds like it involves inviting people into our midst, either into our homes or into our church building. It all sounds like something we would rather downplay, or perhaps ignore, and not be involved with.
It is unfortunate that the modern world seems to have heightened our concerns about these issues and greatly reduced our willingness to extend hospitality to the strangers we find around us every day. Perhaps such concerns are not completely new or limited to the modern world, however. It is possible to understand the remainder of this lesson as a further comment on how to go about extending this hospitality, especially in the face of the dangers that increase our natural reluctance.
Paul encourages those who hear his words to "live peaceably with all," at least as far as such behavior is possible. No evil for evil, but do what is noble. Let all those provocations go and do good to all. It sounds like a nice idea, but one that will never work in reality.
It is a plan that is not easy to carry out. But consider the youngest child in a family. Older brothers have a tendency to tease and bother the youngest, and the treatment only gets worse when the youngest reacts by screaming, shouting, crying, and running to parents to complain mightily about the treatment. It is a difficult lesson to learn, but when the youngest begins to ignore the teasing, and the reactions stop, much of the teasing also stops. It isn't as much fun when nothing happens as a result.
This works beyond the family as well. Rather than being hard with people, Paul suggests giving others more than they deserve, even feeding your enemies when they are hungry and giving them a drink when they are thirsty. When these basic needs have been met, the generosity should continue.
Paul suggests, in a wonderful burst of insight and humanity, that "by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." A desire for revenge is a part of most people, and it seems as if the best way to get revenge is to fight fire with fire. But Paul has a better way, a way that helps Christians to resist evil, to prevent being overwhelmed by evil, and finally to overcome the evil that tempts us, a way to hate evil and hold fast to what is good, as he commanded early on in his list.
Paul suggests that we should overcome evil with good. It is not always the way we are familiar with, and it is certainly not the way most of the world seems to work. It is simply the way that Christians let the divine love of God show through them to the world. It is simply the way we live our lives as Christians. Amen.
Even though this isn't the time of year when people think especially about thoughts of love, this is only a few months past spring, when young people's fancies are thought to turn to thoughts of love, and past June, when many people get married. So it might seem strange to hear about romantic love as one of the two worst inventions of humanity.
But there is certainly some evidence that romantic love is not quite as wonderful as the stories might make it seem. For one thing, there is the terrible rate of divorce in this country, which might be seen as the result of romantic love meeting the real world.
One old pastor used to tell every couple he spoke with during pre-marital counseling that romantic love, the love that is supposed to see a couple through the rough spots, was likely to be quite surprised the morning after the wedding, when both people woke up with bad breath, mussed hair, and all the other unlovely details of waking up and seeing someone for the first time without any effort to prepare for the encounter. No longer a vision of loveliness (or handsomeness) ready for a date, but now another person waking up, perhaps even a little cranky until that first cup of coffee.
Romantic love faces some serious challenges from the real world and all the unlovely details of life there. It is possible that elevating romantic love to a position of being the answer for all problems, as has sometimes been suggested, has contributed to some problems growing out of control. The lesson on this day begins with love, in fact, with two kinds of love. It is likely that taking either of these uses as romantic love would be very misleading.
In fact, this is more than simply two comments on two different types of love. This lesson begins with some rules for Christian behavior. In many ways this list is a sort of "Ten Commandments for Christians."
The list begins with "Let love be genuine." In many ways this injunction is also a summary of the entire list. The word used for love here is agape, a word which is difficult to translate fully. It means love, but that simple word hardly includes everything the word meant when Paul wrote it here.
Before Christians came along, the word agape was hardly used in Greek. It was one of the words used to mean love, and it had little meaning beyond that rather vague use. Christians took the word over and began using it to describe the activity of God, most particularly to describe the loving action of sending his only Son.
Genuine love, which is held up as the first and most important Christian Commandment, is parallel to the divine love, especially because both are best understood by looking at the actions which spring from the love. Paul has written famously about divine love and the nature of the actions that spring from divine love. Those same thoughts lie behind Paul's words here. The call to let the divine love be genuine is a call to us to let our entire lives be ruled by the model of divine love.
As people who live their lives by genuine divine love, we know that this divine love is not merely a matter of things to be avoided. Rather, genuine divine love is something that reaches out to help and support and manifest God's love to the people we meet. As George Bernard Shaw once stated it: "The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity." Genuine divine love is never indifferent.
The second in this list of Christian Commandments continues this theme: "Hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good." Far from being indifferent, this is an active approach to living. More than mere lip service, Paul uses very strong words. The word translated as hate appears only here in the New Testament. It is a very strong word, which means more than merely hate, more on the order of hate strongly or abhor. Not a matter of saying the words, simply expressing a distaste for, but taking an active stance against what is evil and also uniting with what is good.
The term used here to mean hold fast also has a translation which is not used in many texts, but one which is very evocative of what Paul is saying. The word can also be translated as glue together. More than hanging on, Paul is reminding Christians of the need to glue yourself to the good, attach yourself to the good, literally become a part of what is good.
The first thing that comes from gluing yourself to the good is to "love one another with mutual affection." This time the word translated as love is one which is familiar to most people -- philadelphia. While the word is more familiar as the name of a city, it is also a Greek word that describes brotherly love or affection. Rather than the divine love that underlies the entire Christian life, this word embodies the idea of affection for a brother or a sister, and in the New Testament, primarily an affection for a fellow believer.
Many congregations have, at some point in their past, faced issues of conflict. The conflict comes from many sources, and there are usually people who ask something like, "How can this happen in the church?" The answer is clearly that it can happen because the church is full of human beings, and conflict often occurs when people gather together.
Clearly conflict in congregations is not something that has only surfaced in recent years. We might reasonably suspect that Paul's comment, coming as the first result of gluing ourselves to the good, comes from a person experienced with conflict in congregations, from a person who recognizes the danger of such situations and the best way to deal with and prevent such situations. This is not to say all conflict in congregations will be entirely avoided. In fact, some conflict might even be healthy.
North Sea fishermen often face a problem. When they have a large catch of herring, the fish can become sluggish and lethargic and lose most of their value. To resolve this problem, the fishermen put a couple of catfish in the tanks to keep the herring stirred up so they flourish. It is quite likely that congregations can similarly find a few people who challenge the easy assumptions and remind the congregation of some hard facts to be quite important to the on-going life of the congregation. But even a congregational catfish is still bound to try to fulfill this injunction to "love one another with mutual affection."
The remaining items in the list continue to clarify the way that Christians are to live, particularly together. "Outdo one another in showing honor" sounds a little foreign to most people, but it seems that Paul is using a fancy way to remind Christians of the importance of humility. A noted scholar was once approaching the dais when a loud round of applause broke out from the audience. The eminent scholar immediately stepped back to allow the person following him to step up and accept the honor being done to him by the audience. It was simply impossible for the scholar even to consider that the applause might be meant for him.
"Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit." Christianity is, or should be, a passionate adventure. When Paul wrote, being a Christian was likely to cause a series of problems for believers, possibly even ending in death, as it did for Paul himself. Only those passionate about their belief need bother to participate.
While it seems as if this passionate level of participation has diminished greatly today, the fact that Paul includes such a comment in this list indicates that passion was something people in his day could have trouble sustaining, just as some people have problems with passionate Christianity today.
"Serve the Lord." This sounds like the simplest statement on this list to understand. Ironically, it is also one which presents a different problem. When scribes copied the New Testament in ancient times, they regularly used abbreviations to make the work go faster. One system of abbreviation commonly used dropped the vowels from words, much as written Hebrew does. From this system, there are two possible words that could be found here, one meaning Lord, the other meaning time or opportune time, as a footnote in the Bible translates the alternative.
Serve the time. In other words, seize your opportunities. Looking back, it is easy to see the chances and opportunities that have been presented to us, and to rejoice over the ones that were seized and led to great results. It is also possible, if less easy, to recognize the opportunities that were lost because they were ignored. It is likely that either reading of the text can be understood as embodying a central truth about the Christian life.
"Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering." Two statements that reverse each other. Within the Christian family it is easy to rejoice at the good news of another. It is also fairly simple to join in sympathy with others who are suffering. These reactions are natural and present everyone with opportunities to share with others at times of great joy and sorrow.
While the basic instinct to share with others is present in everyone, as Christians we need to be attentive to nurturing the tendency and helping it to grow into the strong ability to be helpful to others in both times of joy and sorrow.
"Persevere in prayer." It might be a surprise to find prayer listed so far down this catalogue of Christian Commandments. It could be that this lowly placement is a result of Paul's assumption that prayer is such a central part of a Christian's life that it needed only a passing reminder to persevere in it. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen once said, "I am not going to pray for you. There are certain things a man has to do for himself. He has to blow his own nose, make his own love, and say his own prayers." Paul certainly shared this perspective when he urged his listeners to persevere in prayer. And so should we, as individual Christians who actually do persevere in prayer.
"Contribute to the needs of the saints." Perhaps it should not be much of a surprise to find a comment about our contributions in a list of Commandments for Christians. There are those who think the only purpose of the church is to collect money to ensure that the church continues to exist. But Paul is not particularly concerned with the survival of the church. He is pointing out the need to contribute to support the needs of the saints. In his time, this was largely a matter of collecting funds to support the widows and orphans in Jerusalem who were the responsibility of the Christian congregation there. Not for the congregation itself, but for the people who depended on it for survival. The same thing is true today. Contributions to support and underwrite the projects of the church that provide for people and their needs are critically important. Often, in this world, it is only the church that provides for the poorest around the globe. It is our obligation to provide the contributions required to support those ministries meeting the needs of the saints.
"Extend hospitality to strangers." This is, perhaps, the comment that many people find to be the most difficult of all those in Paul's list. Strangers are a problem. Today, they might be violent, or ill, or something else. Hospitality sounds like it involves inviting people into our midst, either into our homes or into our church building. It all sounds like something we would rather downplay, or perhaps ignore, and not be involved with.
It is unfortunate that the modern world seems to have heightened our concerns about these issues and greatly reduced our willingness to extend hospitality to the strangers we find around us every day. Perhaps such concerns are not completely new or limited to the modern world, however. It is possible to understand the remainder of this lesson as a further comment on how to go about extending this hospitality, especially in the face of the dangers that increase our natural reluctance.
Paul encourages those who hear his words to "live peaceably with all," at least as far as such behavior is possible. No evil for evil, but do what is noble. Let all those provocations go and do good to all. It sounds like a nice idea, but one that will never work in reality.
It is a plan that is not easy to carry out. But consider the youngest child in a family. Older brothers have a tendency to tease and bother the youngest, and the treatment only gets worse when the youngest reacts by screaming, shouting, crying, and running to parents to complain mightily about the treatment. It is a difficult lesson to learn, but when the youngest begins to ignore the teasing, and the reactions stop, much of the teasing also stops. It isn't as much fun when nothing happens as a result.
This works beyond the family as well. Rather than being hard with people, Paul suggests giving others more than they deserve, even feeding your enemies when they are hungry and giving them a drink when they are thirsty. When these basic needs have been met, the generosity should continue.
Paul suggests, in a wonderful burst of insight and humanity, that "by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." A desire for revenge is a part of most people, and it seems as if the best way to get revenge is to fight fire with fire. But Paul has a better way, a way that helps Christians to resist evil, to prevent being overwhelmed by evil, and finally to overcome the evil that tempts us, a way to hate evil and hold fast to what is good, as he commanded early on in his list.
Paul suggests that we should overcome evil with good. It is not always the way we are familiar with, and it is certainly not the way most of the world seems to work. It is simply the way that Christians let the divine love of God show through them to the world. It is simply the way we live our lives as Christians. Amen.
