What Love Looks Like – Part 2

Romans 12:9-16

I would imagine some of you have read the book, The Shack, which has been popular the last couple years. The story is about a man who suffers a great loss when his young daughter is abducted and killed. He goes to a shack where he meets the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Trinity is portrayed in this story with a black woman as God, a Palestinian man as Jesus and an Asian woman as the Holy Spirit. It has stirred up a lot of controversy for some of its theological positions, but what I enjoyed about it was the description of the love the Trinity have for each other.

There is a constant affectionate, interplay between the three in which they are continually honoring and submitting to one another. There is no sense of superiority or hierarchy; there is a blended relationship of love in which they express complete enjoyment with each other and delight in each other.

Although I felt uncomfortable with some of the theological issues in The Shack, the big insight I took away from it was that our love for each other in the Body of Christ is supposed to be like the love expressed in the Trinity. The Trinity is the model for the kind of community we are supposed to have here in the church. We are supposed to love each other the way the Father, Son and Holy Spirit love each other. (Here is one of the problems with the book. There is one God, not three gods and when you read about three people, it is difficult not to stray into the belief that there are three gods. At this point I refer you to a quote from John Wesley: “Bring me a worm that can comprehend a man, and then I will show you a man that can comprehend the Triune God.”)

Last week I shared six of the twelve ways Paul said the love we have for each other in the Body of Christ is supposed to look like.

I talked about how our love is supposed to be sincere, without hypocrisy. And then our love is to be discerning, seeking out those who love Jesus as we do. Our love is supposed to be affectionate with the emotions we have for our family. In our love, we are to honor each other as privileged children of God, future inhabitants of the Kingdom of God. We are to be enthusiastic in our faith, encouraging each other to be zealous for God. And we are to be patient, having our confidence rooted in hope that we will one day be with Jesus for eternity.

This morning we pick up on the last six ways Paul said we are to love each other in the Body of Christ.

Paul wrote in verse 13
Share with God’s people who are in need.

This is a call for our love in the church to be generous.

There is a lot of economic diversity within our church. We have people in the church for whom paying the 3.5 dirham bus fare to come to church is a significant expenditure. We have others who earn a good salary and can afford to fly off for vacations and buy new cars when they need them. We have people who struggle sometimes to find enough food to eat and others who go out for lunch after church, paying as much for a meal as others would live off of for a week.

On the one side we have people with money who struggle with how they should share the money they have with others in the church and on the other side, we have people without much money who wonder why it is the people with money do not share more of what they have.

We have a woman, a sister in Christ, who comes twice a week to clean our house and she wonders if we understand how poor she really is. She sees each week all our possessions and space and then goes home to her small apartment with relatively few possessions. She cooks for us and then takes home leftovers that will feed her family with food she cannot afford to buy herself.

Many Christian communities in the world do not have this struggle because the churches are more segregated. There are rich communities and poor communities and not much intermingling of the two. We, however, are blessed with a very diverse community, a microcosm of heaven, a slice of heaven. But this blessing comes with some tension as well.

Are those with more money in the church supposed to give money to those who have little until we all have the same amount of money?

That is not what is meant and that is not what was practiced in the early church.

In Acts 2:44 we read that:
All the believers were together and had everything in common.

When Luke wrote that they had everything in common, he used the same Greek word Paul used to write that we are supposed to share our resources with those in need.

But in Acts we know that Mark’s mother owned a house. Barnabas owned land in addition to the piece he sold and gave to the apostles. Some people had more than others. The Greek-speaking and Hebrew-speaking widows were in need and received help from those who had more to give.

So it is not a question of equalizing the money and possessions in the church. It is a matter of sharing what we have with those who are in need.

The challenge for us as a community of followers of Jesus here in Rabat is to be generous with our possessions and money. We have an alms fund that we use to help people from time to time who need help. Each Sunday you have the opportunity to put some money in the special offering envelope to help with this need.

There are two women who beg in front of our church every Sunday. They have been here for the ten years I have been here as pastor of RIC. I have discovered they are professional beggars and rent children by the day to make their begging more successful.

In my ten years I have never given money to these women and I rarely give money to beggars on the street. I don’t know who is truly in need and who is scamming or begging professionally. I watched a beggar one day when I waited a couple hours for a ride, who turned on and off like a light switch the pleading, suffering look on her face. Each time someone came down the road she switched on her pathetic look and then immediately turned it off and chatted animatedly with the woman next to her.

A primary reason I do not give to beggars is because my first responsibility is to care for the needs of those in the Body of Christ and those needs are abundant here in our church. I have a fixed amount of resources and choose to use what I have within the Body.

I encourage you to be generous when you become aware of a need in the church. I encourage you to be generous with your possessions, opening your home to others, sharing meals with others, letting God move your heart to help those who are genuinely in need.

Which leads me to the next characteristic of love on Paul’s list:
Practice hospitality.

As generosity is shown to the needy, hospitality is shown to visitors.

Origen was a second century Egyptian leader of the church. He wrote about hospitality, saying:
We are not just to receive the stranger when he comes to us, but actually to enquire after, and look carefully for, strangers, to pursue them and search them out everywhere, lest perchance somewhere they may sit in the streets or lie without a roof over their heads.

Eugene Peterson translated this verse as be inventive in hospitality which carries some of this sense that we are to go out and seek ways to be hospitable.

So should we have people staying with us often? If we have many nights with nobody staying with us, are we missing the mark? Are we failing in the love we are supposed to have?

I am very much aware of the tendency to water down the teaching of the Bible to make it more acceptable, but we do need to read the teaching of the Bible and view it through the culture into which it came.

In this case, the need for hospitality was different at the time when Paul wrote than it is today.

At the time of Paul, there were inns and hotels but these were unsafe and unsavory. In the time of Paul it was the responsibility of Christians to make sure that visitors were not subjected to such rough treatment and so the responsibility of the church was to invite them into their homes.

Today, the climate is much different. There are inexpensive hotels which are safe and clean. Hospitality today might include helping a visitor find a good place to stay for the night or nights they are here in Rabat. You don’t have to feel guilty for not inviting people into your home to stay when they are visiting Rabat.

However, for your own benefit, I still encourage you to invite people into your home, if not for a night or two, then for a meal or coffee or tea.

When we were in the US, we hosted university students who we invited over for special holidays, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and other times as well. Twenty years later we are still in email contact with some of the students we befriended.

When our church had a missions conference, we always put our names in to have missionaries stay with us. We felt it was a privilege to have such interesting people in our home and it was a great learning experience for our daughters who tell us today this is one of the special memories they have of growing up.

Over our ten years at RIC, we have formed many friendships by having people over for a meal or staying at our home for a night or two or three.

Sometimes people do not practice hospitality because they think they have to go to too much effort. We have simple meals when people visit us. The missionaries who stayed with us in our home in New Jersey enjoyed the simplicity. People who visit us in our villa in Rabat enjoy the simplicity. When people come to visit, we show them around the house, show them where to help themselves in the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets, show them the hammock in the back lawn, magazines and books to read, how to put on the music system and then tell them to relax and feel at home.

If you go to too much work to put the house in perfect order and to make a fancy meal, then you will feel stressed and the people coming to your home will not really be able to relax. Your need for perfection will work against hospitality.

Singles in our church have a more difficult life in Morocco than married couples. There is not a lot to do in Rabat in the evening, unless you go to the more unsavory nightclubs. It would be wonderful if some families would open their home every once in a while so singles and others could come and relax. Play some games, watch a movie, share some snacks. Let them come play and interact with your children. You and your children will be blessed by this.

The university students in our church are far from home. It would be wonderful if families and singles in the church would invite some of the students to come and share a meal once in a while.

I shared last week that Paul said our love for each other in the Body of Christ is supposed to be affectionate, as in family relationships. Treat others in the church as family and invite them into your home to share a meal. This is how we can practice hospitality and build our sense of community.

Paul continues in verse 14 to say
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse.

It may be that if Paul had a computer he would have cut and pasted this verse into the next section about loving our enemies, which we will get to next week. But whether or not that is the case, I think there is a point to be made that we can have enemies within the church.

G. K. Chesterton said, “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.”

What do you do when a brother or sister in Christ attacks you, makes unfair accusations against you, stirs up trouble for you, alienates you, cuts you off, betrays you?

Remember that all these characteristics of love Paul is listing flow out of Romans 12:1
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.

You tell me you cannot forgive someone who has hurt you or made accusations against you and I will tell you that in light of God’s great mercy, in light of all God has done for you, you need to go to the altar, bare your throat and await the slit of the knife. You are to sacrifice your pride, your hurt, your shame and offer yourself to God and allow his forgiving love to overcome you so that you can likewise love those in the church who have hurt you. A church in which people hold grudges and do not forgive takes on an icy atmosphere. The fellowship of the body suffers when people refuse to get along with each other. The witness of the church to the world is crippled by the lack of grace and forgiveness in the church.

Paul continues in verse 15
Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.

This is a call for our love for each other to be sympathetic.

When my first grandson was born, I was in Spain at a conference. I was taken by surprise how emotional I became about his birth and there was a need to celebrate so I invited seven or eight friends at the conference to go out with me to dinner that night. I needed to have friends with me.

When my dad died, I needed to have friends with me with whom I could talk about my dad, tell stories about my dad.

When Abigail gave birth to Ibrahim, I invited Zak and Tracy and a few other fathers to celebrate with a steak dinner, something that my father did with me when my first daughter was born.

We are not meant to celebrate or grieve alone. God designed us to live in community.

The problem is that often our community is not very close. If I read in the paper that a baby was born, it means almost nothing to me. If a neighbor has a baby, that means more to me. If someone in the church has a baby, that impacts me more. (If I have a baby, that would be a miracle.) The closer the relationship, the more the birth means.

So the closer we are to each other, the more we will be able to share in the celebrations and tragedies of each other’s lives.

I encourage you to work at this. When someone has reason for celebration, take time to rejoice with them. Maybe you can use this as an opportunity to practice hospitality. Go out to a café, share a meal, do something special and celebrate together.

Keep on celebrating; keep on grieving with others in the church.

Two weeks ago, the pastor of CIPC (Casablanca International Protestant Church) received his identity card after living here for six years with just a récépissé (receipt). As I was writing this sermon, I emailed him and congratulated him on his two week anniversary. Remembering creates a closer, more unified community.

What is true with celebrations is more true with tragedies. When someone dies, we need to come alongside and listen and hear stories of the person who died. We need to share in the grief being felt. But a month or two months later, we need to still be there.

My dad died in September 2008 and I thought about him almost every day for the first year after that. I still think of him many days. I thought about him on his birthday in July. I thought about him on the anniversary of his death. I took a picture of his corpse with my cell phone and I look at this picture every three or four months or so, stunned at how lifeless he looks. I pray for him, not knowing what happens after death.

We don’t grieve and then get over it. It stays with us. So I encourage you to remember the events in the lives of people close to you in church and then to continue to celebrate and continue to grieve with them.

Going back to last week’s sermon, when you see someone and they seem a little out of sorts, ask them how they are doing and mean it.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his book, Life Together, “The beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them.”

Ask and then take time to listen. Be sympathetic.

Verse 16
Live in harmony with one another.

The literal Greek is: Think the same thing towards one another. Be of the same mind so you will live in agreement with one another.

This made me think of Luke’s description of the early church (Acts 4:32)
All the believers were one in heart and mind.

And also of Philippians 2:2
make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose.

If you look around our church, what you see is incredible diversity: maybe 25 nationalities, 40 or so denominations, all races, large socioeconomic differences, educational differences, linguistic differences. What do we have in common?

What we have in common is far greater than all the things that make us different. Paul wrote in Ephesians 4:4–6
There is one body and one Spirit— just as you were called to one hope when you were called— 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism; 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

All of us who are Christians have one relationship in common. Every one of us has been saved by Jesus. It is the hand of Jesus that reached out and pulled us into relationship with him. All of us have the same eternal vacation destination – heaven.

If one person from the capital of every country in the world started to walk in a straight line to Rabat, what would happen? One person from Abuja, another from Yamoussoukro, and Antananarivo, Seoul, Madrid, London, Mexico City, Ottawa, Bern, Berlin, Dublin, Beijing, Acura, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Washington, DC – all setting out in a straight line to Rabat.

Every step they took would bring them closer to Rabat, but what else would happen? Every step they took would also bring them closer to each other. The closer each person got to Rabat, the less distance there would be between him or herself and all the other people heading toward Rabat. Coming to Rabat would draw them closer together.

I often say in marriage services, that the most important thing a couple can do for their marriage is to focus on drawing nearer to Jesus. As the husband and wife in a marriage each draw nearer to God, they also draw nearer to each other.

We will not develop harmony in the church by making a list of our differences and setting up programs to overcome them. Harmony will be the consequence of our growing in faith, developing greater intimacy with God, growing in our love for Jesus.

When there is conflict in the church it seems what is most obvious to me is how far both sides are from Jesus. When harmony is missing in the church, the problem is not horizontal, it is vertical.

Finally, in verse 16 Paul wrote:
Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.

When I was a young pastor in Ohio, my neighbor’s garage was the place where all his friends came to relax. He had some stuffed chairs and a potbelly stove and some tables. He and his friends did not go to church. They hunted, fished, drank and socialized.

Periodically they would have what I called a protein feed. They would pull all the squirrels, fish, rabbits and venison out of the freezer and grill them up. There was a keg of beer in the garage so they would feast and then play a card game called euchre. I was invited to these feasts and because I limited myself to two glasses of beer, I gained the reputation of being an excellent card player.

Over time, as our relationship developed, I invited my neighbor and about eight of his friends to come to a Bible study in which we looked each week at how Jesus interacted with people. It was a great study and then I received word that some of the ladies in our church were disturbed. They said that if these men ever came to our church they would be highly upset.

I was livid. I enjoyed being with these men much more than I enjoyed being with these superficial, religious ladies who knew next to nothing about being in a living relationship with Jesus.

Jesus had the same reaction when the religious leaders came to him and complained that he was hanging around unsavory people, prostitutes and tax collectors.

I mentioned last week that our love is to be discerning. We are to see who it is that is on God’s side and then love them. I mentioned that the world makes lots of judgments based on superficial qualities: beauty, wealth, power being the big three.

God wants us to look deeper than that. God wants us to push away the world’s superficial filter and look into the heart.

God wants us to push away our prejudices and allow God to lead us into friendships that come from having a mutual love for Jesus and a desire to serve him.

We have the privilege in this church of being brought into close proximity with people from very different backgrounds than our own. This can make our fellowship more difficult but it also makes it more rewarding. When we love each other as God intends us to love each other, our witness to the world around us is powerful.

This morning when we celebrate the communion meal with Jesus, I want you to do it a little differently. Normally we emphasize the individuality of communion. It is you and Jesus. But this morning I want to emphasize the community aspect of communion. We come as a family to this meal we share with Jesus.

So I want you to invite someone to come up with you when you come for communion. Say to someone, “Let’s go together,” or “I want to go with you for communion.” Don’t make this like a dance in which you sit by the side of the dance floor waiting for a partner to come and ask you to dance. You get up and go and ask someone.

As a community, I invite you to come to celebrate the meal Jesus gave us to remember his great mercy in our lives.