I had a conversation yesterday with someone about how to whistle. Famously you put your lips together, but not everyone finds it easy to make a noise. And how do you learn to dance? You can read about it, talk about, be shown it and guided through it, but some people ‘get it’, and many more don’t. It is true of riding a bike or even learning to walk; little ones pretend, or ‘glide’, emulating what they see others doing.
In the same way it is difficult to learn to love. Paul says love should be sincere. The word he uses, anupokritos , is used six times in the bible, of faith, of wisdom, and especially of love. It is related to hypocrisy, a pretence or acting out of something untrue, and it means to be without pretence or dissimulation, or falseness.
There all sorts of reasons to pretend to love. I have not been watching the series about the Borgias on television, but it seems obvious that if you are not a Christian but want to be promoted within the church, you need to give the appearance of loving. Robert Browning imagines a smiling Spanish monk, who says to himself about another brother:
Gr-r-r — there go, my heart’s abhorrence!
Water your damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
God’s blood, would not mine kill you!
Then again, you might consider that politeness is the opposite of love. There is a theory that America is a well ordered society because so many people carry guns; the result is that you are careful not to insult others because you might end up in a duel. If this is true, it is not that you feel affectionate towards others but that you are afraid of death. We do something similar in polite society when we obey the rules of courtesy to avoid giving offence and facing social death, or at least embarrassment. We even say there are things we should not discuss, such as politics or religion, or money; we are really offering an outer pretend image of ourselves so that the real us inside is not revealed. This is the opposite of the Christ-like, all-accepting love which we can never earn or deserve but which he chooses to lavish on us.
So our passion, our prayer is to learn to love. We catch the flavour of that from the second half of the verse: Hate what is evil, literally shrink from it. Imagine the most revolting thing, that the sight or smell of repulses you. That is how we are to respond to evil, at an instinctual level. Like Joseph fleeing from Potiphar’s wife, we run screaming from all that is evil. In the same way, we find ourselves responding in our deepest beings to God’s generous love. Do not try to love, we do not need to act lovingly, we just find ourselves acting out of love.
Who can be like this? Those who are led by the Spirit, who offer their bodies as a living sacrifice, who are thrilled to find themselves to be part of the body of Christ.
What does this love look like?
Mary Hinkle Shore comments: “Surrounded and upheld by this undeserved and steadfast love, then, the community of Jesus Christ practices love. "Let love be genuine," Paul says in Romans 12:9a, and then he spends the rest of the chapter describing sincere, non-hypocritical love in various spheres of the Christian life. The imperatives in this reading relate to four circles of relationships: (1) kinship within one's own Christian community, (2) hospitality to "the saints," that is the Christian community beyond one's own closest brother and sisters in Christ, and to strangers, (3) blessing directed to one's enemies, and (4) peaceable interactions with everyone.”
First, we live as brothers and sisters within the Christian community. We prize every opportunity to go beyond the conventions of mere politeness, to know each other as we really are, and to love each other anyway. As John Ortberg says, everybody is normal until you get to know them. The number of times that folk leave a church or group because they cannot get on with others – that’s the whole point of offering our bodies as a living sacrifice. We are devoted to one another in love. We honour one another. We serve each other with enthusiasm and joy. We care for each other when suffering and sickness come. It is the difficulty, the near impossibility of this, that drives us to our knees in prayer, leads us to meditate on the lessons God is teaching us. The main reason that folk come to trust in Christ is that they encounter communities of folk who are truly, sincerely, living out this life of love. They are Christ centred, passionate about learning from Christ as disciples, motivated to serve Christ’s body the church as ministers, determined to do all they can to build up the community, the koinonia, which is the body of Christ, and motivated by Christ’s love for all to share his love with others by engaging in evangelism. As we look around at the family that God has placed us in, we will be doing what it says on the tin if we stop merely acting in a loving manner and just live the life of the Spirit, whose fruit is love.
Of course, God’s love reaches out beyond our immediate circle. Paul spent time and energy raising money for the church in Jerusalem of which he was not a part. We respond to the needs of others outside our close fellowship, although in a very small way. 97% of our income is spent on the work of St Michael’s; the remainder is our share with mission partners across the world. Some are good causes but a bit anonymous, such as the Bible Society or Tear Fund. Others we have good relationships with such as Connect or CYFC locally, or the Macau Prison Fellowship. We would like to do more, as the proper response to love. As we grow in this area, so we will each perhaps be able to contribute more and find that our meagre offerings are multiplied across the world.
God’s love reaches out to his enemies, and so does ours. In work situations, in families, in the roads where we live, even perhaps in church, things are said and done that are deeply upsetting. We can try hard to respond lovingly, but we will fail. We can admit our inability to love, and surrender the situation to God, asking him to sort things out. We give up the right to demand justice, knowing that our God will do this in his own time and in his own way. We seek to treat our enemies with genuine loving kindness and care, even if this causes them a burning sense of embarassment.
Finally, a sincere love is Open for All. There are no limits and no conditions. Broadcasters and supermarkets try to get us into their clubs or families to promote loyalty and stop us going elsewhere. God causes the rain to fall on the righteous and unrighteous alike, and loves everyone. In embracing Jesus Christ, we are embracing not just those people who are like us or see things our way. We are finding that we love the foreigner, the person who is much poorer (or richer) than we are, or who has a disturbingly different lifestyle.
There is a complete abandonment, an extreme commitment in all this, to no longer be conformed to this world’s way of thinking but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. It is the determination to put the will of God in our lives above all else. This was what frightened Peter and led him to remonstrate with Jesus.
God give us grace to respond to his mercy, to trust in him, to allow his kingdom to come in our lives, and to respond with sincere love for him and every else.
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