Church at Wieuca

Guest (Male): Good to be back with you. If you didn't know, Kevin is on vacation, but I was on vacation as well last week. Sometimes when you both have vacation, you're the one that gets to come back and preach the next day. That is okay. I am happy and delighted. As one of my mentors says, I don't have to preach today, I get to preach today. I am grateful for the opportunity.

Allow me to read our scripture that we're going to focus on this morning. It's in the 12th chapter of Romans, which is Paul's letter to the church at Rome. We're going to be reading verses 9 through 21. Hear this word from God this morning.

Let love be genuine. Hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good. Love one another with mutual affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints, extend hospitality to strangers.

Bless those who persecute you. Bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.

If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God. For it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay," says the Lord. No, if your enemies are hungry, feed them. If they are thirsty, give them something to drink. For by doing this, you will heap burning coals on their heads. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. This is the word of the Lord. Please join me in prayer.

Oh God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be found pleasing in your sight this morning. Amen. Have you ever been envious of someone else? Or let me ask it in a don't break one of the Ten Commandments way instead, have you ever been in awe of someone else?

Is there someone that you've known or read about who fills you with wonder? I think if we were to take a few minutes this morning to share a name or two, we probably would have quite the list. Some of us would name the same people, maybe well-known people. Others of us would name someone known only to a handful of people in the world, perhaps a saint in your own family or circle of influence.

Perhaps you're in awe of someone like Dolly Parton, who we said goodbye to this week. Dolly was a champion for early childhood reading amongst so many other causes. She created the Imagination Library, an effort to spark a love of reading by mailing free books to children from birth to age five.

Dolly was inspired by her father's inability to read and to write. So in 1995, she started this library for children in her own home county in Tennessee. Dolly says, "When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true. I know there are children in your community with their own dreams. They dream of becoming a doctor or an adventurer or a minister. Who knows, maybe there's a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and a singer. The seeds of these dreams are often found in books, and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world."

Dolly Parton's Imagination Library mails high-quality, age-appropriate books directly to each registered child's home so that every child can feel the magic that a book can create regardless of their family's income. As of this week, the week that Dolly has died, her Imagination Library has gifted 332,411,218 books. Dolly Parton was offering hope. Dolly Parton is a person to be in awe of.

This past week, my wife and I, which my wife is actually with us this morning. It's wonderful to have her in worship as she's on break from her church today. We just returned from the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York. Some of you are saying, what is the Chautauqua Institution? It is a nonprofit education center that was founded in 1874 that draws nearly 100,000 visitors each summer for programs in the arts, education, religion, and music.

Each of its nine weeks during the summer is built around a theme, a theme devoted to exploring the best of human values. This week's theme that we were at was about the importance of gathering, and it included speakers like Priya Parker, classical pianist Laura Downes, linguist John McWhorter, Henry Louis Gates Jr., US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, saxophonist Kenny G, and the Australian Pink Floyd Show. It's the only week I've ever been to that you can hear a classical pianist, a jazz player, and psychedelic music all in the same location.

As a part of the experience, they also have a different chaplain that leads community worship, which is an essential and important part of the daily experience at Chautauqua. Our chaplain for this last week was Father Greg Boyle, a Jesuit priest from Los Angeles. My answer to the question that I posed at the start of this sermon is this: I am in awe of Father Boyle.

For those of you who do not know who he is, here is a brief history about him. From 1986 to 1992, he served as pastor of Dolores Mission Church, which was then the poorest Catholic parish in Los Angeles and the one with the highest concentration of gang activity. In the face of policing and mass incarceration as the answer to gang violence, Father Boyle and his community took what was then a very radical approach. He said, "Treat gang members as human beings."

In 1988, that approach became what is now called Homeboy Industries, which employs and trains former gang members through a range of social enterprises and serves thousands of people each year who walk through its doors seeking a better life. What started in 1988 is now the largest gang rehabilitation and reentry program in the world.

Here are a few quotes from Father Boyle about this ministry. "We imagine a world without prisons, and then we try to create that world. We work with the population that nobody desires to work with, and it's a principle of this place that we stand with them. Gang violence is about a lethal absence of hope."

What Father Boyle said and more importantly what he embodied is the core of our Christianity: hope. Not the kind of hope that's really just about blind optimism or the power of positive thinking. That kind of hope has its place in our world, but that's not the kind of hope that led Father Boyle to believe the love of Jesus is real and is actually capable of whole-life change.

Last Sunday during the morning worship at Chautauqua, Father Boyle preached on the mercy of God. He said that mercy is God's love language. It is mercy that lets us wash the world's feet and allows our own hands to stop shaking. It is God's mercy and God's love that hold hope together for us.

Paul is preaching a similar message as Father Boyle in his letter to the church at Rome. Romans is the longest letter we have from Paul, and it is full of instructions for Christ followers. The first 11 chapters, Paul is assuring his readers that God's justifying grace extends to all people, not to just one favored group. God's justice, God's love, and God's hope, all of it is for everybody.

Then we get to chapter 12 that we read this morning. This is where the letter begins to turn. Where genuine love had only been something that God or Jesus had performed, now Paul is saying it becomes something that Christ followers do. Paul is making the argument that love and goodness are the constant companions of every Christ follower. It's in these 12 verses that Paul begins to lay out norms to guide us on how we treat our neighbors as Christ followers.

But what's important in these norms, what I want you to notice, is that buried within those 12 verses is one line about hope. There in verse 12, inside of 16 commands about love, for Paul, hope and love are inseparable. Hope is what makes costly love possible, and love is how hope becomes visible to the world.

Hear a different take on some of these verses. Listen to how Eugene Peterson in his message version, how he wrote verses 9 through 13. Love from the center of who you are. Don't fake it. Run for dear life from evil, hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply. Practice playing the second fiddle. Don't burn out. Keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Master, cheerfully expectant. Don't quit in hard times, pray all the harder. Help needy Christians, be inventive in hospitality.

Paul's command here is to let love be genuine, to let love come from the center of who you are. Love is to be unpretentious. Love is not to be faked. When we assume the best of ourselves and the worst of others, then our love is pretentious. It's fake. The love that Paul is calling us to is what one biblical scholar calls a hermeneutic of generosity, meaning we love from a place that assumes the best of someone's motives even when our first instinct suspects the worst.

We can do this. We can love genuinely because we have hope for one another as God hopes for us. Continuing with our passage as found in The Message, hear these next three verses from Eugene Peterson. Bless your enemies. No cursing under your breath. Laugh with your happy friends when they're happy, share tears when they're down. Get along with each other. Don't be stuck up. Make friends with nobodies. Don't be the great somebody.

Notice that Paul is not promising to any of us that we're going to have a life free of problems once we follow Christ. In fact, with his words, he's assuming we're all going to have problems. That's not the promise. What he's promising is that hope isn't the absence of suffering. It's what makes patience in suffering possible. Hope holds our future secure. So then we are free to fully enter into somebody else's joy or somebody else's grief without being threatened by it. When we weep with someone, that doesn't undo our hope. When we rejoice with someone who has what we lack, that doesn't either.

If you've gone numb to another person's pain or joy, maybe it's because you're guarding your hope too highly. Paul tells us to put our guard down. In the final verses there from Eugene Peterson's Message, he writes this: Don't hit back. Discover beauty in everyone. If you've got it in you, get along with everybody. Don't insist on getting even. That's not for you to do. "I'll do the judging," says God. "I'll take care of it."

Our scriptures tell us that if you see your enemy hungry, go buy that person lunch. Or if he's thirsty, get him a drink. Your generosity will surprise him with goodness. Don't let evil get the best of you, get the best of evil by doing good.

It's here that Paul closes with his boldest claim: that final justice belongs to God. It does not belong to any of us. Because we trust God's justice, that frees us from seeking our own justice. So instead, what Paul tells us to do is to bless those who hurt us, to find those who are in need of food or water and provide it, to be generous in ways that surprise them and probably surprise ourselves.

Again, this is not wishful thinking. This is not an optimistic view of life or positive thinking. It's about trusting that God's hope for restoration, God's hope for reconciliation comes for all of us. It's the kind of hope that lets us stand before someone who hates us and yet still see that God's image has also been stamped upon them.

Now, is this genuine love that Paul is talking about a call to being naive or excusing evil behavior among us? Let me be clear, the answer is no. Paul is not implying that you endure abuse, that you endure other evils of the world to express your genuine love and hope. God is still a God of safe boundaries and protection of our lives.

As Paul writes in verse 18, he writes, "If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all." Do not hear God telling you to stay in a harmful and abusive relationship as some way of pleasing God or representing God's hope through victimization. God does not expect that of you. God does not expect you to be God. God asks you to follow the example of Christ and where that is possible in your life to do it.

Father Boyle, I believe, embodies this type of hope for us with his own life. In Los Angeles, he refused to see violent offenders as hopeless, as lost, as bound only for prison or death. Instead, he chose what is a radical path, to see what many call enemies as human beings, to see these people as God's beloved. But he also lives in ways that provide healthy boundaries and protection to those who only respond in harmful ways. He recognizes that God is not calling him to be the savior of the world, only to point others to the genuine love and hope that he knows in Christ Jesus.

In another of his sermons from this past week in New York, he took a line from the poet Hafiz who says, "Every since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you." He turns that poetic line into a picture of God. That it is our God who is running through the streets after every one of us because God heard our name and God loves us and God simply can't take God's eyes off of us.

But the question that he asked and that still sits with me even this morning is this: What if God's heaven is you? What if God's heaven is you? When we can see ourselves as God's heaven, then perhaps that frees us up to see one another as God's heaven too, even our enemies, that we can see them as beloved children of God.

It's in this image of hope that Father Boyle holds on to that shapes his ministry in Los Angeles and across the world. Because God cannot take God's eyes off of us, because we are God's heaven, then we can live in a hope that is not wishful thinking. We can live in God's hope that turns the world upside down and is counter to the messages that tell us that you do not matter or that you should only look out for yourself.

This is what Paul is telling those of us who claim to follow Christ: that this place that we gather, this church, is a practice field for living this way. The church is a real-life laboratory for perfecting this call to genuine love and extravagant hope. When we practice hospitality, we practice genuine love. When we care for the stranger in our midst, we practice genuine love. When we move beyond acts of charity towards acts of a real justice, we practice genuine love. When we offer a place at the table for everyone and not just the leftover crumbs we throw away anyway, we practice genuine love.

Paul's vision for the early church and Paul's vision for the church of 2026 is an alternate society compared to the world's prevailing vision. What the church is offering is not wishful thinking. The church is the truest invitation to hope that the world will ever know.

But we all know that the sad truth is hopelessness is so easy to find. You don't have to look far. So the challenge then for you and me this week is to find and to believe the hope that Paul speaks of, the hope that is buried in the hopelessness and evil that surrounds us. We really don't have to live as those who don't have hope. A world without hope is a terrifying place, but Paul tells us there's a different way to be.

So this week, practice hope, not wishful thinking. This week, practice love, genuine love with friends and with enemies. And this week, live in awe of every person that you encounter, an awe that is built on the hope and the love of Jesus Christ for you, for me, and for all of creation. Please pray with me.

God, as we stand before you today in awe of you, we thank you for the reminder that you are also in awe of us. Help us to see one another as you see us. Help us to offer hope and genuine love as it is offered to us. God, help us to follow these words of Paul that call us to an alternate society in the world. For it's in Christ's name that we pray. Amen.

Our song of commitment this morning is We Are Called to be God's People. And as we sing, I invite you to consider how you can have the hope and the love of Jesus today. I invite you to listen to God's call that may be upon your life. Perhaps God is calling you to join our community of hope here at Wieuca as a member of this church. Perhaps God is calling you to declare your hope in God publicly through the waters of baptism. Or perhaps God is calling you to reconsider the ways that you will choose hope and genuine love as a faithful follower of Christ. This is your invitation, this is your time to respond as God moves among you. So as we sing and as we stand, I will be here in the front to receive you in prayer, to receive you in hope, and to receive you in love. Let us stand now as we sing.