There are times when I look
at the readings we are going to hear in church and think to myself, “Why bother to preach? The readings just
speak for themselves”. Today’s second reading – that list of bits of good
advice from St Paul to the Christians in Rome is one of them. “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil,
hold fast to what is good…” I mean, what is there to say, other than
“Amen”? Perhaps I should just sit down and have done with it.
But on second thoughts, maybe
not!
You see, it is one thing to
hear a passage like this, and even to understand it in our heads. But it is
quite another thing to live it out. Human beings love a simple slogan or motto
that encapsulates what they think is the right way to live. “Keep calm and carry on” “ Coughs and
sneezes spread diseases”, “Be the change you want to see.” Whether we post them on Instagram or
embroider them on a sampler, or inscribe them on stone, we like these bitesize
sayings, but being able to quote them isn’t the same as being able to live
them. How many of Paul’s little sayings in this passage do we agree with?
Probably all of them. How many of them do we put into practice? Ah, that’s a
different matter.
The really important question
isn’t “how should I live? We usually know the answer to that. It is, “why don’t
I live like that.
We know we should “hold fast to what is good”, so why do
we so often find we have let go of it. We know we should “Live in harmony with one another”, but we still get caught up in
petty jealousies and malicious sniping.
The Christians Paul was
writing to in Rome were, I am sure, no different to us in this, and I’m also
sure that St Paul knew that. He knew that a simple list of do’s and don’ts
wasn’t going to change them on its own.
That’s why, to understand this passage, we need to know what has led up to it.
We heard the section immediately before it last week. It said, “present your bodies as a living
sacrifice.... Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the
renewing of your minds…” . We won’t
get to be people who love genuinely, suffer patiently, bless those who
persecute us, live peaceably, just by saying the words, however good we think
they are. It is only when we put ourselves into God’s hands as “living
sacrifices” , when we let him get to work on us, changing our attitudes, our
world view, our priorities, our intentions, that our lives can be transformed
in the ways we need them to be.
Today’s Gospel reading shows
us what that might look like in practice, and why it tends to take so long!
Again, we need to know a bit
of context. In the passage before this Peter had just recognised that Jesus was
“ the anointed one, the Son of the Living
God,” and Jesus had acclaimed him. “You
are Peter – the rock – and on this Rock I will build my kingdom. “
But then Jesus started
talking about his death. He would be arrested and killed by the authorities, he
said. Peter couldn’t take it in.. Of course he didn’t want to think about his
friend suffering, and that bit about resurrection – well that was just
incredible anyway. But it was more than that. Peter assumed, like most people
of his time, and many people in ours too, that if bad things happened to you it
meant you had somehow deserved them, that you had offended God.
Surely, if he really was
God’s Messiah, that couldn’t happen.
But Jesus answer was swift
and he doesn’t pull his punches. “Get
behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your
mind not on divine things, but on human things.” “You haven’t understood how God works at
all,” Jesus was saying. “You’re so
used to living in a world where might is right, where people get respect
because they are wealthy or strong, that you can’t grasp that God might see things
differently.”
Peter had had a flash of
insight when he realised that God was at work in Jesus as he preached and
healed. He really was the Messiah. But his insight would have to go a lot
deeper if he was going to understand what that meant – that God could also be
at work in the pain, humiliation and apparent failure of the cross. His whole
world view would need to be overturned before his mind could be renewed, and it
didn’t seem like he was ready for that yet. It can take a lifetime, and lots of
ups and downs for God to do his work in us.
I read a news story this week
about a young woman from Florida, Angela King, who had grown up in a racist,
anti-semitic and homophobic environment. As a teenager she had fallen in with a
neo-Nazi gang and had become a far-right extremist, plastered with white
supremacist tattoos. Eventually she was jailed for a vicious attack on a Jewish
shop assistant, and was sent to prison. And there in the prison she found
herself confronted with the very people she had always hated and feared most –
many of her fellow prisoners were African-Americans. She couldn’t avoid them.
The article I read said this…
"People knew why I was in there and
I got dirty looks and comments. I assumed I would spend my time with my back to
the wall, fighting,"
What
[she] did not expect was the hand of friendship - especially from a black
woman.
"I was in the recreation area
smoking when a Jamaican woman said to me, 'Hey, do you know how to play
cribbage?'" King had no idea
what it was and was taught to play.
It
was the start of an unlikely friendship and King found her racist belief system
crumbling as a result. Her friendship circle widened as she was taken under the
wing of a wider group of Jamaican women, some of whom had been convicted for carrying
drugs into the US.
"I hadn't really known any people
of colour before, but here were these women who asked me difficult questions
but treated me with compassion".
…
During
her first year in the detention centre she was tipped off that a newspaper article
was coming out about her case. She told one of her new friends how worried she
was about the publicity.
"My friend had a job that meant she
got out early to help prepare breakfast. The day it came out she stole the
paper and hid it so no-one could read it. She, a black woman, did that for me,
an ignorant white woman who was inside for a hate crime."
As it happened, King also
realised while she was in prison, that she herself was gay – we often hate in
others what we really fear in ourselves.
She’s now out of prison, has
gained a degree in sociology and psychology and works with an organisation
called Life After Hate (https://www.lifeafterhate.org)
which supports people like her who have left far-right extremist groups.
Her story spoke powerfully to
me as I considered these readings we’ve heard today. I don’t know if she is of
any particular faith, or whether those Jamaican women were either, but it seems
to me that something very holy happened in the mess of that prison. Hers is a mind that has been renewed. God has
been at work. Her whole life has changed – even the hateful tattoos have
gradually been renewed or transformed into loving messages instead. And it all
started because a small group of people had the courage to bless someone who
persecuted them, to love with a love that was genuine.
Because of that, Angela King
has learned to see the good in those she had hated. She has learned that she
doesn’t need to use force to be valued or respected, that she can drop the
defences the world had told her she needed.
She has learned to love and to be loved. But it took a prison cell to
teach her that.
To go back to the question I
started with, “why do we find it so hard
to live in the way that Paul tells us? Why do we endlessly repeat his words,
and yet find they have so little impact on us?” I think the answer is that,
as much as we want to be different, we don’t want anything actually to change,
because change often hurts and disturbs us. It feels far easier and safer to
cling to the patterns of thought and behaviour we’ve grown up with, and maybe grown
old with, than it is to see that God could be at work in new ways, in people we
have overlooked or avoided. It is especially difficult to see that God could be
at work in suffering, mess and failure, in the things we just want to brush
under the carpet and forget about, but unless we learn to see God there, we’re
unlikely to find him anywhere else.
Both Peter and Paul learned
the hard way to look again, to let themselves be reshaped, transformed, as they
encountered God at work in a broken, suffering, humiliated man on a cross. Because of that they were able to see God at
work in all the other broken, suffering, humiliated people they came across,
and in the brokenness, suffering and humiliation of their own lives. That
turned their lives upside down. The wisdom Paul preached came from his own
experience. He had seen evil overcome by love. Like Angela King, he had been
blessed by his enemies, and encountered genuine love.
It is easy to say Amen to
Paul’s long list of do’s and don’ts, to turn them into slogans on a t-shirt or
memes on social media, but if the way of life they reflect is to take root in
us – and in a world where hatred and fear so often have the upper hand, it
surely needs to - something usually needs to give, to break, to die in us.
That’s the bit we find so difficult.
May God give us the courage
to find him in the mess as well as the glory, and the grace to let him
transform us by the renewing of our minds.
Amen
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