Romans 12:9–21 | Matthew 16:21–28
Last Sunday, we talked about the road before us. We walked with those two disciples on the road to Emmaus and considered their surprising discovery that, as they tried to make sense of everything that had happened, Jesus was already walking beside them. I suggested that might be a useful image for us as we begin this journey together. We do not know everything that lies ahead, and we do not need to know it all, but we can trust that Jesus is already walking this road with us.
I also asked a question that you will probably hear me ask more than once during our time together: What is God asking of us now? Not what God was asking twenty years ago, and not what God may be asking five years from now, but what God is asking of us here, in this moment. This morning, Paul gives us something of an answer when he begins this section of his letter to the Romans with these simple words: “Let love be genuine.”
My theology is not terribly complicated. In fact, I can summarize the whole thing in one word: love: love of God, love of neighbor, love of self, love of stranger; love expressed through compassion and justice, forgiveness and reconciliation, hospitality and service. I do not mean sentimental love, the kind of love we put on greeting cards or reduce to a warm feeling. I mean the kind of love that asks something of us, changes the way we see another human being, and eventually changes the way we live.
That is precisely the kind of love Paul is talking about. He tells us what love looks like when it gets up in the morning and goes about its business. Love one another with mutual affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Serve, hope, persevere, and pray. Meet others’ needs and practice hospitality. Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. Live in harmony, associate with those whom the world considers beneath you, and do not think you know everything. Paul’s love has verbs because genuine love does something.
There is something wonderfully energetic about Paul’s vision of love, and something profoundly countercultural.
But imagine a world where the great competition was over who could show the most honor to somebody else. Imagine trying to outdo one another in kindness and generosity, competing to see who could listen better, who could make the stranger feel most welcome, or who could make certain that nobody was forgotten. That would be a rather different kind of competition, but Paul thinks that is what our community ought to look like.
Biblical scholar Rochelle Stackhouse describes Paul’s words as a kind of “behavioral covenant” for the church. I like that description because a covenant is more than a list of rules. A covenant describes the relationship we choose to have with one another and the promises that shape our common life. Paul is not simply tossing out a collection of unrelated instructions about being nice. He is describing a way of living together, a pattern of relationships that ought to distinguish a community trying to follow Jesus.
That makes this section from Romans particularly appropriate for us right now. Eventually, there will be questions about the future, conversations about mission, identity, and priorities, and eventually conversations about your next settled pastor. But before we begin asking what we are going to do, we should consider who we are going to be. What kind of community will we be while we discern what comes next?
“Let love be genuine” seems like a pretty good place to begin.
Stackhouse offers another idea that I find helpful, what she calls a “hermeneutic of generosity.” Now, hermeneutic is one of those wonderful theological words we use when a simpler word might do. It simply means a way of interpreting something. So, a hermeneutic of generosity means that when we encounter another person, we resist the temptation to immediately assign the worst possible motive to whatever they have done. We leave open the possibility that there may be more to their story than we know.
That sounds wonderfully spiritual until somebody is driving too slowly in front of you on the highway. Suddenly, the hermeneutic of generosity becomes considerably more challenging. The world wants us to see the other person as the enemy and always to assume they have an ulterior motive. Paul is suggesting a different way.
Our spiritual life does not begin when we walk through the church doors and end when we walk back out. The supermarket checkout line, the highway, the family dinner table, and even Facebook can occasionally become holy ground because these are the places where we encounter other human beings. These are the places where the love we profess gets tested.
Paul eventually moves beyond the merely irritating person to the genuinely difficult one. “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” “Do not repay anyone evil for evil.” “If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” Finally, Paul tells us that if our enemies are hungry, we should feed them, and if they are thirsty, we should give them something to drink.
Immediately after “Let love be genuine,” Paul says, “Hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good.” I like the idea of hearing “hold fast” as embracing what is good. There is something active about that. Genuine love is not passive or indifferent; love and goodness belong together. Love does not require us to abandon moral discernment, pretend everything is acceptable, remain silent in the face of injustice, or call evil good.
And yet Paul refuses to allow our recognition of evil to become permission to surrender the humanity of another person. Somehow “hate what is evil” and “feed your enemy” belong to the same Christian ethic. We can have convictions without contempt. We can name injustice without dehumanizing another human being. We can oppose something someone has done without deciding that the person who did it is beyond the reach of love.
We should never reduce humanity to their actions. Oppose their actions, yes. Seek justice with all we have, yes. But we always have to remember, they are people, created in the image and likeness of God. Stripping away their humanity is something we just cannot do.
That brings me to Dolly Parton.
Like millions of people this week, I was saddened by the news of her death. All week, I kept returning to a question: why was she so beloved? Plenty of people become famous; far fewer become beloved. There was the music, of course, and the movies and the rhinestones and the big hair. But none of those things fully explain why so many people felt that they had lost someone this week.
She grew up poor in the mountains of East Tennessee, one of twelve children, and her father could neither read nor write. That experience eventually inspired the Imagination Library, which grew into an international literacy effort that has placed hundreds of millions of books into the hands of children. When wildfires devastated her home region, she showed up. When Hurricane Helene devastated parts of Appalachia, she showed up again. When COVID arrived, she donated $1 million to Vanderbilt research that contributed to the development of the Moderna vaccine. There were scholarships, medical programs, and assistance to families, but the pattern beneath it all was remarkably simple: Dolly saw a need and, when she could, she tried to fill it.
But her generosity extended beyond money. She was a woman of deep Christian faith with convictions. During the national reckoning over race in 2020, when asked about Black Lives Matter, Dolly responded in the way only Dolly could: “Of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!” She supported LGBTQ+ people and marriage equality, and she also spoke repeatedly about her belief that Christians were not supposed to appoint themselves judges of everyone else. “God is the judge, not us.”
That combination is what struck me. Dolly was not without convictions, nor did she pretend differences did not matter. But she seemed unwilling to allow those differences to determine whom she was permitted to care about. As I reflected on her life this week, I found myself writing that Dolly managed to hold convictions without requiring enemies.
There is something profoundly Pauline about that. “Hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good” means that Christians can and should have convictions. But those convictions do not give us permission for contempt, nor do they allow us to appoint ourselves to God’s judgment seat. Genuine love asks whether we can remain committed to what we believe is good while continuing to recognize the image of God in someone who believes very differently.
Paul’s final instruction makes clear that none of this is passive: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” He is not asking us to ignore evil. He is asking us to overcome it without allowing it to determine who we become. That distinction matters because the danger of evil is not only what evil can do to us; the danger is also what evil can persuade us to become. If hatred teaches us to hate, if contempt teaches us contempt, or if cruelty convinces us that cruelty becomes acceptable when our cause is righteous, then evil may have overcome us even while we believe we are fighting it.
Spirit-led living means allowing God to rearrange our instincts until the love we profess becomes the life we actually live.
And that brings us, briefly, to our Gospel reading. Peter has just made this extraordinary confession that Jesus is the Messiah, and Jesus begins explaining what being the Messiah will actually mean: suffering, rejection, and the cross. Peter does not like this plan at all, so he takes Jesus aside and begins to correct him. I love Peter. Imagine the audacity required to take Jesus aside and say, “Listen, Jesus, I think you may have misunderstood how this Messiah thing is supposed to work.”
We usually focus on the harshness of Jesus’ response: “Get behind me, Satan!” But I have been thinking about those words “get behind me” differently this week. Peter has gotten out in front of Jesus. He knows where he thinks the road should go, and now he is trying to persuade Jesus to follow him there. Jesus tells Peter to get behind him, to return to the place of a disciple. The disciple does not walk out front telling Jesus where the road ought to lead. The disciple follows.
There is a connection here that I do not want us to miss. Jesus tells Peter, “You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” At the beginning of Romans 12, just before the passage we heard this morning, Paul tells the church, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” Peter’s mind needs to be rearranged. Paul’s Christians need their minds renewed. Perhaps we do too. Spirit-led living is not about getting God to endorse the road we have already chosen; it is about being transformed enough to follow where Jesus is actually leading.
There may also be a word there for us during this interim season. Last Sunday we talked about the road before us, and when we know there is a road ahead, there can be a temptation to start running toward the destination. Of course there are questions about what comes next, and eventually there will be questions about who comes next. Those are important questions, but an interim is not simply an inconvenient space between two settled pastors that we need to get through as quickly as possible.
There is work for us to do on this part of the road. There are stories I need to hear, joys we need to celebrate, and perhaps griefs we need to acknowledge. There are questions we need to ask about who we have been, who you are now, and who God may be calling you to become. None of that is simply marking time until a settled pastor arrives. It is holy work, and we do not want to get so far out in front trying to determine where Jesus is going that we miss what he is showing us here.
This is where Romans and Matthew come together beautifully. Jesus reminds us of where the disciple belongs, behind him, following, and Paul gives us something of a covenant for how disciples travel together. We travel with genuine love, mutual affection, honor, patience, generosity, hospitality, humility, prayer, and a willingness to share one another’s joys and sorrows. We do not have to know precisely where the road ends to decide how we will treat one another while we walk it.
In the piece I wrote about Dolly this week, I eventually asked a rather strange question: How can we be more Dolly? Most of us cannot give a million dollars to medical research or start an international literacy program. Most of us do not have theme parks, recording contracts, or international platforms, and I suspect very few of us could pull off the rhinestones. But we can notice the person in front of us. We can see a need and ask whether there is something we can do. We can help a neighbor who is struggling, show up when our community hurts, welcome someone who has been told they do not belong, and hold convictions without contempt.
Perhaps, though, the question is not really, “How can we be more Dolly?” The deeper question is, How can we become more like the people Jesus is calling us to be? Dolly gave us a contemporary glimpse of what some of these ancient practices can look like when somebody tries to live them.
I ended that reflection by saying that the world seems a little darker now, but perhaps the best response to darkness is not simply to mourn the light that has gone out. Perhaps it is to carry some of that light ourselves. That seems to me to be a fitting image for Paul’s final words. To overcome evil with good is to refuse to let the darkness around us determine the people we become.
Perhaps that is what God is asking of us now. We do not need to know the entire road, and we certainly do not need to rush toward the destination. Our place is behind Jesus, following, paying attention, listening for what God may be saying along the way. And while we walk, Paul gives us the pattern for our common life: genuine love that does something, love that reaches beyond these walls, love that embraces what is good, and love strong enough not to surrender itself when loving becomes difficult.
“Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good.”
Perhaps Spirit-led living really is as simple, and as difficult, as that. Amen.
