Romans 12:9-13, 13:8-10
September 1
Andrew Scales
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The Apostle Paul wrote Romans as a letter to Christian communities that he had never met. He’s starting a conversation with them all the way across the Mediterranean Sea, hoping that they will welcome him if he comes to Rome. Sometimes his correspondents found what he had to say compelling, beautiful, and transformative. And sometimes they pushed back, argued with him, and challenged him to re-evaluate what he taught and believed. I find it refreshing to consider Romans as Paul’s invitation to fellow Christians into a dynamic dialogue about what it means to follow Jesus in their time.
In our readings from this morning, Paul exhorts his conversation partners in Rome to practice a love that is genuine. Genuine love builds trust so that members of the community can speak what’s on their heart and know that they will be heard and respected. Paul writes that genuine love shows generosity to the people you know well, and it shows hospitality to strangers. Genuine love makes space for people to be vulnerable and share their fears in the confidence that they will be supported and helped. Genuine love is more than a feeling or an idea, but a way of talking with and treating one another by which we continue growing into the Beloved Community.
The Beloved Community. Maybe you’ve heard me or Len use that phrase when we’ve talked about the campus ministry we serve called Princeton Presbyterians. Every Sunday night during the academic year, we worship with undergrad and grad students in Niles Chapel at a service called Breaking Bread. We sing hymns together, pray for one another, hear a short sermon, and we celebrate the Lord’s Supper together. Thanks to support from the Presbytery of the Coastlands, individual donors, and the generosity of Nassau Presbyterian Church, we are able to host a fellowship meal each week after worship. We laugh at each other’s stories, eat the good food Jose Cintron and his team have made, and share about what’s been tough that week. We grow together in understanding how deep God’s love is for us through the love we share for one another.
The Beloved Community. The phrase took shape in America through the work of Black civil rights leaders from the fifties and sixties, and it is rooted in a vision of life together that goes all the way back to the New Testament. I believe Paul was talking about the Beloved Community when he wrote his letter to Christians in Rome around 57 AD. And we believe in Princeton Presbyterians there’s a cloud of witnesses from our own time who remind us what it looks like to show others genuine love. We laugh together because some of our Catholic friends at Breaking Bread have reminded us that these witnesses sound an awful lot like their tradition’s concept of “patron saints.” They’re role models in the faith who inspire us to become our best selves. Like Paul, they are our conversation partners about how to be the Beloved Community.
Let me give you a few examples. We talk a lot about Mister Rogers, who reminds us that we can talk about uncomfortable and scary things, because “If it’s mentionable, it’s manageable.” Another favorite in our community is the one and only Dolly Parton, whose songs of strength, courage, and tenderness are backed up by generosity that funds covid vaccine research and has donated more than 150 million books to children all over America.
But perhaps my favorite conversation partner at Breaking Bread is the civil rights leader John Lewis. John Lewis grew up in Alabama under segregation, and began organizing sit-ins protesting segregation at restaurants in Nashville as a college student. He was one of the original Freedom Riders, riding buses throughout the South in defiance of racist policies that treated Black people as second-class citizens.
He nearly died when a mob attacked him and his friends at the Montgomery bus station, just as he nearly died when police officers beat him as one of the leaders of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965, demanding the right to vote. He represented metropolitan Atlanta in Congress from 1986 until his death from pancreatic cancer in July 2020.
John Lewis is someone whose life and work rhyme with the vision of Christian community that Paul wrote about in his letter to the Romans two thousand years ago. He was a lifelong disciple of nonviolent resistance to injustice. And as a disciple of non-violence, he also became a teacher of those principles, someone who invites the younger generation to take up the work now that he is gone.
When George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officers in May 2020, Black Lives Matter demonstrations emerged as the largest protest movement in history. At the same time, John Lewis was dying of cancer. His final essay for The New York Times was called, “Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation,” and it was published on the day of his funeral. I’d like to read some excerpts from that essay now:
While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.
That is why I had to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, though I was admitted to the hospital the following day. I just had to see and feel it for myself that, after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on.
Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me. In those days, fear constrained us like an imaginary prison, and troubling thoughts of potential brutality committed for no understandable reason were the bars….
Like so many young people today, I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. He said it is not enough to say it will get better by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.
Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble.[1]
Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can participate in the redemptive work God asks of us by practicing genuine love. Genuine love calls us to imagine dignity for ourselves, for our neighborhoods and schools, even for our enemies. Genuine love confronts harmful behaviors and invites us to imagine a different way forward. Genuine love draws upon our creative energies to make our community a safe place in a manner that acknowledges the breadth of humanity that comes through our doors. Genuine love in our time means saying “No” to violence and “Yes” to peace in a troubled season for America. Genuine love is a path that we walk together, listening to one another, helping each other, working toward a better future together. As the Apostle Paul puts it in this morning’s reading, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:10).
Here at Nassau Presbyterian Church, we have been participating in that continuing conversation of what it looks like to practice genuine love in today’s world. As Pastor Lauren McFeaters shared during worship last Sunday, leaders of this congregation have been in conversation about how to make Nassau a safer community. Over the past year, there have been some unsettling incidents—unpredictable outbursts during worship—that have raised questions about how we respond in a manner that’s true to our deepest values and calls on us to be our best selves. Pastor Dave Davis convened a Security Task Force that has proposed new security measures that the Session, the elders of this church, have adopted.
It has not been an easy conversation. It has revealed the deepest fears some members and leaders have about the possibility of someone doing violence to this community. The decision to hire a security firm that provides an armed guard at worship services has raised fears and questions from other members and leaders.
I am grateful for the effort and care that church leaders have already invested in this important question of making this place as safe and open as possible. As someone who has loved ones who have been traumatized by gun violence, this conversation has motivated me to learn more about the relationship of armed guards to the safety of institutions like schools, churches, and hospitals.
I’ve been reading studies by the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Association of School Psychologists, and resources from the PC(USA)’s Presbyterian Mission Agency. I’ll include links to these resources in the manuscript of this sermon when it’s posted on the “Sermon Journal” page of Nassau’s website later this week. My intention in doing this research is to express my resolve that I will remain in genuine, loving, truthful conversation with you.
Because this new security plan is such a significant change in our life together, Dave and Lauren have asked the elders of this church to be open to hearing people share their questions and concerns. I am grateful for that openness to dialogue, and for their promise that this will remain an ongoing conversation among the members of Session.
I love you so dearly, and I am proud of your witness in this community and the ways you love one another. I hope that you will consider sharing your thoughts with the members of Session. As you do so, I ask each of you to consider the people who have helped you grow in your love for God and neighbor. What would they say? How will you honor them with your words and actions? In this moment, my prayer is that we will be ordinary people with extraordinary vision as we do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God.
Preacher’s Note:
As I mentioned in the sermon, I have included links to articles about gun violence, armed security, and their impact on institutions like schools and churches.
Blessings,
Andrew Scales
Resources:
JAMA Network Open, Volume: 4, Issue: 2 (2021) “Presence of Armed School Officials and Fatal and Nonfatal Gunshot Injuries During Mass School Shootings, United States, 1980-2019,” Jillian Peterson, PhD, James Densley, DPhil, and Gina Erickson, PhD
Federal Bureau of Investigation, “A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States Between 2000 and 2013,” Washington DC: Department of Justice, September 16, 2013.
NASP (National Association of School Psychologists) 2018, “School Security Measures and Their Impact on Students”
Larry Buchanan and Lauren Leatherby, “Who Stops a ‘Bad Guy With a Gun’?” New York Times, June 22, 2022.
Laura Esposito and Alex Yablon, “Do Armed Guards Prevent School Shootings?” The Trace, August 14, 2023
PC(USA) Presbyterian Mission: “Developing an Emergency Church Plan for Violence on Church Property”
Presbyterian Peace Fellowship: “Your Congregation Can Prevent Gun Violence”
John Lewis, “Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation,” The New York Times, July 30, 2020.