Turning Up the Heat

Turning Up the Heat--June 22, 2017

"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." [Romans 12:9-16]

What does the Spirit move us to do?

To love.  Loving... wider, fuller, deeper, until every relationship in our lives, every connection point with anyone else at all, is drenched in real, authentic, more-than-endorphins-in-the-brain-or-greeting-cards-on-the-rack love.

But to understand what this "love" looks like, this genuine love that the Spirit causes to overflow through us and spill out over everything else, we need a closer look at what is buried here in the fast-flowing directives of this passage from Paul's letter to the Romans.

I'm not usually one to spend a lot of time getting lost in the weeds of differing translations from the Greek of the New Testament into English... but sometimes, I just have to stop.  Because up above, the New Revised Standard Version, for all of its other strengths or weaknesses, really misses something about how this passage works in the interest of trying to make simple English sentences.  So, forgive me for a moment, but we need to dust off this translation a bit.

First off, in English, most translators make each phrase into its own command, which makes each thought appear like it is a separate sentence, unconnected from the others as though Paul is just randomly firing off imperatives.  "Do this!" "Don't do that!" "Now do this!"  But really the Greek is all something like a long run-on sentence that all flows out of the opening directive about genuine love.  It really feels more in the Greek something more like this:

"Here's what genuine, unhypocritical love does: saying no to what is evil, clinging to what is good, loving one another like you are a family, going over and above and before each other to show honor, not being lazy in your dedication, boiling over in spirit..."

Right off the bat, you can see how that changes the feel--instead of this being a hodge-podge of unrelated commands, this is a sketch, a picture, of a whole way of life that hangs together.   In other words, all of this is what love looks like.  We don't get to be selective and pick just the ones that are easier for us to do and say, "Look how loving I am--I was nice to the people I already like!" or "I'm great at feeling love... so long as I don't have to actually do anything that makes any sacrifices..."  No, instead, Paul says that if love is genuine, it will play out and spill over into all of these kinds of actions and attitudes.  It will mean sharing with others who are in need, welcome for strangers and outsiders, empathy for those who are heavy-hearted, refusal to return evil for evil, and not giving up or bailing out on people just because it gets hard. That's what genuine love is all about--all of those, because love drenches every part of us, every relationship, every facet of who we are.  We have a way of being much more selective with our love--we limit who we deem worthy, or we are unwilling to be inconvenienced, or we refuse to take the risk of sharing someone else's sorrow or need.  That's easier to justify if we read Romans 12 as just a shotgun approach to lobbing out random instructions, but if these are all part of one reality called "genuine love," we can't be so hit-and-miss.  Paul has in mind a love that pushes us wider, fuller, and deeper to overflow from the bounds of our lives as the Spirit keeps leading us.

Now, that brings up one other thing in this passage that needs to be dusted off and held up to the light.  The rather tame translation from the New Revised Standard Version just say, "be ardent in spirit," but the Greek is much more energetic.  The verb is more literally, "boiling over" or "seething," and it's unclear whether Paul simply means "the spirit" as in "the human spirit," or means "the Spirit" as in the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit of God who brooded over the waters in creation like a divine wind.  Of course, even if Paul is only referring to "the human spirit," he would surely say that our [human] spirits will only be boiling with passion and energy if they are stirred up by the Holy Spirit, like the wind of the Spirit at Pentecost set the apostles loose on the world like someone had shaken up a can of Coke and let it spray all over.  Either way, then, the Spirit of God is at work behind all of this--the Spirit adds the fire, you could say, that brings our lukewarm hearts to a boil and sets them to overflowing, like a pot you forgot to keep an eye on while cooking the spaghetti that spills over when it gets to a rolling boil.

To be enlivened by the Spirit of God, then, is to be envigorated with love that acts, love that spreads, love that embraces not only the people I already liked, but pushes me to treat all the followers of Jesus as family, and stirs me to offer genuine welcome and inclusion to those labeled outsiders and strangers, and leads me even to act with grace toward people I would otherwise call my "enemies."

You miss all of that if all you read in your Bible is "be ardent in spirit," like it's one more random command in a list of unrelated helpful religious suggestions.  But if we read this passage rightly, we'll see it's all about love... it's always been about love.  And the kind of love to which we are called takes practice and commitment to get better at, to be sure, but it is also always something that pushes us a bit further, a bit wider, a bit more real and vulnerable, than we would have been comfortable with on our own.

That's part of how you know it comes from the Spirit of God turning up the heat on these tepid hearts of ours--we would always be satisfied with a love that is "less than" or "just for some" or that can be confused with just warm, fuzzy feelings.  But when the Spirit of God, the giver of life, turns the burners up on us, we find a love boiling up inside of us that cannot be contained any longer, and that pushes us beyond what we were comfortable with yesterday.

When the Spirit sets us to boiling, love cannot be restrained inside mere feelings or niceness-to-people-I-already-liked--love spills over and drenches neighbor, stranger, and enemy and draws us all into the stirred-up waters over which the Spirit still broods.

Turn the heat up on us, O Spirit of God, and set us to boiling over with love that doesn't pretend.