Simple, Not Easy--November 14, 2023

Simple, Not Easy--November 14, 2023

"Let mutual love continue." [Hebrews 13:1]

My goodness--could it really be so simple? "Keep on loving one another." Just like that. So perfectly, succinctly elegant. Continue loving each other like siblings in a family--that's all. For a book that often waxes theological about the tiniest details of obscure stories from the ancient Scriptures, the writer of Hebrews sure seems to have kept it short here. Is it really that simple?

Well, simple, yes--in the classic sense of simplicity meaning, "Without lots of moving parts." Simple, yes--but easy? No.

Keep on loving is a brilliantly clear direction for us. The trouble is in moving from the words on the page to the lives in which that love is supposed to be brought to life. I've got a hooded sweatshirt in my closet that says, "Love your neighbor," and a button that reads, "Love your enemies" on my lapel, too, but that doesn't mean I can always (or regularly!) do a half-decent job of it. It turns out just wearing the words doesn't stop me from being a jerk sometimes, or being self-centered deep down, or refusing to give someone who really upsets me the benefit of the doubt before I ridicule them in my mind. The instruction to love isn't complicated in terms of steps to follow, or calculations to be done--but it is hard to live it with much consistency.  Simple, but not easy.

Maybe we should event back up for a moment and consider what it means that the Scriptures see "love" as something that we can be commanded or instructed to do. I suspect our first hang-up is right there, because we are so used to hearing the word "love" merely as some kind of emotional response to chemicals firing in our brain. We hear the word "love" and instantly go to the mirage we call "romance," or we think "love" means "liking someone" or "being similar enough to someone else in viewpoint to agree with them sufficiently," or "feeling good when you around someone."

We 21st century folks have a way of turning the notion of love into just a gut reaction, and if that case, the idea of a commandment to love seems like nonsense. How can you command someone to feel a certain way? How can you require their brains to pump out the proper endorphins on your say-so to trigger an emotional connection with someone? How can you ever instruct someone to show "love" to anybody, if you don't know how they FEEL about that person or people already?

Well, this is the point for us to rip the band-aid off, as cleanly as possible: love ain't about our feelings, at least not primarily or initially. The writer of Hebrews isn't commanding us to "feel" a certain way about other people, but rather to choose actions, words, and habits that seek the good of others. Love is a verb, not an emotional state, in other words. Love is about the constant, consistent choice to seek the well-being of others, even when we don't feel like it, and even when we don't particularly like the people we are loving. As Valarie Kaur says, "We do not need to feel anything for our opponents at all in order to practice love. Love is labor that returns us to wonder--it is seeing another person's humanity, even if they deny their own. We just have to choose to wonder about them."

In that light, there's a new clarity to these words from Hebrews 13--the writer isn't telling us we all have to feel a certain warm, fuzzy feeling toward one another. But rather, even in spite of the times and the ways we irritate, disappoint, or wound each other, we are called to continue to seek the good of everybody else around the circle--even when they have not extended that same kindness to us, and even if they never do. That's actually part of the beauty of how love really works--if it is the real thing, it always has a certain reckless unconditionality about it, that says, "I seek your good even when you don't seek mine."

All of this is especially true in families--which, by the way, is the kind of love hinted at in this verse, since the word translated "mutual love" here is the Greek "philadelphia," which is a word for love between siblings in a family. And a family, unlike a social club, a business with employees, or even a friendship, has a certain inescapable gravity to it. You are stuck with the siblings you have in this life, and that is a beautiful (if also sometimes frustrating) thing. Your belonging in the family doesn't depend on whether your sisters and brothers like you at the moment, and their belonging doesn't depend on your vote either. It is the love of your parents that creates a family and says that each of you belong, and that therefore you belong to each other, no matter what. We learn, in a manner of speaking, how to love even when you don't feel like it from the earliest experiences we have in our families. They show us what it is to be loved even when we have been nothing but ornery stinkers to the people under our roof. And they teach us the skill and practice of doing good to them even when they have been ornery stinkers.

That's the thing: we have been taught already, all our lives, to love the people in our families even when we don't particularly feel like it. The move that the writer of Hebrews makes is simply to take that same spiritual muscle memory and widen it to apply to everybody. We're called to show the same commitment to doing good that we have been raised to do for our biological family with everyone that belongs in the family of God. That kind of love isn't dependent on how you feel about the other people around you, and it doesn't depend on them being enough "like" you or "like-minded" to be worthy of it. You don't have to agree with someone's perspective, their politics, or their preferences still to seek to do good to them. You don't have to decide someone else is "worthy" to receive kindness from you in order to extend the kindness. You don't have to let the stinginess or mean-spiritedness of someone else's heart infect your heart to be stingy or mean back. That's not an endorsement of their meanness or stinginess, but actually just the opposite: it's a refusal to let them set the terms of engagement. And refusing to answer someone else's selfishness, crude-ness, bitterness, or bigotry with more of the same is exactly how we defeat those things. It is what it looks like to love continually--not just when it is convenient.

Today, the direction we are given is pretty straightforward, but not easy by a long shot. Love today. Love the way God loves you--with reckless abandon and unconditional grace. Love the way you have known the love of Jesus--which sought us all out even when we were dead-set turned away from him. Love everybody the way you were raised to love the siblings in your family--simply on the basis of their belonging, and not whether you felt like it in the moment.

This is how God transforms the world. You and I can be a part of it today... right now.

Lord God, give us the strength to love as you do, today and always.