Genuine, Ordinary Love

Let love be genuine.

Our letter from Paul opens with this phrase today. A beautiful sentiment, and a surprisingly challenging one. Because most of us would like to imagine that our love is genuine. We don't wake up in the morning thinking, “Today I am going to practice a very convincing but actually kind of fake love.”

And yet Paul seems to know something about us: It is possible to have very good ideas about love without always being very good at loving the people who are actually in front of us. It is easier, sometimes, to love an idea than a person.

We can love the idea of community. We can care about “the poor,” or “the stranger,” or “our neighbors.” We can have strong convictions about what a loving Christian community ought to look like. Then there is real life. The actual person.

The person who interrupts us. The person whose joy is difficult for us to share. The stranger who walks through the door and doesn't know how any of this works. The brother, sister, child, parent, who drives us crazy, The person who needs something from us when we're tired. The person who has hurt us.

Paul doesn't give us an abstract definition of love. He gives us a series of ordinary instructions about what love might look like among actual people.

Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.

Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly.

Do not repay anyone evil for evil.

If your enemies are hungry, feed them.

There is something strikingly ordinary about this list. Paul has spent eleven chapters in a letter to the Romans talking about the mystery of God's mercy, about sin and grace and Israel and the Gentiles and the astonishing scope of God's salvation. And then here he gets very practical. Suddenly he's talking about what love looks like when it has to live among other people.

And perhaps that is part of what it means for love to be genuine. Not that it becomes grand or extraordinary, but that it becomes real enough to enter ordinary life.

There is a phrase in this passage that is especially interesting: Outdo one another in showing honor. The English translation makes it sound a little like a competition, as though Paul has invented some sort of kindness contest. But the Greek word here carries the sense of going before, taking the lead, going first. Paul may be inviting us not to compete in honor, but to take the initiative in honoring one another.

Go first.

Not because the other person has proven that they deserve it, but because you have decided that their life is worthy of your attention.

Theologian Sam Wells offers a helpful way of thinking about how we relate to one another. He describes four possibilities: doing for, doing with, being for, and being with.

We can do something for someone. We can do something with someone. We can be for someone, standing with them and wanting their good. And we can simply be with someone.

All four have their place. But Wells points out that we can become stuck in doing for and being for. We can become very good at helping people without ever fully entering into relationship with them.

Sometimes that is because those options feel safer. If I am doing something for, or being or advocating FOR you, I can keep you at a distance. And doing with someone draws us nearer. BUT If I am being with you, an action that is mostly rooted in presence, I have to encounter you. I have to allow your experience to matter to me. I might even discover that you have something to teach me.

And that brings us right back to Paul.

Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep.

That little word matters. Paul doesn't say only, Help the person who is grieving. He says, weep with them. He doesn't say simply, Be pleased that somebody else is happy. He says, rejoice with them.

Sometimes love does something. And sometimes love simply stays with us.

To stay with someone is to pay attention. To actually see the person who is there, rather than simply seeing the need in front of us. Which makes me think again about those crumbs we talked about a few weeks ago.

What struck me then was not simply that a crumb is easy to overlook because it is small. It was that the crumb is not less bread because it is a crumb. It is still part of the same loaf. Its size doesn't change what it is.

And I wonder if something similar happens in the way we see one another.

We can become very good at seeing people in pieces. We see the part of someone that is useful to us, or difficult for us, or familiar to us. We see the role they play in our lives. We see the thing they need, or the thing they are particularly good at, or the thing about them that we have already decided we understand.

Sometimes, without meaning to, we stop seeing the whole person.

These encouragements from Paul aren't instructions for managing other people. They are invitations to enter into relationship with them. To let another person be more than the particular thing we happen to see in them.

Because when we are really with someone, we cannot reduce them quite so easily. We have to listen. We have to encounter them. We have to leave room for the possibility that there is more to this person than we have yet seen.

Genuine love requires enough humility to leave room for that not-knowing. To listen, to learn, to be surprised, to allow another person's life to expand our understanding of the world — even, sometimes, our understanding of God.

That is a different kind of relationship from simply deciding that we know what is best for someone else. It is closer to what Wells meant by being with than what he meant by doing for or even doing with.

And perhaps that is part of what it means to go first in honor. Not necessarily to take charge, but to take the first step toward relationship — to welcome before we know what someone will contribute, to listen before we have decided what we think, to make room before we know exactly what will happen when we do.

And then Paul makes the whole thing harder by naming how this genuine love might be shared with those who may have hurt us, with those whom we disagree:

“Do not repay anyone evil for evil.”

“If your enemies are hungry, feed them.”

“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

This isn’t niceness, or pretending that harm doesn't matter. It isn't saying that injustice shouldn't be named or resisted, and it isn't saying that forgiveness means forgetting what happened, or that someone who has been harmed owes their harmer warmth. Paul is not asking the wounded to pretend the wound isn't there.

What he is asking is something more specific, and in some ways more demanding: don't let someone else's actions determine the kind of people we become.

Sometimes we do that by simply withholding kindness. Making sure someone knows we are angry. Refusing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Letting resentment set the terms of how we now move through the world.

Paul says: don't let evil reproduce itself through you.

“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

That is not passive. It is not the absence of a response. It is a refusal to allow another person's failure to become the author of our own behavior.

And I think this brings us back to where Paul began: “Let love be genuine.”

Because genuine love is not simply an idea we hold about how we ought to treat other people. It is something that happens when we are willing to encounter actual people as they are.

It asks us to go first in honor, not because we know what someone deserves, but because we are willing to enter into relationship. It asks us to be with one another, not only to do things for one another. It asks us to leave room for the possibility that we do not know as much as we think we do. And it asks us, even when we have been hurt, not to let the harm done to us decide what kind of love we are capable of offering.

None of that means that love will always feel easy or that we will always get it right. It means that we keep returning to one another. We keep making room. We keep learning how to see. We keep going first.

Because genuine love is not something we achieve once and then possess. It is something we practice, together, every time we choose relationship over certainty, presence over distance, and goodness over the desire to make someone else pay.

“Let love be genuine.”

That is the invitation we are given: to let love, allow love to be the force that it has the potential to be. Not to become people who have mastered love, but people who are willing to keep learning how to experience that potential. To love one another.

To go first.

And then, when it is our turn, to stay.