Right Here, Right Now

What does it look like to live out radical love in the middle of a world that prizes power, strength, and retaliation? That is the question at the heart of Paul's letter to the Romans, written to a community of believers living under the shadow of the Roman Empire. Paul was not writing theory. He was writing a survival guide for people who looked like a political threat simply because they believed that Jews and Gentiles, slaves and masters, men and women all belonged at the same table. In Romans 12, we find a remarkable list of practical instructions grounded in Hebrew scripture, calling us to genuine love, humility, hospitality to strangers, blessing those who persecute us, and refusing to repay evil with evil. The passage draws on Deuteronomy and Proverbs to make the case that kindness overcomes hostility, and that living peaceably, as far as it depends on us, is not weakness but a form of resistance. At the center of it all is agape, the love of God, which Paul describes in Romans 13 as the fulfillment of the entire law. This sermon invites us to ask where we are being called to that kind of love right now, in our own communities, and what it might cost us to live it out.