St Paul, Love and Burning Coals

… if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’  Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good (Romans 12.20).

As you may know, the Sunday lectionary which the Church of England follows, and not just the Church of England, but the wider Anglican Communion, the Roman Catholic Church, Lutherans, Methodists, and others, appoints not two, but three readings for each Sunday over a three-year cycle:  one from Hebrew scriptures, one from one of the New Testament books that isn’t one of the Gospels; and a reading from one of the four Gospels.  (I realize that this is not the most gripping way to start a sermon – but stay with me, everyone.) 

Here at St Mary’s, the preacher gets to choose either the passage from the Hebrew scriptures or the NT reading appointed.  By and large here, and this is true for me too, preachers tend to go for the Hebrew Bible reading.  Those of us who are Anglicans of a certain vintage will know that the ecumenical revised common lectionary we follow, brought into Anglican Eucharistic worship, the riches of the Hebrew scriptures.  In the days of Holy Communion by the Book of Common Prayer, you got an Epistle (usually a bit of Paul) and a reading from one of the Gospels over a one-year cycle, but never a reading from the Hebrew scriptures.  When something called the Parish Communion Movement started in the early 20^th century, Holy Communion replaced Matins (or Morning Prayer) as the main service on Sunday in many Anglican churches.  In addition, over the course of the 20^th century, Evensong has become a much rarer Sunday parochial staple, not that you’d think that in Oxford, as cathedrals and Oxbridge chapels are places where it has remained an important liturgical provision. 

One of the unintended consequences of the Parish Communion Movement was that Anglicans – fair to say, both clergy and laity – became less and less engaged with the Hebrew scriptures.  Matins always had a psalm, and both an Old Testament and New Testament reading.  (The common lectionary also provides a Psalm but I’m going to pick my battles here.)  The common lectionary rectifies that impoverishment and strikes a blow against an early church heresy that can still pop up its head nowadays, Marcionism – named after a second century chap called Marcion.   

Hard core Marcionism taught that Jesus was not the son of the God of the Hebrews but the son of a much nicer, above it all, transcendent sort of God, not a God involved in all the muck of human affairs.  That God, the God of the Hebrews, is the Screw-up responsible for creation – creation in Marcionism not a good thing, because the material world is yucky and poopy and, despite what Genesis tells us, creation is not ‘good’.  Writing this sermon yesterday, it struck me that some climate change deniers are channelling some modern-day version of Marcionism.    

At its milder end, Marcionism lives on in the view that the New Testament negates, makes irrelevant, is the corrective lens for, the ‘Old’.  At best the Old Testament is a sort of warm up band for the main attraction of the New Testament – something I always find particularly challenging in Advent, despite loving that season of the church year.  Even our nomenclature of ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Testaments can reflect this.  When I was a graduate student, I attended an inter-faith service and the well-intentioned Anglican priest introduced the rabbi by saying that Rabbi So-and-So was going to read from the Old Testament.  The rabbi got to the lectern, gave us all a stern look, and said, ‘I am now going to read from the Bible’.  That has stuck with me.

So, you’re thinking, where is she going with this?  Well, when I first looked at the readings for this Sunday a few weeks ago to start thinking about what to preach about, I just couldn’t get that passage from Romans out of my head. 

… ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’  Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

All the above is by way of saying that if we did have all three readings, we would have collectively, since June, Sunday by Sunday, been trooping our way through Paul’s longest, most expansive, most sophisticated, complicated, baffling, and at times heart-breakingly moving letter in the New Testament, his Letter to the Romans.  And in the Law of Unintended Consequences, as the Parish Communion Movement did for the Hebrew Bible, our practice here of omitting one of the readings has led to a latter-day lack of engagement with St Paul. 

So, if we had been collectively trooping our way through Romans over the summer, today’s passage might make more sense.  I’m not a biblical scholar, so I am braced for multiple corrections at coffee, but at the risk of dangerous over-simplification, before we get to our passage this morning, Paul has made his most complete (though admittedly at times somewhat tortuous) argument that we human people are a) screw-ups of the first order who can’t even do the right thing even if we tried, and frankly we don’t even try very often and yet b) are justified by the grace given us by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  As he says in chapter 6:

The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus ….For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord (6.10-11, 23).

Note here ‘free gift’.  Absolutely free.  Put away your wallet, your money is no good here, folks.    Nothing to be ‘earned’.  No tricks; no ‘terms and conditions’; not ‘free’ like a ‘free lunch’ which, as we all know, there is no such thing.  We can fuss and fret about whether we are ‘good enough’ for God to love us; we can channel that pernicious inner voice that says it really is about performance, about works.  But Paul tells us it is the ‘free gift’.  And Bonhoeffer’s famous gloss on Paul is true:  this grace is ‘free not cheap’ – it is grace accomplished for us by nothing other than the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. 

So to this morning:  having established our inability to achieve our own salvation but, rather that we are accepted and loved entirely by grace alone, Paul is fretting that those folks in Rome may think that there is no need to change, grow or strive.  Note his list of virtues.  It is a much lower bar than Jesus’ rebuke to his disciples in our Gospel reading.  These qualities are not heroic or sexy but about the ‘long haul’, often hidden, discreet:  patience, perseverance, mutual respect, everyday love.  Paul doesn’t think these are easy – in fact there is plenty of evidence that he was pretty much a screw-up at all these things himself.  Paul, I think, is speaking out of self-awareness, not self-righteousness.  Like us, he is only human, and if he can’t resist citing the Book of Proverbs, that when you’re nice to your enemies, you’re also ‘heaping burning coals upon their heads’, in case the virtue of the act itself is, well, just not enough.  When that happens, just focus on those hot coals.  Paul’s language is deliberately exaggerated, as one commentator, the theologian Jane Williams, has put it:  ‘We are to be competitively respectful, zealous in service, joyful in hope, and almost embarrassingly hospitable’.  She notes that Paul ‘needs the Christian community … to understand that these qualities will not come by accident’; they need to be worked at with intentionality, dedication and energy. 

In the Church of England, we need this intentionality as we approach what I hope will be some progress in changing in an inclusive direction the explicit public teaching of our church in matters of human sexuality.  The meeting of General Synod in November may actually be the crunch point, though as a church we have a collective ‘crunch phobia’.  As a member of General Synod for 13 years now, I’ve certainly had my capacity for patience, perseverance, mutual respect, and love tested and if I’ve sometimes let an image of hot coals flash before my eyes, well, like Paul, like you, I’m only human.

So, it might be good to hear regularly in our Eucharistic worship, along with the riches of the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels, Paul’s dispatches to folks as flawed and lovable as he was, as we are.  Just a thought.