Courageous Love

As far as pandemics go, we have lived through a difficult one. But we’re not the first generation to deal with one. And we’re not the first to wonder if we are living in the last days. In the third century, the Roman Empire experienced an epidemic that killed up to 5,000 people a day and lasted twenty years. In terms of percentage of worldwide population, it was 600X more lethal than Covid-19. At that time, the bishop of Carthage, Cyprian, preached a sermon to his congregation that reflected on the possibility that the world was coming to an end, and its message could have come right out of the book of Hebrews. “The kingdom of God, beloved brethren, is beginning to be at hand; the reward of life, and the rejoicing of eternal salvation, and the perpetual gladness and possession lately lost of paradise, are now coming, with the passing away of the world; already heavenly things are taking the place of earthly, and great things of small, and eternal things of things that fade away. What room is there here for anxiety and solicitude? Who, in the midst of these things, is trembling and sad, except he who is without hope and faith? For it is for him to fear death who is not willing to go to Christ. It is for him to be unwilling to go to Christ who does not believe that he is about to reign with Christ.”

He points out that becoming a Christian doesn’t mean you will escape the afflictions that are common to this world, “so long as this common flesh of ours is borne by us in the world.” Cyprian’s message: we should run to help the sick without fear, with courageous love.

Times of affliction are times of testing. What is inside us? What should be inside the community of Jesus Christ?

So far, in our journey through the book of Hebrews, we’ve seen the superiority of Jesus to any other person, any religious figure or religious system. He is God in human flesh, and He has offered an atoning sacrifice, so you can be made whole, you can rest in His work, and draw near to God. The writer is appealing to his readers to hold on to their faith in Jesus. Abide in Him, listen to Him, obey Him, draw near to God through Him.

We draw near to God, but we still live in this world. The writer shifts the message in the middle of Hebrews chapter 10 to begin talking about the implications for our life together as a community of faith in Jesus. We provoke each other to love and good works through encouragement (ch. 10). We have a faith that can see the unseen realities of God as more valuable and secure than the things we can see now (chs. 10, 11). We are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken (12). So we are fearless, shameless, and filled with hope. We are a unique kind of community. We are a community shaped by Jesus, with a culture all our own, that should stand out in any culture.

What does a culture shaped by Jesus look like? In our passage today, we’ll see that it is a community that finds contentment in God’s love in Jesus Christ and pursues a pure and courageous love for others. Jesus demonstrated the love of God for us by offering Himself as a sacrifice for us. It was one that treated us as brothers and sister. His love made strangers and enemies into friends. He had a pure love that came from His confidence in His Father’s love for Him. Our love should look like His. It should be affectionate, hospitable, compassionate, and pure.

Affection for Brothers, Hospitality for Strangers, Compassion for the Oppressed

The writer begins this section with three imperatives that describe the kind of love we should find in the Christian culture. The first, according to 13:1 is “brotherly love”, what we might call affection. He says, essentially, “The brotherly love thing, stay in that.” Immediately he goes on in verse 2 to say, “Don’t neglect the love for strangers thing too.” The word for hospitality for strangers is all one word, and it’s related to the word for brotherly love. We all know that one, it’s “philadelphia”. Philos = friend love. Adelphos = brother. The word for hospitality for strangers is “philaxenias”. Literally, love foreigners. In other words, we love our brothers and sisters, and we treat strangers and foreigners like family.

This church has traditionally been very good at the first love. Love for the brethren. You are generous and kind, and bear with one another. We have the normal family squabbles, but I’ve seen you seek peace and reconciliation and care for one another’s needs in healthy ways. Our passage today is telling us to take that same kind of love and apply it to people outside the church too. Hospitality is a great place to start.

A couple of years ago, a woman showed up out of the blue in need of gas to get home to the county. It was so amazing to see the ways you all jumped in offering her food and gas money and whatever help you could. We also have literal foreigners coming to our door now, many of whom are brothers and sisters in the faith. You all have generously donated furniture, clothes, food, and time, to help welcome them to Portland. A couple of you have even had the honesty and courage to say you aren’t sure you agree with the policies that brought them here, but you can see that as a community formed around Jesus, we can love them like family anyway. Being a follower of Jesus means you have the eyes of faith that can see there’s something bigger going on. Something unseen that is more real and more important than the things that are seen.

The reference to some people entertaining angels unawares is almost surely a reference to Abraham and Lot in Genesis 18, 19. Abraham was a man who lived a life characterized by love. He loved his family, loved Lot sacrificially. And he treated strangers like family. So, when the Lord Himself showed up with two angels, appearing as men, Abraham didn’t hesitate to heat up the oven and make food for his guests. Not because he knew who they were. But because this was who he was. And after the meal, God invited Abraham into His plans. The writer is saying, be like that. Treat strangers like family as a habit, because you never know when you might be participating in God’s bigger plans.

God likes to show up in surprising places. Remember how Jesus said that when you take care of the poor, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and prisoners, you may find out that He was there, receiving your gift personally (Matthew 25)? Maybe our writer has that in mind when he goes on to apply this love to prisoners and people who have been mistreated.

He says, we should do this as though we are experiencing what they are experiencing, “since you also are in the body (verse 3).” You could be experiencing the same thing tomorrow, so don’t forget those who are experiencing them today. This is the definition of compassion.

Love, Fear, Contentment and Courage

But maybe you’ll argue that there is a danger with compassion, or affection, or hospitality, that they can go astray into excesses. One excess is to become indiscriminate in the ways we love others, and lose purity. The other excess is to be too discriminating because we love our money more than we love people.

Verses 4 and 5 can be hard to interpret because there is only one verb in each sentence. The verb applies to the activity of God. The rest of the sentence describes the state of a pure love, free from excesses. The first excess deals with sexual purity. God judges sexual sins, so marriage should remain the pure expression of love in the family. Love and the fear of God are always connected.

I’ve heard atheist activists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens mocking Christians saying that if God really is so great, why would He be so concerned with petty things like what happens in your bedroom. They’re missing the connection between a God of pure, covenant love and the earthly, human picture we have in the covenant of marriage. The purity of marriage isn’t just about the strength and health of healthy family structure upon which a healthy community is built. It’s a picture of the gospel.

Marriage should be honored because it is a demonstration on a human level of the love of Jesus who sacrificed Himself on the cross to purify His bride, the church. If we cannot honor the covenant of marriage in our human relationships, we will not be able to truly honor Jesus as our Savior and Lord.

The second excess is in the opposite direction, to withhold love from others because we have disordered love of money. If you love money, you will never be content, because you’ll never have enough. For the person that loves God, He is always enough.

God has promised over and over again to the community of faith, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” If there was nothing more than this, would you be content?

But the writer seems to really hit the nail on the head in verse 6. Other than disordered loves, the other factor that keeps us from truly loving others courageously with a pure love is fear. If we fear people, we cannot love them. If we fear only God, and learn to rest in His presence and provision, we can confidently say, “The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?” This confidence frees me to love.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” ― C.S. Lewis, “The Four Loves”

Right now, everyone fears this vulnerability. We fear losing what we’ve had. The community shaped by Jesus that we see in the book of Hebrews is so different. It’s confident, full of hope, content enough to love others without fear. We love one another as brothers and sisters, and we love strangers like family. What’s the relevance of this message to us? We’re not first century Hebrews Christians, we’re not dealing with our pandemic the same way Christians of Cyprian’s day dealt with theirs.

When you read the list of characteristics of the community shaped by Jesus in Hebrews 13:1-6, we see the relevance to our present culture. Our culture has divided up love for foreigners and the poor from the values of sexual purity and love for the vulnerable, like the unborn, prisoners, and the oppressed. But a community shaped by Jesus is free from the constraints of that way of thinking.

Timothy Keller article re: Christians and politics. “Biblically, Christians ought to be equally and energetically concerned about guarding the life of the unborn, about racial injustice, about the plight of the poor, and about promoting sexual morality and the health of the family. We should not have to choose among these. We should not have to play down about some of them in order to promote others.”

The church of Cyprian’s day stood out because they were willing to die loving the sick like Jesus. The church of our day maybe should stand out by obliterating the lines that divide our culture. We are the people that love both those inside the church, and outside it. (Your community group meets to care for one another, but it can set a place at the table for an outsider too.) We care for immigrants as well as veterans who have been mistreated. We call the church back to honoring marriage and we choose to love the poor more than our own money. We love the unborn child and the woman that has had an abortion. God is with us. We do not need to fear what others will say or do.

Questions for Discussion

What do we learn about God in this passage?

How do God’s qualities, attributes, or actions shape us as a community?

What does brotherly love look like?

What does “love for strangers” (hospitality) look like for us as a church?

How does it shape our love for prisoners and the mistreated to remember that “you also are in the body”?

What are some disordered loves (adultery, love of money, etc.) that affect our church today? How is contentment in the presence and provision of God helpful in re-ordering our love?