"Taught To Be Christian"
- Dr. Todd R. Wright
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
... Paul is simply echoing Jesus’ commands, but that hasn’t made it any easier for people of faith to fulfill down through the centuries.
Romans 12:9-21
August 30, 2026
Dr. Todd R. Wright
I have told you before about Robert Fulghum, author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. At one point he sat in a coffee shop in Seattle with a sign that read, “Tell me a short love story and I will buy you coffee and make you famous!”
The result is the book True Love, full of the kind of stories that you’d expect: a man who miraculously reunites with his first love on an LA freeway; a husband’s love for his wife after a debilitating stroke; a smile shared at a stoplight; a woman who spins a tale about love discovered thanks to an old brown couch … every time she moves, she needs strong-backed men to help!
But then there’s the story of a high school junior who met a girl outside of Cleveland in 1964. She was lovely and easy to talk to. They enjoyed each other’s company and might have dated, fallen in love even, but she was black and he was white and that was a line people didn’t cross in mid-sixties suburban America. By his own admission, he didn’t have the courage to buck society at that time, and so with graduation, they went their separate ways.
I’d like to tell you the story has a happy ending. I’d like to tell you they reconnected at a HS reunion and got married. And I’d like to tell you that Paul’s words aren’t needed anymore.
But they are, aren’t they?
Paul is writing to a community of faith in a city he’s never visited. He doesn’t know the people there; doesn’t know their faith; doesn’t know their struggles or little victories. But he knows enough about the human condition that he wants to talk to them about love.
Not mushy love; not head in the clouds love; not flashy, tabloid love. No, he wants to teach them about the fine print, about genuine love, about working love, world transforming love.
Earlier in his letter Paul wrote, "God shows his love for us in that while we were sinners, Christ died for us." Later he assures his listeners that "nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Paul believes that love is the key – because they have experienced God’s undeserved, unconditional love; because love is stronger than any force that opposes it; because love is the only way to make sense of what Jesus did and who God is. So Paul proclaims that this community should practice love, even when it runs counter to the ways of the larger society. It’s a hard teaching.
It gets worse. As Paul works his way through 27 imperatives in a few short verses, the degree of difficulty rises. He says love the people next to you in church; he says put your love into action by showing hospitality to the saints (the Christian community beyond your walls) and strangers; and finally, he looks them in the eyes and says, love your enemies.
Now Paul is simply echoing Jesus’ commands, but that hasn’t made it any easier for people of faith to fulfill down through the centuries.
And yet, in memorable moments, they have.
During the Civil Rights era people marched and sat at lunch counters and participated in a bus boycott. In return they were beaten and imprisoned and suffered verbal abuse. They sang “We Shall Overcome” and endured it all without resorting to violence. Why? Because they believed that love was more powerful than evil.
Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “I think the first reason that we should love our enemies, and I think this was at the very center of Jesus’ thinking, is this: that hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe … The strong person is the [one] who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil.”
Maybe you remember the shooting at a one room Amish schoolhouse twenty years ago. Charles Roberts took hostages and shot ten girls, killing five, before turning the gun on himself.
The reaction of the Amish community would have made Paul proud.
“On the day of the shooting, a grandfather of one of the murdered Amish girls was heard warning some young relatives not to hate the killer, saying, "We must not think evil of this man." A family spokesman said an Amish neighbor comforted the Roberts family hours after the shooting and extended forgiveness to them. One Amish man held Roberts' sobbing father in his arms, to comfort him. Marie Roberts, the killer’s widow, wrote an open letter to her Amish neighbors thanking them for their forgiveness, grace, and mercy. She wrote, ‘Your love for our family has helped to provide the healing we so desperately need. Your compassion has reached beyond our family, beyond our community, and is changing our world, and for this we sincerely thank you.’"
And then there’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who was executed for his opposition to Hitler’s euthanasia program and persecution of the Jews.
In his book, Life Together, Bonhoeffer observed,
“Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. At the end all his disciples deserted him. On the Cross he was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and mockers. For this cause he had come, to bring peace to the enemies of God. So the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the thick of foes. There is his commission, his work.”
This man who wrote in the midst of his enemies went on to quote Martin Luther:
“The kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies. And he who will not suffer this does not want to be of the Kingdom of Christ; he wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies, not with the bad people but the devout people. O you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ! If Christ had done what you are doing who would ever have been spared.”
Christ showed his love for sinners by living with them, sharing table with them, healing them!
Maybe you think Paul is preaching to people who must stand up to Roman persecution or lynch mobs, to crazed gunmen or military dictators, but not to folks like us. Maybe you think he couldn’t possibly know what it is like to live in a divided nation like ours.
I think you’d be wrong. I think Paul’s words still apply to people …
who just celebrated our 250th birthday, a founding birthed with blood and sacrifice, not just words;
who are at war – a war our leaders decided to start, although there were other alternatives:
who must decide how to feel about aliens who cross our border or ask for sanctuary;
and who have mixed feelings about the homeless who walk our streets.
Paul’s words about “contributing to the needs of the saints and extending hospitality to strangers” … calls us out whenever Common Grounds asks for toilet paper for our neighbors or we come to a stoplight next to a man with a cardboard sign pleading that “Anything helps!”
Paul’s command to “bless those who persecute you” … asks the faithful to do some heavy lifting whether they are from Ukraine or Gaza, Haiti or here.
Paul’s plea that believers in Rome “live in harmony with one another” … is tough sledding when we disagree deeply with our neighbors (or our own family) about political or policy points.
Paul’s advice to leave vengeance to God seems impossible … when the sting from being wronged still aches.
No matter what the faithful have done in the past, Paul’s words challenge us every day!
Is the love we have known in Christ real? Is it powerful enough? Is it transforming us?
People are waiting to see what our answer will be, day in and day out. Amen
Detail from “Sunday Morning in Virginia” by Winslow Homer, 1877 (Depicts a family in a slave cabin with children being taught how to read from the Bible)
From “Loving Your Enemies”, a speech delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, AL, 11/17/1957.
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