"Holding Together: Instacart Community"
The First United Presbyterian Church of Loveland
“Holding Together: Instacart Community”
Rev. Amy Morgan
January 17, 2021
Romans 12:9-21
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good;
love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.
Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord.
Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.
Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.
Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.
Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are.
Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.
If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.
Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”
No, "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.
I’m sure many of you, at some point in the pandemic, have used a grocery home delivery service. My family was actually ahead of the curve. We started using Instacart months before it was essential to the survival of the species. And when we signed up, we really enjoyed it. Our shoppers chose great produce, found all the things we requested, shopped and delivered to our door in less than an hour. We cooked and ate at home more, before it was the only viable option for sustenance. We were more thoughtful about what we ate and were more intentional about our meal planning. It was great. We loved it.
And then the pandemic hit. Instacart delivery would take a week or more. As grocery store shelves emptied out, our shoppers would only find 3 of the 35 items we ordered. And they were all substitutes for the brands or sizes we wanted. We just started stocking up on junk food – chips and cookies and ice cream – because it was what we craved and what was reliably available. After the pandemic hit, Instacart just didn’t work the way it used to at all. Just like pretty much everything else in our lives.
The frustrating changes we experienced with Instacart paralleled our relationships and our community. Because we couldn’t all be together in one place at one time, communication slowed down, even with the employment of technologies intended to help speed it up. We had to substitute in-person activities for much less-satisfying virtual ones. We tried new things: Zoom happy hours and pot-lucks, outdoor, physically-distanced, masked social events, online hymn sings. But they weren’t what we really wanted. And so many things were just simply not available to us: hugs and holding hands, big family get-togethers, church chili cook-offs, and so much more. Like my Instacart, our community life became sparse, and we had to substitute activities we knew and liked for things that just weren’t everything we needed.
The church in Rome, at the time Paul was writing to them, may not have been suffering through a global pandemic, but they were experiencing a fair amount of social upheaval and disorientation. The Jews who constituted a large part of the original Jesus-following community in Rome had been expelled by Emperor Claudius and returned after his death to find the Christian community much altered by the Gentile Christians who had remained behind during the exile. The Jewish rituals and traditions had been emptied out or substituted for ones that appealed more to non-Jews. This tumult only increased in the years leading up to Paul’s visit to Rome as Emperor Nero began his infamous persecution of all Christians. While the Christian community of the first century consisted of small house-churches instead of the large gatherings we know today, even those gatherings sometimes had to be suspended or precautions had to be taken to ensure members’ safety. The community was fractured between those who publicly proclaimed their faith – and faced the consequences – and those who capitulated to Nero’s demand for pagan sacrifice while privately worshipping Jesus. Their social bonds were frayed, and community life was certainly less than ideal.
And into this Paul writes, from a Roman prison, the words we heard today. It is a recipe, of sorts, for community in times of struggle.
First, a healthy dose of love. Not the pre-packaged, saccharin, preservative-laden love. Genuine, organic, Grade-A certified, non-hypocritical love. Martin Luther King, Jr. whose legacy we will celebrate tomorrow, said that “Love is not emotional bash; it is not empty sentimentalism. It is the active outpouring of one’s whole being into the being of another.” Without this ingredient, love, the recipe will fall apart. It is listed first, and it holds all the other ingredients together.
But to that love, Paul adds hate. Not just some mild distaste or even strong dislike. The Greek word used here is found only in this verse in the whole of the New Testament, and it means to completely abhor, to feel intense hatred.
Now, we have all witnessed many times in our public and private lives the terrible damage that hatred can do. I personally do everything I can to avoid even using the word hate, much less feeling it. But the fact is that we do feel hatred. And, as Elie Wiesel once said, “The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.”
Community cannot hold together with indifference to evil. And so Paul encourages hate in the face of evil.
I was asked this week if I believe that evil exists. For me, there is no doubt. There is a force at work in the universe, a potent one, that opposes the goodness of God’s will, that strives to separate us from God and from one another, that deceives us into believing we are God, and that encourages us to dehumanize others and destroy God’s creation for our selfish desires. Indifference in the face of such a force is folly. To create community, we must hate the evil that seeks to destroy it.
That evil is not a person, or group, or nationality, or ideology. Paul’s recipe doesn’t call for hating other people or even hating particular actions. Notice what hatred is blended with in Paul’s recipe. Blessing those who persecute us. This is not hatred that leads to violence, oppression, or cursing. This is not hatred that arises out of being persecuted or victimized.
Paul also adds to this recipe “do not repay anyone evil for evil.” The key to our hatred of evil is the recognition that it resides within each one of us. Each of us are just as capable of evil as anyone else. The hatred in Paul’s recipe is not a reciprocal, fight-fire-with-fire kind of feeling. As Jesus taught, “first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye.” To do otherwise, Jesus says, is hypocrisy, the very opposite of the kind of love Paul prescribes. Hatred of evil, beginning with the evil we participate in and perpetuate, must be blended with genuine love to create community.
The next ingredient in this recipe is “koyAo” – holding fast, uniting, joining together, or cleaving to. This is the word Jesus uses when he talks about a man leaving his father and mother and cleaving to his wife. We are to be married to goodness, bound to it with covenantal devotion. Jesus says that “no one is good but God alone,” so this means we are to unite ourselves inseparably to the goodness of God.
These first three ingredients – love, hate, and cleaving to God – form the basis of the whole recipe for community. Everything else that is added flavors and seasons, helps it to rise and thicken. Affection, honor, energy and devotion, hope, patience, perseverance – all of these enrich community life.
To this Paul adds contributing to the needs of the saints – those we know and love and trust. And he adds extending hospitality to strangers – those we don’t know and have no reason to trust. This recipe will cost us something. Maybe money. Maybe time. Maybe it will require us to be vulnerable, to peel away some of our protective layers to get at the goodness inside each of us.
In challenging times like these, there are so many needs. Psychologists have talked recently about compassion fatigue. We only have the capacity to care so much about so many things. And so it’s easy for our circle of generosity to shrink. Trying to understand what hospitality even looks like when we can’t invite people into our homes or share a meal with strangers is another challenge.
For this ingredient of community, we’ve got to get a little creative and get to the essence of the thing. We can certainly still contribute our financial resources, and many people are being very generous toward the saints of this church right now. But there are other needs we can contribute to as well. The need for social contact – a phone call, a card, a porch visit, an outdoor stroll. We can contribute to the need for hope, or the need for a listening ear. To contribute to the needs of those we know and love, we must attend to each other’s longings, we must rejoice together and weep together, we must learn from each other’s wisdom. In short, we must mix this ingredient in with all the others in Paul’s recipe.
Showing hospitality to strangers also depends on the other ingredients. Not being haughty, not claiming to be wiser or “right,” not putting others in categories that belittle them and constrict our appreciation of their full humanity. Hospitality to strangers is not just about hosting homeless shelters and stocking food pantries. It is about encountering people with ideas, customs, and vocabulary that is foreign to us and welcoming them as honored guests into the tables of our hearts.
Finally, Paul says, “if it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.”
If it is possible. I love that. It’s so fair. Because some days, it just isn’t possible. One day early in the pandemic, a friend of our church really needed yeast to make bread. They’re gluten-intolerant so they actually need to make their own bread. But because everyone in the universe suddenly found themselves with endless hours on their hands and decided they would take up bread-making, there was not a single packet of yeast to be found in the entire city of Loveland. Jason knows, because he went to literally every grocery store looking for it. Sometimes, we simply can’t find what we need to make community come together. The shelves are bare and no substitute can be found. And so realizing that this is just how it is sometimes removes the burden of perfection, lowers the stress of aspiration in times when community life is just too challenging.
But Paul also doesn’t let us entirely off the hook. He says “so far as it depends on you.” There are some things we don’t have control over that may make life together not possible at times, but we are still charged to do everything in our power to make it work. When we really needed an ingredient, and Instacart couldn’t deliver, there were times we had to take the risk of getting in the car, driving to three different stores ourselves, and finding something that would do.
The goal of community life, the final product of Paul’s recipe, is living peaceably together. I know that’s what all of us want now, more than ever. We are tired of the partisan bickering, the complaints about who is doing what and who did it first and who did it worse. We’re exhausted from the fear of more violence, of more arguments, of more threats and condemnation, of more lies and accusations. We are not living peaceably together as a nation. And that has repercussions and implications for our personal relationships with family and friends, for our local community, and especially for our church family.
Living peaceably does not depend on all of us agreeing on everything, or everyone getting everything they want. It doesn’t mean we like each other all the time or even have a shared set of values. It really boils down to conquering our addiction to vengeance and overcoming evil with good. Paul says to leave room for the wrath of God, who, as the Hebrew scriptures proclaim again and again, is “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” Old Testament scholar Patrick Miller wrote that we are “driving our enemies into the arms of a loving God” when we implore God to deal with them. Even as Paul calls us to cling to God’s goodness ourselves, he encourages us to employ that goodness to overcome the evil we hate.
We may be working with a reduced supply of love, or have to find a meaningful substitute for hospitality. Things don’t work like they used to, and these are challenging times. But if we follow Paul’s recipe with whatever we have and whatever we can find, we will find ways to hold together our community in peace.
To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.
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