There's No App for Loving

Good morning. If we have not met, my name is Geoff Bradford, and I'm happy to welcome you to worship today as you've been welcomed already. We're gonna finish up the book of Hebrews today. We're gonna be looking at Hebrews chapter 13. It's our custom to read God's word aloud together. So if you want to find that in your bulletin, in those pew bibles on page ten seventy, or you can look on the screen that's behind me. Let's join our voices.

Let brotherly love continue. Don't neglect to show hospitality for by doing so, some have welcomed angels as guests without knowing it. Remember those in prison as though you were imprisoned with them and mistreated as though you yourselves were suffering bodily. — Hebrews 13:1-3

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

You know, today as we finish up Hebrews, this book moves from some of the richest theology in our understanding of Jesus in all the Bible to very practical application. And it's a pivot moment. It reminds me of an old episode of the TV show Friends where Ross and Rachel have bought a couch, but Ross is too cheap to get movers to take the couch up this spiral staircase. So he gets Chandler and Rachel to help him do this. And they keep trying to navigate this and he keeps yelling pivot, pivot, pivot. And they're not pivoting. And finally Chandler's like, "Does pivot mean?" This is a pivot passage. And there's a lot of these at the end of the New Testament letters where they go from theology to pivot to application. This is a regular thing. The Bible always takes us and we read these books, these New Testament letters, and they don't end with "theology is awesome." They instead pivot, and they go from doctrine to duty. They go from the vertical to the horizontal. They go from the indicative to the imperative. They go from love of God to love for one another.

And we're starting a sermon series. I'm kinda pivoting off of this passage to start a sermon series for the whole summer, and I'm gonna put this image up behind you. It's called "There's No App for That." And it's about all the one anothering commands of the New Testament. All the ways that we are called to pivot off this theology that we have of God's incredible grace for us and the way that we're supposed to live that out in our relationships with one another as a church, as the people of God in this room.

One anothering is personal. It requires our whole selves. One of the things happening right now, one of the reasons we chose this image is because you can put on a lot of weight consuming Christian content, spiritually speaking, but you put on muscle in community. You put on muscle when you use that with other people.

So today we're gonna talk about practical love. A call for practical love. And here's my outline. If you take notes, it's in your bulletin: the prescriptions, the patient, and the practice.

So this passage begins with what I'll play on words. There's three words that all begin with the same root phila, which means love. So Philadelphia, you might know that one—the city of brotherly love. Philoxenia, love of stranger. Philodesmios, love of the prisoner. We're gonna take them all in reverse order.

Let's look at these. I'm gonna call them first, this one, love of sufferers. This is verse three.

Remember those in prison as though you were in prison with them, and they mistreated as though you yourselves were suffering bodily. — Hebrews 13:3

And we may have images of a modern prison hearing this. People can survive in a modern prison in America without help from the outside. Not so in the first century. You wanna get a fuller picture of this, read the book of Acts, read the book of Philippians. People had to have some family, some friends outside of prison contributing to their livelihood for them to make it, for daily needs, for clothing, and for food. You didn't survive prison without help from the outside.

And this call then is for us to care for those who are likewise suffering. What is our "in prison"? It may be literally those in prison, but this is those who are suffering regardless of their circumstances, whether they are there because of their own choices or they're there because of the fallenness of this world. This is the orphan, the poor, the homeless, those struggling with mental illness. Anybody suffering in their body, without regard for how they got there, whether it's their fault or not. The Bible doesn't give us room to be discerning about that. Rather, it calls us for mercy and justice for those who are suffering.

What's needed for this passage is empathy. You're supposed to act as if this is you. It says:

As though you were in prison, as though you yourselves were suffering in the body. — Hebrews 13:3

It is a sad day in America where a Christian pastor has to stand up and say empathy really is a biblical value. It really is. Empathy is not a bad word, and it's not a problem. It is absolutely central to the Christian gospel. It's what Jesus had as he looked and cried over Jerusalem. It's at the heart of the Good Samaritan parable. It's at the very root of all the Old Testament commands to love the quartet of the vulnerable—the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor. This is absolutely central to our calling as a church.

When you did this to the least of these, you did it to me. — Matthew 25

The call for us as God's people is to adopt the empathy of God toward those suffering, toward the least and the last and the lost.

For each of these, I'm going to give you an image. For this one—for suffering love, for those suffering—I want you to picture your car. Because what's required for this kind of love for those who are suffering is to move, is to get up and go. These situations are not going to appear on your front doorstep for the most part. You're going to have to inconvenience yourself. You're going to have to disrupt your schedule and your life and your finances and your routine and even your relationships in order to enter into somebody's life who's suffering.

So how can you do this? There are lots of ways that you can imagine. But if you need help, that's what we have a diaconate for. They're always trying to help the church be about God's business in the world. You can talk to them about Rides Ministry. You can talk to them about our partnership with the suffering church worldwide. You can talk to them about our partnership with Mount Pleasant looking to do a STEAM after school program or a soccer ministry. There's lots of ways, but I trust the Lord is going to open up something in your life. But you've got to be on the lookout for this. It's going to require your car.

Love of Strangers

Second, love of strangers. This is verse two:

Don't neglect to show hospitality for by doing this, some have welcomed angels as guests without knowing it. — Hebrews 13:2

Now it's funny. If you Google the word hospitality, it means almost the opposite of what the Bible means. If you Google hospitality, you're going to get two things. Stuff about the hospitality industry—hotels, restaurants, resorts, Airbnb, Vrbo—and you're going to get tips. Lots of tips. People who are helpful. You're going to get Martha Stewart, Ina Garten, the Lazy Genius, the Nap Time Kitchen, all the influencers who are telling you how to have an awesome home and awesome stuff and awesome tasting food. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not what the Bible's talking about.

Hospitality in the Bible means almost the opposite. It isn't about family, friends, or followers. It's about strangers. It's not about the host; it's about the guest.

Here's my image for stranger love: those giant front porches on ranch houses around Raleigh. There was a time in Raleigh's history where air conditioning wasn't what everybody had, and after dinner you would get out of your house and go sit on the porch and try to let the house cool down during the summer. You'd sit on that front porch, and the front porch was the halfway point between the street and your living room. It was a place of hospitality. It was a place of welcoming strangers who were out on their porches or walking down the street—this middle place. And this is a picture of what the church is to be.

If I had a million dollars, you know what I'd add on to this building? A giant overbuilt front porch on that part of the building. It would look really weird, I know. I don't care. But ceiling fans and overstuffed couches and maybe a porch swing. The church is to inhabit this middle place and to be a place where we're saying, "Welcome—halfway point between the world and inside."

Here's the one thing that the influencers in the hospitality world get right: lavish. The reference here about entertaining angels—people always wonder about that. The book of Hebrews has a lot of interest in angels if you want to study all that. But it's a reference to an Old Testament story in Genesis 18 where Abraham looks up. He's sitting outside his tent. He looks up and there are three strangers coming. Sarah comes out and they prepare a meal for their guests. But it's not just any meal. They go kill a calf and prepare the entire calf for their guests.

Abraham says, "How much flour do we have?" She says six pounds. He's like, "I want you to make all of that into the best bread that you can make it." And she makes an enormous amount. The curds and whey, which is what they use to make a kind of yogurt. And this is an over the top meal that Abraham and Sarah prepared that would have taken hours. You can imagine the guests were sitting around. But it's revealed later—it's the Lord and angels that are visiting. And what's in view there is this sense of, like, we're putting on the spread. We're pulling out all the stops. We're doing the whole thing for our guests. We are doing everything.

Biblical hospitality is not just what we do when we're gathered as a church, but what we do when we're scattered. I remember reading a book a couple years ago called Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. It's a story about an unlikely friendship between two couples that forms while they're in grad school at Wisconsin. This one couple, Larry and Sally Morgan, move from the Pacific Northwest to Wisconsin. They can barely afford to get there, and they don't have enough money past the first month's rent. They have no idea how they're gonna afford this. And the first week that they're there, they run into and meet this couple named Sid and Charity. And Sid and Charity just sort of adopt them. They scoop them up. And this is what it says—I love this quote:

We straggled into Madison, Wisconsin, western orphans, and the Langs adopted us into their numerous powerful reassuring tribe. We wandered into their orderly Newtonian universe, a couple of asteroids, and they captured us with their gravitational pull. They worried about us more than we had a chance to worry about ourselves. There were plenty of opportunities for jealousy. There were plenty of opportunities for suspicion, but they shared what they had—and they had so much—but it was ours before we could even envy or ask for it.

I love that picture of not hoarding but sharing. Not even an opportunity for envy because of such open-handed generosity. And somebody in here is like, "I'm not that. I'm not rich." But you're doing better than Abraham. Abraham was on a permanent camping trip. I don't know anybody in our church who lives in a tent. So I don't care if you got the lowliest apartment in our church. Maybe you're like, "I'm up for that award. I got the smallest house." It doesn't matter. These are things that God has given you to open up and welcome the stranger. Can you open up your calendar? Can you open up your lives? Can you open up your schedule?

This is what we find out: you're gonna be the receiver in this. When you do this, you're gonna be surprised. Just like they entertained angels and they were blessed by those angels, you will be blessed by those you open your home to—strangers, people who don't know you. I know I'm gonna trust that the Holy Spirit has opportunities here. You don't need me to tell you what to do with this. But if you need a little help, this fall we're hosting a Missions Together Conference. One of our daughter churches is putting it on. We're hosting it over here in our fellowship hall and in our sanctuary. Rosaria Butterfield is coming to talk about her book, The Gospel Comes With a House Key. It's kind of heavy metal hospitality—I mean, hardcore if you need some ideas.

We also have opportunities to adopt college students. College students have been a huge part of the history of our church. We now even have a ministry connection with international college students. And we would love to be a church that adopts students and brings them into our homes and welcomes them as family. We're running a VBS this summer. We have an opportunity to welcome the neighborhood and the kids who are at the preschool in this building during the week, their siblings—all kinds of opportunities. And I trust the Spirit's gonna wake up to you opportunities this week. Who can we have over? How can me and my dorm room guys, my apartment mates, be about God's hospitality for the stranger?

Spiritual Sibling Love

Last one here. Last prescription: spiritual sibling love. This is verse one:

Let brotherly love continue.

This is love for God's people, the church. And the writer of Hebrews makes it sound like this is the easy one. "Hey, just let this keep going." Personally, I think this is the hardest one. You know, I think it's no accident the Bible uses the word "siblings." I know some of y'all love your siblings and some of you hate your siblings, and that's within a ten minute conversation. Sometimes this is really hard.

There's a TV show called Slow Horses that's about a dysfunctional team of British intelligence agents in MI5. And they've been relegated to the bottom of the barrel in MI5 in this place called Slough House.

And they're overseen by Jackson Lamb who's this kind of slovenly terrible person. And when pressed about the people who are part of Slough House, he says, "Yeah, they may be losers but they're my losers." Kind of like the church. You don't get to choose who's here, just like your siblings. And that's in a lot of ways what we feel about the church. Like, how did I end up with these people? Just being honest. Can we be honest in church? I guess okay. You're very quiet this morning.

But they're my losers. God's put me together with them.

The Kitchen: Where Real Life Happens

Here's my image for this one: the kitchen. I don't know what happens in your house, but in our house, the kitchen is the place where everybody seems to want to gather. We're always trying to shoo them into the den when we have people. Nobody wants to go in the den. They want to be in the kitchen.

And it's funny—the kitchen in a home is where the real stuff happens. That's where we share the hard and the tears and the intimate. That's where the real stuff happens. And more metaphorically speaking, that's what happens in our lives too. When we invite somebody into the kitchen part of your life, suddenly it just got real. Suddenly we're talking about the real things going on, the worries, the fears.

Here's the call of verse one: invite spiritual siblings into the kitchen part of your life. Do you have anybody in there? There's no app for this. Do you have people who know what you're worried about? Do you have people who could pray for you with knowledge without you sharing something? Because they just know.

Friends, this isn't optional as a Christian. We sort of treat this in our church as optional. I noticed people kind of cycle in and they sort of graduate from community group. They move away from deep relationships. Survey says: not healthy for you. Not healthy.

Here's the call of Hebrews 13. The trajectory of the gospel is always out and in. Notice: out from siblings to strangers to sufferers, and in from the street to the porch to the kitchen.

Who Needs Practical Love?

So that's the prescription. Who's the patient? This may seem very obvious. Who needs practical love? You may say, "Well, you've just told us." Nope. Haven't. Trick question.

Here's the thing: it's not the people out there who need your practical love. Do you know who it is who needs practical love? You. This is what we need. And this is for two groups: the spiritually sick and the spiritually hurting.

The Spiritually Sick

This passage is right before the one I preached two Sundays ago about discontentment—about discontentment with either your stuff, your status in life, how much money you have, or your station in life, whether you're married, single, divorced, separated, whatever. Two areas that we really struggle with as people. And it's interesting that these two passages are butted up against one another, and I think that's not a surprise.

Because one of the ways that the Lord invites us out of discontentment is through practical love. There's something about our hearts that are sick. The Evert brothers call it "ill with wanting." I had a professor in seminary who used to call it the "I wantsies." I want this. I want that. I want this. I want that. And it's a sickness of our souls. There's something about serving others in practical love—with your car, on the front porch, in the kitchen—that does this: it pries your fingers off of thinking about yourself.

And man, we get sick when we're thinking about ourselves all the time, and we're so good at it. I am really good at thinking about myself. I never had to learn it. It just came so naturally to me. I felt really gifted in this area. But the Lord gives us this for the spiritually sick to help us take our eyes off self.

The Spiritually Hurting

Second, it's also for the spiritually hurting. Now the book of Hebrews was written to a group of people who are limping, and they're considering going back to Judaism because they've been persecuted for their faith. And you might expect the writer of Hebrews to be like, "You're right guys. You're hurting. What you probably need is just some time out from worship. You need a break from community life."

And instead, he says this to these people: lean in. Lean into practical love. And it is the opposite.

It's like somebody recovering from surgery. You're recovering from an operation and what do you want to do? One thing: not hurt. I want to not hurt. And that usually means I want to not move. And what does the evil physical therapist want to make you do? Get you up. Get you moving. I know I pick on physical therapists all the time, right? I think the writer of Hebrews was a physical therapist in the first century. Because they're like, "Hey, time to move. You're hurting. You've got church hurt. You've been abandoned by people in fellowship. You're struggling with your faith. You know what you need to do?"

The opposite of what you want to do, which is to move toward other people. Not take time off, not bow out—step in. So let's put this third point into practice.

Two things happen when we step into practical hospitality.

Number One: We Rehearse the Gospel

We rehearse the gospel. Going back to the oldest parts of the Bible, in Deuteronomy chapter 18, God commands his people to practical love for the stranger and the sufferer and the outsider in the community. Why? Because you were the stranger. You were the sufferer. By practicing hospitality, by practicing love for the suffering, by entering into practical love for others, we are rehearsing our own story.

Let me sum up the entire book of Hebrews this way: You were strangers. You were foreigners. Here's a shorthand for the gospel in Hebrews—Jesus, the true Son of God, higher than the angels, supreme in every way, was made a scapegoat for our sins and outside the camp to die as a sacrifice for sin. All so that you could be called brothers and sisters. All so you who were suffering, you who were trapped in sin, you who were far off from the promises are brought in. And this is what it says: Jesus is not ashamed to call you brothers and sisters.

In fact, verse five of this passage is a little verse that sometimes we forget the context it's in:

I will never leave you or abandon you. — Hebrews 13:5

What's funny about that in the Greek is it sounds ridiculous. It says, "I will never never never leave you, and I will never never abandon you." Nobody talks like that. You'd be looked at weird if you said the word "never" five times in a sentence. But when we rehearse practical hospitality, we are getting to experience again some of what it means to say, "God will never never never leave me and never never abandon me." When we do that, we're acting out a story that's our own story. What a gift that we get to rehearse the gospel when we open up our lives.

Number Two: We Remember and Receive

A couple years ago, Susan got to know a woman in our church family who had a couple little kids. Susan had the mom over for coffee a couple times and the kids over to play. One of the times I happened to be there—it was my day off. And they show up at the house, and Susan has been so kind to these people and welcomed them. What's funny is the little girl, who's four, has this sense of like, "I kind of belong here." So she wants to do a tea party, and she wants me to be at the tea party. She invites me to the tea party and she gets the tea party elements from Susan and serves me tea. It was a little too hot—I found out it came out of a pot. It's just water. There are plates with imaginary cookies and she's feeding me, serving me this tea party.

And I thought, how ridiculous is this? What a picture of what the Lord must think watching us. Because here's the Lord who's provided everything that you have, who's welcomed you in, who's given you everything in Christ. When we do hospitality, it's like serving the tea party—taking what God has given us. When we do practical love for the stranger and for the sufferer and the sibling, we're just taking the things that God's given us, little bitty things, and we're using them for somebody else. And I gotta tell you, it was a great tea party. It was a great day to be at home with that little girl and receive.

Go and do likewise.

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Let's pray together. Father God, thank you for the gifts that you've given us. The fact that we're here this morning, we got up out of our beds, we had clothes to put on, we have a place to worship, we had breath for another day. We're here with your people. We get to remember how much you love us, sing songs. Father, we pray—Lord, all we have is from you. And Lord, we thank you for the gifts that you've given us. And we recognize in some ways it's as silly as a child's tea party.

Lord, help us to open our hands, open our hearts, open our lives. We pray, Father, this week for opportunity to love the sufferer—those who it's gonna require something of us and inconvenience us. We thank you for opportunities to love the stranger, to open up our homes and our lives and our checkbooks. Lord, we pray that you'd help us to open up our hands of our stuff and Lord, to love our siblings, to let people in to the deepest parts of our lives.

Father, we confess this is hard for us. We're tired. We've got the I-want-sies. We're spiritually hurting. We sort of don't wanna do anything. Lord, get us moving.

We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.