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Morning Meditation
July 30, 2025
William Wilberforce
Reading: Romans 12:9-13
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 honour. 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.
Meditation by Jeremy O’Neill
This passage from Romans is one of those texts wherein every word deserves careful criticism. The beginning seems easy enough to agree with: be good to one another, serve God. We would all agree that these are at least worthy of our consideration. The conclusion is also one that goes over well with me, as I am an advocate for Christian hospitality. The middle however, is hard for me to read, in particular this week.
On the one hand I understand the need to be patient in suffering. Part of faith is always leaving room for the hope of new life and better things to come. But I also can’t help but think about how much suffering there is in the world and how what feels most urgent is not encouraging patience but encouraging actions to end the suffering. As people are starved in Gaza, I cannot imagine telling a Palestinian child to just “be patient in suffering.” It feels more important to me that people are fed than that they seek the spiritual discipline Paul argues for in this letter.
This discussion comes on a day that the church remembers William Wilberforce, a person of faith who devoted his life to reducing the suffering of others. While he was certainly guided by prayer and hope, I cannot imagine him telling one of the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people he worked to set free that what they really ought to do is be patient in their suffering.
I once had a trumpet instructor who would always tell me “play the note that you see, not the note that you wish were there.” I sometimes feel that we do this with scripture. It is easy to read into scripture the meaning we want to get from it. We go to sacred texts looking for answers, but we do so with the answer we want already in our heads.
I don’t actually think this is a bad thing. I believe that if scripture helps you live your life in a way that is better for you and better for the world around you it shouldn’t matter if there is some sort of confirmation bias associated with it. So I wish that this passage said something about making sure that people are safe and fed. I wish it had some guidance on how to live life in a violent 21st century world. And I wish it had more words of help for the helpless than just “be patient.”
But it doesn’t say that. And we can question why, we can lament, and we can reread the text and ask ourselves what it does actually say. That being said, I would argue that though scripture is important, the work of God is so much greater than scripture. God works in our gut, and those feelings, whether they be sorrow, joy, lament, or hope, can be trusted. Maybe our gut feelings—those which we cannot shake and cannot find a scripture passage to justify—maybe these deepest concerns are the work of the Spirit.
Prayer
Let your continual mercy, O Lord, kindle in your Church the never-failing gift of love; that, following the example of your servant William Wilberforce, we may have grace to defend the poor, and maintain the cause of those who have no helper; for the sake of him who gave his life for us, your Son our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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