Sermon: Laws, Rules, and Who We Truly Are

Romans 13:8-10

Laws, Rules, and Who We Truly Are

James Sledge                                                                                       September 6, 2020

I hope I haven’t told this too many times, but there’s an old joke about an engaged couple who are killed just days before their wedding. On arriving in heaven they say to St. Peter, “We were supposed to get married this weekend. Is it possible to get married in heaven?”

Peter thought for a moment and said, “I suppose so. I’ll get right back to you.”

A year later, Peter came to the couple and said, “Everything’s worked out. We’re ready for your wedding.”

 “That’s great,” they replied, “but you know, we’ve had a year to think about this, and we were just wondering. If things don’t work out, is it possible to get a divorce in heaven?”

Peter rolled his eyes and said, “It took me a whole year to find a minister in this place. Now you want me to find a lawyer!?”

Long ago, when ministers were held in high regard, this joke might not have worked. But between Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar, Jim Bakker, pedophile priests, and evangelical leaders more interested in political power than Jesus’ teachings, pastors are fair game now.

Lawyers, on the other hand, have been the butt of jokes for centuries. Shakespeare had characters in his plays speak ill of them. Obviously many lawyers are good and decent folk who conduct themselves with integrity, but a number of factors cause people to dislike them. Some view them as helping criminals, or as money hungry “ambulance chasers.” It doesn’t help that lots of politicians are lawyers. Then there is simply the nature of laws themselves.

Laws are clearly necessary, but as soon as a law is written people want to know just what is does and doesn’t allow. Most of us engage in a bit of this. Does that 25 mph speed limit mean I can’t go 26? Can I go 27, 28, 30 without getting stopped? Corporations engage in this on a much larger scale, some more ethically than others, and this naturally engages lawyers.

Any set of rules will lead people to explore what the limits actually mean and how best to employ them to their own advantage. You can witness that in sports, in classrooms, in church youth groups. On more than one occasion I’ve had people want to do this with me on the rule about tithing, the Old Testament command to give the first ten percent to God. “If I want to calculate a tithe,” goes the question, “do I use pre-tax income or after-tax?” Hmm, maybe we should consult a church lawyer.

When the Apostle Paul speaks of “the law” in our scripture reading, he’s talking about religious law, but his logic applies to speed limits and many other laws as well. Twice in our passage, Paul says that love fulfills the law. This is an entirely different way of looking at rules than we typically do. No calculations on the minimum required or the most we can get away with, but simply, am I acting out of love.

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Five hundred years ago, prompted in large part by reading Paul, a monk named Martin Luther came to understand the law differently. One did not earn God’s favor by being good enough at keeping the rules, said Luther. God’s favor was a gift born of God’s great love.

God’s dealings with humanity do not look at rules as we typically do. There are no calculations about the minimum required. There is no precise formula for how much is forgivable. God’s rules are meant to rightly order society and our lives. The law is for our sake, not so God can figure out who measures up and who doesn’t.

But despite Luther and Paul’s insistence that God’s favor is a gift and not earned, a lot of Protestants simply traded one set of rules for another. They changed the formula from do all the right things and God will love you to believe all the right things so God will love you.

And so while Protestants often talk about grace as the free gift of God, turns out it’s not really free. You have to follow the rules about faith and believing. And then we’re right back at figuring how the rules do and don’t apply, what the minimum requirements are, what sort of fudge factors do or don’t exist, and how to calculate where I stand. 

When we understand God’s grace this way, I wonder if that doesn’t mean we’ve never really understood the relationship of love and law, love and rules. We still think of God’s favor as transactional, given if certain conditions are met. But might we simply be imagining a god who is like us; never mind that Jesus came to help us become more like God.

But we are capable of being more like Jesus, more like God, and you can see that in families when they are at their best. Most healthy, well-adjusted families have rules. Children may think that the rules are there just to make their lives more difficult, but rarely is that the intent. The rules are to keep a child safe, to help him navigate difficult situations, help her grow into a good, responsible, mature adult.

Sometimes these rules have transactional aspects. “Clean your room, or you won’t get to play video games.” Good parents generally do enforce such rules, but on a deeper level, I don’t think they are truly transactional. What parent would not on occasion hug a crying child who has royally messed up, saying, “It’s okay. Don’t worry.” Rules be damned.

In loving, well-adjusted families, it is love that motivates behavior. Very few parents take care of their children because they’re worried about legal trouble if they don’t. They don’t need to check to make sure they aren’t breaking the law against child neglect. They’re loving parents, and their love more than fulfills the law.

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When I was growing up, it was common to hear people speak of their church family. It’s much less common nowadays, and not without good reason. Too often the term carried with it unspoken connotations that the church was a place for families, that it wasn’t terribly welcoming to couples without children, single parents, or single, young adults.

But I wonder if we didn’t lose something helpful in abandoning the family metaphor. Congregations are supposed to be like families, at least healthy, loving, well-adjusted families. They are not supposed to be like the world where relationships and interactions are transactional. They are supposed to be communities driven by love. They are supposed to train us to be Jesus’ disciples in the world. They are supposed to be laboratories that show the world an entirely different way of being and interacting. They are supposed to be communities that relate to one another, and the world, not transactionally, but out of love.

I think that is what Paul is talking about when he writes that loving your neighbor as yourself fulfills the law. And Jesus makes clear in his teachings that neighbor is not restricted to those who live nearby, those who are like us, or those who are good or nice to us. Anyone in need is our neighbor. Even our enemy is our neighbor.

Imagine how different the world would be if it were governed, even just a little bit more, by love rather than transactional rules. Imagine if truly loving our neighbor as ourselves began to take hold in our community. Imagine if it took hold more fully in our congregation. Imagine if all our relationships and interactions mirrored the love that God in Christ Jesus has for us. Who would not want to be a part of that family.

That is who we are called to be. That is what we are called to share with the world. And Jesus promises that the Spirit will be with us and help us when we seek to live out this call. The Apostle Paul says that when we are “in Christ,” we become new creations. We are made new, transformed, joined to Christ and so more and more able to live and love as he did.

This is not some impossible work given to us, something we will never be good enough to carry out. No, in our baptisms, this is who we are. Oh we will make mistakes, will mess up and hurt one another from time to time, but that is not who we are. We are God’s beloved children, filled with the Spirit, filled with God’s love, equipped and empowered to share that love. By the Spirit, Christ dwells in you. That is who you are, who we all are. Let us live into our true identities. Let us be who we truly are.