Romans 13:8-10 “Love Simply”

This last week I got a text from someone who was distraught with life. This person told me of all the issues and problems she was processing in her thoughts. At the end of the text she wrote “The only place I feel safe is in church.” And, that is why they call this space the “sanctuary.” (ha ha) We do feel safe here!

Even as a boy growing up, when I was being beaten up in school, I felt safe in church–even though the same bullies might actually be there. I knew they could not beat me up in church! Maybe that is why I just always wanted to spend the rest of my life in church. I guess I should have become a pastor!

The rest of the world, school, work, market, you name it, are not based on the same principle as church. You see, church is based simply on love of God and one another. Well, specifically Paul says that we will love our neighbors.

I have been thinking that in today’s world that the idea of neighbors has changed considerably. In fact, I get promotions all the time from an airlines here in Hawaii saying: “Great deals to ‘neighbor’ islands.” I think to myself, “It is okay to say we have neighbors as long as we keep them on other islands!”

When I was growing up, it was different. We did everything with our neighbors. We used to grow grapes and make wine with one of our neighbors. We used to as kids sneak off to another neighbor’s living room to watch television because my father did not like our watching TV at home. When our next-door neighbor died in the middle of the night, his wife came to wake us up and seek consoling from her neighbor. The neighborhood was our part of the world. We encountered the rest of the world through our neighborhood.

When Mr. Rogers on PBS sang his song : “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood—won’t you be my neighbor?!” We were in heaven. We understood what that song was about. It was about gentlemen in their comfortable sweaters playing with models. It still made sense to us. Neighborhood had not yet become “the hood!” as “gangsta” youth like to call it.

To be sure, in the time when Paul was writing this letter, you could not NOT know your neighbor. In those days, people shared ovens for baking bread in the villages. They shared a single source of water, whether a stream or well. They shared grazing land for their animals. They worshipped just with their neighbors. No one drove in to worship from the next town over. When towns and villages came under attack, neighbors would fight alongside one another defending one another’s very lives.

I know that life has changed so much. Yet, the bible tells us that we must love our neighbor. That is the second part of the Great Commandment of Jesus Christ. Check out Matthew 22:34-40, “. . . .’Teacher which commandment of the law is the greatest?’ He said to them ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and soul and mind. . . and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. . . .’” These words are directly from Jesus. Paul re-uses them in his own writing. In this is the very basic understanding that in the least one should know who his or her neighbor is. That is your homework for today! Make sure you know who your neighbor, and love your neighbor.

The Bible tells us that the debt we owe is to love one another. How is this a debt we owe? How can we owe love? That is because we are indebted to Jesus Christ that through His eternal love He sacrificed himself for us. When somebody else does a great kindness for us, we say that we owe a “debt of gratitude.” So, we do owe this debt.

This is the same word in the Greek that is taught to us by Jesus in the Lord’s Prayer. “Forgive us our debt as we forgive our debtors.” We owed our neighbors to love on them, but we did not. Now we owe them that debt!

This is exactly how it is with what we owe God in terms of loving our neighbors. We will go to stand before our Lord still owing love to our neighbors. We could do as some people do today with financial debt and just try to forget that they owe so much. Think about it this way, if you do not believe in Jesus then you might pretend not to owe a debt at all! But, pretending that your mortgage does not exist does not make it go away! So it is that we actually do owe love to one another because we were first loved by God that he sent Jesus to us.

I want to point our something that I find really interesting in the difference between what Jesus commands and what Paul tells the Christians in Rome. You see, Jesus actually commands us to love our neighbors. The Greek for the word to love is in the plural imperative. This is really strong language. Paul does not use the command form that Jesus used. Paul uses the simple future tense. “You will love your neighbor.”

The debt we owe to love others will one day be settled in heaven. That is Paul’s point. Maybe today you think you can get away with anger and hatred, but not forever! You shall love–this is the debt you pay today or tomorrow.

Now, the very least we should do is pay off the minimum balance of what we owe. Paul mentions these as following the last five commandments of the Ten Commandments of the Law of Moses. You can find these in Exodus 20, which we studied last time in our evening Bible Study. By the way, when you look at your bible it may only have four of the Ten Commandments. Some bibles have four, some have five. The one that is sometimes missing is “You shall not bear false witness.” It is one of those editorial choices that some translations have followed. The basic idea from Paul would be that we should not harm one another as neighbors. If you are stealing, committing adultery, etc., then you are harming others. The least we can do is do no harm. That would be our minimum payment in recognition that we do owe God something!

Yet, loving our neighbor entails more than not stealing his power tools or killing him outright. Loving our neighbor means loving him as “ourselves.” That is exactly what the Bible says! This reflexive pronoun lands in the objective case in the Greek. This reads to me as an admonition to look at our own lives objectively as how our neighbors would look at us. Would you want your neighbor to hate you? Would you want anyone to hate you? Look at your life objectively so that you can check to make sure that the love is flowing outward from your life to others. This is not about self-love for sure. This is rather about looking at your own life objectively.

Love those near to you! This is the debt to the one who loved us first. This whole idea of loving as a debt got me to thinking about how love is seen differently in other cultures. Kitty and I were talking last week about her being on the Navajo reservation and trying to learn the Dine’ language. In the Navajo belief system, a man must actually give a part of his soul away to those whom he loves. This is done through prayer, dance, and lastly the man carving a Kachina doll that represents his own spirit be given away to female members of the family.

In my younger days I took that to heart and actually carved out of wood Kachinas for my mom and sisters. Even my Aunt in Germany got a piece of my soul through a carved piece of avocado wood. This was what it meant to love someone. You would give of your own soul in sharing with another.

John 3:16, “God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son. . . .” And, Jesus gave up his earthly soul to us that we might know heavenly love. “We love because He first loved us.” (1 John 4:19) This is what it means to simply love–to be willing to accept God’s love into your own life and be willing to sacrifice all for that love.

Saint Paul was desperately trying to tell the people in Rome that they are loved by God even though things were so tough for them. He was probably trying to convince himself of this too as his situation in Corinth was not easy either.

Later he finds it necessary to define love back to the church in Corinth in his famous lines in 1 Corinthians 13: “Love is patient, love is kind. . . .it believes all things, hopes all things. . . .love never ends.” WE repeat these words at marriages now even though they were meant for the church in general. This is the debt we owe–nothing else but to love others in a godly sense as we know God loves us. Amen.