Romans 13.8-14
Shortly after he died, I spoke to Mike’s son on the telephone.
Mike was a member of the church, a singer in the choir, and the sexton of the cemetery. Long before cancer ensnared him, Mike dreaded the day when he would be a dead body in need of a gravedigger. Mike’s melancholy abided with him as reliably as Linus’s blanket, making it all the more miraculous that in the last few weeks of his life, Mike approached his dying accompanied by dozens of you.
You took him food and gave him company. You interpreted medical jargon for him and hassled his family to show up. You helped him to bed. You lifted his spirits. You picked him up off the bathroom floor. As his days turned to hours, you cradled his head in your lap and you ran your fingers through his hair; you rubbed his tumored bones and you wet his dry lips and you even played music on a handmade harp for him.
You made it difficult for me to have a moment alone with him.
I honestly don’t know what people do without a Body.
“You all at the church,” his son told me over the phone, “He loved the church, and the church loved him when it mattered most. You all really picked him up and carried him to the end. And that was especially important given that I live all the way out here in California. Let’s face it— it’s no secret— there was more distance between my dad and me than just geography. The church’s love made all the difference.”
Thinking about his comments, I commended one of you last week for stepping forward to love Mike to the End.
“I didn’t realize Mike and you were friends,” I said to her.
“Friends? Mike? Mike and I were not friends. In fact, he grated on me. I won’t miss the insufferable emails he always sent. And I’m pretty certain Mike didn’t care for me either.”
“But then, why did you…? I mean, I heard you helped him on and off the toilet.”
“I’m a Christian,” she replied with a shrug of the shoulders, “What choice did I have?”
As much as we might like to argue with her, as much as we might like to posit a choice for the Christian life, as much as we might wish to insist that God’s word of promise (the gospel) frees us from God’s word of command (the law), the apostle’s strict logic in his epistle will not allow us to do so.
At the top of chapter thirteen, Paul addressed the specific question of taxes and, more generally, the obedience believers owe to the governing authorities. Now, in verse eight, Paul pivots to deal with an altogether different debt, love expressed by those who know what time it is. First, Paul opens this passage by inverting the language of obligation. Instead of writing “Pay everyone what is owed them,” Paul says, “Owe nothing to anyone, except to love.” Paul then elaborates on this initial command with what philosophers call a syllogism.
A syllogism is a simple logical argument constructed from a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. The most famous example of a syllogism— as the apostle Paul surely knew— comes from Aristotle.
Major Premise: All men are mortal.
Minor Premise: Socrates is a man.
Conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
Major premise, minor premise, conclusion.
If the first two statements are true, then logic requires that the last statement is true as well. No matter how much we might like it otherwise, logic will not allow for the conclusion’s contradiction.
Paul puts the major premise of his syllogism thus: “The one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”
After enumerating exactly what he means by the law— the Decalogue— Paul asserts his minor premise: “The commandments are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Or, as Paul unpacks it in the next verse, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor.”
Finally, Paul signals the conclusion of the syllogism in verse ten with the telltale therefore. “Therefore,” Paul lays out the logic— we have no choice but to conclude, “love is the fulfilling of the law.”
Because Paul has laid out such a spare, tight argument, what Paul does not write is just as critical as what he does.
Paul does not say love of neighbor is the entirety of the law.
Paul does not say love of neighbor leads to new life.
Paul does not say love of neighbor justifies or saves.
Paul does not say a great deal.
But what Paul does say— precisely— is that “love is the summing up of the law.”
Paul would have no need to mention the law at this point in his epistle if he was determined to undermine or disregard the law, as some interpreters allege. The language of summation presupposes that the law is not void and warrants fulfillment. Life under grace has its own law. That is, our love of God takes place as an event. The event of our love of the other.
As New Testament scholar John Barclay writes:
“The incongruous gift of Jesus Christ is entirely undeserved but strongly obliging…This obedience is not instrumental (it does not acquire the gift of Christ, nor any additional gift from God) but it integral to the gift itself, as God wills newly competent agents who express in practice their freedom from sin and slavery to righteousness. Without this obedience, grace is ineffective and unfulfilled.”
Last Sunday, before the benediction, Edward stood in front of the altar to show you all his baby girl. Carolina is named after her grandmother, Edward’s Mom. The Cubillo family has been a part of the church for exactly five years.
In the fall of 2019, I had just arrived back at church on a Tuesday morning after a brief vacation. I had a long To Do list and my whole work week meticulously laid out. We were in the middle of a staff meeting. A visitor buzzed the security intercom at Door #2.
“I need help,” she shouted into the speaker in hesitant, broken English.
Dottie, the secretary, buzzed her inside and then summoned me.
I walked to the main office and discovered a woman about my age, neatly but simply dressed, with her black hair pulled back taut.
Three children sat across the same sofa as her.
Their names, she told me, were Scarlett, Edward, and Denis—6, 12, and 14 years old respectively.
I offered her my hand and introduced myself in my broken Spanish.
She introduced herself as Carolina.
“I was a teacher,” she said out of the blue and looking like she was struggling to get the English right.
I must’ve looked confused because she went on to explain, and what she told me wasn’t what I was expecting nor was it what I wanted to hear with such a busy week before me.
“We just arrived here,” she said, “last night. From Nicaragua.”
I still wasn’t processing her situation and it must’ve showed because she quickly added: “We left Nicaragua fifty days ago.”
“Por qué?”
“My community very dangerous,” she said and wiped away tears, “I left—my home, my work—for them, for my children.”
And then, as best as she could, she told me about their journey, first by bus, then on foot, and finally stowed away in the back of a delivery truck. Seeking asylum, they’d been separated and detained at the border and then eventually reunited and released on her own recognizance to report back at a later date.
She pulled a cell phone out of her back pocket and showed me the documents that corroborated her story, the first one stamped with her mug shot. They arrived on a Monday and were living in the basement of an acquaintance less than a minute’s walk from the church. Literally, a stone’s throw.
“Do you have any food?” I asked her.
“No.”
“Do you have a job lined up?”
“No.”
“Do you have a lawyer—an abogado?”
“No.”
“What about your children—are they registered for school?”
She shook her head and appeared overwhelmed.
“What are you going to do?”
This time she had an answer.
“I prayed and I prayed all last night,” she said, and she’d suddenly stopped crying and looked both serious and euphoric. “I prayed and finally God spoke. He answered me, and God said to me to come here.”
“Here?”
She nodded.
“God said to me that he’d make you help us.”
“He did, did he?”
And she smiled and shook her head and said “Yes.”
She said “Yes” emphatically, like she’d just witnessed a miracle.
“Isn’t that just like God,” I muttered under my breath, “he knows I don’t have time for one more thing and so he sends you my way.”
“Como?” she asked, confused by my mumbling to myself.
“Never mind,” I said, “it sounds like Jesus is determined for us to help you so what choice do I have?”
“None,” she said matter-of-factly, “no choice,” like it had been a serious question.
Just as it is essential to pay attention to what Paul does and does not stipulate about the law in his syllogism, it is critical to recall what Paul has heretofore said about love.
When you do, you realize this summons is even more burdensome than it sounds. Remember, Paul writes to the church in Rome around the year 55AD, nearly a half century before the evangelist composed the Gospel of John; consequently, Paul’s auditors did not know how Jesus, “on the evening when his hour had come,” set forth foot washing as the paradigmatic form of love.
Likewise, the Christians at Rome were not privy to Paul’s correspondence with the Corinthians so they had not heard that “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.” Paul has not told them as he told the churches in Galatia that “In Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love…”
When it comes to love, the Romans’s only reference point is what Paul has already told them in his epistle.
And thus far, what Paul has said about love Paul has said about God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord. This love, Paul has declared to the church at Rome, “has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been gifted to us [through baptism].”
The love with which we are to love, the love which is the summing up of the law, the love which is our always-outstanding-debt to everybody, is a love beyond human possibility. It is a love that is innate to no one under the Power of Sin. It is a love that must flood our sin-hardened hearts exactly because it is love without regard for deserving. The love that has been poured into our hearts in order to be poured out onto others— Paul says in the very next verse that it is love for the weak, for the ungodly, for sinners and enemies, and even for those at enmity with God. Martin Luther says in his Large Catechism that the commandments are “blessed revelations of our good, delightful to follow.”
Maybe the law is a delight to follow.
But this love with which we are to love?
This law for life under grace?
It is a whole other order of obligation.
“What choice do I have?” I asked Carolina five years ago this fall.
“None,” she said matter-of-factly, “no choice.”
And just like that, we were obliged to act.
Meredith, our Children’s Director, found games to occupy the kids while they waited. Peter put down what he was doing and left to stuff his trunk with food for them. And I stared at the fourteen items I had on my To Do list for the day as I waited on hold, making calls all day long for Carolina, connecting her with the county, finding her a lawyer, locating services, resourcing her three kids. I hassled a few of you for the cash for a down payment on an apartment.
When we drove them home later, I carried bags of food inside and I gave her my cell number and I told her that if there was anything else she needed to call me.It was the sort of compassionate gesture you make to someone when you don’t really expect them to take you up on the offer.
Later that night I got a text from a number I didn’t recognize.
“This is Carolina,” it said, “thank you to you and your church.”
“De nada.”
And then I watched the text bubbles roll up and down as she texted another message. “The school say I need to go to Central Office to register my children.”
“How are you going to get there?” I texted back.
“I prayed,” she replied, “and God said you should take me.”
“He did, did he?”
“Si.”
And then the next text quickly followed.
“God say to tell you that I’m baptized. You have an obligation to me. As a brother. In Christ.”
“That’s the annoying inconvenience of worshipping a living, loquacious God,” I typed but didn’t send.
Over a year ago, I stood outside in the cemetery and I watched Mike, weighing perhaps no more than one hundred pounds soaking wet, slowly fill a grave while a family wept.
Wheezing from the effort, Mike dusted the mud off his pants and then quickly left to go package food at the church’s mission center. But Mike was not alone with us that afternoon. I remember more than a dozen of you gave up the better part of your Thursday to get the dead guy where he needed to go and get the living he left behind where they needed to be. And here’s the stunning fact. Not a one of you— neither Mike nor the rest— knew the dearly departed or his family.
On the way back through the graveyard, the deceased’s daughter commented to me about the work of love the church had extended to her father, a stranger to all of us.
“I’m surprised so many people would show up to help someone they didn’t know,” she said, “It’s remarkable.”
“It’s a miracle,” I mumbled.
“I’m just surprised this is how people would choose to spend a Thursday.”
“I suspect they felt like they had any choice in the matter,” I replied.
“Prophecies will come to an end,” Paul writes to the Corinthians, “Tongues will stop. Knowledge will cease. But Love will never end.”
It’s another syllogism disguised as a song.
Major Premise: Love will never end.
Minor Premise: Love does not contradict the law.
Conclusion: Therefore, the law cannot be refuted.
And so Paul speaks of its fulfillment.
On the law, Robert Jenson writes:
“God’s work on creatures is not random but morally purposeful. He creates and redeems us to be this and not that…It is in fact but the other side of a radical doctrine of sin and new creation that our understanding of the commandments themselves can be simple and straightforward: God tells us what he has made us to be and will yet make of us.”
God tells us what he has made us to be and will yet make of us.”
Simply—
Our love of God takes place as an event.
Our love of God is the event of our loving the other.
Time can be as eternity— this is what it means to know what time it is.
In other words, you can do this. Indeed you have no choice. Well, let’s be clear here. If you don’t want to owe everybody an always outstanding debt of love, then hear the good news. These words are not for anyone. Paul is writing to believers. If you want to be one of those— here’s the bad news— then he is writing to you.
Paul is writing to believers.
And if you want to be one of those, then Paul is summoning you to what for any other person is beyond human possibility.
But for you it’s not an impossibility.
For you it’s an inevitability.
How?
As Luther unpacks this inevitability:
“By your baptism, you have been so joined to Christ it is as though one person were made of the two of you…so that by faith you can say, “I am Christ, that is, Christ’s righteousness, obedience, and life is mine,” and Christ can say: “I am that sinner, his sins, her death, are mine because they cling to me and I to them;" for baptism binds us into one flesh and bone.”
Baptism binds Christ and you into one flesh and bone.
It is another syllogism hiding in the mystery of you baptism.
Major Premise: By water and the Spirit, you have been clothed with Jesus Christ.
Minor Premise: And we know for certain that Jesus can love others to hell and back.
Therefore: You can pour out onto others the love God has poured into your heart.
Five years ago this fall, at the end of a long week helping a family that showed up at our door, I mentioned all the details to Dottie, our secretary.
And Dottie replied, “In order to be a pastor, you must have to really enjoy helping people in need.”
“Enjoy?” I asked, “Do you know many people in need? Most of them aren’t that enjoyable.”
“Then why did you choose to do it?”
“Choose? I’m a Christian, no different than you— what choice did I have?”
In his book Paul and the Gift, John Barclay writes:
“Christian life is an impossible newness given as an unfitting gift…everything that can be said about Christian action, obedience, and obligation arises from this generative basis because the very life that believers now live is created and sustained by the resurrection of Christ…who enables and shapes their patterns of behavior…Hence, the obligation now incumbent on believers is not to “gain” grace (or salvation), nor to win another installment of grace. There is a only single grace of eternal life that runs from the Christ-event to eternity not a series of “graces” won by increases in sanctification…what is given to believers is not a new set of competencies added to their previous capacities: what is given is a death [baptism] and the emergence from that death of a new self…thus Paul gives genuine exhortations to agents who have been genuinely freed.”
Like Israel, you have been set free for joyful obedience. And like Israel, the Lord feeds you for the journey ahead. So come to the table. Eat up.You need all the sustenance you can get— you’ve got an everlasting debt to repay.
In fact, it’s another syllogism:
Major Premise: The love of Jesus knows no limits.
Minor Premise: The bread and the wine are his real presence.
Therefore: Believers, be warned. This incongruous gift— loaf and cup coupled with faith— is strongly, strangely obliging.
The Incongruous Gift is Strongly Obliging