“Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”
We are in the winding-down phase of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. In fact, it will show up in our Sunday readings for only one more week. It has been a long journey with Paul this summer. And maybe, like me, you’ve grown a bit weary of all of this Romans talk.
But, overall, I would say that this “sermon series” experiment has been a fruitful one. It has allowed us to follow Paul’s argument from beginning to end, giving us a fuller picture of the early church, and, hopefully, a clearer understanding of Christ’s love and our own salvation.
As I mentioned in the sermon I gave at the other campus last week: “At the start of chapter 12, Paul has just completed his rigorous theology of salvation that validates the equal claim of all people to the eternal promises of God.”
Now that his readers are clear about their own salvation, they are invited to respond by following the example of Jesus and living differently than they did before. And Paul doesn’t leave them hanging. He outlines the values and behaviors that exemplify Christ-likeness.
As a writer myself, I can’t help but nerd out over Paul’s elegant framing for this section, which goes from chapter 12 to the beginning of chapter 13.
“Let love be genuine…Owe no one anything, except to love one another.”
Biblical scholar Brendan Byrne refers to this frame of love as a “bracket.” He writes that the bracketing: “enfold[s] all obligations, from the sublime to the most mundane, within the one central response of love. No domain of Christian life stands apart from this core requirement” (Sacra Pagina: Romans, 393).
“Let love be genuine.” That first sentence of chapter 12 gets to the heart of what it means to follow Jesus. The rest of the chapter describes how “genuine love” is made evident through our behaviors: “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are, and so on.”
As chapter 13 begins, Paul reemphasizes the point, this time through the lens of law and duty: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”
God’s laws matter, Paul says, but they matter because love matters. Paul seems to know that we humans have a tendency to hyper-focus on the list of restrictions instead of focusing on the intention behind them. The intention of God’s law is and ever will be: “love your neighbor as yourself.” If you are operating from a place of love, you will make choices that fulfill God’s ethical requirements.
Start from love, and right action will follow.
“Let love be genuine…Owe no one anything except to love one another.”
Paul has answered the question of: “How do we follow Jesus?” with a resounding call to “love.” But the question that remains for us today is: “How do we actually love like Jesus?” Not in the romantic or family sense. Not as a one-off, or simply a nice thing to do when it is convenient. But as a habit that transforms every interaction in our lives.
If you’ve driven on any Austin highways this weekend, you may have seen the latest safety message for Labor Day Weekend: “Drive safe as a labor of love.”
When I saw this message on 290, it surprised me – because it runs contrary to most public safety announcements that warn about personal consequences, like getting pulled over.
Yes, it’s clearly an attempt to make a timely safety message for “Labor” Day. But it also promotes a social ethic: Pay attention out there, because your actions impact others. It could just as easily say, “Drive safe, to love your neighbor as yourself.”
It seems like the public safety people have been reading Romans! In its simplicity, this silly roadside message drives home the cause-and-effect that Paul keeps emphasizing: Start from love – and right action will follow.
This concept came together for me when I read a section of Martin Buber’s I and Thou with friends last week.
Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, believed that relationships operate in two modes. The most common one – the mode that makes up most of our interactions and experiences throughout life – is called the “I-it” relationship. This is when we interact with one another from a well-meaning, but superficial place.
For example, you and I meet and I make a series of judgments about you based on how you look, where you grew up, your gender, age, and profession. Likewise, you judge me in the same way, painting a picture of me based on a set of identity markers and personality traits.
When we’re done interacting, we might know a whole lot about one another, but we still don’t really know one another. We have seen each other as categories of people, but we haven’t encountered the whole person underneath.
The other mode of relationships is what Buber calls the I-Thou or “I-You” relationship. In this interaction, there is a breakthrough that goes beyond the surface. It’s like our souls meet, and who we are in God’s eyes becomes clear to each of us. Buber would call this, becoming “real.”
The I-You encounter makes us so powerfully aware of God’s love that we are filled with love for all living things. Buber says that, in these flashes of knowing between two people, we are so full of divine love that it is as if we are Jesus on the cross, willing to die for the love of the world.*
We become aware, as Byrne puts it in connection to Romans: “To all – even the most difficult and unlovable – believers owe a debt of love flowing from the love with which God love[s] them…”
In this “I-You” interaction between two people, we become able to love all people without judgment or resentment.
Depending on who you are, Martin Buber’s philosophy is either an “aha” moment or a head-scratching moment. But I bet all of us can remember a time that we connected with someone in a way that made us aware of a presence beyond ourselves and a truth beyond our comprehension.
In fact, I have had those connections with many of you – in the smallest moments. And they give me a sense that anything is possible – and that the world can be better.
“How do we actually love like Jesus?” We pay attention to God-moments in our interactions with our neighbors: with unhoused people asking for money on the street, in the profound observations of children, in the peace of nature, with friends at a football game, or at the “passing of the peace” in church.
We stay attuned to divine love under the surface of all that is – and how it binds us together and makes us whole. Because, when we experience real and genuine love, it enables us to see the whole world through God’s eyes. And we won’t be able to help but give what we “owe” from the abundance of love we have already received.
We will become each other’s labor of love. And we will keep laboring: when we disagree, when our ego gets the best of us, when we’re tired of saying we’re sorry.
We’ll keep laboring in love. Because we know that Love is who we really are in Christ. And what could be better than being real?
Amen.
Leah Wise 