10.30 am Morning Prayer, all Saints Oakham
Romans 13: 8-14
There is a game, a visual game you sometimes see in magazines, or on television – on University Challenge for example. A very small corner of a well known painting is magnified on the page, and you are asked to guess the painting from which that little fragment comes. Sometimes the fragment is mysterious and even when we see the whole painting we still say ‘Really’ and take a bit of time to see how the fragment fits. Sometimes the fragment makes sense on its own, you can see what it is, although it can still be a surprise when you see the whole painting and say ‘Ah yes’ – now I see how it fits together, now the fragment makes even more sense.
Well I think we sometimes have a problem like that when we read the Bible in church. Paul’s letter to the Romans is a good example. In my Bible Romans is 12 densely packed double column pages of text – about 10,000 words. Today we have a couple of paragraphs from quite near the end – in the 13th out of 16 chapters – just 7 verses – a mere 170 words.
What does this fragment mean? And even if the meaning of the fragment seems obvious how does it fit into the whole of Romans, let alone the whole of the Bible.
And a second thing to remember before we look at this passage is that Romans, like several epistles in the New Testament, is a ‘therefore’ book. A ‘therefore’ book… what do I mean.
Romans has two parts. If you stop at the end of chapter 11 you will have read Paul’s tightly argued piece of logic in 8 chapters explaining why it is we need to become Christians, how it is we can become Christians, and the wonderful advantages of doing so. And then in three chapters, 9-11, Paul explains how the coming of Christ means things were now different for Jewish people and for Israel as it then was.
Now if Romans stopped there at the end of chapter 11, all well and good, but it could just be all theory for discussion, detailed arguments to work through, the sort of mind-stretching stuff which some of us enjoy but some of us do not get on with at all. Academic Bible study, theology.
But at the very beginning of chapter 12, Paul says that is not enough. I know you haven’t get chapter 12 in front of you, but Paul introduces the last five chapters of Romans from 12 to 16 by saying. ‘Therefore, be transformed’. ‘Therefore’. Romans is a ‘therefore’ book. Understanding all the information in the first eleven chapters of Romans only means anything if it goes on to change how we live our lives. It only means anything if ‘therefore’ we are transformed. It only means anything if our understanding of Christian faith is not just intellectual or academic, but is life-changing. The rest of Romans, chapters 12 to 16, is about ‘therefore’.
o this small section of Romans 13 which we are looking at this morning is part of the ‘therefore’. What will our lives look like, if we really understand those first eleven chapters and let Christian faith transform us. Paul talks to us here of three transformations in particular.
The first one is that we will love one another
8 Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.
Now in that 1st century culture financial debt – was especially frowned on. You must never owe anyone anything financially, but what you owe – to anyone, to everyone – is to love them
If you love them, you will ‘fulfil the law’, in Paul’s phrase because in loving them you will consistently and always be keeping God’s law. And Paul gives us some examples of that, examples from the 10 commandments – 9 ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet’
And the example of Jesus’s own summing up of the Law ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ 10 Love does no wrong to a neighbour .
Paul you’ll notice has not mentioned here those first few of the 10 commandments which focus on our relationship with God, nor has he mentioned Jesus’ summary that we love the Lord God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. Of course that is equally important too, but here Paul is concentrating on ‘therefore’ love, which reveals itself in our love for our neighbour .
Just what do we mean by love? I’m old enough to remember the late 1960s when, particularly in San Francisco there was much talk of ‘love-ins’ which seemed to be little more than sitting around taking drugs and having warm thoughts. That is not what Paul means here by love
Just what do we mean by love? The English language unfortunately has only one word ….. love. Greek, in which of course the New Testament was first written down, has several words for ‘love’. Here love is not that ordinary, everyday love among humanity, among friends and family, for which the Greek word is philadelphia. It is not of course romantic love, for which the Greek word is eros. But in all this passage, the Greek word translated love is agape.. agape the extraordinary love that God has for us, that took Christ to the Cross for us. Agape, which we now reflect in our Christian love for our neighbour.
If we want to think more what is meant by love, what better than going home this afternoon and reading Paul’s summary in 1 Corinthians 13 – that famous passage about love so popular in wedding services, written about the same time as Romans
1 Cor 13 ……4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never ends.
That’s the agape love for our neighbour, the ‘therefore’ love, the transformation love we are talking about.
Paul started talking about financial debt, but of course we have one debt we cannot repay, our debt to Christ in dying for us. We cannot repay that, but we can demonstrate that we have understand the enormity of that love gift, by relentlessly, unfailingly, gutsily, inexhaustibly loving our neighbour.
- The first transformation, love one another
- The second transformation, be ready
Be ready
11 Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. Asleep meaning dead to spiritual things For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; 12 the night is far gone, the day is near. Many early Christians expected the ‘day’ , the return of Jesus and the end of the world to be very soon. The first 40 years or so after the Resurrection were extremely tough – there was fierce persecution of Christians, and you can understand why people thought this was an immediate precursor to the Second Coming of Christ.
For us now, all we can say is that our face to face meeting with Jesus is a day nearer than it was yesterday whether that is because the return of Christ to wrap up the world as we know will indeed happen soon, or whether simply that we are each a day nearer our physical death and our meeting with Christ. 12 the night is far gone, the day is near Are we ready?
- The first transformation, love one another
- The second transformation, be ready
- The third transformation, get ourselves equipped
Equipped, use the available armour
12b Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light Darkness meaning the world system in opposition to God
… put on the armour of light
Now you probably recall that Paul uses this ‘armour’ illustration elsewhere. In Ephesians chapter 6, he goes into more detail about putting on the armour of God, ascribing meanings to each part of the armour – helmet, sword, shield. And so on. Here he just calls it the armour of God. What kind of spiritual armour is it? Not I think the kind of armour you see worn by those grand medieval knights – covered head to foot in heavy shiny metal armour, so they are cumbersome, can hardly move, hardly hear, isolated. No – the armour of God works best, not in isolation, but in teams – individual armour, but also community armour for Christians – when Paul coined the phrase he was perhaps thinking of how a Roman phalanx marched in battle, a group of legionaries with those large rectangular shields all tightly aligned so that no sword, arrow or spear can get through. Some shields held together over their heads so they could not be attacked from unexpected angles. Very like those transparent shields used by our modern riot police. Armour which protects us spiritually, armour which works best when we as Christians work together, the armour of God. Putting on the armour of God is a great illustration of the way God protects us if we trust Him, accept His protection, if let God empower us -, as Paul says in v13 to live honourably ….
But I am not sure we can now let Paul get away with what he does next … which is to mix his metaphors.
Armour is a good, but it’s not a perfect, illustration. Armour does protect us as individuals and as community. But armour is still heavy, clunky, and hard work to carry around. And in the next sentence, in the last verse of our reading, Paul suddenly comes up with an even better metaphor to describe what he wants to get across. 14Instead, he says put on the Lord Jesus Christ
Same idea put in a different way: we put on the Lord Jesus Christ as we put on clothes. Our clothes surround us, close to our skin, keeping us warm, keeping us dry, protecting us from the elements, not restricting us, but moving with us. And thus we can ‘put on’ the Lord Jesus Christ.
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So there we are – today’s fragment: Paul’s three challenges for each of us to take into the coming week, three hints to help us be sure that we are putting ‘therefore’ into practice, that we are making our Christian faith so much more than an academic discussion or a theoretical debate but instead a faith which understands ‘therefore’, a faith which is alive, a faith which transforms, a faith which loves, a faith which is ready, a faith which we allow to be life-changing, by using God’s armour, or rather by putting on the Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen