It's My Job to Love

Evensong sermon from July 1st, based upon Romans 13.1-10

If you’ve been hearing any Stateside news over the past few weeks, I’m sure you’ll be aware of the controversy over the enforcing of a policy to separate parents and children during immigration investigations of those seeking asylum. 

If you’ve seen any photos of the facilities and circumstances some of these children have been kept in, it’s difficult to imagine any justification for it, let alone justifications being made based on Christian belief and scripture. 

US attorney general Jeff Sessions quoted a line from the Romans passage we’ve heard this evening.

He said: "I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order."

In using this line he’s making a statement so broad that it could be used to justify anything a government does, whether ethical and moral or not. 

Sessions is a member of the United Methodist Church and his use of scripture in this way has actually led more than 600 members of the church in the US to register formal complaints against him, for violating the UMC’s Book of Discipline, its code of laws and social principles. The charges could lead to a church trial, though that’s unlikely.

The problem we have here is the transposing of one sentence of scripture, written in about 55AD, written to a completely different people in a completely different context, and trying to make that fit this situation. Sessions ignored what comes right before this passage;

"If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." 

And he ignores what comes at the end of this evening’s passage:

“Love your neighbour as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”

So given it’s context what do we think Paul meant when he wrote Romans 13? And can this modern situation be filtered through it? 

It appears Paul is telling the church in Rome to tow the line with the authorities, yet we know Paul himself was jailed multiple times. Was Paul concerned his letter might be read and trying to protect the church? Maybe the entire section is advising the Roman Christians to keep their heads down and out of trouble to protect them.

There’s also an echo of Jesus’ words in Mark 12: “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Unlike it’s recent use we can’t take this sentence or even the passage from this evening in isolation. So much of the letter to the Romans spends time discussing how the Jews, Christian Jews and Roman Christians should live together. The Jewish people were exiled from Rome under emperor Claudius and were now returning after his death, Paul was encouraging the Romans to accept them, to live alongside them and emphasising the ways in which they were similar. This reading of Romans is the antitheses of Jeff Sessions use of the scripture, with an agenda to divide and separate and to emphasise difference.

You may feel that my reading of scripture supports my own agenda, which I guess it does, but I'd like to think that my agenda is one of love: 

“Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” If I’m to be judged, I’d prefer the charge to be that I was too inclusive, too loving, than of using a faith-based belief to separate families, exclude and judge. 

I have a lot of issues with Billy Graham but there’s a quote of his I’ve heard half a dozen times in the last fortnight:

“It is the Holy Spirit's job to convict, God's job to judge and my job to love.”

It’s our job to love. If the way we use our bible, our holy scriptures, goes in any way against Jesus’ core teaching of Loving God and our neighbour as our self, then we’re doing it wrong.