Today's Sermon

 

"Pick and Choose:  The Gifts of Paul 8"

 

Romans 13:1-14
               13 Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. ²Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgement. ³For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval;⁴for it is God’s servant for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. ⁵Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience. ⁶For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, busy with this very thing. ⁷Pay to all what is due to them—taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honour to whom honour is due.

               8 Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. ⁹The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet’; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ ¹⁰Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

               11 Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; ¹²the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light; ¹³let us live honourably as in the day, not in revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy. ¹⁴Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.  THIS IS HOLY WISDOM HOLY WORD.  THANKS BE TO GOD.

“Pick and Choose:  The Gifts of Paul 8”

            Is it…holy wisdom, holy word?  We say that each week, and not infrequently with a chuckle after we’ve heard a difficult, awkward, or confounding passage.  Today, we get there at line 1:  “13 Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. ²Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgement” (Rom 13:1-2).  Do we believe the ruling authorities have all been put there by God?  What a fun topic in an election year, but an appropriate one to explore theologically.

            We use the term “clobber passages” to describe verses in the Bible commonly used, or misused as I would argue, to condemn homosexuality.  The use of clobber passages is a great illustration of the tendency to pick and choose when it comes to the Bible.  I will emphasize this and ignore that.  I will find what I think condemns certain sexual practices mentioned a few times but ignore the far more prevalent teachings about money. 

               We have a terrible tradition in American public life, even as religiosity declines, of cherry-picking biblical passages with almost no understanding of them.  When the Apostle Paul was writing this passage there was an emperor in place, and yet even in our democracy people will appeal to Romans 13.  I have heard pundits and politicians do it explicitly, yet notice how they only when it is convenient.  When my side is in power, it’s, Obey the authorities!  Law and order!  If you don’t like it get out!  Stop protesting or “resisting” to use Paul’s term.  You don’t hear as much enthusiasm for the divinity of taxes, even though both Paul and Jesus advocate paying them.  Strangely, amnesia sets in when the other side is in power.  My president was sent there by God.  Yours is illegitimate.  We simply pick and choose.

               When we pick and choose in a way that distorts not only the original intent and context of the passage but also its fidelity to the larger gospel message, we’re engaging in what theologian and author Kaitlyn Schiess calls “text jacking”, hijacking the text for an unfaithful agenda.[1]  Text jacking does all sorts of harm, for it cloaks in religious language messages counter to the gospel. 

               When we say, “The poor will always be with you,” (Mk. 14:7) as an excuse not to help those in need, that’s text jacking. Jesus, to whom those words are attributed, was clearly concerned about the plight of the poor as was the Old Testament passage from which his words are derived.  When we employ “A shining city on a hill” derived from Matthew 5:14, to prop up American exceptionalism, that’s text jacking.  It’s fine to aspire to have the best country possible, to strive to be a blessing to the world, but remember Jesus was not talking about a nation state.  He spent his life and ministry defying the boundaries humans mistook for being important—bloodlines, ethnic lines, political boundaries.  When we say, “No one comes to the father but by me” (John 14:6) to non-Christians, that, believe it or not, is text jacking.  That passage was about including an excluded people. It’s not permission to inflict all kinds of spiritual, social, and familial trauma.  Text jacking is a fairly lazy treatment of the text.

               Even in the church we can display a fairly stunted understanding of scripture.  Fundamentalism has been positioned as the only way of taking the Bible seriously. Notice, I didn’t say “literalism” because there is no such thing as a literal reading.  All reading, all textual communication is inherently symbolic. Letters on the page are symbols, words, sentences, all of it.  Fundamentalism claims to follow what the Bible says.  The problem is the Bible says contradictory things.  As Brian McLaren puts it so well, the Bible is not a book, but a library, with writings from different people in different times holding different beliefs.  You can no more “follow the Bible” than you can follow the library.  The concept of biblical inerrancy was not widely held for at least 1,500 years after Christ, and even then there was significant debate. In many places, it wasn’t codified until much later.  Do you know when the doctrine of inerrancy was first codified in this country?  1978 in an evangelical document called the “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.”  As Richard Rohr and Philip Newell have reminded us, it’s usually when the church has felt it was losing its grip on society that it has made more radical claims to singular authority.  In moments such as those, the church either tries to tighten its grasp or has the wisdom to open its heart and its mind to what the Spirit might be doing.  You can tell which I think is the more faithful choice.

               Though written in a context far different from our own, Romans 13 does wrestle with an incredibly important theme.  Paul, this definitive figure of early Christianity, has given us a gift of inviting us to wrestle with this question.  What is our relationship to and obligation to the civil authorities?  One the one hand, we are taught from the time we are very young, to follow the rules, to obey authorities, pay your taxes, honor father and mother—that’s all biblical (Exodus 20:12)!  On one level an ordered life is a good life, for a person and a society.  There is a stream of compliance with state authorities in scripture, and not even democratically elected ones.  It may make some of us uncomfortable, but it’s clearly there. 

               On the other hand, there are ample reasons, faithful and biblical reasons, to defy both the governing authorities and their rules. Are we really to believe all authorities are put there by God?  Caesar aside, Hitler?  Being law abiding sounds nice and it may generally be a good principle, but what about slavery, that was legal, as was segregation, women being denied the vote. Our country was formed in an act of lawbreaking, defying a ruler supposedly ordained God and the church. None of this is to mention the great tradition of civil disobedience, breaking the law, in the cause of amending and improving the law.  Augustine famously said an unjust law is not law at all.  When Jesus healed someone on the Sabbath, he broke the law (Matthew 12:9-13, Mark 3:1-6, Luke 6:6-11).  Shall we condemn Jesus?  The very day I was doing research for this sermon and thought I was done, I got an email about screening a film on “The Philadelphia Women” which is about the ordination of eleven women as priests in the Episcopal church in 1974, which was, you guessed it, against the rules. Not to boast, but the Presbyterians did it, by the way, in 1956, though I’m sure it was done “decently and in order,” which, as you know, is a phrase of Paul’s in the Bible (1 Corinthians 14:40).  Oh, it’s just so confusing.

               In her book, Jesus for Everyone: Not Just Christians Amy Jill Levine, a Jewish New Testament scholar, reminds us that Jesus has a way of defying us when we try and box him into who we’d like him to be.  We usually like Jesus to be just like we are.  So, just as Jesus doesn’t neatly fall into the conservative characterizations of the culture wars, neither does he entirely fit into the progressive box of nonsectarian political revolutionary.  He kind of troubles us all.

               So, what was Paul thinking when he said these words in Romans 13?  You might say Paul really believed that the authorities were really truly put there by God and were to be obeyed.  You could also argue neither Paul nor Jesus were all that concerned with earthly authorities because they believed the end of times was coming and all those authorities would be replaced.  You might make the case Paul was making a strategic move late in his life, accommodating to the Roman empire as a survival tactic for the movement since Jesus hadn’t come back as quickly as, or in the form, he originally anticipated. 

               The question, however, is not what Paul thought, but what Paul invites us to think about.  He invites a better question.  It’s not whether to break the law, but when to break the law, defy authority, and how.  We have to pick and choose.  Wait, what? I thought picking and choosing was the whole problem.  It’s the problem if you’re reading and employing the Bible simplistically and problematically. It’s the solution if you commit to a more studied and evolved relationship with the scriptures.  Lady wisdom is the key when dealing with the text. Knowledge is the accumulation of information.  It’s fixed. Knowing how and when to put to use various pieces of knowledge based on what the situation calls for is called wisdom, judgment.  We’re all familiar with popular proverbs that say the opposite things:  “Out of sight, out of mind” and “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”  Both are true, though in any given moment, one may be truer, more appropriate. 

               The same is true of the Bible.  Here's the quintessential example from the book of Proverbs in the Bible: 

               Proverbs 26:4 – “Do not answer fools according to their folly, or you will be a fool yourself.” 

               Proverbs 26:5, the very next verse – “Answer fools according to their folly, or they will be wise in their own eyes.”

               Was the biblical author an idiot, saying opposite things in adjacent sentences, or were they signaling to us that it’s not enough to mindlessly lift up a few words and bludgeon people with it unthinkingly? We’re being told by the scriptures we must use judgment, deciding wisely when and how to employ which piece of instruction.  That’s why it’s such a crime that Christianity or religion has been associated with the unthinking.  No! It’s about the highest of moral, spiritual, ethical, and, yes, political reasoning. 

               We don’t text jack, but of course, in every situation, we must pick and choose.  That’s the point.  Our job doesn’t end when we read the scripture, the holy text.  That’s when our work begins.  It is our obligation, our responsibility, to cultivate wisdom, reasoning, conversation, debate, so we know what to do with all this we’ve been taught.  Holy word, yes, but only when paired with holy wisdom.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

 

[1]https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/03/us/politicians-bible-verses-textjacking-christianity-cec/index.html