Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 4, 2011

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Paul’s relationship to the Jewish law, that is, the law of Moses contained in the Torah, is, shall we say, complex at best. Mostly he thinks that salvation doesn’t come through the law at all, but through grace. Still, he thinks that in some way the law still has value. In the passage we heard from his letter to the church in Rome Paul tells what he thinks the law is really all about. He says basically the same thing that Jesus said about it. Paul puts it this way: “The 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 neighbor as yourself.’” Romans 13:9 For Paul, and pretty much for Jesus too, all the laws of moral living come down to only one, love your neighbor as yourself. Love is the measure of all law. Love is the measure of all moral living. What morality demands is not mechanical obedience to specific moral rules, not even the Ten Commandments.

And we like that, don’t we? Or at least most of us liberal Christians do. It sounds right to us. It sounds so much more generous, so much more reasonable, than a demand that we adhere to a specific set of moral rules. I think Paul and Jesus are indeed right here. Love is the measure of all moral living. We like the emphasis on love, but there’s something about it that we may not realize. Replacing specific rules of moral behavior with a general command to love, as attractive as it may sound, actually creates a lot of difficulties. It sets us free from rigid legal codes, but freedom brings with it responsibility. The freedom of the law of love brings with it the necessity that we discern what it means in the specific circumstances of our lives, and that can be really hard.

Consider this: Legalistic ethical systems, systems that give us a long list of specific rules to obey, have the great virtue of giving specific answers and clear guidance for our moral decision making. They say these are the rules. Learn them. Obey them. If you do, you’ll be fine. If you aren’t sure what to do in a particular situation just look at the rules, just look at the laws. They’ll give you the answer. All you have to do is act on that answer. It’s really quite neat when you think about it. It’s neat because you really don’t have to think about it. You just follow the rules.

Unfortunately however, legalistic ethical systems have fatal flaws. I’ll just mention two of the more important ones. One is that life is always far more complex than any legal code of behavior. There are always circumstances in the lives of real people that the most complete law code just doesn’t address. Those of us who have worked inside our secular legal system know this truth, and that system actually accommodates that truth rather well. That system relies heavily on the work of courts in discerning how a law applies to the particular facts of particular cases. Much legal work consists of making an argument about what a law means and how it should apply in a particular case. Of such things are lawsuits made. Legal work is rarely as simple as reading a law, finding a clear answer to your client’s problem, and simply telling the client what he must do. Life in our society is immeasurably complex, far more complex than any law code can ever be. Discernment in the specific cases that life produces will always be required.

A more fundamental problem with legalistic ethical systems is that laws are always human creations. Some religions try do deny that truth and attribute the laws to God, but the most laws can ever be is some human’s discernment of what God wills. Laws are therefore necessarily human constructs. As such they necessarily reflect the values of the humans who constructed them. Those values are always grounded in more foundational understandings of the nature of reality in general and of human nature in particular. And the thing about those foundational human understandings is that they change over time. The ethical rules that were grounded in them, however, once they’re written down, don’t change. A perfect example is the condemnation of all homosexual behavior found in Leviticus in the Old Testament and in Romans in the New Testament. Conservative Christians—that’s an oxymoron by the way, but never mind—demand compliance with these ancient laws of human behavior. But those laws are grounded in an ancient understanding of human nature, specifically of human sexuality. Those underlying understandings have changed, but those ancient laws have not. The result is a demand for compliance with laws that no longer hold up, and that demand produces immense human suffering—broken lives, shattered families, despair, and far too often suicide. The danger of legalistic ethical systems finds no better illustration that this.

“Love your neighbor as yourself” as a summary of the law avoids these problems of legalistic systems. That commandment is open ended. It gives a standard of behavior but no specific rules of behavior. That is its great virtue. It is infinitely flexible. We can apply it in any situation. It is grounded in a human discernment of the will of God to be sure; but that discernment is universal in the world’s great religions, and it certainly lies at the heart of our Christian faith. This morning we heard it not only from Paul but from the First Letter of John as well. Because it states a general principle and not specific rules it is always open to new discernment of what love is and what love requires.

Love your neighbor as yourself avoids most of the problems of legalistic ethical systems, but of course it also avoids their virtues. It avoids clarity;. It avoids certainty. It demands much more from us than a legalistic system demands, not less. It demands that we be constantly engaged in discernment. It demands that we take risks, the risk that we might be wrong and the risk of condemnation by those who cling to legalism among them.

Yet for all that difficulty and all that risk the summary of God’s will as love your neighbor as yourself is Christianity’s final word on how we are to live, on what God’s will for our lives really is. We might prefer the easy answers of specific laws, but our faith won’t let us take that easy way out. St. Augustine famously summed up the law of love by saying “Love, and do what you will.” That’s not an easy directive to follow. It’s not a safe one. It is, however, the one we must follow if we are truly to be disciples of Christ. Amen.