Trinity 14
The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity
10 September 2023
St Bene’t’s, Cambridge
The Reverend Dr James Gardom
From the Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 18, Verse 8. 8: Owe no one anything, except to love one another.
In the Epistle to the Romans St Paul has a problem. It is helpful to us that St Paul’s problem is also our problem as Christians. It is Humanity, or perhaps more strictly speaking the diversity of humanity within the Church.
Christianity started within Judaism in Galilee and Jerusalem, but it spread. Almost immediately the leaders were struggling to hold together the Aramaic speaking and the Greek speaking parts of the community and there was tetchiness about the distribution of food to each other’s poor. Then it jumped to the community of Gentiles called God Fearers. These were people who were attracted to Judaism, and the teaching about God, but for good practical reasons did not want to move into the Jewish community. Did they have to be circumcised and all that followed from that. And then more groups start knocking at the door.
So St Paul has to deal with a real diversity of Christians.
a. Traditional believers, who have visceral difficulties about sharing life and food and worship with Gentiles. Food is especially difficult, when you have been taught, and felt from your infancy that a particular thing is unclean.
b. Then there are gentile God fearers hoping this new revelation does not mean the end of their established patterns of life, their friendships, their jobs and their roles, their civic responsibilities.
c. Then there are self-identified philosophers who would like to remain credible to their intellectual friends on the Areopagus, but are moved by the hope which St Paul teaches.
d. Then are enthusiasts who thrive on ecstatic utterance, and whose faith cannot survive without the energy of miracles, and prophecies, and speaking in tongues.
e. At different times Paul is wrestling to keep all of these and others within one body, one community, one confession.
What is Paul’s solution to the endlessly complex problem of getting a diverse group are Christians to live together fruitfully? The solution is love.
I am really sorry - this is a problem for the preacher. We talk about love so much in the church, we sing about love, we pray about love. It has become a word without energy, almost without meaning. I wish I could renew for you the complete absurdity of discovering that God is Love, that Love is the purpose of creation, that Love is the stuff of eternity that Love is the only basis for community.
What makes us human? It is not our rationality, our creativity, our Nobility. It is that our love can mirror, be bound in with the Love of God. What does it mean to live a good life? It is not about knowing yourself. It is not about being yourself. It is not fulfilling yourself, nor fulfilling your potential, nor even leaving the world a better place. Living a good life is about giving and receiving love. And this is not some aesthetic choice – it is a statement about the core of reality, what is eternal, what is actually real. Which is absurd. It makes an old person wiping up vomit for a neighbour more real, more eternal than Alexander the Great or Albert Einstein, if Alexander or Albert do not know how to love.
So what is it like, this love, with which Paul so deeply longs to bind together the Christian communities?
Love should feel like an urgent debt. “Owe no one anything, except to love one another”. Do you know that sense of urgent obligation? You have forgotten the birthday of a family member, or a close friend. You must get something. You have sent an Email that has been misunderstood, and the ripples and misunderstandings are spreading, poisoning. You must do something. An old friend is dying, and the time is getting short – you must, must visit. Love should be for us an urgent need. You must, must love.
Love should encompass your whole life, as comprehensive as the law. 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 neighbour as yourself.” We may argue about the means until the cows come home, and perhaps we should. But the End, the purpose of life and action is beyond doubt - to find the right way in this moment, and in each moment, to love.
As a result, love is intensely practical. St Paul talks in detail about Vegetarians and Carnivores, about keepers of holy days and those who studiously ignore them, about rich and poor, young and old, about leaders and led, about wise and foolish, and always the question is, how do you show and receive love so that the individuals and the community can flourish.
I do know, and as a Christian leader I have very good reason to know, that it is not easy. Our reading from Matthew is a powerful reminder that it is not right to avoid conflict at all costs. Hard work. Love is urgent, comprehensive, practical hard work.
What brought you to church this morning?
Beyond doubt, in part, habit and obligation – although there is little social obligation, and it is not a terribly difficult habit to lose. But what brought you to church? You may never have said this to yourself, but I believe you came to learn to, and to be resources for, love,
When it comes to love, we need all the help we can get.
f. We started with confession, lamenting our failures of love, and being assured that God still loves us.
g. We hear the scriptures read, always beautifully, informing us of God’s love for the world.
h. We come to hear teaching, in the sermon. I wish we could do better, but the preaching is good, and we go on our way with better ideas about love and how to love.
i. We come to pray, in a mysterious way binding our love and God’s love to the needs of the world.
j. We come for the sacrament. We are eating the God who is Love, to be nourished by the God who is Love.
k. We come for fellowship. There are some extraordinary lovers in this congregation. We have so much to learn from each other.
A couple of warnings, however.
l. The first is that we can forget that all this stuff about love is extraordinary, revolutionary, and unique and it let it decline into a gentle platitude.
m. Second, and worse, is that because we are so sure because we talk about love so often we can actually let ourselves off doing it. We Christians can sometimes seem all mouth and no trousers.
But then there is the glorious opportunity. To align ourselves interaction by interaction, prayer by prayer, donation by donation, relationship by relationship, until we actually filled, taken up into the glorious love of God.
Thank you for coming to share with us that quest for love which is urgent, comprehensive, practical – and hard work. Please come again, and share, and help us do it.