Why Rules Don’t Rule September 4, 2011 Proper 18 Ordinary Time, Year A Romans 13.8-14

            Not long ago I purchased an IPad2. It came without instructions. It did, however, come with prohibitions. The tiny booklet inside the package insisted that I should “not drop, disassemble, open, crush, bend, deform, puncture, shred, microwave, incinerate, paint, or insert foreign objects into” my new device.

            Well, heck, I had planned on doing ALL those things!

            It’s the lawsuits, of course. With product liability awards averaging just south of two million bucks per case, companies now go to great lengths to insulate themselves against the stupidity of their customers. Forbes Magazine reports actual warning labels that say things like, “Danger: Do not hold the wrong end of a chainsaw,” “Never use a lit match or open flame to check fuel level,” and, on a carton of eggs, “This product may contain eggs.”

“The first thing we do,” Shakespeare wrote, “let’s kill all the lawyers.”

Paul, harking back to Jesus, recognizes that rules can’t cover every contingency. “The finer the net is woven,” says theologian Hans Kung, “the more numerous are the holes.” It isn’t that the provisions of the Old Testament law are harmful or irrelevant; Jesus said the law and the prophets hang on the dual commandment of love, not fall from it. (Mt 22.40) Rather, rules can never be more than means to a previously chosen end.

If I begin with selfishness, no list of “thou shalt not’s” is long enough to keep me from doing harm. If I begin with love, the list at last begins to make sense. If I begin with love, I start searching for practical applications, which the specific commands supply. If I begin with selfishness, I start hunting out loopholes, which the specific commands inevitably contain.

We should note the subtle trick Paul plays with the specific roster of unloving behaviors he tags onto his general observation. He hits the Baptist biggies – beer and internet porn – and then, just when the “amen’s” reach their crescendo, he hauls out a tape recording of last week’s business meeting – “strife and jealousy.” That’s the problem with love as the only law: It drags us into God’s bright daylight and shines the sun on all kinds of sin.

Warning: This Bible Does Not Work When Closed,

Doug

Collect

Loving Father, Your laws are lines that sketch the face of love. Grant that we might look at Christ, so that we might love like Christ, so that we might look like Christ to a world that so desperately needs to see Christ, in whose name we pray, Amen.

Benediction

May love be all your debt,

            And every man your creditor.

May love be all your law,

            And every man your judge.

May love be your clock and calendar,

            And every day your deadline.

In the name of the Father,

And of the Son,

And of the Holy Spirit,

Amen.