You Can’t Go Wrong
Romans 13:8-10
September 4, 2011
Harold and Jane were not a very religious couple, but they tried their best. Even so, they
managed to make it to church only once a year. On that auspicious day, as they were leaving the
church, the minister said, “Harold, it sure would be nice to see you and Jane here more than once
a year.”
“I know, Pastor,” Harold replied. “We’re very busy people, leading active lives. But at
least we keep the Ten Commandments.”
“That’s great,” the minister said. “I’m glad to hear that you keep the Commandments.”
“Yup, we sure do,” Harold said proudly. “Jane keeps six of them, and I keep the other
four.”
Well, they say marriage is about teamwork! And maybe that’s not so unusual, picking
and choosing your commandments.
The Apostle Paul does it in today’s scripture passage from Romans. Not that he’s writing
off the other commandments, but he chooses four to make a point here. “You shall not commit
adultery; you shall not murder; you shall not steal; you shall not covet” – that’s his final four.
Why these four? Because these are commandments about relationships. They’re not ones
merely about the health of your own soul. Instead, they lay out the way people of faith are
supposed to deal with one another. And they’re not all that difficult to keep, most of them. You
shall not murder; you shall not steal – a nice, quiet, law-abiding life pretty much takes care of
those. The commandments forbidding adultery and covetousness – those may be a little more
demanding, because we are vulnerable to the temptations of sex and money. But they’re
keepable, those commandments.
But then Paul, like Jesus, takes it a step further. All of these commandments about
maintaining and growing healthy relationships, he says, are summed up in Jesus’ commandment
that we should “love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s the more difficult way, because it’s not a
negative – it’s not “you shall not.” It’s what every business consultant these days calls
“proactive” – it’s a positive thing that we are called to do.
To love your neighbor does not mean merely that you don’t murder him, even when he
throws a loud party at 2 a.m. It means to find a way to extend ourselves for the betterment of
another, really in the deepest sense for the spiritual growth and health of another. That’s what
Jesus is asking for when he asks us to love one another – that we put aside self-interest, not
forget our own interests entirely, but to recognize that your interests and my interests and the
interests of that overburdened young mother in the next car over – they’re all the same in God’s
eyes.
And so as much as we are about discerning what it means to live a good life, a life with
purpose, a life that means something, Jesus is saying, loving your neighbor means being in the
kind of affirmative relationship with that person that will open the door for him to become his
best self. The self God is calling him to be. It’s up to that neighbor to follow God’s call, but it’s
up to us – as Christians, as people doing what Jesus tells us to do – to set the stage for that.
So I just want to talk briefly about five ways we can do that, can take to heart the interests
of other people. And as I do, I’m hoping that a picture will come to your mind – an image of
someone who has crossed your path, probably not someone you’re particularly close to, but
someone with whom you might try out one or more of these ideas.
The first way to bring Jesus’ ethic of love into action is to look for and identify the good
in this other person, and then say it out loud. Back in the insecure days of college life, someone
said something to me that has stuck with me ever since. She was quoting another person who had
said about me, “He doesn’t say much, but when he does, it’s worth hearing.” As simple as that,
and it has stuck with me all these years. It reminds me that it’s all right to be quiet, and it assures
me that when I feel moved to say something, there’s at least a possibility that it might be worth
saying. That kind of positive recognition works wonders, because it induces people to do more of
it. There’s an old study in the psychology of operant conditioning in which a young couple is at
the movies on a date, and they buy a big tub of popcorn, and the girl decides to try an
experiment. Every time her date reaches for the popcorn, she snuggles up to him a little, and
every time he stops eating popcorn, she pulls away. Within ten minutes or so, he’s shoveling
popcorn into his face like there’s no tomorrow. OK, so that’s a little manipulative, but it’s the
truth: People respond to positive affirmation. You want to see more good in the world, recognize
and affirm the good you see happening already.
The second way to live out this ethic of love is to invite people into community and into
relationship. I’m not talking about adding them as Facebook friends. I mean figuring out some
way to get face time with each other. Have them over for coffee. Invite them into your bridge
group or your golf game. Here’s an idea: Invite them to church. This takes a little leap of faith,
but you can do it. The goal is to do this as naturally as children make friends with the new kid
who moved in two doors down – they walk down and say, Who are you and what do you like?
They establish whether there’s some common ground there, and then they go play freeze tag.
From that kind of gentle curiosity, relationships grow. When you love your neighbor, you build
relationship with that person – slowly, over time.
Three: Learn to love the ways that people are different – different from you and different
from each other. Church communities can be a little self-selecting, and being part of a church can
make us think that this is what it looks like to be a Christian. Whereas in fact all sorts of people
serve God in ways that are beyond our imagining, in big ways and small ways. Last Sunday in
the New York Times there was an essay by a woman who was talking about what it was like to
raise a child by herself in New York City. One of the things it had taught her, she said, was that
we are dependent on each other in all sorts of ways. She wrote this: “Heading into the subway
one day, I was struggling with getting Skuli (her young son) in his stroller, along with my heavy
bags, down the stairs, when out of the corner of my eye I saw a thuggish-looking teenager
walking toward me with a menacingly blank look on his face and his pants drooped. He leaned
over, picked up my stroller and, without a word, carried Skuli down the two flights of stairs to
the subway platform. I sputtered a thank-you. He looked me in the eye and said in a soft voice, “I
was raised by a single mom, ma’am.” Learn to love that people are different from you and me,
and in all probability are good and valuable people anyway.
Four: Accept the fact that people make mistakes. One of the ways we get into trouble is,
when someone does something that offends us, our default assumption is that she did it on
purpose, and she did it out of spite. No wonder it feels so painful and we get our dander up. But
one thing I have learned is that it’s very rarely about you. People act out of all sorts of motives,
many of them unconscious, and if you’re offended, often it’s just because you’re nearby. But as
Miss Manners says, if you assume that people are acting in good faith, you can preserve
relationships that start to go off the rails, because you can see offenses as mistakes and not
attacks.
And finally, accept that you aren’t perfect, either, that you’ll mess up your relationships
sometimes. Learn to forgive yourself for that. God forgives you, you know. Do you really want
to judge yourself more harshly than God does?
In today’s reading from Romans, Paul says this: “Love does no wrong to a neighbor.”
You’d be surprised how true that is. With a little practice, you will find yourself thinking and
acting in ways that are truly loving. Your cynicism and suspiciousness about people start to melt
away, and you begin to see that spark of godliness in all sorts of people, from the sweet little kid
riding her bicycle to the tattooed guy being led away in handcuffs on the evening news. When
that happens, you’re seeing people with God’s X-ray vision, and it changes you. You’re calmer,
more accepting of yourself and others, more tuned in to the movement of the Holy Spirit in the
world around us. And your life is one long dessert course, because that holy vision is sweet,
sweet, sweet.
May it be so! Amen.