The Anarchist

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
03.20.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons: Romans 4:1-5; 13-17

Winter is finally giving up. Spring is shoving it aside in a great wash of buds and warmth and pollen. If you step outside and into the no longer bitter air, and breathe deep in the lingering light of evening, you can smell the first few pioneers slapping firing up their grills, as the sweet heady smell of meat and barbeque mingles with the first flowered fragrances of the season.

For those of us who prefer not to spend our whole lives sitting in little metal boxes, this is also the time of year when we can finally fire up our motorcycles, get our motors running, and head out on the highway. I used to do that 12 months a year, riding in driving rain or in sub-freezing temperatures. I had the kit and the skills to handle it.

But with my boys to drop off at religious school or swimming or drum lessons, that got a bit dicey. My boys are too smart to buy the line that frostbite builds character, and “Honey, I froze the kid” is not something you ever say to your wife if you expect your next date night to go the way you want it to. And if you have to bring your magic devil box to church to project the slides for praise and worship, it really helps if that magic devil box isn’t exposed to 20-degree temperatures and 75 mile an hour winds. That’s a minus 5 fahrenheit with windchill, kids.

I’ve already lost one MacBook that way, and I’m not making that same mistake twice.

Now, though, with the passing of winter, I’ve coughed the bike to life again. Those first few rides in the air of spring are always enough to remind you why you bothered getting into motorcycling in the first place. As that motor clears it’s throat, and you hear the snarl of the inline four, and the hungry rasp of the intake when it gets on the pipe, it’s tempting to let ‘er rip. It’s tempting to just go wide open throttle and howl like a Bat out of Aitch-EE-Double--Toothpicks, slicing and dicing through traffic like a five terawatt laser through Jello. I’ll freely admit that I do open the old girl up now and again. I did manage to get from Annandale to downtown DC in 18 minutes for this week’s Presbytery meeting, at the height of rush hour. And I found a parking space instantly in Northwest DC at 5:40 pm on a Tuesday. A free parking space, no less. Man, I love my bike.

But I never, ever ride in a way ride in a way that would startle, trouble, or panic those around me. This is not because I’m afraid of the law. It’s not because I’m worried about blue and white and flashing lights. I’m not worried about being pulled over or ticketed. It’s because I’m concerned about not just my own well being, but also the well being of the car-trapped souls around me who’ve been consigned to the asphalt and steel circle of Dante’s Inferno.

I don’t want to offend them. I don’t want to freak them out, or have them brake suddenly, or swerve and curse and hate those inconsiderate bikers. Life is stressful enough without me adding to it. I do not do this because it’s the law. I don’t do that because I’m afraid I’ll get in trouble. I do that because that’s just the right thing to do.

The Apostle Paul thought and taught a great deal about the place of the law in the life of Christians, and nowhere does he go deeper into that thought than in his letter to the church at Rome. It is, as you heard last week, a powerfully complicated and convoluted letter. It does not read easily or simply, because it wasn’t meant to. This letter was written as the height of Paul’s theology, and is intended to open his readers up to the continuum between the traditions of the people of Israel and the non-Jewish people who found themselves drawn to follow Jesus.  This week’s passage is also not easy, a circling and often challenging text.

The issue, for Paul, is how we get into right relationship with God.  What connects us to God?  What allows us to find our purpose, and to know the how and the why of our lives?   For that, Paul goes back to Abraham, back to the most ancient ancestor of the Hebrew people, the one from whom the whole covenant people sprang.

How, asks Paul, was Abraham connected to God?  Was that relationship a relationship defined by a set of rules, measured by the requirements of the Torah?  No.  How could it have been?  There wasn’t the Law.  Torah did not yet exist.

Instead, what Paul suggests is that what mattered in the relationship between Abraham and God was not that Abraham did one thing or refrained from doing another.  It was not because Abraham followed a particular set of rules to keep from offending God.  It was not because he followed the law. 

Laws, after all, are the way that we keep order in the world.  They exist to keep things in balance, and to keep people from doing harm to one another.  If we break a law, then we can expect to get punished.  You speed, you get a ticket.  You really really speed, and you lose your license.  You hurt someone, you go to jail.  You kill someone, and your own life may be taken away.  As Paul says in verse 15, the law brings wrath.   If you fear the wrath, you act to avoid it.  That is the relationship we often have with the law, particularly on a big straight stretch of road on a beautiful spring day.

But faith, the kind of faith that saves, is not that kind of relationship.   Faith is not based on fear of punishment.  It is based on our willingness to receive the gift of God’s grace.  What did Abraham do to merit God’s grace?  Nothing.  He did nothing. Well, that’s not true, entirely.

He did have faith.  Faith is not an action among other actions, but a way of defining yourself in relation to God.  It’s a bit like trust, but it goes deeper.  It’s trust in the same way that you trust that your heart will beat, or you trust that you’ll remember to breathe when you sleep, or the way that you trust that your hand is just a part of you.  Faith is the orientation of your whole self, of your whole being, towards God.  In that state, God’s gracious love is far easier to receive...because we’re already turned towards it.

Living like that puts us outside of the law.  It makes us anarchists, in a way, but not in the angry black clad radical Molotov cocktail throwing way.  It makes us anarchists, but not in the goony V-for-Vendetta-Guy-Fawkes-mask-wearing way.  Those so-called anarchists who think their freedom gives them the right to hate and destroy are just as caught in the trap of worldly power as dictators and despots.  If you are a true anarchist the way that the Apostle Paul was an anarchist, that just means that the law no longer matters, as, in fact, it really doesn’t matter if you are a truly moral person.

If you don’t do something that effects other people only because you’re afraid of getting busted, then you aren’t really moral.  If you see someone fall, you don’t stop to check to see if they’re OK because you’re afraid they might sue you otherwise.  When the leadership of this church makes sure that we deal effectively with damaged ceilings so that the asbestos they contain doesn’t harm folks here, they aren’t doing it because regulations and laws say so.

You do those things, if you are a person of faith, because you want to. 

What matters in our relationship with God is not that we do what God wants of us, but why we do what God wants of us.  What matters is our heart.  First and foremost, we are to love God.  And love is not something you can legislate or regulate.  It can’t be coerced or forced and remain love.  The God we know most fully in Jesus Christ does not do that.

Really loving God, and through that loving neighbor, fulfills all of the requirements of both the sacred law of Torah and the laws of whatever nation we find ourselves in.   At the end of Romans 13, in verses 8-10, after talking of the laws of the state, the Apostle Paul says his final word on this: 

“Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.”

Such a radical, that Paul.   But that’s the rallying cry of the revolution that Christ began.  It might be fun to join the two of them, and in joining them, change the world.   AMEN.