Law is about control, and the mind set on law is a mind set on control—control of self and control of others, in some combination.  It’s possible to be a faithful keeper of the law and not be a legalist, if your focus is not on the law but through the law; thus we have the psalmist and others in the Old Testament who speak of the law of Moses with great love and joy, because their minds were set not on the law, but on God.  For them, the law was not an end in itself, but a way to see and know God.  They were using the law as God desired it to be used.  But when we collapse law into law—or when we collapse anything else into law—so that our focus is on the law itself and keeping the law rather than on the reality behind the law, then we betray what we claim to serve.

This is easy to see in the “weak” party in Rome, who were insisting on keeping the purity laws and the Jewish religious calendar; they were clearly making the kingdom of God about eating and drinking.  Less obvious is the fact that the “strong” were doing the exact same thing.  We miss that because we think of religious law as telling us not to do worldly stuff (and commanding us to do churchy stuff), but you can be just as legalistic, arrogant, and self-righteous about notkeeping that sort of law as about keeping it.  All you’ve done then is replace “thou shalt not eat meat and drink wine” with “thou shalt eat meat and drink wine.”  Either way, you’re making it all about your dinner, rather than about the Lord, and that’s not what God is on about.

Unfortunately, legalism is hostile to listening and learning, because it breeds the conviction that I’m right and I already know what I need to know; learning, after all, must begin at least with the admission, “I don’t know,” and usually with the willingness to say, “I’m wrong.”  It’s also hostile to compromise, because it turns winning the argument into a moral imperative.  As such, neither side in this dispute is willing to back down.

Now, as we saw last week, Paul agrees with the theology of the Gentiles here.  You’re absolutely right, he says:  the old categories of ritual purity, of things you can’t touch and foods you can’t eat because they’re unclean, are meaningless in Jesus.  None of that matters anymore.  Given that, you might think he would support the “strong” group—but he doesn’t.  Instead, he tells them they are the ones who need to change.  No, they don’t have to start keeping the law, but they do have to respect those who are weaker in their faith, and be considerate of their scruples.  The strong have been flouting their freedom, breaking the Mosaic law right in front of their Jewish brothers and sisters, and pushing them to do the same; Paul commands them to knock it off.

Why?  Because they were the ones with the stronger sense of Christian freedom.  It was their responsibility to compromise because they were the ones who were free to do so.  For the weak to compromise their behavior for the sake of the strong, they would have to compromise their beliefs, to break their faith, by breaking what they believed to be a moral obligation.  For the strong to compromise their behavior for the sake of the weak, all they would have to do is voluntarily restrict themselves—to use their Christian freedom to not act as they would prefer in certain circumstances out of respect for the beliefs of others in the church.  They didn’t have to compromise their beliefs, betray their morals, or give up their Christian freedom; all they had to do was honor others above themselves and put the good of their neighbor ahead of their own desires, just as Paul had already told them to do.  Doing whatever we want is never a moral obligation.

It’s easy to imagine how the “strong” party in the church in Rome would have howled at this, but Paul has three arguments for them.  One, they are causing others pain by their insistence on getting their own way; that’s not loving, and so it isn’t an appropriate exercise of their freedom in Christ.  If the “weak” party were demanding they do something which was actually sinful, it would be different, but that isn’t the case.  Two, Paul says, their behavior is counterproductive, because pushing the Jews in the church to break the law won’t help them understand that they are truly free in Christ.  In the end, all it will do is harden their conviction that not keeping the law is bad.

And three, the strong need to understand that in pushing their weaker brothers and sisters to break the law, they are in fact driving them to sin.  True, the kosher laws are no longer binding on Christians, and so it isn’t a sin to eat non-kosher meat—but if you believe it’s a sin and you eat it anyway, then for you it’s a sin.  That might seem strange, but think it through.  If you believe an act is sinful and you decide to do it anyway, what do you have to do?  You have to decide to disobey God.  That decision is a sin, regardless of anything else.  If you’re absolutely convinced that God forbids us to step on cracks in the pavement, that doesn’t mean stepping on a crack is a sin—but if you believe you’re defying God, your intent is to sin, and so you are guilty of that intent.

Again, this doesn’t mean that we must be bound by the scruples of others—the mere fact that someone believes something we’re doing is wrong doesn’t mean we have to agree with them.  But we must respect their scruples.  For one, we need to listen to them humbly and respectfully, since they might be right; God might be using them to alert us to sin in our lives that we hadn’t been aware of.  And even if they aren’t, we need to respect their concerns and be careful not to lead them into anything that would be sinful for them, even if it’s not sinful at all for us.

Now, as we say this, we need to remember that there’s another sort of weakness in faith, one common to all of us in one way or another, which we can’t just blithely expect people to grow out of; it’s not exactly what Paul’s talking about, but his argument applies nevertheless.  Let me turn things over for a minute to Craig Ferguson of The Late Late Show, who puts it better than I could:  [NB:  start at 9:21; I can’t figure out how to make the embedded clip begin at that point]

Drinking alcohol isn’t a sin for everyone, but for some people it is.  Why?  Because you have to know your own weakness, and be wary of it.  We all have temptations that are particular weaknesses for us; some are just more societally acceptable than alcoholism, and more subtle.  Whatever they may be, we have to respect the danger they pose, and set guards in our souls around them, because even going near them is playing with fire.  To take another example, if sexual temptations are a particular weakness for you, there may be times when even turning on a computer is sinful, because that will be the trigger for temptation; that’s your point of no return.

We all have temptations for which even creating the possibility of being tempted is going too far; they’re like a black hole in our heart—once we cross the event horizon, we’re going to be sucked in.  We have to draw lines around them in our souls, because whatever anyone else might be able to do, we can’t even go toward them safely.  We can’t insist that everyone else has to draw the same lines, though we can certainly tell others why we’ve drawn the lines we have for ourselves; and we have every right to insist that our fellow Christians respect those lines when they’re around us.  By that same token, we have the responsibility to respect the lines others have drawn for themselves, so that we don’t put a stumbling block or a cause of offense—in the Greek, a skandalon—in their way.  Therefore, let us not judge another for their weakness, but let us instead judge our own behavior, so that we do nothing to make our brother or sister fall.

The break between chapters 13 and 14 marks the beginning of the last major section of Romans, but we need to be careful not to make the break too sharp.  It seems abrupt, and in a way it is, but chapters 14 and 15 continue to develop points and themes from earlier in the letter.  In particular, chapters 12 and 13 aren’t just abstract teaching about Christian behavior; though they do apply generally to every part of life, they’ve also been intended to lay some specific groundwork for what comes next.

We’ve said all the way along that Paul is particularly concerned for the relationship between Jews and Gentiles in the church; that’s why he lays out his argument in a way that stresses the continuity between God’s work in the church and his past work in national Israel.  That’s also why Paul puts so much time and effort into, first, arguing that Jews and Gentiles now come to God on exactly equal footing, in exactly the same way—through Jesus Christ—and, second, showing that this doesn’t contradict anything God said through the Law and the Prophets, but in fact fulfills them.  His concern is theological, but good theology is practical:  bad theology on the part of both Jewish and Gentile Christians has led to quarrels and division in the body of Christ, and needs correcting.

The root of the matter appears to have been, as you would expect, disagreement over keeping the Jewish law.  On the one hand, you have Jewish Christians who do believe that they are saved by Christ alone, but also believe that they need to continue to keep the Old Testament law as law in order to live the kind of holy and pure life God requires.  On the other stand Gentile Christians, many of whom never kept the law before, who see no need whatsoever to do so now, given that their salvation is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.  This wouldn’t need to be a problem, except that each group is convinced that they are right and the other group needs to change, and is bad for refusing to change; as a result you get quarrels, name-calling, accusations, put-downs, and all the other things that make up the political ads I talked about last week.

In this case, the Gentile group despises the Jewish group as weak in faith for continuing to cling to the law of Moses, while the Jewish group is con­demning the Gentile group as unrighteous—as not even caring enough to be righteous—for refusing to keep the law.  Paul is not going to let this continue.  Whatever else either side may have right or wrong, their attitude toward each other is absolutely sinful and inappropriate.

He makes this argument even though he clearly agrees with the Gentile Christians that their Jewish brothers and sisters are indeed showing weakness in their faith.  They couldn’t be sure that the meat was kosher, and both it and the wine might have been offered to idols before being sold, so—just vegetables and water for them, just like Daniel and his friends.  There were many religious days to keep—besides the major feast and fast days, many Jews would set aside a day each week to fast and pray.  Is any of this necessary?  No; but how does that give the Gentiles any right to pass judgment?  Or again, what makes the Jews in the church think theyhave any right to judge?

There are a couple issues here.  One, neither group is sinning.  Both have put their faith in Christ alone; both are accepted by God.  Paul would like to see the Jewish Christians grow stronger in their faith, to the point where they no longer feel the need to keep the law—where they can trust their freedom in Christ—but this is nothing for which they deserve to be berated or treated with disdain.  On the other hand, they don’t have the right to claim their weakness as righteousness, much less to judge anyone else by that standard.

Two, both groups’ focus is wrong.  Was it inappropriate for the strong Christians to recognize the weakness in faith of some of the Jewish Christians?  No.  Was it wrong for the weak to be concerned about the way some of the Gentile Christians were living?  In part, but maybe not in whole.  We’re called to build each other up in faith, not to ignore the issues in one another’s lives.  But.  Remember what Paul’s been talking about—don’t think more of yourself than you ought to, honor one another above yourselves, love one another.  Put aside the works of darkness, including dissension and jealousy; don’t try to make yourself superior to one another.

When we see weakness or sin in the life of a fellow Christian, if we can do anything to encourage and guide them and help them grow, we have a responsibility to do what we can; but even when that means exercising discipline, as parents or as leaders, that doesn’t give us the right to pass judgment.  Judgment comes down from above, and we don’t stand that way before each other; we come from beside one another, down on our knees, humbly seeking to serve.  The right to judge is God’s alone, because only the master has the right to judge his servant, and there is only one master:  God.

It’s no accident that this discussion in chapter 14 comes immediately after the commands in chapter 13 to walk in the day and stop planning out ways to satisfy the desires of the flesh; that’s a lot of what the dispute here is about.  OK, so you don’t need the law to be saved—but isn’t it the best way to make sure you’re living the way God wants you to live?  It seems like the most obvious one; but as Paul has already said, it doesn’t work.  The law doesn’t address what’s really wrong with us, and if we believe we need to keep it in order to be righteous, we tend to end up becoming convinced that we’re righteous because we’re keeping it—and thus that anyone who isn’t keeping it with us, isn’t righteous.  To whatever extent we put our trust in law, we’re putting our trust in ourselves rather than in Christ; that weakens our faith, and it makes us judgmental.

Instead, rather than focusing on controlling our behavior—and thus on controlling the behavior of others—we need to focus on the inputs:  where are we spending our time, physically and mentally?  Where are we turning our attention?  Paul has said this multiple times in various ways:  we need to set our minds on the Spirit of God, and the things of the Spirit, and thus open ourselves up for him to renew our minds, to change us from the inside out.  We need to recognize that we’re in a spiritual battle, which means we can’t fight it with weapons of the world—and law is one of those.

Here, by the way, is where we get to the change in the sermon title.  I didn’t realize this until late in the week, but the translation “armor of light” is an odd one:  the word in verse 12 isn’t the word for armor.  Depending on context, it either means “instruments” or “weapons.”  I guess they get “armor” from the clothing imagery in verse 14.  But this isn’t just a passive thing; it’s not just about protecting ourselves.  We are to take the light to the darkness—to actively go after the darkness with the light.

We should attack the sin in our own lives with the light of God; and we should attack the sin in the lives of those around us, and in our culture, the same way:  not with anger, judgment, condemnation, and bitterness, but with love, grace, joy, hope, and peace.  To be sure, people may not want the light shining into their lives, and they may respond with hostility; but our intent must never be to tear someone else down or to punish them, but only to build them up, to help them grow and heal.

As I stand here this morning, we look forward with great interest to a day three and a half weeks from now, when we will finally be free of campaign ads—at least for a year or so.  Honestly, whatever you think of the state of government in this country, I don’t think anyone likes the state of our political advertising, or political conversation more generally—it’s loud, it’s depressing, and it’s exhausting.

You see, our politics these days are powered and poisoned by anxiety; and if you take a look at the roots of that anxiety, it’s troubling.  When I was a kid we used to sing a parody of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”:  “This land is my land; this land ain’t your land.  I got a shotgun, and you don’t got one.”  And so on.  That’s the attitude driving our politics these days:  a frantic insistence that this is my country—and if you disagree with me, not yours.  You see it every election cycle; whichever party’s in power, candidates for the other one stand up and say, “It’s time to take back our country!”

As Christians, we’re supposed to have a broader perspective.  Remember what we said about Romans 8—this is not our home, this is not our final destination; we are in the wilderness, in between the land of slavery and the Promised Land.  That’s why 1 Peter 2 says, “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.”  We are aliens and strangers, we are exiles and transients; we are here for a time on our way to someplace better.  This is not our homeland, but the land of our wandering.  Is this our country?  Yes, but not to own, not to control, not to belong:  this is our country because this is where God has placed us to serve.

Our model is not the Jews in Israel under King David, but the exiles in Babylon under King Nebuchadnezzar.  Nebuchadnezzar was a highly problematic king from a Jewish point of view, since he worshiped false gods; and though he learned a certain respect for the God of Israel through Daniel, his successors lacked even that.  The exiles weren’t in their true country under their true king, and they knew it; but Jeremiah tells them, for as long as God has them there, to settle in and work for the good of Babylon.  Never forget that this is not your home, to be sure; but equally, never forget that you’re here because God put you here, and he put you here to serve.

Which is what Paul is on about.  As we saw last week, these seven verses sit in the middle of a long passage about love; if you took them out, you’d never guess anything was missing.  But they belong here, because loving others as Christ loved us will have political consequences.  In particular, Paul forbids us to take any sort of vengeance or in any way respond in kind when evil is done to us; instead, he says, “Overcome evil with good.”  And yet, evil must be judged and punished.  That, Paul says, is what government is for; and so he spends a few moments considering the purpose of government and how we as Christians should relate to it.

Note carefully how Paul begins his argument.  Everyone, he declares, must submit to the governing authorities—everybody, period, no ifs, ands, buts, or exceptions.  But he says submit rather than obey.  We must acknowledge the general rule that the government has authority over us, because God who is the source of all authority is the one who has instituted all human authorities; and we submit to them under God.  Our ultimate allegiance is to him, and our total obedience is due to him alone; all human authorities are secondary, deriving their legitimacy from him.  We don’t have the right to reject them, but government doesn’t have the right to do anything it wants, either.  When a government is bent on rewarding evil rather than good, then we must obey God rather than government.  That’s part of seeking the welfare of the country to which he has sent us.

In general, however, we are to obey the governing authorities, because God has established them to serve his purposes in the world.  That’s true whether the authority in question is the town council or President Obama; and it will be true next month whether we see a second Obama term or a victory for Governor Romney.  After all, neither one could possibly be as bad as Nebuchadnezzar was.  The government of Rome wasn’t particularly godly either, even at its best; but even ungodly and flawed governments play a necessary part in God’s work in human history, as Rome most certainly did.

Our submission to government, then, isn’t rooted in the assumption that govern­ment always does what is right—or even that it usually does what is right; Paul isn’t that naïve.  Rather, it’s rooted in trust in God.  God is in control, and in everything that happens he is at work to accomplish his purposes.  He has appointed our governments and their leaders, and so they function as his servants.  If they are rebellious, then he will judge them and take his vengeance on them in his due time; and as Joseph said to his brothers, what they mean for evil, God will use for good.  It doesn’t always make sense to us, and often what happens isn’t what we think God’s will is, or ought to be; but however each election turns out, and whatever laws may be passed—even if they are unjust—we can trust that God is still on his throne, and his plan and his will have not failed.

We need to disengage from the “win at all costs” mentality of our politics—which doesn’t serve us well, and really isn’t ultimately about the issues anyway.  That mentality comes from our politicians; for many of them it is “win at all costs,” not for anyone else’s sake, but for the sake of their jobs.  We’re just being used.  If the American church were to stop playing politics and choose to show our country a more excellent way, we would bear witness to the gospel in a way that the world could not ignore, or explain away.

Yes, we should be engaged with the issues, and yes, we should do everything we can to see that what our governments do is just and right; in our system, we have some small power to influence that, and we’re responsible to use it.  But we must do all things humbly, remembering that we are sinners in need of grace, and people of limited wisdom, just as much as those with whom we disagree—and for that matter, that the same is true of those politicians we support.  There are no messiahs in politics, on either side.  There’s only one Messiah, and he flatly refused to work politically even when he could have.

As well, we should remember that our true battle isn’t political but spiritual, and our true enemy is spiritual; even the most evil people we ever see, though they be judged by God for their evil, are ultimately the victims of our great enemy, just as we are.  We shouldn’t see our political opponents as enemies—and the more we do, the more that obliges us to love them and pray for God to bless them.  Yes, we may pray for him to bless them with repentance and wisdom and regret, but even so, we need to recognize that when God told us to love one another, he meant them, too.

And finally, we need to recognize that when Paul tells us to submit to the governing authorities, it’s because it isn’t the church’s job to be the governing authorities.  Our mission is not to win political battles, and our call is not to make people act in godly ways; that’s law, not gospel.  Law is the government’s nature and mission; the gospel is ours.  Yes, the gospel speaks to the issues of our day, because the gospel speaks to every­thing—and yes, if we preach the gospel faithfully, that will mean challenging the world where it doesn’t want to be challenged, just as that has always been part of preaching the gospel.  But we must keep the gospel at the center of everything we do, and our aim must always be to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ, not to push the platform of a political party; and when we speak the truth of God into political issues, we must always do so lovingly, our speech seasoned heavily with grace, in a spirit of peace.  There’s enough loud, loveless, graceless speech in our political ads as it is; heaven forbid we should add to it.

“What the world needs now is love, sweet love”; so Hal David told us.  “All you need is love,” according to John Lennon.  Is it true?  Well, maybe.  It depends.  Define your terms—what do you mean by “love”?  If we’re talking about the love of God revealed in Christ, then yes, without question; but people usually aren’t.  They more often say things like, “if you loved me, you would”—in which the word “love” is wielded as an emotional crowbar, a basis for demands and manipulation.  That’s not real love.

The problem is, we keep trying to define “love” to suit ourselves; but that would derail everything Paul’s talking about in this chapter.  We need to let love rule in our lives, but that love must be genuine.  That word—the NIV translates it “sincere”—is important; we need to distinguish real love, the genuine article, from the counterfeit.  Real love is no mere pretense or outward display, it’s nothing we can use to suit our own agendas; rather, love is defined by God, who is the source of all love.  It’s an expression of his nature and character, and so it shapes our character to make us more like him.

Thus love is not merely about feelings; that’s part of it, but love expresses itself in action, and so changes our behavior.  The love of God in us moves us to want what God wants, and to want to do what he wants; it takes away our taste for evil, teaching us to loathe it instead.  As such, love fulfills the law of God, because it moves us to do the will of God not out of fear or duty or desire for reward, but out of a renewed mind and heart.  We keep the law on the way, as we’re on about something more important; our focus is not on keeping the law, but on loving God, and loving others as he loves us.

The more we seek God, the better we know him and the more we love him, and the more we’re motivated to love those around us.  As with any relationship, our love will tend to cool if we don’t keep seeking him; we need to keep opening ourselves up to the Holy Spirit.  It’s not just praying or reading the Bible—we can easily do both those things with closed hearts; it’s pre­paring ourselves for the Spirit to speak to us, and letting go our efforts to control what he might say or do.  The more we open ourselves up, the more the Spirit fills us with love for God and fires us up to love each other and serve the Lord—to serve the Lord by loving each other.

Part of that is the Spirit’s work in renewing our minds, in giving us the common mindset Paul talked about in verse 3.  Here in verse 16, the NIV renders it “live in harmony with one another,” but we might say “think the same thing toward one another”; the point is not that we never disagree (or never admit we disagree), but that we recognize that we all stand together:  we all share in one salvation, through one faith, by the one grace of God, and we are all absolutely dependent on his grace.  Thus we live in humility toward one another, humbly confessing our own sins and failures and shortcomings, and humbly forgiving our brothers and sisters for their sins and failures and shortcomings, recognizing that we all need grace, and we all need each other.

Thus as well Paul tells us we should seek to bless one another rather than to bless ourselves—and indeed should actively look for opportunities to do so.  We are brothers and sisters in Christ; in a healthy family, we may not always be happy with one another, but we’re always committed to love and care for one another regardless.  We understand that the need of one is the need of all—and we should see our church family in the same way, holding our needs in common and doing what we can to ensure that they’re all met, because that’s what people who love one another and are committed to one another do for each other.  Nor is this just about physical needs.  Paul also calls us to grieve with those who grieve, sharing their burden and letting them know they’re not alone; and, what’s often harder, he tells us to rejoice with those who rejoice, not grudgingly or enviously, but wholeheartedly glad with them and for them.

Our love doesn’t end with those who love us, however; we’re also called to love non-believers, and we’re called to love our enemies and those who persecute us.  Indeed, God loves them as much as he loves us, and so we should love them just as sincerely and single-mindedly as we love our friends within the church.  Not only are we forbidden to avenge ourselves, Paul tells us not to call down God’s vengeance on our enemies; instead, we’re supposed to bless them and serve them, and to ask God to bless them.

Now, that might seem like a wildly unreasonable set of commands, on the surface; but Paul wants us to see deeper, and so he quotes Proverbs 25:  do this for your enemies, “for in so doing you’ll heap burning coals on their heads.”  Blessing those who curse you isn’t giving in to them, or cooperating with them in hurting you; rather, it confounds them, because it’s not in their script.  As Oscar Wilde quipped, “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”  To freely serve your enemies and bless your persecutors in the love of God is to act in defiance of their hatred and opposition, against their expectations, and out of a power which is completely alien to them; for we can only do so sincerely in  the strength of God, by the work of his Holy Spirit.

Apart from God, when we’re attacked, we can’t see past our own egos and our own hurt; we may hit back in anger, freeze in shame, or run in fear, but we cannot act freely or constructively.  God gives us the strength to respond with love, and the ability to trust him that we will not lose by loving our enemies and asking him to bless them.  You see, the greatest blessing God can give them is repentance—a blessing which can only come through the burning coals of shame and guilt.  It is better for us that our enemies should repent than that we should see them destroyed; better that they become our friends, and better that they confess the wrong they’ve done and seek to make it right.  But if they will not, then God will judge them for it in his time.  Either way, in the end, he will vindicate those who love him, who depend on him and call on his name.

You can’t overcome evil with evil, and you can’t beat hatred with hatred.  Either it crushes you, or you become like it and it absorbs you.  You can only overcome evil with good, and you can only defeat hatred with love.  We lose sight of that, because we get focused on the battle we see, and we think that’s the real battle—but it isn’t.  The real battle is to continue to love in the face of hate, and continue to do good in response to evil; when by the grace of God and the power of his Spirit we’re able to do that, then even if we lose, we win.  We win because the love of God is the power of his kingdom, and the powers of this world are doomed to fail, but his kingdom is eternal, and his love will reign forever.  Let’s pray.