Our Only Obligation, Sermon September 4, 2011

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
September 4, 2011
Proper 18

On Friday, I took my kids to volunteer at St. James the Less School in Hunting Park.  My children pointed out that since the volunteering was not their choice it wasn’t really volunteering.  Faced with young minds that wanted to know why, I had to reflect, “Why does our family value serving our neighbors”  It is a true saying, “The child forms the parent!”

Thankfully our reading from Romans was there to help me reflect on the call to serve. In short, the passage says, “Our only obligation is to Love our Neighbors without Gratifying our Lesser desires.” 

Obligation, Love, Gratification are my key words this morning.

Let’s take that summary apart.  Paul starts the passage with a rhetorical trick.  “Owe no one anything.”  Which sounds good … until you get to comma, “Owe no one anything (comma) except to love one another.”  That is a different picture.  Our obligation to our neighbor is to love them.

And what is this love according to Paul? He summarizes the 10 commandments and says, don’t kill your neighbor, don’t sleep with his or her spouse and don’t covet their stuff.  That is a fairly low bar for love, a classic negative definition that doesn’t shed much light on our positive obligations to our neighbor.  However, Paul is saying something about the context of love – love is about social fabric, trust, solidarity and cohesion – the essential foundations for a just society – not just about warm, fuzzy feelings.  Murder, adultery and coveting are wrong because they totally undermine any chance of social cohesion, trust, or solidarity. They break relationship in ways that are most challenging to redeem, restore, and reconcile.  They distract vital energy from our mission to be a Holy people.

Finally the fun stuff, gratification; “Make no provision to gratify the flesh,” writes Paul. Remember, for Paul, flesh is not the same as body.  Flesh is our compulsive nature, which acts out of a disordered desire that disrespects and damages the integrity of life before God.  Instead, Paul offers an alternative flesh “Put on Jesus Christ,” put on our Baptismal identity which orders our desires toward respecting and enhancing the integrity of life before God which is gratifying in its own way.  The problem is not gratification itself.  I want to emphasize healthy pleasure, faithful gratification.  To often the moral life is depicted as totally detached from pleasure rather than having a pleasure all its own which is much more satisfying than what our culture peddles as fulfilling and desirable.

Our only obligation is to love our neighbor without gratifying our lesser desires.  We need to hear this statement today.  The question of obligation to neighbor is at the center of a heated debate with a large number of Americans rejecting any sense of obligation or social bond, rejecting the common good not to mention love of neighbor.

For the intentional follower of Jesus Christ, there is no question that we owe love to our neighbor, that we are in essential solidarity with the well-being of our neighbor and called to be as motivated by their interests as our own.  Our Faith provides an alternative understanding of what it means to be human, centered on the freedom to act according to the obligations of love.  This alternative rubs against the grain of our cultural concept of humanity at every point. 

I am deeply concerned that we are not only living in an unethical time, but an anti-ethical time.  (Totally shocked that a good friend with an MBA from a leading business school never had a business ethics course!) Public discourse about human behavior is increasingly dominated by the pseudo-science of economics and the misused real science of genetics which claim to explain our behavior according to fixed patterns of rivalrous self-interest, base gratification, and fundamentally competitive, libertarian modes of freedom.  It does not seem a coincidence that this cruel logic is dominating an age of unprecedented inequality.

Against this horrible effacement of our moral integrity and aspiration we have St. Paul’s simple words, “Owe no one anything, except to love them.” 

How does our Faith change the questions and change the possibilities?  Must we always pay less for food if paying less harms workers?  Or can we – in love – choose to pay more?  Must we always pay less for labor if paying less harms workers?  Or can we – in love - choose to pay a living wage?

Of course, we will get the protest about the all-powerful market and the cry that to choose a Christian ethic is to put us at a disadvantage to competition.  This protest is absolutely true, yes following Christ is costly, it makes us vulnerable, and it makes us look foolish.

Faith does not give us every answer to every question but it does give us the strength, courage, and trust to face what must be confronted; open to new possibilities that glorify God.  At the risk of looking foolish, what if our obligation to love our neighbor is calling us on this Labor Day weekend to explore how we can create living wage jobs?  Why should that seem impossible?  As a single community of faith maybe we can create a few jobs.  As a diocese maybe we can turn our considerable resources toward much more job creation, as a member of POWER we join with 40 congregations in Philadelphia and one of our agenda items is job creation.

Passive, powerless, despair in the face of inevitable economic forces is not our calling.  Our obligation is to love one another in ways that enhance the integrity of life before God, and meaningful, productive labor is one way life finds integrity.