Again, if it were not for the insertion of chapters and verses we would read this without even pausing from verse 6. We are to pay everything that is due from us as citizens – regardless of whether we feel it is fair. We are not to be foolish about it since we have the options of tax deductions, offsets, exclusions and other perfectly legal means to reduce the burden but, in the end, we are to pay our debts to the government. Whatever we legitimately owe we are to pay and not be constantly figuring ways to off load our rightful debt to others without the means or knowledge. In the course of my work I have dealt with a number of estate and tax attorneys and have met more than a few who are so consumed with tax avoidance and gaming the IRS that they spend their lives creating the most convoluted schemes and devices. They are not as much interested in the welfare of the families they serve as they are in beating the IRS. I know if they could find a way to pay no taxes at all and live rent free off everyone else they would do it in a moment. That is no way to live and that is why Paul wants us not to spend our time that way – which we will see in a few minutes. We are not to be driven by avoiding taxes or withholding our respect for officials unless they earn it from us by holding to our particular ideas and beliefs. I like what Justice Scalia said. “I attack ideas. I don’t attack people. And some very good people have some very bad ideas. And if you can’t separate the two, you gotta get another day job.”

So, we should not live as debtors with those we rightfully owe. But, there is one debt from which we are never free and that is the obligation to love one another. I do wish Paul had made that a voluntary action and not a sense of debt. I am not being told to volunteer to love my neighbor but I cannot ever get out from under the obligation to do that. I owe my neighbor a debt that will never be fully repaid. We are never even with each other and there is no way I can get an exclusion or deduction. I am stuck with loving you and your loving me it seems. It is like a parent’s love. It is a responsibility and not just a feeling. It is what Rollo May termed “an act of the will.”

Love that is pleasant is like a flower – beautiful, fragile and temporary. Love as Paul describes it is like the story in the rings of a great redwood with the record of fire, drought, disease and storms. It is love that thrives in the good years and perseveres in spite of hardship, misunderstandings, and crises.

I know I quote Wendell Berry all the time and maybe you get tired of him but he is so clear on this point. It is from his book “Jayber Crow” about a young man who leaves his home but then comes back and in spite of always considering leaving again finds himself staying on just a little longer.

“And so I came to belong to this place. Being here satisfies me. I had laid my claim on the place had made it answerable to my life. Of course you can’t do that and get away free. You can’t choose it seems without being chosen. For the place in return had laid its claim on me and had made my life answerable to it.”

I was introduced to Justin Skeesuck and Patrick Gray this week by a friend.

“Over the past 20+ years, a progressive neuromuscular disease has slowly taken away Justin’s ability to use his arms and legs. From each morning until night, Justin requires daily assistance in every aspect of life such as eating, getting dressed, bathing and even using the restroom.

It’s very humbling to be in a position where you have to be bathed, you have to be helped going to the bathroom and having neighbors come over and pick you up off the floor when you’ve fallen down,” he told TODAY.com.

“You start to question the purpose of being here, and I could see that darkness and for the first time knew how people could get to that point in their lives and just live in that darkness.”

One rainy, ugly day, a light went on.

“I had the choice in my life to go down this road — or I could choose to make the best of it and reshape my life where I could still be an effective husband and father, where I could still achieve things,” Skeesuck said. “I chose not to go down that dark road.”

In the spring of 2012, Justin learned about the Camino de Santiago while watching Rick Steve’s on Public Access TV. Soon after, Justin asked his lifelong friend, Patrick, what he thought about tackling the ancient pilgrimage. Patrick’s response was simple and direct. He said, “I’ll push you.”
Two years later, they started their journey and had absolutely no idea how they would make the 500 miles from France to the Cathedral in Santiago.”

And that is exactly what he and a team of others – some friends and some total strangers – did for six weeks in Spain. They push, pulled, lifted and carried Justin the 500 hundred miles of the Camino de Santiago.

You can learn more about the journey and the film they are making at www.illpushyou.com

That is what Paul is talking about here. We have a claim on each other and for some unknown reason we are answerable to each other. We are strangely connected as different as we are from each other and are a part of each other’s lives. It’s not just social or we happen to be interested in the same things. In God’s providence we have been put together to take care of each other. To spur each other on to good works. To keep each other from drifting. To encourage each other and to tell the truth in love so that we might grow up into maturity and the “whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” We cannot do this on our own. I owe you this and you owe this to me. Not just when we have the inclination or good feelings but even when we would rather be doing other things.

Of course, as Paul says, love is the fulfillment of the Law but he doesn’t mean it is enough to have good feelings about people around us. The whole purpose of the Law was to be our tutor in teaching us to love one another. We don’t start with love any more than we start with a concert before we have learned our scales. We start with obedience and then work our way toward love. It is so much easier to leave people with a set of rules to follow and hope they will live good lives that way but Paul understood that the rules had a larger purpose other than good individual lives. The purpose of the rules was to teach people not just to be good but to love one another. It’s not easy and it doesn’t just happen. There are disciplines and practices that are required to learn how to love one another. It’s not natural. In fact, it is impossible on our own and that is why it is important to remember that much of what Paul instructs is useless and only frustrating for the person who is not a Christian. People may point to others as examples of non-Christians who have loved their neighbors and some of those people are far more attractive than Christians to the world. But, they have not loved their neighbors in the way God intended. They may have been extraordinarily kind and considerate but that is not the only measure of love. Love is far more than that. It is the love that can only come from first loving God and that love is sometimes a total surprise. Unless our love somehow points people to God and not to our kindness and consideration then it is not the love that Paul is talking about. This does not mean door to door evangelism in our neighborhood or at work but it does mean constantly asking the question, “What does it mean to love this fellow believer in spite of our differences?” If we can do that then we are making progress.

“And do this, understanding the present time. The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over; the day is almost here.”

There is an urgency to loving one another in Paul’s mind and not just loving one another in order to get along or make life pleasant. Always in the back of his mind was the sense of responsibility he had for the Church and his calling to prepare them for the return of Christ. He was not focused on the present alone but felt the deep obligation of preparing them for the future. It was even larger than that. He was revealing a mystery through the Church that had been hidden. In Ephesians he says, “Although I am less than the least of God’s people, this grace was given me: to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make plain to everyone the administration of this mystery, which for ages past was kept hidden in God, who created all things. His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose which he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Think about that. What is the role of the church? To make known to rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms the wisdom of God. That is vastly different from the way we see the church, I suspect. For many of us, it is to meet our spiritual and social needs and provide a certain salt and light in our community. Not according to Paul. The reason we are to love each other is not to be at peace with each other or just an example to the non-Christians around us but the church is the only place in the whole universe that is a witness for the wisdom of God. For me, that means these rulers and authorities are watching our lives together to catch a glimpse of what is on the mind of God. I have no idea what the implications of that are…but it’s a larger purpose than I can imagine.

So, we are to wake up from our slumber. I like the way Eugene Peterson puts it in the Message:

“But make sure that you don’t get so absorbed and exhausted in taking care of all your day-by-day obligations that you lose track of the time and doze off, oblivious to God.”

What does it mean to wake up to God? What does it mean, as Paul puts it elsewhere to “redeem the time” and live wisely. What does it mean to “number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom”?

I think it means an awakened mind. A friend of mine in Dallas went back to graduate school at SMU at the age of 50. As she told me, she felt she had drifted off to sleep in the Highland Park bubble. She had everything everyone around her wanted but she was drowsy. She graduated first in her MBA class at the Cox School of Business. She woke up her mind.

I think it means an awakened spirit. Another friend, Ali Hannah, was a consultant for McKinsey and spending his days analyzing companies. He went through a Bible study course named Alpha that changed his life and he spent several years working to make that course available to people around the world.

I think it means an awakened enthusiasm. A friend, Gordon, had been in Christian work for decades and found himself dry and worn out. He went with a ministry to Africa for two weeks and when he came back he had found a whole new purpose and energy for his work.

It means an awakened heart. Marriages can go to sleep or doze off. Sometimes our interest in other people lags and we find ourselves becoming insensitive and distant. Our hearts need waking up. I’ve been with people who have become so burdened with the needs of others that their own hearts become cold and hardened. Our hearts need a jolt now and then.

It can mean an awakened gift. People make fun of George W. Bush for becoming a painter but I don’t. Getting older and free from the strains of some responsibilities is often the perfect time to rekindle something that is inside you but has never been given a chance to grow.

“So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us behave decently…”

So often we think about “deeds of darkness” as serious sin – orgies, drunkenness, sexual immorality and debauchery. They are. No doubt about it. But sometimes it is not so much deep darkness as it is living in a kind of gray half-light that is neither serious sin or the joy of living in the light. It is what you might call artificial light. As some of you know, I love to take pictures of fruit and vegetables – along with flowers. Outdoor farmer’s markets are perfect for me but indoor farmer’s markets with fluorescent light are terrible. That light washes out everything that natural light enhances. Sometimes an anemic spiritual life is more like artificial light than deep darkness. It is a washed out light that is a cheap imitation of real sunlight. It is what C.S. Lewis called greytown in “The Great Divorce” where a drab half-light never turns to darkness or becomes light.

“I seemed to be standing in a bus queue by the side of a long mean street. Evening was just closing in and it was raining. I had been wandering for hours in similar mean streets, always in the rain and always in evening twilight. Time seemed to have paused on that dismal moment when only a few shops have lit up and it is not yet dark enough for their windows to look cheering. And just as the evening never advanced to night, so my walking never brought me to the better parts of the town.”

As you know, his description of Hell is not so much one of torture and fires but of a permanent grayness and separation. I sometimes think those “deeds of twilight” may do more harm to the soul than deeds of darkness. The older I get the less likely I am to indulge in those but boredom, greed, apathy, resentment, envy and bitterness – those are the sins of this stage of life. In the “Screwtape Letters” Wormwood puts it this way, “You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but also in conversations with those he cares nothing about, on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say…’I now see that I spent most my life doing in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”

The word for “behave decently” also means “with grace and elegance” and that is what Paul is heading for all along in this passage. Yes, there are things we can no longer do but by loving our neighbor, being awake to God and redeeming the time we can live the lives of grace and elegance God intends. We can live in the light. We can live with color. We can live with anticipation and the expectation of what God is doing. We can live with a sense of opportunity and purpose and genuine commitment to each other while we wait, as Paul says, for the time when we shall inherit the kingdom of God.