Broadway Christian Church ·Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship ·July 17, 2005

Prayer of the Day

Gracious God, fit us this hour for usefulness in your world that our words and deeds may add to your praise.  Amen.

Scripture
Romans 13:8-14

Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the Law.  The commandments, “Do not commit adultery,”  “Do not murder,”  “Do not steal,”  “Do not covet,” and whatever other commandments there may be, are summed up in this one rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  Love does no harm to its neighbor.  Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

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.  So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.  Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy.  Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature.

Message
Owe No One Anything, Except…
Rick Frost

It is good to be back with you again.  As some of you may know, our gang has been out of town.  We went to a family reunion at Aunt Helen’s cabin.  God bless Aunt Helen for having the foresight sixty years ago to buy one acre – just one little acre of land – that is now within the city limits of Estes Park, Colorado.  It’s all right.  She’s already willed it to somebody else.

It’s a good place for a family reunion, however.  At 9,000 feet in the middle of July, the Big Thompson River is just a hundred yards down the way, a herd of elk is frolicking in your backyard.  It’s not exactly Fulton, but it will do.  Family reunion!  A wonderful time!

On our way to Estes Park, we were in Evergreen visiting some friends.  Some of you know that place.  There is a highway in the mountains called Peak-to-Peak Highway, and we were driving along there at ten or eleven thousand feet, and it starts to rain, sort of a snow-and-rain kind of thing.  I turned on the car’s windshield wipers.  The one on the driver’s side, of course, came loose and started flopping around.  There was this murmur sitting next to me saying, “We may want to fix that soon.”  It was a redheaded navigator sitting next to me.  You know how that is.

“I’ll take care of it when we get to Estes Park, Sweetheart.”

Knowing my mechanical skills, she visibly shuddered.

I called the NAPA Auto Parts place as soon as I got to Estes.  “Yes, we have two of those in stock.”

“I’ll be right there.”

For $9.99, she handed me the windshield wiper component.  Now, I didn’t know that.  I thought windshield wipers were just that little rubber thing that you slid.  No, no.  They now have the whole thing – the component –  $9.99.

“Hard to install?”

“No,” she said.  “It’s easy.  Just follow two steps.  There are pictures right there.  Follow the instructions.  Just follow the directions.”  A key message to all mankind.

So, out of the NAPA parking lot I went.  I opened the box.  I pulled out the picture instructions.  I did exactly what it said, and I fiddled with that darn thing for 30 minutes.  I couldn’t get the old component off.  I looked at my watch.  It was 4:40 on Friday afternoon.  I ran back to the NAPA place.

“Can you help?”

“No, we just sell this stuff.  We don’t install it.  Try Bob’s up the way.”

I jump in the car, drive to Bob’s Auto and Truck Repair.  He has a slew of SUVs and 18-wheelers in his various bays.  Desperately, I grab my wiper; go into the office.  Susie, the receptionist, looks up.  “Can I help you?”

“Susie, I’m obviously from out of town.  My windshield wiper needs to be replaced, and I can’t get the darn thing off.  Is there anybody here who can do this two-minute job before you close?  Please?”

She rolled her eyes, put the phone on hold, got a screwdriver out of her desk, walked out to my car.  Step one.  Step two.  Voila!

I stood there in awe.  I considered touching the hem of her garment, but then I thought better of that.  She still had the screwdriver.  Anyway, “Susie,” I said, “you’re amazing.  I mean it took me 30 minutes.  How did you do that?”

She just looked at me.

I said, “Susie, how much do I owe you?”

And she said, “Aw, forget it.  Gosh, it was nothing.  Have a good vacation.”

I said, “No, no.  I insist.  You’ve done me a huge favor,” and I pulled a $10 bill out of my wallet.  “I hope this $10 will be sufficient.”  (I thought, you know, $300 an hour should pretty well cover it.)

She smiled, “If you insist.”  She took my $10.  Everybody went home very happy.

“What do I owe you?”

St. Paul said in his letter we read just moments ago, “Owe no one anything.  Owe nothing to anyone.”

Tough words in a debt-ridden society.  Right?  Tough words for you and me to hear and for most of the people in this country, because we have house payments, and we have car payments, and we have student-loan payments, and we have loads of credit card payments.  That’s just for the financial openers, folks.

“What do I owe you?”

Within the context of this passage, Paul says owe nothing to anyone, and you’ll save yourself and the people in your life a lot of pain and a lot of grief.  Why?  Because… you know this.  When you owe somebody something, you no longer have a relationship with that person.  You have a deal.  Right?  It’s a deal.  They have something you want.  You have something they want.  Sometimes it’s money.  Sometimes it’s privilege.  It can be sex.  It can be position.  It can be potential.  It can be power.  It can be a way in to where you want to get.  It can be a way out of where you want to get away.  Before you know it, a deal is cut.  Right?

A deal!  Then you’re in this endless loop of give and take.  You’re in this endless cycle of using and being used.  In some circles it’s called, “Pump, Dump, and Run.”  That translates pretty simply to this: “Acquire it.  Consume it.  Toss what’s left into the trash can, and then move on.”  In all kinds of settings – folks, you know this – that’s not only legal in this country; it’s very acceptable.  It’s happening all the time.

Has anybody else besides me noticed that most of the folks that you and I connect with in this world don’t think of us as persons anymore?  We’re a unit of value.  We’re an object.  We’re a customer.  And what that means is you have something that someone else wants or you owe something to someone, which Paul says leads to a whole grab bag of difficulties if you’re not really, really careful.

Theft, adultery, promiscuity, coveting, even the taking of another life.  Read it in the paper every day.  All of which are the consequences of perceiving people – real live human beings – as objects of measurable value.  You know… How much you are really worth as opposed to being a person, a child of God, which is of immeasurable worth.  You see… That is the issue.  It has always been the issue.  It hasn’t changed.  It’s the issue of the ages.  It’s the spiritual issue of the day.  It’s never going to go away.  How you answer that question – whether you are an object of measurable worth and value or whether you are a person of immeasurable value and worth – how you go about that, how the world goes about that, how our society goes about that, makes all the difference in the world.

“Owe no one anything,” said St. Paul, “except to love another person.  That’s the one thing you owe.  It’s the only thing you want to owe because,” Paul says, “the one who loves another has fulfilled the laws of God.

Now, everybody here knows how the world works, how it really works.  It’s buying and selling, it’s giving, it’s taking, it’s using, it’s being used.  Nothing is free.  You know that.  Everything has at least an unspoken understanding that a favor that is done for you is a favor that can be called back when it’s wanted and needed.  What goes around comes around.  It’s the good-old-boy system.  It hasn’t changed.  It’s the way the world works.  You know that.

Karl Barth, the great theologian of decades ago, said, “Love of another ought to be taken as a protest against the way the world actually works.”

Jesus undertook the protest by using one single force, and that was the force of love to turn everything in the way the world usually works upside down.  The relationship between the haves and the have-nots, between the sick and the healthy, between the clean and the unclean, between the lost and the found, between the noble and the ordinary, even between the living and the dead.  And the purest form of his kind of love was the love given freely to someone who was absolutely unable to repay it.  Do you remember that?  Where payment was utterly an impossibility.  That, in the New Testament, is considered the supreme form of love.

Folks, there is a reason why 3,000,000 children in this country are going to go to school in September hungry every single morning.  There is a reason why the infirmed elderly are going to die abandoned in nursing homes that you and I are never going to see.  There is a reason why 25 per cent of the population living on the African continent suffers from the disease of A.I.D.S., while the first-world nations withhold stockpiles of effective medications.  There is a reason why our government is sending 125,000 U.S. troops to Iraq, but not a soul did we send to Rwanda.  There is a reason.  It’s not that hard to figure out.  Those folks simply, seemingly, have nothing to give us in return.  There is no return on our investment.

But Jesus said, “What good is it if you love the people who can repay you?  I want you to love even your enemies, and in so doing, if you do that, you will receive your reward in heaven.”

Folks, I’d be the last person to stand before you and tell you I know how that happens and how you get there.  How do you get to that point in your life?  How do you get to that point unless you actually, personally, experience the depth of God’s love in your own life?  How in the world do you get there unless you know from your own personal experience that grace is free?  Yes, it is, but, by golly, it ain’t cheap.  How in the world do you know that?  How in the world do you get there if you have never been at a place in your life where there is no way that you can repay the debt?  There is nothing you can do to personally make things right, to make things even.  If you haven’t been there, you don’t know what we’re talking about.  It can be preached.  I’ve heard it all my life.  I’ve preached it all my life.  But until it’s experienced, those words are absolutely lifeless.

Now, I’ve been fortunate.  I get to see it almost every day.  I get to see it with people who sit in this room.  I have personally experienced it myself, but I want you to know it’s rare.  It’s rare in today’s world.

The question today:  Are you one of the few?  Have you experienced personally what we’re talking about?

He threw himself over the edge one day of a treacherous, lonely canyon that in today’s world is called “marital infidelity.”  He stayed down there for about seven years.  He didn’t know how to pull himself out of it.  He was too afraid to ask for help.

Things got messier and messier.  One day he lost his grip, nearly fell off the face of the earth.  He lost contact with his family, his friends, his colleagues, his church.  He lost everything.  But, he came to the place one day when he wanted it back.  He wanted it back, all of it.   And so he asked, how in the world could that happen?  He was told, basically, there is only one way.  You have to ask for it.  Grace is free, folks, but it’s not cheap.  He couldn’t buy it back.  He couldn’t earn it back.  He couldn’t work a deal to make it happen.  What this young man was begging for was free, but it wasn’t going to come cheap.  It was going to cost his family immeasurably before it was all over.

It took time.  He stood at the door, and he knocked for what seemed a lifetime.  It looked pretty bleak, but eventually they let him back in.  They gave him a place to start over, a place in the very family he once destroyed.  Now, some folks thought his wife and children were fools.  Some folks thought he was getting off way too easy.  Some folks thought he didn’t deserve another chance.  But a few – not many – but a few understood this isn’t about winning and losing.  This isn’t about fairness.  This isn’t about retribution.  It’s only about the love of Jesus, which came into this world to overcome it.

I have a job for you this week.  I’m going to give you an assignment.  It goes for me, too, by the way.  I want you to make it your mission this week to be on the lookout for something.  I want to ask you.  I want to give you the assignment of loving someone this week, in an appropriate way, who cannot repay you.  You’re not going to get one thing in return.  I want you to attempt the pure love of the way of Jesus.  You’re going to get that opportunity, most of you.  I want you to try it.  I want you to love just the way Jesus loves us – not according to our merit, not according to our net worth, not according to our gifts, not according to our usefulness, but according to our need.  If you are willing to do that, my prayer is that it might be an experience – a personal experience – for you that you see in the face of that person whom you love, your own reflection, your own likeness – that part of you that is undone, undressed, unworthy.   If you’re willing to do that, if you do it, I think you’re going to be one of the few.  You are actually going to experience the depth of God’s love.  You’ll know something of the fact that grace is free, yes, but it ain’t cheap.  Perhaps, maybe for the very first time, you’ll understand the words that are found in the Gospels that say, “Behold the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world,” because you’re not an object.  You’re a person.  You’re a child of God, a person of immeasurable worth.

So… “Owe no one anything except to love one another, for the one who loves fulfills all the laws of God.”

And we all say together… “Amen.”  

Benediction

Generous God, your love is a gift we’ve freely received.  May it be a gift we freely give.  We are the beneficiaries of your will.  Help us to share this inheritance.  Amen.