Sixth Sunday After Pentecost

Today's text is Romans 13:1-10, read by Russell Alexander. This morning's sermon was delivered by Rev. Emily Bowen-Marler.

Lead Pastor: Rev. Dr. Phil Snider (he/him)

Associate Pastor: Rev. Emily Bowen-Marler (she/her)

Youth Director: Paije Luth (she/her)

Children’s Church Coordinator: Valerie Bush (she/her)

Executive Assistant: Wacey Rivale (she/her)

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

The word of Scripture, Romans chapter 13, verses 1 through 10. Let us hear the word of the Lord. Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore, whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval. For it is God's agent for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain. It is the agent of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore, one must be subject not only because of wrath, but also because of conscience. For the same reason you also pay taxes. For the authorities are God's agents, busy with this very thing. Pay to all what is due to them, taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, and honor to whom honor is due. Owe no one anything except to love one another. For the one who loves another has fulfilled the law, the commandments. And any other commandment are summed up in this word. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. Here in the end, the reading of God's sacred word, may it add a blessing to you and I as we share together in mutual ministry and love. Amen.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

Well, I don't know if any of you all read that, heard that scripture reading that Ruth Ann shared with us earlier and felt yourself squirming a little bit during part of it. You know, I just, I really found myself all week long wishing that I could ask Paul what he was talking about when he wrote those words in his letter to the Romans, because I've just been having a really hard time wrapping my brain around it. For some context and further head scratching, I want you to take a look at chapter 12. I don't know if any of you can recall chapter 12 right off the top of your head, but Paul talks about new life in Christ, the members of the body of Christ, the different gifts we are given, and the marks of a true Christian. He then writes, Let love be genuine, hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good, love one another with mutual affection, outdo one another in showing honor, do not lag in zeal, be ardent in the spirit, serve the Lord, rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another, do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Do not claim to be wiser than you are, do not repay evil for evil, but take what you is thought, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. No, if your enemies are hungry, feed them. If they are thirsty, give them something to drink. Hopefully I'm not her enemy since I'm her daughter, but for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads. Oh, look, there's my water bottle. I am set. So Paul says, if you have if your enemies are hungry, feed them. If they are thirsty, give them something to drink. For by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. These are beautiful. They're words to live by, with a little bit of self-righteousness thrown in there with that whole heaping of burning coals on their heads. But then Paul launches into a the passage that Ruth Ann read to us a little bit ago. And I gotta say, it feels like a hard left right there. Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God. And those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore, whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. I don't know. But those verses feel a little suspicious to me. It sounds like Paul is declaring that all governing authorities are instituted by God. I mean, I know there are people of faith who insist that is true right now, and we are not to resist the authority of the current administration because clearly they are in power because God deems it so. However, I don't remember them declaring this was the case from January of 2009 to January of 2017, or again from January of 2021 to January of 2025. Pretty convenient, huh? When you declare a passage to be true when your guy is in power and then find a way around it when it's not your guy who's in power. But back to Paul, when you read a little further, it really does seem like Paul is making a good faith assumption about the governing authorities. That they are acting for the public good. And you can read that in what he writes next. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval. For it is God's servant for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain. It is a servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be subject not only because of wrath, but also because of conscience. For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, busy with this very thing. Pay to all what is due them, taxes to whom taxes are due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due. Reading this part of the passage on being subject to authority reveals that Paul looks upon government as a good thing, something that is instituted for the good of the people, to ensure that good deeds are encouraged and evil deeds are punished, that taxes are a good thing, intended to be used by governments also for the good of the people, to build roads and aqueducts, to provide stability and order. Of course, I read this and I just can't get past those first two verses. And I find myself thinking, did you know Jesus, Paul? Because I seem to remember Jesus challenging authority. He pushed against rules that were being enforced by the religious authorities when they got in the way of healing, when they cut others off from community, when they failed to be rooted in love. I seem to remember Jesus encouraging his followers to engage in nonviolent resistance by carrying the Roman soldier's pack an extra mile, when Roman soldiers were bound by law to only have someone carry their pack one mile. So having someone carry it that extra mile would lead that Roman soldier to face consequences. Or when Jesus instructed his followers to turn the other cheek when they are struck as a way to demand being treated as an equal, or forcing their opponent to use their unclean hand to strike them, something that again would be frowned upon in their society. Or when Jesus told his followers that if someone sues them and takes their coat, they should give their cloak as well, because that would force the person to see their nakedness. And again, the problem would befall the person who was viewing the nakedness. So it was a way to nonviolently resist oppression. Jesus sure seemed to be operating under the assumption that those in power, the authorities, were not necessarily acting for the good of the people. I mean, Jesus was crucified by the Empire. So why is Paul instructing the community in Rome to submit to the authorities as though they were instituted by God? So I read through so many commentaries trying to get to the bottom of this. There are some who wonder if that these verses were actually penned by Paul or if they were inserted into the manuscript at a later date, given the passage that precedes it that I read earlier, the verses that talk about um, the verses that talk about the way we are to love our enemies, and then the verses that immediately follow this passage on authority, owe no one anything except to love one another. For the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and any other commandment are summed up in this word love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbor, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. That passage would flow really nicely from the end of chapter 12, where Paul talks about the loving treatment of enemies. So it just seems strange to have those first seven verses of 13 shoved in there. Except the earliest manuscripts of this letter to the Romans do have those first seven verses of the 13th chapter. So it really does seem that Paul wrote them. So then some have wondered if maybe Paul dropped those verses in because he wanted the Jewish community in Rome to be safe, to not provoke the Roman authorities because there had been Jewish communities that had been expelled from Rome. Paul didn't maybe Paul didn't want that to happen to this community. Keep your heads low, Paul says. Like how people of color are told from a young age when they are pulled over by a police officer to put both hands on the steering wheel and not do anything to escalate the situation, or they may not come home from the encounter. So maybe Paul was just trying to keep this community safe. I really don't know. But when I think of law and order and how it functions in our country, Romans 13 comes to mind. When we look at the definition of law and order, we find it to be the enactment of laws and their strict enforcement by police and the courts. It can also be the safe, civil, and orderly functioning of society viewed especially as a result of the enactment and strict enforcement of laws. Those things sound okay-ish. The problem is law and order is usually taken to the harshest edge of these definitions. So when I hear law and order touted by politicians and elected officials, I find myself feeling deeply uncomfortable because I fear there is something more sinister at work. Because pursuit of law and order seems to follow along lines of targeting people who speak up when they see injustice, targeting people who gather to protest racist policies, targeting people who look a certain way or think a certain way. In practice, law and order gets touted as let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore, whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. We are hearing voices of faith elevated by the administration to bless it. And this is not an accident. As the Reverend Tracy Blackman writes, before oppression is written into law, it is almost always preached into legitimacy. She was reflecting on a trip she'd made to South Africa, where she visited a church where apartheid was preached from the pulpit, and then drew the line to things that have happened in our own country. She continues, the sanctuary stood only steps away from unspeakable suffering, not because the worshippers lacked compassion, but because their theology had taught them that domination could be holy. That is how always how it becomes. Not with hatred, with hermeneutics, not with violence, with interpretation, not with legislation, with liturgy. The most dangerous theology is never the one that announces itself as evil. It is the one convinced it is righteous. Whenever Christianity becomes useful to political power, political power eventually begins redefining Christianity. Faith loses its prophetic voice the moment it becomes chaplain to the empire. The truth of the matter is this law and order passage in Romans 13 has been used to perpetuate great evil in this world. It has been used to keep the masses quiet and compliant. Recently, people used this passage to excuse what happened to Renee Good in Minneapolis. This passage has been weaponized against those who opposed slavery in the South, those who marched and worked and fought for civil rights in the 60s. Romans 13 is a bludgeon used by authoritarian regimes that know how to manipulate the religion of the masses. The first two verses of Romans 13 were used as one of the justifications for the doctrine of discovery, declaring that governing authorities had the right to claim land populated by indigenous people, and that the indigenous people populating that land must submit to those governing authorities or else. And I think we know what the or else was. But despite what some people may want to claim, Paul's words in Romans 13 are not the ultimate guide on how we should engage with or respond to authority, nor are they the only biblical words to address it. As I mentioned, Jesus challenged authority in creative, nonviolent ways. And he also wasn't afraid to flip tables when he observed exploitative practices taking place in the temple. Resistance against and caution for those and authority appears throughout Hebrew Scripture. In 1 Samuel 8, chapter 8, Samuel warns Israel of corrupt kings who use up the people and land for their own purposes. In the first chapter of Isaiah, the prophet bemoans the ways that their leaders act like thieves and do not defend or extend care to the widow or the orphan. The prophet Jeremiah says these words to the king in chapter 22, 13 to 17. Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness and his upper rooms by injustice, who makes his neighbors work for nothing and does not give them their wages, who says, I will build myself a spacious house with large upper rooms, and who cuts out windows for it, paneling it with cedar and painting it with vermilion. Are you a king because you compete in cedar? Did not your father eat and drink and do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. He judged the cause of the poor and needy. Then it was well. Is it not this to know me, says the Lord? But your eyes and heart are only to on your dishonest gain, for shedding innocent blood and for practicing oppression and violence. Now that is a word spoken to authority, Jeremiah. I know someone you could preach that to today. Law and order in and of itself isn't the enemy of the good, but the ways it gets used by people in power whose primary interest is in amassing power for themselves is precisely the kind of behavior that is called out in the Bible by those who are unafraid to speak truth to power. These people of God were driven to speak by a deep commitment to love that demands concern for the ones who are most vulnerable, for the ones who have lost their voice, for the ones the world ignores, the ones who feel they have no place. That love demands that they be noticed, that they be provided for. These exhortations from the people of God throughout scripture remind us that the governing authorities that are blessed by God are the ones that ensure the widow and the orphan are cared for, that the strangers among us are welcomed, that the hungry are fed, the naked are clothed, the homeless are housed, that the oppressed are freed. This matters so much to God that Jesus' first sermon in Luke echoed these very words from Isaiah. That is true, law and order, ensuring that all have enough, that all can thrive, because only then can peace truly reign. It's probably no surprise that I picked Law and Order and what the Bible says about it for this Sunday. I picked it in large part because yesterday the United States celebrated its 250th birthday. And I've been wrestling with this anniversary. I don't think I'm alone. In part because of the way it's been used and abused by the current administration, in part because I wrestle with what it means to be an American, and I recognize the ways that we fall short no matter who is in the presidency. I wrestle with what it means to be an American citizen in these times, knowing what the founding fathers dreamed this country could be, while also recognizing the grave and often horrific injustices it was built upon that denied the dream to so many because of the color of their skin or their gender or their status. There was an impulse at the founding of this nation to dream bigger, to imagine a world where all could be free. And there were voices trying to encourage that, like Abigail Adams telling her husband to remember the women. He didn't seem to do that. Those who argued against slavery, but not vehemently enough because the dehumanizing and terrorizing institution of slavery continued for far too long. Throughout the course of our nation's history, there have been steps to rectify mistakes made, to extend the dream to more people, and then the backlash would take us back several steps. We're watching that happen now with the dream being snatched away from immigrants who had protected status, from immigrants who are working toward obtaining their green card, from trans people who are having their rights and identities limited and even removed, from women who do not have the same rights the generation before them had, from so many different people. We are watching people distance themselves from those who are different or those who are more different than they are, attempting to erect a wall of safety around their difference by calling out those who are more different, as though somehow authoritarian leaning regimes ever truly make those distinctions. Roberto Che Espinosa writes about this so eloquently in his Substack post for the Fourth of July. He writes, I write these words on a day devoted to celebrating freedom, and I cannot ignore the carceral logics that continue to shape so much of our public life. These logics do not merely build prisons, they teach us to police one another, to fear difference, to confuse domination with order, and to mistake obedience for belonging. Yet even here, I remain unwilling to surrender the imagination, because imagination has always been the first territory empires attempt to occupy. If another world is possible, it will not emerge because power grants us permission. It will emerge because ordinary people continue cultivating forms of life that exceed the boundaries empire has drawn around what is considered possible. And that prompts me to ask: what does it look like when our imaginations are not constrained by law and order, by what those in power tell us is acceptable or possible? Yes, the history of this nation is stamped by impulses toward controlling law and order that limit the extensions of rights and freedoms to certain categories of people, but the history of this nation is also marked by the dreams and actions of those who called out injustice and pushed for another way, a way that included more people, a way that broke down the barriers, from Frederick Douglass, reminding us that it takes more than rhetoric and pretty words when he said, I prayed for freedom for 20 years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs, from Harriet Tubman making 19 trips to lead 300 enslaved people to freedom, from Sojourner Truth declaring, Ain't I a woman too? From Dorothy Day working tirelessly for the working poor in this country, from students sitting at lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, demanding to be seen as fully human, from people boycotting and marching in the streets and shining a light on the nastiness of Jim Crow, from those engaging in hunger strikes in Delaney Hall, protesting the abuses towards those being detained there, from the crowds of people gathering outside refusing to accept unjust immigration practices and crying out against the mistreatment of our immigrant neighbors, all people standing up to those in authority who use law and order as a means of oppression and control. Those in authority tell us that the flourishing of all people is impossible. But as people of faith, we dream bigger than that. We follow the one who shared a vision of the kingdom of God where order was subverted and the kingdom was like a mustard seed, a weed that grew and grew and overtook the garden and grew so much that it became a tree and the birds of the air made nests in its branches, where God provides for all the people the same, regardless of status or hours worked in a day, where people who had been suffering are restored to community, where the work of women is celebrated, where children who had no status in this society at the time are cherished, where all are invited to the great banquet and the discarded and forgotten are given the seats of honor, where love for God is shown through love for neighbor, and where we are reminded that that is the fulfillment of the law. The vision of God and God's kingdom is a vision where the law is love, and that is what brings order to this world.