September 6, 2020 Sermon: Loving the Fine Print

Is following Jesus all about the fine print? Or is being a Christian about love? Paul says loving your neighbor fulfills the law – and that’s good news!

Here’s the audio, video, and text of my sermon on Romans 13:8-14 and Matthew 18:15-20 on finding God’s love in the fine print.

Grace and peace from the One who was, who is, and who is to come, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

How many of you have a cell phone? Ok, how many of you have an insurance policy? Ok, how many of you read everything in the terms and conditions of your cell phone or insurance policy?

Good for you if you have, but the vast majority of people (myself included) do not read everything in every document they agree to.

I read this week about a woman named Donelan Andrews, who actually read all the fine print of a travel insurance policy last year. I’m quoting from the Washington Post now: She was “deep into page seven of the policy when something jumped out at her. ‘Pays to Read,’ read the contract.

It continued: “We estimate that less than 1 percent of travelers that purchase a travel insurance policy actually read all of their policy information — and we’re working to change that.” It said the first person to email the company and mention the fine-print contest would win $10,000. Andrews immediately emailed.”

The next day, the company called her to tell her that she was the first to email, and she would indeed get $10,000. Pretty good for a $454 policy!

Other companies go the other direction and sneak all sorts of things into their fine print. NPR has an article with examples, like 22,000 people in Manchester, England who by using public Wi-Fi inadvertently agreed to 1,000 hours of community service including cleaning public toilets and relieving sewer blockages. I don’t think they followed through on that one.




Or on April Fools’ Day 2010, British retailer GameStation users who didn’t read their license agreement and specifically uncheck a box agreed to grant GameStation “A non-transferable option to claim, for now and forevermore, your immortal soul.” Apple’s iTunes is not to be used to produce nuclear weapons.

So with that in mind, how many of you have read the entire Bible all the way through? A poll a few years ago found that 87 percent of American households own a Bible (actually, they own three on average), but only one in five claim to have read through the entire Bible.

Now, I actually don’t think it’s that big of a problem if not very many people have read all the dimensions of the temple in 2nd Chronicles, or all the tribal census lists in Numbers. But in general, reading the Bible is good.

But part of why people don’t read all of the Bible is that there’s a lot in it, especially a lot of laws, and a lot of those laws are not intended for us to follow. Many of them we can’t follow today. Jewish tradition holds that there are 613 commandments in the Bible, and obviously Jewish tradition doesn’t count anything in the New Testament.

We often narrow it down and focus on the ten commandments – I’m guessing some of you can list all ten commandments. But there’s a lot of fine print that goes with those commandments. If you want to follow God’s law, there’s a lot of detail you need to pay attention to!

And of course, once you get detailed laws, people start doing two things: They start looking for loopholes, and they start criticizing others who don’t follow the laws the “right” way.

Fortunately, or rather, by God’s wise provision, we have this great passage from Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome. Paul takes the entirety of all the commandments, all 10 of them, or all 613, and say here’s how you fulfill all of them: “Love one another. The one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”

This isn’t just Paul making this up, either – remember Jesus was asked which commandment in the law was the greatest, and he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Love God, love people. The rest is fine print. Of course, we need the fine print, we need the rest of the commandments and the rest of the Bible to show us how to do the loving, but we also need to not get so hung up on the details that we miss the point.

As Paul says, the rest of the commandments are all explanations of how to love your neighbor and not do them any wrong. Don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t covet – those are all part of loving your neighbor.

And of course, loving your neighbor isn’t limited to those particular commandments. Those commandments extend to the rest of the way we treat each other.

As Martin Luther talks about in his Small Catechism, the command to not murder includes helping and supporting our neighbors in all of life’s needs.

Honoring your father and mother means more than just literal family; Luther says it includes all those placed in authority.

Not bearing false witness involves coming to our neighbor’s defense, speaking well of them, and interpreting everything they do in the best possible light.

The ways we spend our time, the causes we support, the things we protest and advocate for, the way we vote, the ways we treat other people both personally and collectively, all of it ought to be rooted in loving our neighbor, for love is the fulfilling of the law.

Read the fine print, but don’t use it as an excuse to avoid the call to love. Interpret everything through the lens of love.

That brings us to the Gospel reading from Matthew 18, which is the most fine-print seeming thing Jesus ever says. This gospel reading feels like a policies and procedures manual, doesn’t it? If two people in the church have a conflict, follow this checklist. In fact, these verses are often used that way. In our church’s constitution, this is the only Bible passage specifically cited. It’s in chapter 15, on Discipline of Members.

This is a tough passage to look at because the examples of how to use this for conflict resolution get so specific. At least for me, it’s hard to read this without thinking about actual situations of conflict and whether this would have helped or not.

And of course, in my examples, I always want this to work on my side, to my benefit. Maybe this is a way to convince them (whoever “they” are) that I’m right! Remember, give humans fine print and we’ll try to find loopholes in it.

But what Jesus is saying here is about more than particular situations. This might be a policy statement, but it’s a policy statement for when love breaks down. It’s an acknowledgement right from Jesus that even though the call is simple—love God, love people—we as people and we as the church won’t always live up to it.

It’s not the ideal. It’s not the way things are supposed to be. But in choosing to build his church with real, live human beings like us, Jesus accepts that conflict will happen. He gives us some instructions to deal with the fact that even as Christians, we won’t always live up to the way we’re supposed to be.

When someone sins against you—when the community of love breaks down—don’t jump straight to trying to get the world on your side against them. Instead, go to them directly and resolve it.

If that doesn’t work, bring someone else with you, not to gang up on them, but so there’s someone else to listen to both of you and perhaps mediate. Maybe having a witness or two will help towards resolution.

And if that doesn’t work, maybe more of the church needs to get involved, and if the break is just too big, the last step, Jesus says, is to “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”

That sounds pretty final, doesn’t it? And yet, “Let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector” is much more than just a fine print operating procedure statement. Really, it deserves an asterisk of its own to remind us just how exactly Jesus said to treat people such as Gentiles and tax collectors.

Where the religious leaders and the public society scorned them, Jesus went and sought them out. Matthew himself, after whom this gospel is named, was a tax collector when Jesus called him to become a disciple and follow.

This very chapter of Matthew started with Jesus lifting up a child as someone worthy of welcome, and then telling a parable of a sheep who wanders away from the flock. Our Father in heaven is like the shepherd who leaves the 99 to go seek after the one. The one who wanders away not only still needs love; that one has a more urgent need!

See, it comes back to love. The one who loves another has fulfilled the law and all its fine print. Love God, love people.

Let’s pray.
Lord Jesus, you came and lived among us as the ultimate example of love.Help us to respond to your love for us by loving the neighbors around us and around the world. Shine your light and love through us, that the world may know your love. Amen