How’s your credit rating these days? Are you keeping up with what you owe or have you fallen behind? 

Now before you answer that let me clarify what I’m asking. I’m not asking about your personal finances, mortgage, car payment, or credit card balance. I’m asking about how you are loving these days. 

“Owe no one anything, except to love one another,” Paul says in today’s reading from his Letter to the Romans. (Romans 13:8-14) That line captivated me when I first read it last week. And it’s continued to challenge me. Paul is describing love as a debt we owe one another. 

I don’t often think of love as a debt I owe everyone. Do you? Love as a debt we owe others probably isn’t what most of us have been told or come to believe about love. Think about how we most often talk about and (mis)understand love. 

• We say we love all sorts of stuff. I love my truck. I love riding my bicycle. I love chicken fried steak. And I love my wife Cyndy. You’ve probably said things like that. What does any of that even mean? Is chicken fried steak really on the same level as Cyndy? So what do we mean by love?

• I suspect most of us often associate love with romance and particular feelings. We fall in love and we fall out of love. The Righteous Brothers told us that love is a kiss with closed eyes and tenderness in the fingertips and if those are gone then “you’ve lost that loving feeling.” I love that song but is love really as fickle as my feelings? And can love remain even after the feeling is gone? Are my feelings the reason I love? 

• Years ago Cyndy asked me why I love her. So I made a list. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” (Elizabeth Barrett Browning) I counted all the reasons I love her. “You are beautiful. We have fun together. You are a good cook. We have similar interests. You support my work.” I listed one hundred reasons (pretty romantic, right?) and the longer the list got the shallower it sounded.
  
  Would I really stop loving her or love her less if she quit cooking or we developed different interests? The singer Lana Del Rey asks a similar question, “Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?” What if love has no reasons? What if love has no why or because behind it? What if we just love because we love? What if loving is the most natural, and sometimes difficult, thing we do?

• Think about what we hear in songs and movies about love. “You complete me.” “You’re my everything.” “I can’t live if living is without you.” They sound so good until they start sounding like neediness. Is it an expression of my love or an expression of my codependence? And what if I took responsibility for my own life, didn’t make another responsible for me, and just loved because I loved and not because I needed or was getting something?

• Have you ever said to someone or had someone say to you, “If you loved me you ________”? Fill in the blank. “You would know what I want without me having to tell you.” “You would make me happy.” “You would fix my problems.” “You would do what I want.”
  
  Is that really the love Paul is speaking about? And is love really that manipulative? Does love mean we get what we want? Surely there is more to love than that. 

• The Beatles told us, “All you need is love.” I wonder how many of us took off down that road only to discover we also need some other things – friends, a job, meaning and purpose. Many of us got our definition of love from a line out of a novel that became a movie, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” I wish life and love were that simple. But I don’t think they are. Just the other night I told Cyndy I was sorry and I said it because I do love her.

I don’t think love is ever as easy or simple as we often think it is or want it to be. We romanticize, sentimentalize, and generalize love and then wonder what happened. Love is some of the hardest work we do. We want something from love but what if love asks something of us? Maybe that’s what Paul is getting at when he says that love is a debt, an obligation, we owe one another. “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.”

And Paul doesn’t base this debt of love on who the other is – whether we like him or her, have feelings or reasons for loving, or consider the other to be worthy or deserving of our love. Paul doesn’t condition our love on who the other is but on who we are. We have an obligation, we owe the other love.

What would it be like if we loved like that? Try this. Look around.. Take a good look at each other. Those are your creditors. When you leave her today and run into someone or see others at the grocery store they also are your creditors. When we see a stranger, news photos of migrants crossing the border or Moroccans recovering from the earthquake, they also are creditors of our love. No one is to be left out and unloved. 

So what does Paul mean when he speaks of love? You already know. You’ve heard it at weddings, you may have it printed, framed, and hanging on a wall. It’s that famous passage from 1 Corinthians 13:

Love is patient; 
	love is kind; 
	love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. 

It does not insist on its own way; 
	it is not irritable or resentful; 
	it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, 
	but rejoices in the truth. 

It bears all things, 
	believes all things, 
	hopes all things, 
	endures all things. 

Love never ends.

How’s your credit report? Let’s not romanticize and sentimentalize those words. Let’s not empty love of its power. 

When I hear those words I begin to picture the people in my life that were and are those things for me. There’s David. As much as he likes me he doesn’t let me off the hook. He holds me accountable and calls me into my better self because he loves. For thirty years Cyndy has shown up day after day – bearing, believing, hoping, enduring – she’s shown up to me when I didn’t show up or when I didn’t show up with my best self. She’s shown up to my joys and sorrows, my hopes and my brokenness, my good days and my bad days. That’s a lot of patience. And there’s Marga always holding the truth before me, my best friend John, my grandmother Bum Bum, my great uncle Wawa, and always my mom and dad.

They are the ones along with so many others who’ve stuck by me. They have loved, shaped, and formed my life. They have bought me to this moment. They offered me the freedom, space, support, and opportunity to become me. And I wonder, who has done that for you? Who is doing that for you today? Who are the faces of patience, kindness, believing, hoping, enduring in your life? 

Imagine what our lives and world we be like if we all did that for one another, if we went around to every creditor – stranger, family, friend, neighbor, or enemy – and offered love the way Paul describes it. 

Here’s the thing about this debt of love. It’s not a debt we can ever pay off. In the verse immediately before today’s reading Paul says, “Pay to all what is due them—taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.” They are debts that get paid off.  You get a release of lien. It’s a transaction. Not so with love. 

Love is an endless debt we owe to one another. It never gets paid in full. Love isn’t a transaction it’s an ongoing relationship, a way of being with and toward another. We should never say, “I loved,” but “I am loving.” It’s ongoing and some days we do it well and other days we struggle. Either way the debt remains. So we love beyond the feelings, without reasons, even if it’s not reciprocated, no matter how much effort it takes or how deeply it breaks our heart. We just love because that’s who we are, because that’s who God is. 

It seems to me that if we are not paying on this obligation and loving one another then we are foreclosing on our own heart. And I don’t want to do to that. I hope you don’t either. Let’s figure out how to love. 

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Image Credit: Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.