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Morning Devotion for the Season of Easter

May 10, 2023

Invitatory

On this day the Lord has acted; we will rejoice and be glad in it.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.

Reading: Romans 13:7-8

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. Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.

Meditation – Peter Vanderveen

I experience a moment of trepidation each year when I have to sign the personal tax forms that will be filed on my behalf with the I.R.S.. Someone else prepares them for me, but I’m very aware that a final figure has been determined as the calculation of what’s due, which is framed in language of great seriousness. Accuracy counts. Penalties apply for misrepresentation. And I am required to affix my signature to this number. This is my obligation as a citizen. 

There’s a particular utility to the term “due.” We use it to manage much in our lives. We take stock, and what is due we pay or provide or give to one another. It’s only fair. This keeps order. And it offers no small degree of satisfaction. Caring about what is due is a form of recognition. It’s an intention not to take advantage, and we should be as glad to offer this as we would be to receive it. Even Paul supported structuring our lives by measures that are quantifiably just and equitable – though I suspect that the first verse above is one of the least quoted from all his writings.

Knowing what is due is also essential to what Paul then says about love. After advising that we should settle all our debts, he then makes one exception. He shifts from our responsibility to pay whatever is due to noting that there remains one thing that can never be reduced to a final figure or balance. For love is always owed. Or, said another way, love is something that can’t be quantified or neatly calculated so that it can be paid for or paid off. It doesn’t remit to measures of fairness, and, thus, it is something that is never finished. There’s always more to give.

That’s an unsettling idea because we so want to tame and constrain love by making it as transactional as so many other aspects of our interactions. But Paul is very clear in noting its difference. Love isn’t so obligingly finite. It’s rather our affirmation of something intangibly and mysteriously infinite in one another. There’s no bottom to love, which means there’s no way that we can cleanly walk away from others – or God – as if, here too, we’ve met our obligations.

And, paradoxically, this is how the law is actually fulfilled – by our active acknowledgement that it can never be fulfilled. Since there’s no balance to love that can be figured and there’s no point where fairness in love can be claimed to have been achieved, love isn’t subject to judgment. It can’t be determined to be right or wrong; it can’t be assessed as accurate or not; it can’t be something agreed upon and settled. And if love is always owed, then there’s no time and no context within which we can close ourselves off from one another. The task and the joy is always in front of us, always new.

Prayer

You come to us, O Christ.

You are the Alpha and the Omega

The beginning and the end. All times

And seasons are yours, and in you

All things hold together and are brought to completion.

Draw us by your Spirit into communion

With you and one another and make us and all things

Whole and free in the full force

Of your deathless love.

The Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold