Why are we here?
Text: Romans 13:8-14 Sometimes I struggle with St. Paul, as no doubt he would have struggled with me. He might say I talk too much. I might say he’s awfully opinionated. As much as I respect him, we have our differences, I am sad to say, and so I generally prefer to talk about what Jesus said instead of blessed Paul. But as we come together to kick off a new program year here, a year in which we are using the tagline “We are St. James’s - you are St. James’s” as you will see on our program materials - Paul’s words offer us valuable guidance today for what it means to be, individually and communally, St. James’s. Paul wrote to the Christian community in Rome, which was established only 20 years after Jesus’s death. Among other things, he wanted to offer to them his vision of what life in a Christian community ought to look like. Christian communities, of course, were a new thing in the first century. Paul was the founder of many of those communities, although not the one in Rome.
