Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost 2008

18 Pentecost A 08
September 14, 2008

Romans 14:1-12 (NRSV)
1 Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions. 2 Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables. 3 Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat; for God has welcomed them. 4 Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another? It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand.
5 Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike. Let all be fully convinced in their own minds. 6 Those who observe the day, observe it in honor of the Lord. Also those who eat, eat in honor of the Lord, since they give thanks to God; while those who abstain, abstain in honor of the Lord and give thanks to God.
7 We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. 8 If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. 9 For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.
10 Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? Or you, why do you despise your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God. 11 For it is written,
"As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me,
and every tongue shall give praise to God."
12 So then, each of us will be accountable to God.


What’s for Dinner?

A Rabbi and a Roman Catholic Priest were sitting next to each other at an Inter-faith event. When dinner was served someone thoughtlessly had placed a slab of ham in the Rabbi's plate. The Rabbi did not protest but simply proceeded to eat other things his faith and physician permitted.

The Roman Catholic padre leaned over in the direction of the Rabbi and said. “Rabbi Cohen, you and I know that the dietary laws from the Old Testament were developed at a time when pork meat was indeed dangerous due to lack of refrigeration and low heat in cooking. Of course trichinosis was rampant and your ancestors in the faith were right in prohibiting eating pork in order to save the lives of many Israelites. Those days are gone, pork is safe and there is no reason to cling to outmoded ancient practices. When will you eat your first mouthful of ham, Rabbi Cohen?”

The Rabbi paused briefly and then responded, “At your wedding, Father Maguire, at your wedding.”

Paul had not been to Rome, but had probably heard a number of stories about the community. It’s not certain how much he’d heard, but it appears that many of the very same issues that he’d already confronted in a variety of places were cropping up in Rome as well.

First of all, it was a difficulty to live in the Roman empire and be Jewish or Christian. Rome was the wealthiest and most powerful empire in the world of that day. It was however pagan, and not only pagan but religiously pagan. Romans were not secular. They practiced their religion with real fervor and piety. They accused Christians and some Jews of being atheists, because they wouldn’t acknowledge the Roman pantheon of gods. Christians could not serve in political offices or in the military of Rome either, and this earned them a reputation for being unpatriotic or even traitorous. Early Christians were strict pacifists. Christians and Jews were considered humorless spoilsports because they refused to participate in any of the Roman festivals.

In addition to tensions with the Roman empire, there we tensions as well between Jews and Christians. Many Jews did not see the evidence for Jesus’ being the Messiah as compelling.
Given the importance of such a claim, they regarded those who went around claiming Jesus as the Christ to be really causing trouble. The Jews had a much better relationship to the Romans than did their Christian cousins, so they were able to exert a fair amount of persecution against Christians, as Paul himself knew well, having been one of the chief persecutors himself.

A third tension was between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. Jewish Christians expected Gentiles to adopt all the practices of Judaism along with their faith in Jesus. Paul argued that the gift of the Holy Spirit more than fulfilled the law for anyone who believes, no matter what dietary or purity laws they followed.

Of course, going back some thirty years or so from when Paul was writing Romans, we have Jesus himself, striving to bring together the many different kinds of Jews, the Pharisees against the Sadducees, the righteous against the tax collectors and prostitutes. Jesus frequently found more faith among marginal Jews like the Samaritans or even entirely gentile people. Jesus himself was accused of failing to keep the Sabbath and ignoring various Old Testament laws about ritual purity.

So what is this like? It is like disagreements between Christians who wear fancy vestments and those who wear Hawaiian shirts, those who believe in transubstantiation and those who don’t, those who believe the scriptures are inerrant and those who don’t, those who pray from books and those who pray extemporaneously, those who baptize by sprinkling and those who baptize by full immersion.

It’s interesting though who Paul calls “weak in faith.” The less faith one has the more laws are necessary. The more faith, the less law.

Now it needs to be said here that the law is good when it is needed. Even in church it is not a bad thing to have structure when the people of the church are weak in faith.

I just attended Sharon Watkins’ pastor’s conference and in discussions about the current Mission Alignment process, a lot of pastors were talking about the lack of accountability in all the expressions of the church. The freedom of the gospel is not license. It is not the freedom to do what you want. It’s the freedom to do what God wants. If we do not want what God wants, we are not free. If we are enslaved to sin, then we surely need all the law we can get.

I know a lot of alcoholics and I can tell you that drunks think that when they’re drinking they are expressing their freedom. “I have a right to drink,” they will tell you. “There’s no law against it.” Or they might even be proud of themselves. “I’m a rebel,” they’ll say, or “I don’t give in to the crowd.”

I can tell you as well that the alcoholic absolutely regards giving up drinking as bowing to some law imposed on him by the self-righteous. Such alcoholics are absolutely doomed until they realize that far from expressing freedom, they are enslaved.

The same is true of people who are sexually promiscuous. They believe they are free, that they are simply expressing their liberty. But most people who are chronically promiscuous are actually enslaved.

The rich young ruler in the gospels must surely regard his wealth as liberating, filling his life with many options, including an active pursuit of his faith. When he comes to Jesus and asks him about following him, and Jesus tells him to sell all he has and give it to the poor, he confronts the ruler with his enslavement to material wealth.

In our congregation, we are free in the gospel to do whatever we want, as long as what we want and what God wants are the same thing. Because if we do what we want and it is not what God wants, we are not expressing freedom, but slavery. For this reason, we balance liberty with law, freedom with rules, because none of us, not one, is so full of faith as to be utterly sure what God wants.

And it is for this very reason that we must be very sure that forgiveness and mercy and grace is the law among us above all other laws. This is not license, but the recognition that we are all of us struggling against our sinful natures to be free to do God’s will. Our community cannot survive or grow or prosper if we are ruled solely by law.

A general once said to John Wesley, "I never forgive and I never forget." To which Wesley responded, "Then Sir, I hope you never sin."

The world is still ruled entirely by the law. You know I don’t seek out such footage because I enjoy seeing it, but last night watching a documentary, which I recommend to you all called The Sierra Leone All-Star Band, about refugees from the conflict in Sierra Leone, I saw a brief clip in which an unarmed man lay in a ditch by the side of the road. Over him stood a man in uniform carrying a large automatic rifle. The man in the ditch was raising his arms in entreaty. It seemed as if he were saying, “Stop, please. Forgive me whatever it is you think I have done. Don’t do this.” But the soldier fired into the man’s back without mercy. This is the ultimate outcome of the rule of law, because sooner or later, someone must be punished.

Moreover, all of us suffer under the law, for none of us who really take it seriously can find ourselves anything but guilty. At my particular season in life, I often find myself nearly overwhelmed with regrets, real anguish about hurt people, lost opportunities for healing, unfinished business. And I know that if I suffer so, there must be many, many others.

Ernest Hemingway wrote a short story called The Capitol of the World about a boy named Paco who had a falling out with his father. In anger, he ran away to the city of Madrid, where he gave himself recklessly to the sport of bullfighting. Paco’s father decided to forgive his son and placed an ad in the Madrid paper:

“Paco, meet me Hotel Montana, 12 noon Tuesday. All is forgiven. Papa.”

As it happened, Paco was a common nickname in Spain. The father arrived at the Hotel Montana to find eight hundred young men waiting to be forgiven by their fathers.

The world is hungry for forgiveness. It is the closest thing we can offer to life. It is the closest thing to resurrection we have to offer.

If anyone here is in need of forgiveness today, I want to let you know that you are forgiven. And if you know anyone who needs forgiveness, I want you to invite them here on Sunday morning, because that is what God wants to offer them.

But I particularly want to offer a word from God to those who cannot forgive, for those of us who withhold forgiveness are in the deepest pit of all. It is so hard to see when there is an obvious and unforgiveable wrong being done, that anger and judgment are in fact of no use whatsoever. It is hard to see because everywhere in every facet of the so-called civilized world, vengeance is the normative way to respond to wrongdoing.

A great pastor and theologian Freidrich Buechner wrote: “Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll your tongue over the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”

Strangely enough, the moment we forgive is the moment that real power begins to flow into the problem. I can tell you from experience that the only power greater than the wrong any human being can do is the power of the love of God.

Paul’s letter to the Romans is about that power, the power of the resurrection. It is the power of a God who loves a world even as that world hates him. It is the power of the peculiar love of God.
Amen.