In
a passage not too long before this one Paul says “You know what time it is, how
now is the moment for you to wake from sleep . . . the night is far gone, the
day is near” and he’s talking
about the return of Christ, which he believed was right around the corner . . .
he believed that it would come before his generation was finished on
earth. After all, Jesus had said as
much, and this was such an ingrained belief in that first generation of
Christians that Paul felt compelled in his first letter to the church at
Thessalonica to reassure them that all was well, despite some of their number
dying before the second
coming. What was going on in the
Christian community was a gradual awakening to the fact that the second coming
of Christ wouldn’t be quite as
soon as some of them had thought. It was
sort of like the folks who take all their worldly possessions up onto a
mountain, sure that Jesus is coming again at 5:36 am on September 4th,
1908, and when he doesn’t, they gradually begin to look around at one another,
then file slowly, a few at a time, down the mountain . . .
That
was going on with at least some of the first-generation Christians when Paul
wrote Romans somewhere around 60 AD . . . Christianity was in a flux, it had
not settled down into an orthodoxy – that wouldn’t happen for a century or so –
and there were a lot of opinions about the way Christianity should be. Among those were Paul’s own opinions, and he
was writing to kind of give them an overview of his theology, which was very
dualistic: as a good apocalyptic Jew he thought in terms of good and evil,
light and dark. In the paragraphs right
before our passage he says “Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on
the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and
drunkenness, debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and
jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus
Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”
And so it’s clear that to Paul, that first line of our passage—“Welcome those who are
weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions”—should be
taken in this context of his admonition to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” To put on the Lord Jesus Christ is to welcome
those who are weak in the faith, but not for the purpose of feudin’ and fussin’
and fightin’. And what does he mean by
“weak in faith?” “Some believe,” he
says, “in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables.” So: here’s one characteristic of the weak:
they restrict their eating. The not-weak
“believe in eating anything. And he
says, those who eat everything must not despise those who abstain . . . and
those who abstain, must not judge those who eat. Note the difference: he’s warning those who
eat not to despise those who don’t, but those who don’t, he warns not to judge. We’ll get back to that a little bit later.
Now. Remember I
said that Christianity was in flux? That
there had not been an orthodoxy established?
That’s what’s going on here. And
although we’re not certain about the specifics of what Paul is saying, we know
the general outline. There was a debate
among first-generation Christians about which and how many rituals must be
followed to be Christians in good standing.
Most prominent, were the Jewish dietary restrictions of the day, like
eating pork or certain kinds of seafood . . . over in Galatians, Paul describes
his disagreements with the pillars of the Jerusalem church—James and Peter,
among others—about whether or not Christians should observe Jewish dietary
rules. And there were other traveling,
Christian teachers—perhaps not unlike Paul—who taught that Jewish observances
like circumcision and the following of the dietary laws were prerequisite to
being Christian. Paul was adamantly
opposed to that way of thinking: “we know,” he wrote in Galatians “that a
person is justified not by the works of the law” and by law, Paul means Mosaic
law “a person is justified not by law, but through faith in Jesus Christ.”
And so, observing the law in general—and not just dietary
laws, but all of the Mosaic law—is not necessary for what Paul calls justification,
and we more commonly refer to as salvation.
But there were still a large number of brothers and sisters out there
who believed that way, who were still what we might call traditional or old-school,
that still believed Christians should refrain from doing certain things, like
eating certain foods, and in our particular case, meat that had been offered to
idols. This stemmed from the general Hebrew
rule against eating meat offered to God, and it had been extended to meat
offered to any god, or as Jews would have it idols. The problem is, you couldn’t always tell if
meat had been offered to idols or not, it was common practice to sell it in the
marketplace, after it had been slaughtered for sacrificial purposes, so it had
become the practice in some places to avoid eating meat altogether.
But Christians—because their salvation, their being
deemed children of God, comes not through observance of the law but by adoption
through Christ—have great freedom which included, apparently, not worrying
about whether or not meat had been offered to idols. And for Paul, this freedom in Christ was very
important: As he wrote also in
Galatians, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do
not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”
The yoke of slavery he refers to is the Torah and its rules about what
you can and cannot eat.
And there were other rules causing problems: religions like
Judaism and the pagan faiths of Paul’s converts had festival days. Judaism had Passover and Purim, worshippers
of the goddess Astarte had lunar observances, followers of the ba’als had
harvest festivals. And for Paul, freedom
in Christ extended also to freedom from strict observance of these holy
days. As he puts it in our passage,
“Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to
be alike.” But those who observe the
days, just like those who follow dietary laws, observe them in honor of the
Lord, and those who don’t do the same.
They are all servants of Christ, worshippers of a common Lord. And who is anybody to pass judgment on the
servants of another? Who is one servant
to pass judgment on another? All serve
the same risen Lord.
Those who eat, and
those who don’t observe the festival days, who Paul here implies are stronger, must
not despise those who do, who hew to the old ways. Those who abstain, who hew to the old
ways—who Paul calls weak—are not to pass judgment on those he might call
stronger because, as he says, “God has welcomed everyone.” Once again, note the differential: those who
are advanced in their faith, those who have claimed their freedom from dietary
laws and observance of holy days through Christ, must not despise, must not
look down on those whose faiths are weaker, who cling to the old ways. But by the same token, those who are more
traditional, more old-fashioned, clinging to the old ways, must not judge those
who are more traditional must not pass judgment on those who are more “advanced”
in their faiths.
And I don’t know about you, but this is beginning to
sound awful familiar. Traditionalists,
keepers of the old ways, judging the newer ways to be inadequate or downright
unchristian? The less traditional, more
“advanced” Christians, looking down their noses at the more traditional in
scorn? There’s nothing more smug than a
person who’s convinced of the new ways, baby, and who looks upon his more
traditional—often older, but often not—brothers and sisters as provincial. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard mainline
Christians—whose churches are by and large failing—make fun of those
video-watching, hands-to-Jesus-raising, evangelicals, whose churches have been growing.
Conversely, there’s nothing more judgmental than Christians
who hold to the old ways, who refuse to see that there may be more than one way
to worship God, who think that a faith that keeps up with the times is a lesser
faith than theirs. Some of those same
evangelicals, that advocate that “old-time religion,” where women are in their
place and there are no gays anywhere near, are so judgmental, thinking that these
peripheral differences, such as about who you ordain or sleep with, are
fundamental to the faith, and that more open, tolerant expressions of
Christianity are literally the work of Satan.
In a denomination like ours, the motto of which is
“reformed and always being reformed,” these divisions become all the more
acute. They get labeled conservative and
liberal, which is understandable: conservatives tend to resist change, they
want to “conserve” the past. Liberals
tend to be more comfortable with a more progressive theology and, yes,
sometimes contemptuous of those who aren’t; conservatives tend not to be as
comfortable with modern theology, and just a weensy bit judgmental of those who
are. And it’s splitting our denomination
apart.
But it happens within churches too . . . and often—but
not always—it’s along generational lines, between people brought up in
times. George Thompson, of the
Interdenominational Theological Consortium, call these cultural streams, and he
points out that four are present in a lot of churches: Millennials, Boomers,
Gen-X’ers and so-called “Silents”, those who grew up during World War II. Each of these generational groupings grew up
when the conditions surrounding them, with the nation and the local
communities, were very different.
Because of this, they tend to view the world very differently: Boomers
protested the Vietnam War, marched in civil rights demonstrations, dropped in
and out of middle-class society, raised kids, married, divorced, and now expect
everything life has to offer. Generation
X-ers, on the other hand, are less certain, the economic situation is not as
clear, they’ve been raised to be more suspicious of middle-class trappings. Millennials are wary of talking and
institutions, distrustful of authority and even more worried about the future. The Silents, called that because they don’t
believe in protest, commit to institutions such as church, helped defeat Hitler
and built the post-World War economy.
And the point is that each of these groups, because they grew up and
matured under very different circumstances, view the world in very different
ways, and—this is very important—they view church differently too. Many times, without even knowing it:
everybody tends to think that what is apparent, real and important to them is
that way to everybody else. And it just
isn’t true.
And it’s along these lines that deep divisions within
churches tend to develop, that underlying splits emerge—that often never
surface directly, but only through trivial carping and fighting. These generational divides, between people
with different world views, different ideas about how society and church should
be run—can cause deep fissures within our churches.
But Paul is having none of it. We are not
to judge or despise one another, but we’re to welcome everyone. And once we get them here, we shouldn’t
expect them to be just like us, to like the same music we do, to commit to do
the same things as us . . . As Paul says, why do we pass judgment on one
another? Or why do we despise one
another? As Paul says, we all stand
before the judgment seat of God, not that of one another. We all serve the same Lord, who is Jesus
Christ. Who are we to pass judgment on
another servant of Christ? We are—and
will be—accountable to God alone. Amen.
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