Weak Community

“Whatever choices you make, do so to honor God, not to one-up

your neighbor.”

Weak Community

A Sermon by Jeffrey K. Krehbiel

24^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

September 14, 2008

Text: Romans 14:1-12

Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions...

Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? (vs. 1, 10)

Church of the Pilgrims

2201 P Street NW

Washington, DC 20037

(202) 387-6612

www.ChurchOfThePilgrims.org

B ack in the Dark Ages– a few years before many of you here this morning were born– I attended Hope College in Holland, Michigan. Hope is affiliated with the Reformed Church in America, the RCA. My junior year I heard Tony Compolo speak for my first time. Compolo is something of an oxymoron in political and religious circles: a progressive Evangelical. Compolo said at the time that he is invited all over the country to speak at so-called Christian colleges and he had yet to visit one that was really Christian. He said you can tell at graduation day. The presidents proudly tell of how their graduates go on to get the best jobs in IBM and Bank of America, working alongside all the captains of industry. Compolo said if they were really Christian colleges, their graduates who go in to these companies and turn things upside down and shake things up and pretty soon no one would want their graduates anymore. Instead, their graduates fit right in.

I often think the same thing about politics. I have a hard time seeing where Christian values are being expressed in the current campaign. Silly me, but somehow I thought that being a literalist meant that you were supposed to take things literally. So why is it that those who proclaim their Christian bonifides the most loudly seem the most intent on building themselves up by tearing down their opponent? Here is the Apostle Paul, about as clear and direct as you can be: “Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another?” Paul asks. “Why do you despise your brother or sister?” “Welcome those who are weak in faith... for God has welcomed them.”

I had similar thoughts my freshman year of college. Like most colleges, the first few weeks of the year were taken up by fraternity and sorority rush. Now, I don’t want to offend all of you who were happy members of fraternities and sororities in college. OK, maybe I want to offend you a little. I had many friends in fraternities, and I know the important bonds of friendship that can form there. But one of the earliest lessons I learned in the church growing up is that the church should be a place where all are welcomed, were distinctions are broken down, where especially those who might feel alienated in other environments would feel at home. The church isn’t supposed to be just another club of like-minded people. So how does a Christian college countenance groups that begin the year by deciding who fits in and who doesn’t, who is acceptable and who is not? Suffice it to say, I had lots of arguments with my classmates about this when I was in college. Still do. No matter what anyone said to the contrary, there was a social pecking order among the fraternities, and everyone on campus knew which were the cool fraternities and which were not.

Maybe I was unduly influenced by a story my dad told me growing up. When he was at Williams, the president of the most elite fraternity on campus, fed up with the whole system, quit and joined the house for unaffiliated students. Some people admired him, most people thought he had lost his mind, but no one followed suit. Twenty years later, however, Williams abolished its fraternity system.

T his is what Paul was battling in his letter to the Christians in Rome. The church was divided between those Paul calls “the weak” and the “strong.” It’s not entirely clear what was going on, but it appears to be a conflict between Jewish Christians in the community and the Gentile Christians. The Jewish Christians, who would have been a religious and ethnic minority, felt compelled to follow Jewish dietary and sabbath laws, and as a consequence, they were being looked down upon by the Gentile Christians, who thought their rules were silly superstitions. The Jewish Christians, in turn, were judging the Gentiles for not following the law. Even though Paul was a Jew, his theological sympathies were with the Gentiles. Followers of Jesus had been set free from the law. It didn’t matter what you ate, or what day you worshiped. But he could not abide the self-righteousness and the sense of superiority among the Gentiles. After fighting battles for the first half of his ministry to persuade the Jewish Christians to welcome Gentile believers, now he was finding that the shoe was on the other foot. There was a certain element in Roman culture that automatically assumed superiority in matters of culture, race and religion, and Paul makes it clear that such an attitude is antithetical to the formation of Christian community.

Here’s the striking thing, though: Paul could have most easily resolved the issue by wading in to the controversy that separated the two groups. He could have indicated which of the two had it right, and demanded that the other group conform. Instead, Paul actively allows for diversity of interpretation while insisting that the two groups learn to live in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Paul encouraged them to let their deeply held convictions stand. “Let all be fully convinced in their own minds,” Paul tells them. But at the end of the day, he tells them, it’s not about you. Whatever choices you make, do so to honor God, not to one-up your neighbor. Paul then lays down this principal to guide them:

We do not live to ourselves,

and we do not die to ourselves.

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.

It may just be one of the most counter-cultural statements in all the Bible: “We do not live to ourselves.” It’s what makes membership in the church different from most any other body you might join. Most of us attend church for the first time for the same sort of reason that we seek out any other activity. We expect to get something out of it. Hopefully we do. Yet the most profound statements of the Gospel echo Paul’s words to the Romans. It’s not all about you. Jesus put it this way: “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

Not exactly lines you want to put on a recruiting poster. Yet that indeed is what the church, at heart, is all about: A community where we learn to live beyond ourselves. In a culture that promotes narcissism as a virtue, church invites its members to live by an alternative set of values and to live by an alternative set of practices, in which we no longer live for ourselves alone. This is the basis for our theme this Homecoming Season: “Living in God’s Way,” Starting today, over the next several weeks we will invite different members and friends of the congregation to share how they practice their faith in particular ways. We don’t lift up these practices as exclusively Christian, but rather as examples of faith-inspired practices that grow out of our relationship with God in Jesus Christ. Together, these practices form a way of life, a way of life sorely needed by our deeply divided world. The Mennonite writer Lois Barrett describes it in this way:

If Christian faith makes any difference in behavior, then the church in conformity with Christ is called to an alternative set of behaviors, an alternative ethic, an alternative kind of relationships, in dialogue with the surrounding cultures. Its difference is itself a witness to the gospel.

[Our first storyteller was Mary Ester, reflecting on the practice of nonviolence. You can read all the stories of “Living in God’s Way” at http://www.churchofthepilgrims.org/homecomingstories.html ]

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