The Church’s biggest gossip and self-appointed arbiter of morals, Ethel, was always sticking her nose in other people’s business.  Most of the church members were unappreciative of Ethel’s activities but feared her enough that they dared not challenge her.  Ethel made a mistake however when she accused George, a new member, of being a drunk after she saw his pickup truck parked in front of the town’s only bar one afternoon. She remarked to George and countless others that everyone seeing his truck there would know what he was doing.  George a man of few words, stared at Ethel a moment and just walked away.  As it turned out George was a professional handy man and his truck was parked in front of the bar that day because he had been fixing some plumbing problems in the Bar’s restroom.  George reckoned it would be a waste of his time and breath to try and explain himself; instead that evening on his way home he parked his truck in front of Ethel’s house and walked the rest of the way home leaving it there all night long. 

            I share this joke because I think it illustrates two important points: first we leave ourselves open to trouble when we jump to conclusions about other people when we don’t know all the facts about their story.  Second we leave ourselves open to even more trouble when we judge other people based on those conclusions to which we have jumped, and act negatively towards those individuals based on our misjudging them.  It would seem to me that in the passage we just Read Paul is taking on both of these behaviors in a big way and making the case that neither has any place in the life of one who is a redeemed follower of Christ.  The apostle Paul is clearly irritated with (but not judging, of course!) those who elevate a personal opinion to an article of faith. There is a fancy word for such opinions, they are adiaphora - that is, “things indifferent or not essential” to one’s salvation. Paul decries quarreling over such opinions whether it’s an opinion about food or holy days. Bottom line, he says, “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves”. His argument is that Christ died for the person who holds a contrary opinion, so where do we come off passing “judgment on” our “brother or sister?” Or, worse, why do we then, “despise” our “brother or sister?”

           All, of whatever opinion or persuasion, will stand before God… and they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand. Each of us will be accountable to God”.  At the same time all of us fall short when we are to stand before God, all of us fall short of God’s desire for our lives.  Again it is the Lord who make’s us stand, not ourselves, without the Grace of Christ none of us could stand before God.  Therefore Paul argues our focus as Christians should always be on Christ the one who has saved us and all the issues that arise in the church over right and wrong ways to worship take a back seat to the saving action of God in Christ Jesus. 

           For this reason Paul is not concerned with proving one group more right than another. It is conceivable any way that one side of the debate over whether to eat meat or not eat meat had it right in God’s eyes.  The crux of Paul’s argument however, is that just as God has welcomed all kind of believers into the household of faithfulness, all those who serve within that household must learn to accept each other. Paul’s reference to all as “servants” emphasizes the subservient, indeed, slave-like status of all believers who are members of God’s household. Slaves answer to the master - not to other slaves - for their actions.

           Let us be clear: Paul is not suggesting that “anything goes.”  In earlier parts of his letter to the Romans Paul draws some stiff lines between right and wrong behavior. Those who practice slander, maliciousness and deceit are beyond the pale of Christian behavior according to him. The key for Paul is whether an individual is genuinely striving to honor God with his or her actions. Though some of our actions may be questionable to others, if they are performed with a thankful heart turned toward God, others must simply learn to live with them. Just because we find someone else’s behavior or convictions unfamiliar or uncomfortable doesn’t mean that they are “wrong.”

           As I am sure you know, Paul did not write all of these things to the church at Rome just for the sake of getting all the rules down on paper; he does not go into such detail about appropriate behaviors among Christians as part of some academic exercise.  Instead Paul is writing to the believers in Rome to correct specific behaviors within the church that he sees as unacceptable within the body of Christ because they are incongruous with the good news of the gospel. I can not express fully how sad it makes me that nearly two thousand years after Paul wrote this letter to the Romans we are still dealing the same unacceptable behavior within the entire body of Christ but specifically in the Presbyterian Church (USA).  I think all of you know that within our denomination there currently rages a battle being fought over who is right and who is wrong concerning a variety of faith issues.  The result has been that a number have left our denomination, and many more threaten to do the same.  Of course the issues over which we struggle are important, and we are all entitled to our own opinion of which is right and which is wrong, but all of those issues, all of them are adiaphora, not essential for salvation.  We need to remember Christ died for the person who holds a contrary opinion, so where do we come off passing “judgment on” our “brother or sister?”  Where do we come off dividing a church based on the judgment we have passed?  Someone said “the church is the only army in the world that shoots its wounded.” Paul says that we should welcome the “weak.” The “weak” are those who don’t share the same opinion as we do, and who are therefore quite obviously misinformed and immature but, we are called to love them anyway, right. Who are we to judge?

           Of course Paul didn’t come up with this idea out of the blue.  His argument is based on what Jesus tells us about how God works in the first passage of scripture we read when Peter asks Jesus how many times he has to forgive.  Jesus answers Peter, a lot, you have to forgive your sister of brother in Christ many, many times, so many that you will lose count. Jesus follows this up with the parable of the un-forgiving servant.  In his book Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve, Lewis Smedes says that the parable of the unforgiving servant is about God and us. It promises that if we act like the unforgiving servant, then God will act like the king. “Jesus grabs the hardest trick in the bag — forgiving — and says we have to perform it or we are out in the cold, way out, in the boondocks of the unforgiven .… He is tough because the incongruity of sinners refusing to forgive sinners boggles God’s mind. He cannot cope with it; there is no honest way to put up with it.”

We all need to remember that sinners refusing to forgive sinners, or pretending like they are any less sinful than any other kind of sinner boggles God’s mind, and hurts God’s heart because it is yet another way that we refuse to live according to the goodness God intends for us.  If we can live into God’s intended plan for us, which is to forgive as we have been forgiven, to look beyond the shortcomings or misdeeds of another the way God has looked beyond our own misdeeds and shortcomings, then maybe, just maybe we might find a way live together peaceably as the body of Christ instead of dividing it into tinier and tinier factions of those who believe exactly the way we do.  The purpose of a Christian community is not to achieve total agreement on every minute detail of faith, all of the adiaphora, but to accommodate all into the household of faith on equal ground.  The church lives and breathes and has its being only because of the existence of unmerited grace and unmitigated love.  A truth we deny when we focus on what we must do to belong, instead of what Christ has done to accept us, when we are more concerned with lifestyles than with broken hearts, when we are more interested in a perfect performance than in a heartfelt faith, and when the reason for a congregation’s continued existence is based only on the physical beauty of its building, instead of the vital life of
its faith.

Kathleen Norris tells of a Benedictine nun who was keeping vigil at her dying mother’s bedside. Seeking to comfort her mother, she said, “In heaven, everyone we love is there.”  “No,” her mother responded, “in heaven I will love everyone who’s there.”  If Jesus is right, and I have every reason to believe he is, and if Paul is right then there will be a lot of people in heaven for us to love, a lot of people we may have failed to love on earth.  May we begin even now, in this life, to live according the ways of heaven.  Who are the “weak” ones in our congregation in our community, in our denomination? Undoubtedly, the answer depends on who is doing the asking. As such, this puts the burden on all members of a Christ-body community who perceive themselves and their convictions as “strong” to consider with compassion the sensitivities of their brothers and sisters in faith. As long as believers have the redemptive lordship and salvific death and resurrection of Christ at the center of their faith, Paul allows for all manner of diversity to remain within the Christian fold.  May we do the same.  Amen.