"Together at the Table"

Preached February 2014 before being examined by the Presbytery of the James in Richmond, VA

Text: Romans 14:1-17

Things are always more complicated when we have to sit down together at the table.

I imagine many of us can picture the scenario. A family can be happy and well-functioning 364 days a year, but when multiple generations of parents and children, aunts and uncles, maybe even an in-law or two, sit down for Christmas dinner, things start to change. To be sure, a family dinner can be a time of genuine fellowship. But sometimes, when we all sit down together, the arguments slip in before we even realize it's happening. Perhaps the conversation wanders to politics or religion, to what on earth Sarah plans on doing with her art history degree, or to why Ed got remarried so soon after his divorce. Sparks fly, and before we know it, what started as a joyful shared meal is reduced to shouts, anger, and tears. Things are always more complicated when we have to sit down together at the table.

In our text this afternoon, the Apostle Paul is seeking to address just that: a time of table fellowship gone horribly awry. For the Christians to whom Paul is writing, the argument this time is about the contents of the meal itself - specifically, whether or not Christians gathered together should eat meat. Now we don't know exactly what it is about eating meat or not eating meat that has the Roman Christians at odds, but from what we know of early Christianity - and from what Paul writes in his other letters - we can make some guesses. We know that the first generations of Christians faced the challenge of bringing together into community people who came from both Jewish and Gentile backgrounds. The Jewish Christians, who knew the God revealed in Jesus Christ to be the same God who established the covenant with their ancestors and who gave them the Law, had to wrestle with the question of what their new life in Christ meant for their relationship to that Law and that heritage, just as the Gentile Christians wrestled with what calling Jesus "Lord" meant for their relationship with their Roman culture and religion. And between these groups, it seems that food was a sticking point.

Paul doesn't explicitly say it in our text today, but in his first letter to the Corinthians, he deals with a similar debate that had to do with meat that had been sacrificed to pagan gods. In Paul's time, you could pretty fairly assume that any meat you bought in the market had been part of such a sacrifice. And for a Christian, that might constitute idolatry. One group, which Paul calls "the strong," had no problem eating this sacrificed meat since, as Christians, they knew there was only one God and that the pagan gods to whom this meat might have been sacrificed didn't exist in the first place. But others, the group Paul calls "the weak," believed that eating such meat was engaging in the very act of idolatry, worshiping a God other than the one revealed in Jesus Christ. Eating this meat disturbed their consciences and violated their very Christian faith.

For us today, this debate may sound rather arbitrary, but for the early Christians, it was a real point of contention. It was disrupting their worship and their fellowship. When they gathered for shared meals, as Paul tells us, the weak passed judgment on the strong, and the strong despised the weak. Sacred table fellowship devolved into name-calling and contempt.

Brothers and sisters in Christ despising and judging one another over the way we live out the Christian faith. We in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) today know something about this, don't we? Whether it's over ordination standards, or questions of theology, or the social witness positions our church takes, Presbyterians of good faith regularly find themselves on different sides of issues of conscience. And to be sure, we're not the first ones. People of good faith being divided over issues of conscience is a problem as old as Christianity itself.

It's interesting, then, that in this text, Paul spends very little time worrying about who is right in the debate. Sure, he identifies himself as one of the "strong" - one of those who does eat meat. But he remains remarkably unconcerned about teaching doctrine, about who has the right answer. He is much more concerned with how they, with how we, treat one another and live together in community in the process of disagreement. Paul tells them not to despise and judge one another but to welcome one another into community, because God has first welcomed them. He admonishes them not to injure or put stumbling blocks before the consciences of their brothers and sisters, for when they do so, they are no longer walking in love. Paul reminds them, and he reminds us, that those brothers and sisters with whom we are fighting are people for whom our Lord Jesus Christ died.

Things are always more complicated when we have to sit down together at the table.

We know that this radical welcome and love that Paul advocates is not easy to practice, and it bears mentioning that Paul himself does not always take his own advice. For example, what happens to this call for Christian welcome when we turn to Paul's letter to the Galatians? There we hear his enraged and impassioned argument against those who believe that Gentile Christians must first be circumcised and observe Torah regulations. He calls his opponents false teachers, claims they preach a false gospel. In Philippians, he calls them "evil workers" and "dogs". (In a moment of particular fury in his letter to the Galatians, he scrawls out, and-I-quote, "I wish that those who unsettle you would castrate themselves!")

Or what about I Corinthians 6, when he insists that the readers expel from the community a man who has been sleeping with his mother-in-law? What has become here of Christian welcome and unity despite disagreement over moral behavior?

The traditional explanation, I imagine, is familiar to many of us. As the argument goes, Paul focuses on acceptance in the face of disagreement in passages like Romans 14 because this matter of eating meat is among the "things indifferent," a "non-essential" to what Paul understands to be the heart of Christianity. On the other hand, on essential matters - like justification by grace through faith, or how one's new life in Christ affects his or her moral behavior, Paul has much more to say about who is right and who is wrong.

Many of us here today would likely agree with Paul that what we eat is not essential to our faith. But for the people to whom Paul was writing, it was hardly a ‘thing indifferent,' or a non-essential. It was a fundamental question of whether or not they were being faithful Christian disciples! It was a Second Commandment issue. Were they practicing idolatry by eating this meat? If, as many Biblical scholars and Christian historians believe, the earliest confession of faith was simply, "Jesus is Lord," then eating meat sacrificed to idols - or even to Caesar himself! - felt for some of these Christians like confessing ultimate devotion to a lord other than their Lord, Jesus Christ.

These Roman Christians were wrestling with an issue of conscience that addressed a fundamental question of their worship, their witness, and their salvation. And aren't we wrestling with the same? I've heard many in the Church say that it's time for us to stop fighting about these non-essentials and get back to focusing on 'what really matters.' But I think to say that is to miss the deep and fundamental way that many of the questions we're wrestling with touch on the very core of our faith. Our questions about theology, and Christian practice, and ordination standards, and so many other things delve into what we believe about who God is, who God has created us to be, and how we are to live as Christ's faithful disciples.

And you know, if I understand what's going on in Romans 14, I don’t think Paul misses that. Paul is not only a preacher and a theologian; he's also a pastor. Before he writes this letter to the Romans, he has spent years preaching, teaching, and living in Christian communities that were wrestling with other issues that were vitally important in their own contexts. He listened to the pain and fear of the Thessalonians as they worried about what would happen to those Christians who had died before Christ returned. He counseled the Corinthians on everything from marriage and sex to death and resurrection to how to deal with abuses of the Lord's Supper. He wrestled with the Galatians' question of the relationship of Christianity to circumcision and the Law.

So when we hear Paul’s words in our text today, I don't think what we're hearing is simply an overly hopeful, naïve vision of what Christian community should look like. No, I think Paul knows just how difficult his teachings about “welcoming our brothers and sisters” and “walking in love” with the people we disagree with really are. And yet, out of his tireless work in the midst of conflict, fully aware of the blood, sweat, and tears involved in working out what it means to be a Christian community, this is what Paul tells us. Welcome one another. Walk in love with one another. Do not cause your brother or sister to fall.

I don't claim to know the answers to our present struggles as a Church - far from it. But I can say this with full assurance of faith: we are called to keep coming back to the table. For as Paul reminds us, "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." As our own Brief Statement of Faith puts it it, "In life and death, we belong to God." And in this community of faith, if we belong to God, we also belong, in part, to one another.

Things are always more complicated when we have to sit down together at the table. Let's do it anyway.