16th Sunday after Pentecost
Romans 14:1-12.
Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions. Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables. 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. 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 God is able to make them stand. 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. Those who observe the day, observe it in honor of God. Also, those who eat, eat in honor of God, since they give thanks to God; while those who abstain, abstain in honor of God and give thanks to God. We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to God, and if we die, we die to God; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we belong to God. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living. 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. For it is written, “As I live, says our God, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall give praise to God.” So then, each of us will be accountable to God.
A Difference of Opinion
I had a lot of conversations with lots of different people this week, and I noticed that more often than not, conversations turn to politics. It’s not a surprise, there’s a lot going on in the world right now, a lot going on in our country, in our town, but as passionate as I can get about it sometimes, I have to admit that I’m not always up the most current on what’s happening in the political sphere. And, that is on purpose. For a good part of the last decade, I’ve generally tried to ignore the news, because anytime I saw a news clip or a news article about politics or something going on in the world, I would either get really angry or really sad. And, I just decided, for my own personal well-being and mental health, that I needed to stay away from the news. Besides, if there was anything really important going on, I was sure that I would hear about it from my friends, either directly, or from what they posted on Facebook. And, I know, Facebook is not the most reliable source of information, but I genuinely believe that my friends are pretty responsible when it comes to posting current events on their social media. And, a lot of times, the posts are just links to articles from trusted news sources anyway, so I could actually just read up on it if it seemed that important.
The problem with this, though, is that even if all of the “news” is accurate, Facebook and other social media platforms have become these echo chambers where we only see and hear what we already believe. They track what you like and what you don’t like, and tailor what you see to what they think you want to see. And, if someone posts something you don’t like, you can unfollow them, and you’ll never see anything that they post, ever again. Social media’s become an electronic mirror, that parrots back to us everything that we already say and think, and we stop seeing the opinions and thoughts of people who think differently from us. After a while, those different thoughts and opinions start to feel so alien, that we don’t understand how a rational mentally-stable human being could think those thoughts at all, and we start to think of them as “other.” We start to judge them, we start to categorize and silo them, and this judgment starts to fray the fabric of our society.
It’s similar to the kind of behavior that Paul is addressing in his letter to the Romans.Paul was writing to them because they were having problems; they were nit-picking at each other’s cultures and traditions. He starts this section by telling them to welcome those whose customs are different, but he has to specify that they should not be welcomed “for the purpose of quarreling over opinions.” This line is kind of hilarious to me because if he felt the need to write it, then they had to be doing it, and it must have been pretty bad for Paul to have heard about it all the way in Corinth, which was almost 1,000 miles away, in time before Facebook and Snapchat.
The way he goes on to tell them what to do and what not to do is so reminiscent of an elementary school classroom. They’re all judging each other over petty unimportant things, and to be honest, in the almost 2,000 years since this was written, we haven’t changed all that much.
Our world is filled with so much strife and division right now, and we have to do something to that. We need to start listening to each other. I have to admit that along with ignoring the news, I may have unintentionally stopped listening to people. I was convinced that some people were just out of their minds and there was no point in talking to them, because it didn’t matter what I said or did, they would never see reason and we would never agree on anything. But, after spending a lot of time thinking about this and looking our text for today, I started to remember something that I seem to have forgotten. And, I’ve been continually reminding myself because it’s been one of the major themes the last few weeks with the Rough Sleepers discussions around town to talk about homelessness. We are not all supposed to be the same. Instead of trying to change everyone to be exactly like us, we need to try to understand each other, to understand where people who we perceive as different from us are coming from, even if, and this is the hard part, they can’t or won’t understand where we are coming from. God is asking us to love and care for other people, even if they won’t love or care for us. The commandment is to love you neighbor. It is not, “Get your neighbor to love you.” Our job as the people of God, is to love everyone. It has never been easy. It’s not easy now. And, it will probably never be easy. But, that’s what we are supposed to do. That’s how we change the world, even if we never get to see that change.
So many of the people in Helena are trying to bridge this gap of difference right now to help our unsheltered neighbors. We need to listen to what people need, and we need to educate our community. We need to educate ourselves and grow in compassion. This is not an us versus them situation. This is everyone, living in community, learning how to help each other.
We all want the same things. We want a safe place to sleep at night, clean water, and enough food to eat. We want to be able to provide for our children, and to be able to pursue our own happiness. These are things that everyone wants, so at the very least, we can empathize with that. And, if we can find common ground, then conversation can start to happen, and maybe we can start healing the rifts in our society. This is the most important thing that we can do right now. God is calling us, moving us to love and kindness, empathy and understanding. Let’s answer that call. Amen.
~ Rev. Charles Wei
