"We Are the Lord's"

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

We continue our meditation on passages chosen from the concluding part of the Letter to the Romans, the part of the letter that deals with ethics. Since God has done all this for us in Christ, how shall we live worthy of that work? We remember that Christ is God’s free gift to us and call Him grace. We accept His gift with thanksgiving and call the means and process of our acceptance faith. Christ in us and we in Christ is the divine love in human life that displaces the morality of rules and regulations, because the incarnate love of God fulfils the obligation that can only be misstated in the terms of moral law. Love works no harm to the neighbor therefore love is the fulfillment and the replacement of the Law of Moses.

Perhaps only a religious lawyer like the Paul, an acknowledged leader in his field, could appreciate the final failure of morality understood as law. This phenomenon of morality as law might repay further reflection. Why do we describe our vision of the good life in terms of rules? Here is an answer to the question from James Alison, our speaker last Thursday. In an essay on the story in John 9 of Jesus healing the man born blind James says that Jesus “subverts from within” the idea of sin. “Sin,” he writes, “ceases to be some defect which apparently excludes someone from the group of the righteous, and comes to be participation in the mechanism of expulsion” (James Alison, Faith beyond Resentment, 2001, p.16). That is, the rules describe a standard by which to judge who is defective, in this case the man who is blind, and so whom to exclude from the group. Remember the story begins with the disciples asking Jesus who sinned, the man or his parents in that he was born blind, and Jesus answers that no one sinned, that this form of the notion of sin is itself sinful, because it makes a defect the grounds for exclusion from the group. Well, we cannot examine here the process by which the story takes us from sin as a defect of the excluded, to sin as the “righteousness” of the excluders, but we can make the point that morality as law sets boundaries around the group and defines who is in and who is out, - in this case the law that one who is deformed or defective cannot have full standing in the Holy People- and that that definition is the essence of sin. In this case the law is a whip used by the “righteous” to drive sinners out, and sin is this act of  “righteousness.”

This is precisely what both Paul and our Gospel are telling us in today’s lessons, the latter emphasizing mutual forgiveness and the former, the primacy of grace and faith.  We shall follow Paul because the situation in which he gives his teaching is perhaps familiar to us, a situation of rivalry within a single congregation. We might perhaps recognize ourselves in these Roman Christians who are fighting about what it is proper to eat at their potlucks. The fight is really about who is a member of our group and who is not, about the power to admit and to exclude. In our churches we have judged, condemned and expelled one another, knowing in our best moments that we do it for sheer love of power, and in our worst moments thinking we are doing it for the good of the church. Paul was very much aware that the crucifiers of Jesus were the political and religious leaders not the scoundrels who were excluded from society. Presently our society at large is writhing with righteousness because of the atrocity commemorated last week; there are evildoers and we know exactly who they are, and we feel justified, even noble in pursuing them. There is nothing wrong with this; societies must protect themselves against criminals, but there is something wrong when those who do not see things in the same way as the majority does are regarded as unpatriotic, and when a multitude of sins is covered over in a solidarity of righteous indignation against foreign devils. We have heard how journalists and politicians were and still to some extent are reluctant to criticize law enforcement agencies if they overstep constitutional bounds in pursuit of terrorists.

Let’s be clear about the situation in the Roman church which Paul is addressing so that we can appreciate better his point that we all belong to God, inclusively and equally, and that it is before God and not before one another that we have to give an account of why we live as we live and why we say what we say. We are each one God’s servant and not the servants of one another. “If we live we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord, so if we live or die we belong to the Lord.” We know that there were at least two groups in that congregation, one of former Jews and another of former Gentiles; they were at loggerheads over the right food to be served at the potlucks and Paul is making his well-known point that there is no difference between these groups because they are all one in Christ Jesus, and that what they eat is utterly irrelevant to their standing before God.

Eating together was an essential part of the life of both the synagogue and the pagan temple. We are not unusual in any way for having a fine big kitchen and an excellent dining room in our church. From the ancient world pagan temples have been excavated showing lavish dining facilities, and clearly Jews were particular about what they ate (kosher) and with whom they ate it. In Galatians 2 we read how they were all eating together in the church at Antioch when some Jewish Christians showed up from the Jerusalem Church and Peter and Barnabas left the table and went off into a corner to eat alone because they did not want to be seen by them to be eating with Gentiles. Paul tells us how he scolded Peter publicly and “to his face” for this action. In the Roman church the Jewish Christians were excluding from their company the Gentile Christians, and vice versa, because they ate meat purchased in the open market where virtually all the meat for sale came from the animals sacrificed in the pagan temples. Not only was the meat not kosher it was sacred to the pagan gods, to demons and idols. You can imagine what a fuss those who believed in this nonsense made. Yes, nonsense, is what Paul calls it by implication, and more pointedly, enslaving nonsense. We who have been liberated by God’s action in Christ from all the powers of this world can only laugh at those still creeping around trying to escape the notice of this demon or that, this bad luck or that. This nonsense is far-fetched by those who want reasons to blame and exclude some while approving and including others, all part of a game of “gotcha!” played by those who cannot otherwise “get a life.” “Those who eat meat purchased at Safeway or Albertson’s and not welcome at our table because those markets do not bless the animals before they slaughter them,” they say, or something like that.

Talking of nonsense, some time ago I heard a presentation by a woman who is a Feng Shui consultant. Apparently realtors are interested in this if only because they need to understand the needs of some of their Chinese customers. You know that this superstition has to do with where to place a house and how to furnish it, etc. an important matter to be dealt with by designers and architects of good taste and good gifts, but not by seers of the spirits. After the presentation I was overheard muttering that all this is quite unnecessary because Christ is Lord of all and if we know him we are set free from all the spiritual powers of this world.

This is Paul’s position and it is quite radical. Look again at the 12 verses we read: It does not matter what you eat, but do not despise those who do not agree with you. Likewise, it does not matter what days, if any, you keep as holidays, especially whether you keep Sabbath or not, but do not despise or even criticize those who behave differently from you. Everything is a matter of personal taste or conviction, everything excepting this: that we all belong to Christ. That is non-negotiable and absolute. We are the bondslaves not of one another but of Jesus Christ, for eternity, and that bondage sets us free from all the powers of this world, which we use to set up groups that include and exclude; it sets us free from each other in everything excepting the obligation to love one another as Christ has loved us. God has included the whole human race in His work in Christ. That grace and faith is all that we have in common and all that we need to have, because in the end while we live and when we die our primary relation is with Christ. For the rest, we are free of other people, except to love.

Here is a coda on liberty: How my life is dominated by my need to have others think well of me! How those images of what the good life, the cool person, the popular game is control my life! (I once had a friend who worked at a ski-resort; he told me that he saw scores of injured people everyday, that the injury rate is one of the industry’s nasty little secrets. Why do the inept ski in danger of their lives? Because that’s what the image of a stylish person demands. I suspect the same pertains in golf; not that people are injured but that much time and talent that might be otherwise invested is wasted for reasons of image). These images, and the countless others are the powers of this world from which we are set free when we realize and affirm life before God, that is, God’s ownership of us all.