Romans 14.1-10
I preached on the road this Sunday, and my gracious host indulged my request to stick with my exploration through Paul’s Letter to the Romans.
During our second war in Iraq, one week during Lent the Lord summoned me to preach about the use of state-sponsored torture. Newspapers had only recently begun reporting on the Torture Memos which documented the ghastly abuses by at the prison in Abu Ghraib. The images outraged the world. In the face of such revelations, the churches in America were silent. I was young and brash and preached what I took to be self-evident.
“Why is the church in America so quiet these days?” I exhorted my hearers.
I let question linger for an uncomfortably long silence before I continued:
“Why are Christians so quiet about this particular issue? What is the matter with us? Why is the church instead consumed with culture wars. Has the church lost its nerve? Has the church forgotten we worship a crucified Lord?
No matter what a person has done or is suspected of doing, once that person is taken into custody, he or she becomes defenseless. The Old and New Testaments alike are clear: abuse of a defenseless person is an abomination in God’s sight. The defenselessness of a fetus is a central argument advanced against abortion. This conviction about defending the defenseless lies at the very heart of our faith. Yet we are silent, as quiet as all his followers who did not shout, “Do not crucify him!”
As soon as I handed over the benediction that Sunday, a church member assaulted me in the narthex and, sticking his finger in my chest, he hollered at me, “Just where in the holy hell do you get off preaching like that, preacher?!”
I stammered.
“Well, Senator,” I said, “It is Lent and the Lord was tortured to death.”
The Chair of the Armed Services Committee shook his head and waved his finger at me.
“You tell me, preacher— if Jesus was still alive do you honestly think Jesus would having anything to say about torture and the government?!”
“Um, well Senator, uh…I mean, he was crucified, I think...um...maybe he would have...” I started to say.
He shook his head and waved me off.
“Jesus would be rolling over in his grave if he knew you’d brought that kind of politics into our church! Just where did you get the idea that your liberal politics has any place in the church?!”
“He doesn’t have a grave…it’s empty…” I muttered to myself.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Never mind,” I said.
He stood there, his hands on his hips, dandruff on his shoulders, waiting for me to answers.
Finally, he repeated his question, “Where did you get the idea that kind of politics has any place among believers?!”
I stammered, “Uh, I mean, it’s called the Book of Kings.”
He thought I was being cute.
“You better watch out!” he threatened, “I could have you run out of this place!”
“Bless your heart,” I replied.
He narrowed his eyes and held his holler to a whisper, “If what you believe about Jesus leads to those sorts of views, then I don’t see how you have any place here!”
And then he shook his now crimson head, motioned for his wife to catch up to him, and then he hurried off.
A few weeks after, on Easter Sunday, when he arrived, opened up the worship bulletin and saw that I was the preacher, he turned right around and left the way he had come.
Back then I was not the humble, wise, and mature man you see before you today. I was proud and pietistic, not a little self-righteous. And I wore his rebuke like the Silver Star. He had wounded me, but I had remained strong in the faith.
Or so I thought.
Looking back, in light of Paul’s letter to the Romans…
Scripture says I was weak.
Remember, the apostle Paul did not number his sentences any more than you do. Not until the Middle Ages did the church add the chapter and verse divisions in the modern Bible. And there is nothing at the top of chapter fourteen to indicate a transition in thought or a change in subject matter; therefore, Paul’s discussion of the dilemma that divides the Christians in Rome in chapters fourteen and fifteen is the continuation of the summons with which Paul ends chapter thirteen, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.”
That is, if the Holy Spirit has clothed you with Christ— if God has baptized you— then the way you make your baptism intelligible to the world is by welcoming those whose obedience to Jesus Christ appears at odds with your own.
Not only is there no transition in thought indicated in verse one, Paul’s entire epistle in fact has been building to his discussion of this issue.
Here in chapter fourteen, all the previous elements of Paul’s letter cohere:
The definition of original sin
The promise and offense of the gospel
The astonishing claim that believers are Jesus’s risen body
And finally the exhortation for disciples of Christ to wrap themselves in Christ (baptism) and so live as Christ.
Every ingredient in the epistle thus far has been folded into the argument in order to reckon with this fight over what’s on the table in the church at Rome.
Meat.
Evidently, some in the church at Rome abstain from meat out of allegiance to the lordship of Christ. Others not only “eat everything,” they fear the scruples of the others contradict the message of Christian freedom.
Paul takes it for granted that readers understand the context.
In the belly of the Beast’s empire, there was no reliable way for believers in Rome to know with certainty that the meat they found in the market had not previously been offered upon Caesar’s pagan altars. This is the reason Jews throughout the diaspora often avoided meat; likewise, a segment of Christians in Rome opted for vegetarianism as an aspect of their obedience to Christ.
To say the least, their fellow congregants did not appreciate their commitment. Quite obviously, “weak in faith” is very clearly not the self-designation of the vegetarian Christians. It is a slur used against them by their fellow believers. It is a contemptuous epithet used by those who call themselves “strong in faith” to express their disdain for the other. The so-called “strong in faith” were strong because they understood what Paul had taught the Galatians; namely, Christ + ______ is no gospel at all. Any ought or should added to the gospel eliminates the gospel.
Though Paul’s sympathies clearly lie with the “strong in faith,” the strong’s reproach of the weak fails to take seriously the fact that, for the latter group, it is a matter of faithfulness to the Ten Commandments and not simply the kosher laws, especially the first and over-riding commandment, “You shall have no other gods but God.”
“How can we proclaim that Jesus is Lord if we eat meat sacrificed to the barren deities?” the weak in faith anguished. “Will not our manner of living contradict our message?
On the other side of the aisle, the strong in faith argued, “How can we proclaim the gospel if we fret over the law?”
While this partisan divide may strike us as a peculiar problem to vex a church, exactly because it was about the commandments we can easily switch out meat for a different biblical mandate in order to get a sense of how this debate threatened the health of Christ’s Body.
For example:
According to polls, millions of Christians in America currently support the mass deportation of illegal immigrants from the country. Indeed Christians are the cohort most in favor of the policy proposal.
On the other hand, other Christians are the first to insist the scriptures broker no compromise, “When an immigrant sojourns with you in your land, you shall do him no wrong. You shall treat the immigrant who sojourns with you as a native among you, and you shall love him as you love yourself, for once you were immigrants in the land of Egypt: I AM the Lord your God (Leviticus 19).”
Switch out meat for a different biblical mandate that currently divides Christ’s Body and you can begin to appreciate the risk which menaced the church at Rome.
Instead of vegetables, insert abortion into Romans 14 and 15. After all, the Lord Jesus attests to the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”
Rather than protein, at issue could be believers who support peddlers of lies yet worship the One who not only commands us not to lie but is himself the Truth.
Jesus commanded his disciples not to take up the sword. Should Christians endorse sending far more powerful weapons to Ukraine or Israel? Survey says we are not of one mind on the issue.
There is more that divides Christ’s Body than what’s on the menu.
When Martin Luther King Jr. called Sunday morning the most segregated hour in America, as much as he was talking about Black versus White he could have been talking about Red versus Blue.
We do not do well welcoming brothers and sisters whose faith in Christ leads them to convictions and commitments other than our own convictions and commitments.
Nevertheless!
This is not a problem without a solution.
The scriptures themselves supply the solution.
As the New Testament scholar John Barclay says, the sheer amount of space Paul devotes to this single issue— meat— signals that he intends his response here to be a model for all our moral discernment.
What the apostle says about this issue goes for all issues.
What Paul says to the weak and the strong in Rome about what divides them, Paul says to each of us amidst our divisions.
Tim Alberta is a journalist who writes for the Atlantic. He is also an evangelical Christian whose father, Richard Alberta, was the pastor of a large, well-known church in Michigan. Starting in 2016, Alberta wrote a number of articles critical of then-candidate Donald Trump. Three years later, on the set of a cable news television show Alberta learned that his beloved father had suddenly died.
On the day of his Dad’s visitation, Tim Alberta stood in a receiving line at the back of the sanctuary with his three older brothers. Alberta’s father had grown Cornerstone Church from a small congregation into a megachurch and now he was surrounded by a crowd of church folks he’d known since he was a boy, all chastising him for his political stance. With his Dad’s body in a box only a few feet away, they ridiculed him for being weak in faith.
Alberta writes:
“They kept on coming. More than I could count. People from the church—people I’d known my entire life—were greeting me, not primarily with condolences or encouragement or mourning, but with commentary about Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump. Some of it was playful. But some of it wasn’t playful. Some of it was angry; some of it was cold and confrontational. One man questioned whether I was truly a Christian. Another asked if I was still on “the right side.” A righteous anger was beginning to pierce the fog of melancholy. Here, in our house of worship, people were taunting me about politics as I tried to mourn my father. Card- carrying evangelical Christians, they didn’t see a hurting son; they saw a vulnerable adversary.”
A few hours after Tim Alberta buried his Dad, he and his brothers crashed on the sofa in their parent’s living room. Behind them, in the kitchen, a small platoon of church ladies worked to prepare a meal for the family.
Alberta recalls thinking:
“Here is the love of Christ. Watching them hustle about, comforting Mom and catering to her sons, I found myself regretting thinking the folks at our church were anything but humble, kindhearted Christians like these ladies. Maybe I’d blown things out of proportion. Just then, one of them walked over and handed me an envelope. It was left at the church, she said. My name was scrawled across it.”
A longtime church elder had written it to say his dead father would be ashamed of him for his politics. Alberta read the letter in shock at its cruelty and then handed it to his wife, who flung it to the floor, crying out, "What the hell is wrong with these people?”
“To be free in Christ is to be free even from the way of life we are convinced inevitably proceeds from our understanding of our freedom in Christ.”
In his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, the theologian Karl Barth writes that “to be free in Christ is to be free even from the way of life we are convinced inevitably proceeds from our understanding of our freedom in Christ.” Paul’s warning to the strong and the weak in Rome, Barth says, is precisely a warning against our faith; that is, Paul cautions us against ourselves. He admonishes us against any certainty about what constitutes the faithful life. “Life under the freedom of Christ,” he writes, “is the unjustifiability of everything we choose to name “the Christian life.””
“Life under the freedom of Christ is the unjustifiability of everything we choose to name “the Christian life.””
Specifically, Barth is referring to the remarkable missing features in Paul's discussion of the debate which divides the church in Rome.
There are two: Concord and Commandment.
First, it is notable that the apostle makes no attempt whatsoever to urge the partisans to settle their disagreement and find consensus over the issue in question.
Second, when he at last addresses the problem between them— Paul does not arbitrate their differences by appealing to the law. Paul neither cites the commandments nor quotes the scriptures.
Instead, Paul points to the Christ event:
"While you were yet an ungodly, enemy of the Lord, Christ Jesus died for you. In Jesus Christ, you have been welcomed by God with a surprising mercy and an incongruous grace. Therefore, welcome the other.”
Meat is such an idiosyncratic, antiquated issue Paul’s auditors today miss how seismic is his solution.
Notice—
Paul subordinates all the commandments to baptism.
You shall love the immigrant as you love yourself.
Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.
Turn the other cheek.
Thou shalt not bear false witness.
Paul subordinates all the commandments to the more determinative fact that through water and the Spirit the Father’s only Son has made you his siblings; therefore, we just are brothers and sisters of one another.
We are more brothers and sisters through Christ than if my mother had made us siblings.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer insists, to exclude others from the Body of Christ based on any law— that is, based on any local tradition, any cultural value, or any political issue— is our attempt to undo what Christ does indissolubly through baptism.
Just so, what is or is not biblical is no longer the final criterion for faithfulness. “Scripture says…” no longer suffices as a way to adjudicate obedience. If you go to the Bible simply to win arguments, it’s your word you find there not God’s word. The final criterion for every argument is now, “In Jesus Christ, you have been welcomed by God; therefore, welcome the other.”
According to Paul, the ultimate and only standard in the “now time” is allegiance to Jesus Christ who has welcomed us.
And because the weak’s abstention from meat is integral to their desire to honor the Lord, Paul accepts it as a genuine expression of faithfulness. Similarly, the strong’s omnivorous diet is an authentic witness to their freedom in Christ; consequently, Paul accepts it too as a genuine— if apparently contradictory— expression of faithfulness.
What Paul will not abide is either side judging the other or offering the other a welcome contingent only on eventual agreement.
Paul subordinates all the commandments to baptism.
What establishes your faithfulness is not your position on a given issue but your motive for staking out that position. To live by faith is to submit all our differences to our allegiance to Christ. If I advocate for a position other than your own but I do so to serve Christ, then, as my brothers and sisters, you must accept it as a legitimate expression of discipleship. However, if I advocate for that very same position for a reason other than to honor Christ— if my position is really just the personal political preference I would have if I were not a Christian— then what is faithful in one light is sin in the other.
This is what Paul means when he warns at the end of chapter fourteen:
“You are condemned if…you do not act from faith; for whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.”
In other words—
It is possible for two Christians to hold two completely contradictory politics on a given issue and yet both be judged faithful and obedient.
And it is possible for two Christians to share the same politics on a subject and for only one of them to be judged faithful and obedient while the other is condemned for sin.
What Paul says to the church at Rome is seismic.
And he intends it to encompass every issue.
But it is not new.
It is what God says to Samuel in Bethlehem as he’s about to search for the new king to anoint, “The Lord looks on the heart.”
Not the box you check on a ballot.
Not the sign you hang in your yard or the sticker you affix to your tailgate.
Not your Facebook post or TickTock video or retweet.
The Lord looks on your heart.
As John Barclay writes on our passage:
“For Paul, the welcome of Christ, because it neither matched nor reinforced preexistent values or norms, has put all other value systems into question. The only salient values for believers are those that arise from the good news. Because peace, love, and self-denying service are integral to this good news, the “strong” must bear the burdens of the “weak.” Walking in love is now the only non-negotiable good that must be practiced at all times among believers.”
Walking in love— what Karl Barth called “the freedom of the prisoner of God.”
"What the hell is wrong with these people?” Tim Alberta’s wife screamed in her in-laws’s living room.
She could’ve yelled, “What is wrong with us?"
Sin.
And while we were yet sinners, Christ welcomed us.
Therefore, welcome one another.
Years after he accosted me in the narthex, Senator Roberts of the Armed Services Committee came to me, inquiring about baptism. The Lord had not saved him through water and the Spirit, and he was at an age where it nagged at him. In the intervening years, I’d grown on him and he had learned to trust me.
To be honest, me getting cancer helped him to take a shine to me.
We were talking about baptism in my office, my print of Karl Barth before an empty tomb hanging behind his head, when all of a sudden he changed the subject.
He took off his glasses.
He rubbed his bald head with his sleeve.
And he said, “All those years ago, when I got angry with you for your (he struggled still to call it such) sermon. You let me walk away. You didn’t pursue me or follow up with me. Why?”
And this time I was sitting but I resumed my stammering, “Uh…”
He shook his head and put his elbows on his knees, leaning forward.
“Was what you said about the Bible true?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I think so— I mean, I believe so.
He nodded like I was a witness in a committee hearing.
“And was what you preached about Jesus true, so far as you believed it?”
I nodded.
“Then why for God’s sake did you let me walk away? Why did you let me stay away for so many Sundays?”
I felt my cheeks flush red.
“You should’ve come after me,” he reproached me, “I’m your brother.”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to interrupt the sermon.
“I’m your brother,” he said again, and then he pointed down at the baptismal liturgy in the Book of Worship that lay open on my desk.
“Or, at least I will be. Come Sunday, we’re going to be stuck with each other.”
The Freedom of the Prisoner of God