So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God.
13 So stop judging each other. Instead, this is what you should decide: never put a stumbling block or obstacle in the way of your brother or sister. 14 I know and I’m convinced in the Lord Jesus that nothing is wrong to eat in itself. But if someone thinks something is wrong to eat, it becomes wrong for that person. 15 If your brother or sister is upset by your food, you are no longer walking in love. Don’t let your food destroy someone for whom Christ died. 16 And don’t let something you consider to be good be criticized as wrong. 17 God’s kingdom isn’t about eating food and drinking but about righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. 18 Whoever serves Christ this way pleases God and gets human approval.
19 So let’s strive for the things that bring peace and the things that build each other up. 20 Don’t destroy what God has done because of food. All food is acceptable, but it’s a bad thing if it trips someone else. 21 It’s a good thing not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything that trips your brother or sister. 22 Keep the belief that you have to yourself—it’s between you and God. People are blessed who don’t convict themselves by the things they approve. (Common English Bible)
“Peace I Give, Peace I Leave: Making Peace in Times of Strife,” Week Four
One by one, every single person in the sanctuary got up and filed through the aisles to the altar up front. They were preparing to take communion. I did not. I could not. I was church shopping, as the unfortunate term goes, and one item my research of this particular congregation failed to uncover was that they practiced closed communion—only people who were members of their particular denomination (as opposed to anyone who identifies as Christian) could partake of holy communion.
As if to drive the point home, they then formed a circle around the altar, facing inward—away from me. I felt like the cheese in the nursery rhyme that stands alone. Heigh ho the dairy-o.
That experience was fifteen years ago, when I was a college student in Portland, Oregon, but I still remember it vividly for what it communicated to me. And lest you feel too bad for me, I did eventually find a church—a Lutheran congregation across the street from the high school I worked at, whose senior minister looked and sounded exactly like Ned Flanders from the Simpsons.
But then, in that moment, it stung. Their rules around food became an obstacle for me to experience the Body of Christ. It was unsettling, the exact opposite of peacemaking. I left that building, never to return, in a state of feeling outside God’s grace. I do not think that Paul would have approved.
When we speak of peacemaking, we speak of being at peace or in a state of peace, we do not speak merely of a lack of violence. As Baruch Spinoza puts it, “Peace is not an absence of war. It is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, and justice.” Peace is something that is proactive, not reactive. It must be created before it can be maintained. So before we can keep a peace, there must be a peace that has been made. Before we become peacekeepers, we must first be peacemakers. Which leads us to this sermon series.
There may be an absence of war for us in the United States at present—rightly or wrongly, we are out of both Afghanistan and Iraq—but I do not think any of us would describe the circumstances since March of 2020 as “peaceful” either. A pandemic means we live not only in a time of increased mortality and danger, but also of increased fallout from all the mental and emotional consequences of living during a pandemic. We are cruel to one another, tearing one another down and apart rather than building one another up and whole. We live in an absence of war, perhaps, but we also most certainly live in an absence of peace.
Yet we follow as our Lord and Savior a Messiah who is called, among other titles, the Prince of Peace. An entire week of Advent is devoted to the virtue of peace. We sing hymns to the peace that God is capable of through Christ. As Christians, making peace—and then keeping it—is part and parcel of our faith. We cannot separate peace from Christianity, they are completely intertwined. We began this series with two weeks on passages from the Gospel of Matthew on the nature of peacemakers and mediation respectively, and last week we hopped over to the book of Acts to hear from the parting soliloquy of Stephen the Martyr. Today, we move to another eventual martyr of the church—Paul—in one of the closing passages of his letter to the church in Rome.
It may be odd, even incongruous, to hear as vehement and sometimes polarizing a personality as Paul preach so strongly on the importance of peaceable coexistence. After all, if Paul were around today, I don’t think he’d have a “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” bumper sticker so much as he’d have one that said, “I said it, it made it into the Bible, and that settles it” bumper sticker. He is, if nothing else, blessed with a strong streak of self-assuredness.
Yet Paul, amid that self-assuredness, is constantly aware that not only does he not live a solo existence, he is actively trying to create and build up community—in Philippi, in Ephesus, Corinth, Thessaloniki, and Rome. He may feel he has the answers, but he also knows that living in community means giving of oneself for the sake of the common good.
And that awareness is at the core of this passage. On the surface, it is about food—the disputes around dietary restrictions in the community in Rome. And I want to say this: this is not a commentary on modern Jewish communities keeping kosher, and if we use what Paul is saying here to position ourselves as spiritually superior for not keeping kosher, we are actually in contravention of the spiritual core of what Paul is saying: don’t destroy what God has done over food. God has built up faiths beyond ours, and we do not get to denigrate them over food.
For our purposes, though, food can be a stand-in word for just about anything: do not destroy what God has created over any number of traditions and customs we elevate to extremely high importance. What Paul is really talking about here for us is the need for openness to the people outside our little church community who do not participate in all our unwritten and unspoken rules, traditions, and customs that make up a congregation’s culture that can be used to invite in, or to push away.
When we talk about that, it is vital to draw a distinction between integration and assimilation. Integration is the bringing together of people in a space where people can be fully present, engaged, and who they are. It involves equal access and power. Assimilation entails uneven power—it carries with it the expectation that people adhere to the preferences of the established group or people with power to create uniformity rather than diversity, and homogeneity rather than breadth and variety.
Now, I want us to ask ourselves this carefully and honestly: when we consider how we try to include visitors or new people to the community of the church, is it to integrate them, or assimilate them? Is the church a place for people to be fully present, engaged, and fulfilled, or is it a place where we make them into who we—not God, but we—want them to be, and that the way we want them to be just happens to be as much like us as possible?
Assimilation does not build up peace so much as it builds up the appearance of peace, by mistaking sameness for peace. The veneer of peace is not the same as peace, it is why Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his Letter From Birmingham Jail about the difference between a positive peace, in which justice is present, and a negative peace, which is merely the absence of overt, surface-level tension.
When we come together to be the church, then, in spirit and in truth, are we putting ourselves first, or are we putting the future church first? The people who have not yet enjoined or been born into the body of Christ but one day will? Are we putting their state of peace first by integrating them rather than insisting that they assimilate into us?
Often without realizing it, a religious community is communicating to the world around it. What are we trying to say? How are we trying to make peace? Are we even trying? Have we committed ourselves to being peacemakers even if—especially if—it means we give up some of our power?
So what peace do we try to build? A negative peace where there is simply the absence of obvious conflict, or a positive peace in which the fullness of justice and human flourishing are able to exist? Building up peace means building up a peace that in turn builds up each other—not merely ourselves.
And I include myself in this--when I get hangry, or sleep-deprived, or just plain stretched to my limit, I can become incredibly pettily selfish. Even this weekend on our date night, Carrie and I arrived too late at the Pizitz and were down to just one option, which hadn't been my first or second choice, and I had a bit of a snit about it. But soon, we were devouring hot pho out in the cool autumn air and people watching, and the previous selfishness not just melted away, but proved itself to be unnecessary. And I have to hold myself to account for that sort of selfishness--we all do.
Paul knew this, he says here that we each will have to give an account of ourselves. He wrote to make sure the Jesus community in Rome knew it too. But do we know it today? I am not so sure. We are apt to let anything be a stumbling block or an obstacle to put in front of a brother or sister in contravention to the common good of the community. Can we account of ourselves when we are obstacles and stumbling blocks to others instead of builders of peace? Can we hold our me-first tendencies to account?
For me-first is not the Gospel. The Gospel is the exact opposite: the last will be first, and the first will be last. Me-first gets us put last.
Peace is not me-first. It is we-first. It is us-first. And it is God-first.
Will we circle the proverbial wagons around the altar, backs to the world so that all we ever see is each other, or will we build up the peace that comes from living in true and full community?
In one, there will be us. There will always be us, and that can be comforting.
But in the other, there will be a kingdom.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
November 14, 2021