Thomas Kleinert
In our Tuesday and Wednesday book groups we have been talking about Peter Gomes’s The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus. Just last week we discussed his take on the famous acronym WWJD - What would Jesus do? Gomes argues that we can’t know what Jesus would do, no matter how convinced we are that Jesus, given the choice between a Hummer and a Prius, would drive the latter. Jesus got in a boat a few times, but he walked everywhere he went, and the one time he rode into town, it was on a borrowed donkey. According to Gomes, the better question to ask is, What would Jesus have me do? We are much less likely to speculate, and much more likely to take our own context into account.
I’m driving to work in a Honda van the size of a tank. I like it because he has room for my kayak and all my gear, and when I take the seats out there’s room for a bed in the rear. When I open the sun roof, I can lie on my back and look at the stars. With all the seats in, there’s room for six or more, but most days I drive around by myself. What would Jesus have me drive? Trade in the van for a used hybrid with twice the gas mileage? Leave the van in the garage and take the bus to work? Get an e-bike and only drive the van when I’m going to the river? What would Jesus have me do?
I’ll get to an answer, hopefully soon; one step closer to honoring God the way I believe God must be honored; one step closer to being a neighbor to my contemporaries and to the children of our children’s children. Others will perceive other demands in their desire to honor God; others will ask, What would Jesus have me do? and arrive at different answers.
I believe the late Peter Gomes, chaplain and professor at Harvard, would have loved the story about Ruth Graham, or Mrs. Billy Graham as she would have been properly addressed back in the 1970s when she attended a ladies’ luncheon with wives of conservative pastors in Germany. She dressed for the event as you would expect a white woman of her background and public position in 70s America to dress. A nice suit, modest, but not Amish; something with a little color and a brooch on the lapel. Simple shoes, short heels, well-coiffed hair, nothing showy. The lipstick she had chosen went well with her blue eyeshadow – she had stopped by the ladies’ room to make sure everything was just so, and she was pleased: she looked nice! The German pastors’ wives didn’t believe women should wear makeup at all, or anything that made them look too worldly. One of them, sitting across the table from Mrs. Graham, was so upset by the shameful attire of the famous evangelist’s wife, tears rolled down her cheeks – right into her beer. Mrs. Graham had no idea what upset the woman so. She was too busy trying to contain herself. “What self-respecting pastor’s wife drinks beer, at lunch, at a gathering dedicated to help bring people to Jesus?”
I don’t know if this story would make it past the fact-checkers, but it is a good one.[1] What would Jesus have us do? We come up with very different answers, and what to us is so very important and obvious, may not even be in the picture for others. That’s how Paul ended up writing about vegetables.
Paul wrote a lengthy missive to God’s beloved in Rome to introduce himself. He hadn’t founded the church there, but he was planning to visit soon, and he was hoping for their support. Paul was on a mission to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ to Jews and Gentiles all across the empire, and the Lord willing, he would travel as far as Spain. He needed letters of introduction. He needed help with travel arrangements. He needed funding. And he may have been wondering if the churches in Rome would be open to supporting him and his work. There were rumors that his gospel of grace undermined moral behavior, that he was preaching lawlessness. And those rumors weren’t just fake news made up by opponents to discredit him. There was evidence to give substance to the charges. In Corinth, some of the baptized understood salvation by grace to mean that all things were lawful, and he had to push back forcefully against their boastful, self-centered attitudes and actions.[2]
And beyond the rumors of Paul promoting lawlessness, there was the ongoing challenge in the fledgling churches of having people from all kinds of religious, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds come together in worship and share a meal, the Lord’s supper – Ruth Graham’s ladies’ luncheon was a walk in the park in comparison. So Paul wrote about an issue that we know had been particularly disruptive in Corinth and Antioch: what to eat and who to eat with when Jesus is Lord.[3]
“Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables.” It may sound like a line from a foodie blog, but those believers weren’t fussing over the health benefits of a vegetarian diet or the ecological impact of meat production. In the first-century Mediterranean world most animals were routinely offered to one god or another when they were killed. There were no stockyards or meat packing plants to supply the cities, there were temples. For some Christians, eating meat that was part of a pagan sacrifice was no problem; to them, there was only one God, creator of heaven and earth, and so, with thanks to God the giver, they ate their meat.
For others, this was unthinkable. To them, it amounted to participating in the worship of other gods, and some would only consider consuming meat that had been slaughtered and processed according to Jewish law, and so they reckoned it was best to steer clear of meat altogether. Only veggies; veggies were safe. But from that scrupulously maintained conviction it was only a small step to condemning others for watering down their commitment to Jesus and God’s law by not separating themselves more rigorously from pagan practices.
And those who did eat with thanksgiving whatever was served? They were awfully close to looking down with contempt on their less-enlightened fellow-believers who didn’t grasp the true meaning of Christian freedom.
In those early years, the Lord’s Supper wasn’t just bread and wine; it was a full meal. Can you imagine what may have been said when they came together to break bread? Can you imagine the looks and the things that weren’t said? Paul had his own views, but he didn’t take sides or adjudicate the disagreement. Nor did he suggest that meat-eaters and vegetarians organize themselves into separate house churches so they would be able to worship with like-minded believers. Instead, he reminded those who would hear his words read in the assembly, that both those who ate meat and those who abstained, did so to honor the Lord. It didn’t matter if they ate or abstained, but that they did so convinced in their own minds that this was what the Lord would have them do. What did matter, and did in fact matter greatly, was that they not judge one another, nor condemn or belittle each other, but rather welcome each other as God welcomed them.
Paul wants us to realize that we belong to each other as members of God’s household, not because of our shared piety, our shared love for certain hymns or prayer books, or our shared preference for certain theological traditions: we belong to each other because Christ has made us his own and we belong to him. What matters is that rather than sitting in judgment over each other for the ways in which we honor God with our lives, we submit together to the lordship of Jesus, the Messiah of God. In submitting together we will become better able to welcome one another as Christ has welcomed us, for the glory of God.
“Owe no one anything,” Paul wrote in the previous chapter, “except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”[4] That is far from lawlessness, but it is equally far from pious law-enforcement, where what I perceive Jesus would have me do, suddenly becomes the rule for what you must do. No, all of us who confess that Jesus is Lord, must ask what this entails for our worship, and for our life together, and yes, our eating habits, driving habits, spending habits. We must ask and we must wrestle with the answers and help each other become aware of our biases and blindspots.
We Disciples love to quote the maxim, In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, love.[5] We love the statement, but we also know that one believer’s non-essentials are another’s essentials. Meat, makeup, beer, movies, dancing – the list goes on. When it comes to defining who we are, we are quick to elevate our own pious preferences to essentials, and equally quick to judge and dismiss the pieties of others as non-essentials or just plain weird.
But Paul will not let us walk away from each other and claim that it is necessary for the sake of faithfulness. We are one in Christ, one with God and with each other, because Christ has made us his own. That love is essential, and that love is meant to be manifest in all things, in every dimension of our life together.
The revolution of the cross is not about turning others into clones of our own convictions and calling it conversion. The revolution of the cross is about radical welcome, our welcoming each other as God has welcomed us. We risk who we think we are for love’s sake, and together we become who God made us to be.
[1] Based on Mark Reasoner’s account at http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=130
[2] 1 Cor 10:23
[3] See 1 Cor 8:13; 10:25 and Gal 2:11-14.
[4] Rom 13:8
[5] For the history of this lovely statement see https://liberlocorumcommunium.blogspot.com/2010/03/in-necessariis-unitas-in-non.html; it may not have been penned first by Rupertus Meldenius (aka Peter Meiderlin) in 1627, but by Marco Antonio De Dominis in 1617 (“In necessariis unitas, in non necessariis libertas, in utrisque caritas”).