Romans 14:1-12
September 11, 2011
Can't We All Just Get Along?
Rev. John M. Caldwell, Ph.D.
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
Nearly twenty years ago, the police officers who had been filmed beating Rodney King, a Los Angeles taxi cab driver, were acquitted. The city exploded in rage. Fifty-three people died in the ensuing riots. Over 4,000 were injured. The city suffered a billion dollars in property damage. Two days after the rioting began, Rodney King uttered the sentence which will be forever linked with his name: “Can we all just get along?”1
The short answer to Mr. King's question is, “No.”
At least, we haven't figured it out yet. We have this tendency to view with suspicion people who are not like us. Maybe this gave us some sort of evolutionary advantage at one time. After all, when we meet people who are not like us, we're not really sure of the rules. The risk of doing something provocative or of failing to recognize that they have done something provocative is high. We could get killed for behavior that looked to us to be perfectly innocent.
Getting along with people who are not like us is like getting along with bees. My father always told me that they wouldn't bother me if I didn't bother them. The trouble is, I never bothered them on purpose, but I got stung anyway.
So maybe there used to be good reason for us to distrust “people who are not like us.” The trouble is, our world has gotten a lot smaller than it used to be and there are all kinds of people rubbing right up against us. The consequences now for our failure to learn how to “just get along” are a lot higher than they used to be. But that doesn't mean that it's gotten any easier.
A smaller world has made it even harder in some ways. It was easy for us Anglos to get along with Latinos when they all lived in somewhere else. Now, there are Latinos right here in Decorah. They are our neighbors and not just in some metaphorical sense. They bring a cultural richness to our community but their presence also poses a challenge to all of us. We may not trust our new neighbors and they may not trust us, but we have to figure it out.
Christians and Muslims bump into each othermore and more often.Some of that bumping is the natural result of a shrinking world.Some of that bumping is a result of falling into the trap of centuries old ways of relating to each other,so that we can write the story of our military engagement in the Middle Eastas just the latest installment of a history that includes(counting backwards):the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century,five or so centuries of sporadic crusades,the destruction of Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchreby Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amir Allah in 1009,and even back to the centuries of conflict along the borderof the Roman and Parthian Empires.
If the last ten years have taught us anything—and the jury is most definitely still out on that question—they have taught us that there has never been a greater need for all the children of Abraham and Sarah—Jewish, Christian and Muslim—to understand each other, learn to live alongside of each other, and—who knows?—even to come to appreciate each other.
So a more complex answer to Mr. King's question, “Can we all just get along?” is this: “No. But we have to learn how.” Our world no longer affords us the luxury of pretending that we don't have to.
In some ways, at least, Rome in Paul's day resembled the world in our day. It was the center of a large empire, one of the largest the world had ever seen. From all over the world people made their way there. Gauls, Germans, Phrygians, Celts from Asia Minor, Egyptians and Jews, people of all ethnic backgrounds saw an opportunity in Rome, so they came. They worked hard to learn the language, which, oddly enough among the lower classes was Greek, and not Latin. They worked hard to fit in, to become Romans. But doing that wasn't simply a matter of changing clothes. At least at home they spoke their own languages. They worshiped their own gods, sometimes adding their gods to gods of the Roman and sometimes, as was the case with Jews, worshiping their own God alone.
Enculturation never happens overnight. An older of colleague of mine became an Episcopal priest just after I graduated from seminary. There was not even any talk of “full communion” then. He had to be ordained again. He gave up a lot for the sake of what he hoped to find in the Episcopal Church: a beautiful liturgy, an appreciation for Christian tradition, and a deep spirituality. He told me that when he had spoken with his new bishop, his Episcopal bishop, he told him that he hoped that there was no expectation that he leave his Methodist roots behind. His bishop replied that he had no such expectation. He might be ordained as an Episcopal priest, but he would always be a Methodist.
So it was in the small Christian community in Rome. Some of the members of the church had been pagans. They had embraced Christ and the new faith. They had forsaken their old gods and no longer worshiped as pagans, but they still dressed as they had before, still ate the foods that they had eaten before. Others were Jews who had embraced Christ and the new faith as a deep expression of the tradition that they had always observed. They, too, dressed as they had dressed before, ate the food they had eaten before, and observed the sabbath and the holy days that they had observed before.
Jewish Christians could not help but feeling that, since Christ only made sense in the context of the Jewish tradition, they had some superior standing in the community. The law was theirs, the prophets were theirs, ethnically Christ himself was theirs. Gentiles were welcome, God had made that clear, but just as clearly Gentiles had much to learn about the Jewish tradition and Jewish Christians felt they were in a position to teach them. For instance Jewish Christians recognized that the threat of idolatry was all around. There were idols everywhere. What pagans called gods, Jews called demons, so idols were a demonic deception calculated to ensnare idol worshipers. About the only meat that the vast majority of folk in Rome ever got came from the animals sacrificed during pagan festivals. It was usually paid for by the rich folks who sponsored these holidays. But how could Christians, Jewish or not possibly eat food that had been sacrificed to a demon? These Jewish Christians, like other Jews, solved the problem by avoiding all meat if they didn't know for certain where it had come from.A sort religiously-inspired "localism."
“Nonsense,” replied their pagan brothers and sisters in Christ. Idols were all a bit of play-acting. There was no reality to idolatry. There were no other gods. The sacrifices were meaningless. The meat, wherever it had come from, was not—could not be—tainted by some meaningless ceremony. These Gentile Christians knew that they were free from all of that. They had been freed by Christ himself. How could Christians cast doubt on that freedom and on Christ himself by pretending that this meat was anything else than a gift from the One God who had made everything? So these Gentile Christians ate the festival meat with thanksgiving.
This made potluck suppers awkward.
The church divided up into two parties. One looked down their noses at the other. The other looked back in disdain. “They aren't real Christians,” they both muttered under their breath.
We can picture Paul as a mediator in this dispute. But he wasn't a very satisfactory mediator. After all, he never did tell them how to lay out their food at potluck suppers. And that's important. A church without potluck suppers, well, I suppose it's possible, but it's certainly not Methodist.
What he did was to reframe the question. “The question,” he said, “was not, Who's right? Who's the real Christian? The question was, Whose are you? To whom do you belong?”
Neither side could meet his eye. They kind of shuffled and looked down at their feet.
“Come on,” Paul repeated, “Whose are you? To whom do you belong?”
It's like a children's message. If you don't know the answer, a good guess is always, “God.”
“God,” they mumbled.
“You belong to God,” Paul said, pointing at the Jewish Christians. “You belong to God,” he said, pointing to the Gentile Christians. “You both belong to God. You are both members of God's household and you will both have to answer to God for your conduct. Where do you get off passing judgment on servants who belong to someone else? Just who do you think you are?”
Like I said, he never did tell them how to solve the problem with the food at potluck suppers.
But that's just as well. If he had, it wouldn't help us much, because we don't have meat sacrificed to idols in our casserole dishes. Although, I suppose, this could be helpful to a congregation that contains both omnivores and vegans.
No, we have our own ways of splitting into parties. We have our own ways of deciding that those people aren't really Christians.
To us, too, Paul could say, “It isn't about you. Whatever you're doing, it's for God, right? Right? So what if some of you serve God and come out on the opposite sides of a question. It's still all about God, right? Right? So, where's the problem?”
“Can we all just get along?” No, not yet. But if we remember who we are and what it's about, it may just be possible.
©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.
1Madison Gray, “RODNEY KING - The L.A. Riots: 15 Years After Rodney King - TIME,” http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/la_riot/article/0,28804,1614117_1614084,00.html.
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