Romans 14:1-12
“Accountability”
October 2, 2011 - Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

         Joe won’t shop at Walmart anymore. He’s been reading about how poorly they pay and treat their workers, how they are taking away American jobs by forcing their suppliers to cut costs and move manufacturing overseas, how many of those foreign laborers are exploited and oppressed. He’s convinced that the only right thing, the only Christian thing, is not to shop at the big blue box.

         The thing is, Joe’s friend Sally likes shopping at Walmart. The prices are good. She can get many of the things she needs all in one stop. Their return policy makes it easy to take back items that are defective. She wants to get the best bargain she can. Shopping at Walmart is what makes it possible for her to balance her family budget in tough times.

         The problem is that this difference of opinion is becoming a problem between Sally and Joe. He believes any really faithful Christian wouldn’t buy from an unscrupulous, exploitative retailer like Walmart. She believes freedom in Christ allows you to shop wherever necessary in order to put food on the table and clothes on your kids.

         You might think what Joe and Sally believe in regard to Walmart is different from and unrelated to what they believe about Jesus Christ. Differences of belief about where to shop, or what to eat as Paul addresses here in Romans 14, are a step down from “Belief” with a capital “B,” or saving faith in Christ. But it’s exactly the same word, “faith” when Paul says in verse 1, “Welcome those who are weak in faith.” Paul spends two chapters of Romans on this matter of quarrels about what Christians eat. It’s a practical issue deeply connected with what is at the heart of our faith.

         Paul’s program in writing to the Romans was to show them God’s plan to reconcile the whole world, including both Jews and Gentiles” to Himself in Jesus Christ through faith. Justification by faith means there is no difference between different races and peoples. We all come to God and receive grace and forgiveness the same way, by believing in Jesus Christ, trusting Him as Lord. Now Paul wants us to see the implications of the lordship of Jesus in how we relate to each other in spite of differences.

         The basic problem is in verse 2, “Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables.” We don’t know for sure exactly what it was about. Some think it’s again a Jewish-Gentile split. In order to keep kosher, Jews in Rome may have avoided meat. But it’s more likely a division across ethnic boundaries. There were “weak” and “strong” Jewish Christians and “weak” and “strong” Gentile Christians. Paul is Jewish and as you can see later in the chapter he regards himself as one of the “strong.”

         It’s a problem internal to the Christian community, not like chapter 12, about relationships with non-Christians. It’s not shopping at Walmart, but shopping at the public meat market which is the likely problem. Christians are struggling with the fact that meat sold in the public market was sacrificed to idols before being sold. That’s clearly the issue when you turn over to I Corinthians 10. Both Jewish Christians who were raised to have nothing to do with idols and Gentile Christians thankful to be free from pagan gods may have perceived spiritual harm in eating meat that had been offered to idols.

         On the other hand, as Paul himself clearly believes, those who are a little stronger in Christian faith realize that there is no power at all in an idol, that those pagan gods have no spiritual reality, and that meat offered to idols can’t hurt a Christian at all. The believer in Christ is perfectly free to buy and eat whatever she likes.

         The problem is how these two groups look at each other. In verse 3 he says, “Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat.” On one side Paul is concerned about those who are a little farther along in faith looking down on those who still have scruples about idol meat. On the other side are those who judge and condemn eating idol meat as sin.

         Most of us believe it’s generally acceptable to drive a few miles per hour over the speed limit. In you don’t, you won’t keep up with the traffic flow. We get annoyed with and despise the driver who creeps along two or three miles per hour under the speed limit, just to be on the safe side. But he may be thinking just as uncharitably toward us, imagining we are all scofflaws and criminals. Paul says both kinds of attitudes are unacceptable in the Christian Church.

         The passage begins with the word, “Welcome.” As we will see in a few weeks in the final greetings at the end of Romans, there was more than one Christian gathering in Rome. It was all one church, but there were meetings in different homes, in different kinds of social groups. So Paul wants these various groups to welcome and be with one another, to reach across barriers that divided them, to engage in mutual hospitality, to invite each other into their homes, in spite of differences.

         So the first reason for the strong not to despise the weak or the weak to judge the strong is at the end of verse 3, “God has welcomed them.” God’s hospitality to us all is the reason we are hospitable to each other.

         Verse 4 unpacks something in Christian faith that goes even deeper. As we are welcomed by God into His family, we become accountable to Him because we become His servants. If Jesus Christ is our Lord, then we answer to our Lord, not to anyone else.

         Notice how Paul puts it, though. My accountability to Jesus alone is not something I claim for myself as a freedom to ignore everyone else. It’s a freedom to acknowledge and give to each other. “Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another? It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand.”

         The whole message of Romans turns around the fact that we stand before our Lord because of the righteousness He gives us by grace through faith. Our standing before Him doesn’t depend on any judgment but His. And if someone believes in Jesus and accepts His grace, that person is forgiven and will stand, just like Paul says here.

         In good Jewish rabbi style, Paul springs from the thought of judging one another to another kind of judgment about days in verse 5. It’s an additional example of differences that didn’t matter. Maybe Jewish Christians still kept some Jewish feasts, or Gentile Christians observed a pagan holiday or two. Whatever it was, it shows that this business of differences that don’t matter has a wider application. It applies to us.

         Verse 6 gives us one basic principle: whichever way you go on a question like this, give honor and thanksgiving to God in what you do. “Those who observe the day, observe it honor of the Lord. Also those who eat, eat in honor of the Lord, since they give thanks to God; while those who abstain, abstain in honor of the Lord and give thanks to God.” If you shop at Walmart, thank God for the opportunity and honor Him with how you spend your money there. If you stay away from Walmart, thank God for other places to shop and do so in honor of Him, not because it makes you better than Walmart shoppers.

         Verse 7 and what follows carries this whole discussion to an even higher level. “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves.” This is where it all becomes so terribly, terribly relevant and challenging to us as Americans. We live in a time and place where we have been raised on the belief that we belong only to ourselves, that we are accountable only to ourselves. You each have the right to pursue happiness and only you can decide for yourself what happiness means. Paul is saying here, as he’s said all along, that that is a false belief and that faith in Christ means something completely different.

         Paul was challenging the politics of his time. Last week we heard him tell Christians to obey the ruling authorities. But at the very same time he said that there is no authority but what comes from God. For the Roman Christians the challenge was to believe and live the truth that Caesar is not lord, but Jesus Christ is Lord. For us the challenge is to believe that I am not the lord of my life, Jesus is the Lord of my life.

         Who I am accountable to is at the heart of the Gospel. That’s why Paul goes to the heart of the Gospel in verses 8 and 9, “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.”

         Jesus did not suffer and die on the Cross and then rise again so that I could be free to do whatever I want. He died and rose so that He could be my Lord, so that He could be in charge of my life. Not Caesar and not myself. Not capitalism and not communism. Not the Republican party and not the Democratic party. Not liberalism and not conservatism. None of those powers are my Lord and I am not accountable to any of them. I belong, because He paid for me with His own blood, to Jesus. He is Lord.

         But once again in verse 10, that accountability to Jesus, that conviction that He alone is Lord is not a right for me to claim. It’s a privilege and freedom to give to my brothers and sisters in Christ. Verse 10 asks how we dare pass judgment on one another, how we dare despise one another? “For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.”

         N. T. Wright paints a nice picture of two Christians wrangling about one of these indifferent matters. One calls the other weak and traditional and rigid, while that one is condemns the other as a wicked sinner. And behind them they hear a deep voice clearing its throat, “Ahem?” They turn to find themselves both facing their God and both having to answer to Him for their actions and for what they’ve just said to each other.

         There are many things for which we despise or judge each other which just do not matter. Not everything, though! Paul is clear in other contexts. We don’t have Christian freedom to have sex outside of marriage, with whomever we please. We don’t have Christian freedom to actually worship some other god. We don’t have Christian freedom to lie or murder or steal. But there are things that are indifferent, that we are free to do or not to do.

         You can shop at Walmart or not. You can vote Republican or Democrat. You can drink alcohol or abstain. You can home school your kids or send them for public education. On a very basic, Christian level, which choice you make on those issues just doesn’t matter, because we are each accountable to our Lord for those decisions.

         On another level, these indifferent matters of freedom do matter. What matters is how we deal with each other around them. Will we welcome and accept each other as our Lord has welcomed and accepted us? Or will we try to lord it over each other?

         The truth, says Paul, is that there is and will be only one Lord. Verse 11 quotes Isaiah to echo the thought of verse 6. What our Lord wants is to be honored, to be praised in what we do, in how we live. We will do that in different ways, sometimes in opposite ways, but He will bring it together in one great offering of worship, “As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue give praise to God.”

         When Paul concludes in verse 12, “So then, each of us will be accountable to God,” tells us how to worship in Holy Communion today. Christ our Lord welcomed each of us. So we welcome each other at His Table. Remember that He died and rose for you, and that He alone is your Lord. But also remember that Christ alone is Lord of the person standing beside you eating the bread and drinking the cup. Which means you both have the same standing, the same hope, the same joy and freedom which He gave you when He died and rose again. You are His. So are your brothers and sisters. Welcome each other.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2011 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj