Romans 15:1-13
“Harmony”
October 16, 2011 - Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

         Forty years ago yesterday, Ricky Nelson, the original “teen idol,” played a concert in Madison Square Garden. His late 50s and early 60s string of hit rock songs had fizzled out with the coming of the Beatles. So in 1971 he was trying for a comeback. He played some of his old hit rock songs, then began to play tunes in his new style, a combination of rock and country western. He got booed off the stage.

         Nelson turned his frustration with that Madison Square audience into a 1972 hit which is burned into my mind. I heard it over and over on the radio during my last couple years of high school. So when I began to read our text for today and heard Paul say at the end of verse 1 that we “ought not to please ourselves,” what I heard playing in my head was the chorus to Ricky Nelson’s “Garden Party”:

         But it’s all right now, I’ve learned my lesson well.
         You see, you can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself.

         Along with Nelson, two or three generations now have learned that lesson well. We’ve learned it so well that it’s almost impossible for us to hear what Paul is saying at this point without trying to qualify it, tone it down, or flat out reject the idea that at the heart of Christian living is a call to please others, not ourselves.

         You might even say that Nelson’s refrain was the theme song for American life since the 70s. In public life and politics we’ve steadily retreated from the idea that we can work together for the good of all, looking out for the weaker and less fortunate among us. We became increasingly complacent about the fact that some people did very poorly while others did very well.

         On an individual level, we were taught by pop psychology to look after ourselves, to not focus on the needs of others, but to attend to our own well-being and wholeness. Even Christians write books with titles like, When Pleasing Others is Hurting You. We’ve been taught that being a “people-pleaser” is a bad thing. We’ve got a term for it now; we call it “co-dependency.” So instead of trying to please others we seek self-affirmation, individual empowerment, and personal growth.

         Yet here is the Word of God speaking to us this morning the truth that somewhere in all that focus on ourselves we as Christian people may have gone off the track. This is not a little issue that Paul is mentioning on the side. No, these verses today are the climax of the largest themes of Romans and they center around Jesus Christ Himself.

         After telling us in verse 2 that, “Each of us must please our neighbor for the good purpose of building up the neighbor,” Paul supports and justifies that command by saying, “For Christ did not please himself.”

         Let’s connect the dots. If it’s unhealthy and co-dependent to seek to please others and not yourself, then that means Jesus was unhealthy and co-dependent. Unless we want to draw that conclusion, we need to reevaluate our own perceptions of psychological health in relationship to others.

         In the rest of verse 3 Paul takes up only one tiny aspect of how Christ Jesus did not please Himself, but it’s got enormous relevance for us. He quotes Psalm 69:9, “The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.” If you turn over to Psalm 69, you will find that it’s about the suffering of God’s Servant in all kinds of ways. Like Psalm 22, it is prophetic of all the agony of Jesus’ crucifixion both physical and emotional. In Psalm 69:21 there is even a specific prophecy that Jesus would be given vinegar to drink while hanging on the cross. But Paul zeros in on the insults, the mocking and derision Jesus experienced.

         Ricky Nelson got booed off a stage and decided that his life from then on would be about pleasing himself. We are very tempted to do the same when we experience insults and setbacks because of the people around us. Forget them, let’s take care of numero uno, play the music we like, do what we want to do. Yet Paul holds up for us the central example of Jesus, who was taunted, spat at, treated like a criminal, slapped around, and yet kept on walking up that hill to die not for Himself, but for you and me.

         Do we really believe what Paul says then in verse 4? “Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction…” Do we really believe Scripture as it teaches us to live our lives for the sake of others, or will we accept what culture and psychology tell us about maintaining our own egos? Will we sing our own songs at Ricky Nelson’s garden party or will we go with Jesus to pray for others in the Garden of Gethsemane?

         Now I know what we’re all thinking. This sounds pretty depressing. If we go with what the Bible is telling us, we’ll all walk around as the chumps of the world, everybody’s doormats, losing our own selves in the hopeless task of trying to please everyone. But hopeless is just exactly what this is not.

         Paul says that these instructions about living to please others are given so that, “by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.” This is not law. This is Gospel. This is the hope of a new and different kind of life from what the world teaches us. This is the good life, life in the kingdom of God. This is hope.

         Verses 5 and 6 show us a little of what Paul has in mind, repeating those words “steadfastness and encouragement” and this time applying them to God and asking Him to grant us to “live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus.” Paul is talking about life in a way, in a community where the age old wounds and weaknesses of human relationships begin to be healed, a life of harmony, and as he’ll say in the second half, a life of peace.

         Literally, Paul says in verse 5 that he’s asking God to grant us to “think the same thing” with each other. We may not like the sound of that either. Our culture teaches us that it’s right and good to think independently, to think differently. To think the same is bad. It’s what cults do. It’s what dictators try to achieve. But what Paul means is that life together in the kingdom of God is “according to Christ Jesus.” We don’t all want to think exactly the same way, or have the same opinions, or like the same things, but we do all want to think like Jesus, to conform our way of relating to each other to His way.

         Let me tell you how I learned something about God’s kingdom, about this thing we call the Church. In graduate school there were a number of us across two or three different departments who started getting together for Bible study and prayer. About the second or third year I was involved in this, we sat down together one evening to discuss our plans for the next few months, what we would study and talk about together.

         We were people from all sorts of denominational backgrounds, including a Catholic or two. I was on my own pilgrimage trying to discern where God wanted me to worship and serve. So my proposal to the group was that we read the relevant Scriptures and discuss just what the Church is. I wanted to approach Church like I was learning to approach philosophical problems, with careful and clear definitions.

         There was some interest in my proposal and we kicked around possible books we might read alongside the Scriptures. In the midst of this conversation, one of us suddenly began to weep. In between his sobs, he choked out the words, “I don’t need to know what the Church is, I just need someone to be the Church.”

         It turned out that our friend’s marriage was breaking up. He needed us to gather around him in love and prayer. We did that. We set aside our definitions of church and we were the Church for an hour or so, weeping and praying with him.

         I saw that same group be the Church in other ways. Another couple among us with three children had no money, barely enough to eat. Some of us went out and bought a freezer at the Salvation Army, filled it with frozen food from our own freezers and dropped it off and plugged it in at their house.

         We’ve all gone our separate ways, still with many different ideas of what a church is. Some of us are now Baptists, others Wesleyans, others Christian Reformed, others Anglicans, others Catholics, and here Beth and I are in the Covenant. We’ve all got varying definitions of the Church. Yet I think we all learned back then something crucial about the Church of Jesus Christ. It’s a community where we learn to set aside our own needs and agendas and begin to think about others.

         The result of the Church being focused others is previewed in verse 6. The result is not a bunch of weak, co-dependent saps with no hope and no joy. The result, says Paul, is that “together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” You don’t lose yourself when you follow Jesus in living for others, you find yourself now as a vital, alive member of something large and wonderful and hopeful, a great, harmonious symphony of worship.

         Verse 7 sums up what he’s been saying about the business of disputes in the church concerning what to eat and which days are holy, saying, “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” Then in verses 8 and 9 he puts it together with the big theme of Romans, “For I tell you Christ has become a servant of the circumcised on behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy.”

         This is what Romans is about. God has been planning and working throughout all human history to bring all people to Himself. That’s what He promised the patriarchs. That’s the hope predicted throughout the Old Testament Scriptures. God is going to redeem and bring together the whole world in His Messiah, the Man that you and I are privileged to know as Jesus the Christ.

         The rest of verse 9 all through verse 12 are Paul’s celebration of what happens when people believe in Jesus Christ and start to live like Him by giving themselves to others. He quotes II Samuel, then Deuteronomy, then the Psalms, and finally Isaiah, all to show that this is God’s plan from the beginning, to bring all people together, and in the process to give them all hope. That Root of Jesse in verse 12 is Jesus. Jesse was the father of David the King, and Jesus was descended from David to rule not just over the Jewish people but over all nations and to bring them hope.

         My friend Robert Roberts tells this story. In September through No­vember of 1989, East Germany experienced the October Revolu­tion. The 40-year old Communist government fell with remarkably little violence. The St. Nikolai Church of Leipzig played an important role in it all. Every Monday evening the church met to pray for peace. People rallied at the church services, then large demonstrations would follow in the street.

         By October 9th it appeared things might get very bloody. People were becom­ing bolder after a visit from Mikhail Gorbachev. East German leader Erich Honecker gave written orders for what he called a “Chinese solution”—following the example of Tiananmen Square—shoot up the crowd. The Lutheran bishop warned of a bloodbath and doctors cleared hospital rooms to accommodate the wounded.

         Yet leaders at St. Nikolai decided not to cancel prayers that Monday. After the service demonstrators numbered 50,000; by the end of the evening there were three times that many. But in answer to prayer, certain members of the Politburo courageously defied Honecker’s orders. No shots were fired. The demonstration remained peaceful and became a turning point in the October Revolution. Weeks later, in new freedom, demonstrators hung a banner across the street: WIR DANKEN DIR, KIRCHE (We thank you, church).

         The church in East Germany brought hope to the people around them, just by doing what the Church is supposed to do, just by being the Church. They prayed, not thinking about themselves and their own danger, but about how they could be there for others. That’s the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit who brings hope to the whole world.

         It can be hard of course. Just getting out of bed on Sunday morning may get sidetracked by our own self-concern, a need to take a “mental-health” day, a desire to receive rather than give. But we come here not just to receive encouragement and hope, but to offer it to each other. Someone here this morning needs your smile, your welcome, your willingness to forget yourself and think about him, think about her.

         It can be hard. Our text started out with the difficult business of asking the strong to look after weak. That can get awfully tiring on the strong. But that means we will all be weak sometimes. Everyone of us is in need of others who like Jesus will not be worried about pleasing themselves but about pleasing someone else in need.

         There are children here who may need you not to think about yourself but to think about them and so teach Sunday School or lead children’s church or watch them in the nursery. But you yourself may need the hug a child may give you or that happy little thank you picture drawn with your name on it.

         Someone here may need your hand on his shoulder and some whispered words of prayer. But you may yourself need that momentary break from your own worries and concerns and the reminder that God is there and listening.

         We do not all think the same, but we think this one same thing, that in Jesus Christ we find life and hope and mutual encouragement. We think we are called together to be a community of people who act like He does, putting others before ourselves. We are not co-dependent. We are inter-dependent, putting our trust in each other because together we trust in Jesus.

         When we’re doing that, when we’re doing it well like that little Bible study group we belonged to in Indiana, like St. Nikolai church in Leipzig, like our own Valley Covenant Church often does, then that brings hope to the world, “in him the Gentiles will hope.”

         The Gentiles who need hope are all around us. There are hungry people that need to see the Church thinking not of ourselves, but walking for them in the CROP Walk this afternoon. There are others in our community who need to see different churches working together in Love In the Name of Christ so their needs can be met by Christian people who are more concerned about others than they are about themselves. That’s when there is hope in this world. That also, says Paul, is when there is joy and peace.

         Verse 13 is the great benediction of Romans, summing up the great theme of faith in Jesus Christ who gave up Himself to bring us all God’s blessing. We will bless each other with it at the end of the service, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

        Amen.

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