Romans 14:1-15, 19-23 1 Corinthians 12:4-20 1; John 2:7-14; 1 John 3:1-4, 9-12

As we’ve seen in our sermon series before, the ancient church comprised not only Jewish folks, but Jews and Gentiles alike. And also, even if the church were to comprise only Jewish folk, all the believers did not hold their thoughts and ideas in common, even if they did their property. Remember that one of the astonishing things about the early church that confounded not only later Christians, but outsiders looking in at this new religious movement, was the generosity and selflessness associated with the church. In the ancient world, selflessness, humility, and generosity to the poor and needy were not values that were highly prized by many. In fact, many people in the ancient world considered these things to make a person look weak, lacking character, and, at the very least, lacking common sense.

The ancient world was one of competition. Men, and unfortunately ladies, this does not apply to you in the ancient world, men strove against one another to make a name for themselves, to leave a legacy of what today we would consider prideful boasting, carving one’s name in a building, leaving behind a statue, hosting games at which animals were slaughtered and people fought to the death. These were the things that the ancient world celebrated in a man. These are the things that mattered. That’s the Roman world. In the Greek world it was a slightly different nuance, but much the same results. In the ancient world, a man’s worth was celebrated based on certain qualities. These qualities were considered important and defined the Roman world. In the Greek world, there was a slightly different interpretation, but the outcomes were quite similar.

If we only had the account of Acts chapter 2, it paints a quite rosy picture of those early days of the church where believers had everything in common and people selflessly were racing to the apostles feet to give them land and property and to share what they had. It would be an amazing story we would marvel at. However, in the pages of the New Testament we read it was not that easy for the early Christians that after the honeymoon period wore off and more and more people became Christian especially those that did not share the Jewish heritage of monotheism and the ethics that went along with it. That the church struggled with its identity, with its character, sometimes even with its purpose was Christianity going to be like other religions of the day more of a social club that identified you as part of a larger group defined by your religious observance or was it going to be a way of life, a philosophy more akin to the teachings of Plato and Aristotle or was it going to be more esoteric in focus concerning otherworldly salvation and leaving this world to run its course because it is merely passing away. In the first 400 years, Christianity expressed these ideas in different ways, either resembling the teachings of Plato and Aristotle or focusing on esoteric concepts of otherworldly salvation and detachment from the passing world. However, in the pages of the New Testament, the apostles, who inherited the Jesus tradition and were the authoritative interpreters of his teachings, recommended a different way of life to the early church.

Christianity was not to be a mystery religion, not to be a philosophy, not even to be a way of life as we would think about it. Christianity was simply to be a description of the way the world truly was. Behind the scenes, God is in control. God has established the world with order, with principles, with rules. God is not fickle like the ancient Roman gods. God does not need to be appeased even with sacrifice as he says in many passages in the Old Testament. God wishes to be in relationship. That is God’s primary way of being. After all God exists eternally as Father, Son, Holy Spirit from time immemorial to time future. There is not a time when God is alone in the way we would understand that word. God is a community and God simply is. And what God does best in the creation is to create the precise thing among the crown of creation, the human beings. God does not create just one person and leave it at that. After all, what does the text say? It is not good for the man to be alone. Instead, God forms a companion suitable for him which is what the text actually says where it says a help mate as some people translate it. That is not a precise translation. It means a partner corresponding to him in all his attributes, including his ability to rule, reign, reason and exercise authority.

I emphasize all this not with an axe to grind, but to clear the air of our assumptions, to sweep away conventional wisdom, and to set up to you an alternate vision of what we could be as a human community. In our culture, it is very difficult sometimes to think about us and about ourselves—us, in the plural. I challenge you, one of these days, to take a hymnal, look at it, and count the number of hymns that a “we” can sing versus an “I. “You will be astonished by how few hymns in our hymnals speak about the stance of a community.” And yet we are called to be the body of Christ, not the collection of bodies of Christ. Yet why do we sing as an I instead of a we? Why is it me and my relationship with God that is most important, rather than our collective relationship to our Creator? When God created mankind, humanity, in his own image, we often think of one individual. But that’s not what the text says. It simply says God created all the human beings at once in God’s image. And yet, even in that text, we impose our beliefs and our individuality to read it almost selfishly from my perspective, my privileged position as an individual.

You are probably tired of hearing me say this, but it really does bear repeating often, that the world of the Bible and its creators and the people portrayed in its pages is profoundly different than the world that you and I live in. From a cultural standpoint, from an ethnic standpoint, from an economic standpoint, and from the vision and values of what made a good life, what made a human successful. Yet even in the ancient world, there was a struggle as well. Christianity, then as now, taught the believers not to listen to the dominant culture’s story that it was telling. That story was that we are masters of our own destiny, that if we but try hard enough, and if we were born in the proper station to the proper parents with the proper resources, the only thing that is holding us back from achieving our potential is us. We have the wealth, the power, and the glory, all we need to do is play the game, the game that has always gone on of competition, one-upmanship, and self-promotion.

At first glance, we would think that our culture tells a similar story. That our potential is limitless. If we but try hard enough, pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, we can achieve anything. But here’s the difference. In the ancient world, how you were born was how you were expected to stay. If you were born a slave, you deserved it. You were, in the eyes of the great thinker Aristotle, inferior to an actual human being. And yes, he said that. Slaves became slaves because they would be so by their nature. Nobles became nobles because that was the way the world worked. To fight against one’s own station and to try to change was seen as an act of indecency, as an act of rebellion, and to change that which the gods had destined.

Yet Christianity in those early days taught those titles does not define primarily that identity. If you look at the offices in the early church, those of bishop and elder, and you look at the names, you will find something truly shocking. In some cases, a slave owner is placed under the spiritual authority of one of his own slaves. The story of Philemon, the runaway slave who becomes a Christian and is returned to his master is perhaps one of those tales. There is evidence of a bishop by the name of Onesimus. Onesimus is not a common name in the ancient world, so it stands to reason that this could be that very runaway slave who has gone from property to elder of the church, presbyter, episkopas, leader, bucking the convention of staying in one’s lane. But all this confusion and tension causes problems in the church as well. Christianity truly was revolutionary in a world of social stratification. Christianity offered a leveling of the playing field. In a culture that valued exceptionalism and excelling beyond one’s peers, Christianity taught that all were valuable, no matter how humble their service. In a society that promoted one man over another, that said people were of different worth according to birth and accident of history, Christianity taught a radical acceptance of those from all stations of life because those accidents of history were merely that. They were not God intended; they were not punishments or rankings of the relative worth of this human over against that one, and they were to be transcended in Christ. The woman was not to look at herself as less than a man in the church. The slave was to look proudly, levelly at the eye of his master in church and say, “Brother, sister, let me serve you, but not let me be obsequious, let me be self-deprecating, but let me outdo you in doing me honor and I doing you honor.” For the slave-master relationship especially, something new was added, a reciprocity of this and that, and it was all guided by one principle that Jesus taught, a new commandment Jesus gave, to love one another.

We think we know what love is because our culture talks about it all the time. The 60s were a reaction to the lack of love showed in the early part of the century through world wars and the various isms of racism, sexism, and classism that stratified society once again. The 60s returns to a sense of love of one’s neighbor, but it missed the mark because it focused so much on romantic love that it forgot to ask Rick Astley’s most important question, and that is, “What is love?” In the New Testament, love is not a feeling. Love is not sentiment. Love is not the pitter-patter of one’s heart when our partner draws near. But love is an action. Love is caring for one’s friends, neighbors, and strangers, their needs, their physical, emotional, spiritual, and financial needs. It is giving of oneself in the service to the other. Love is a kind of sacrifice upon which we lay our ego, our honor, our social status, and we offer it up for God, saying, “I am no longer going to live by the values that promote me over against my neighbor. Instead, he and I both are going to subscribe to Jesus’ teaching that by serving our neighbor, we serve God, and that the more people live into that vocation, the more humanity returns to that which it was intended from the beginning.”

You’ll notice though, in our passages that Paul is writing to correct some problems. To the Romans, Paul is writing about matters of doctrinal dispute. Some Christians thought that their newfound freedom to shake off the legalism and rules of old-time religion allowed them to do whatever they wanted. Whether that caused a scandal in the church, whether that offended our neighbor, did not matter because we were free in Christ. Paul reminds them that it is indeed the case, but the call to love trumps the call to exercise one’s individual liberties. That we must work for the common good of our church family before we ask, “What’s good for me?” My values take second place to our values. Our success takes priority over my success. The Romans wanted to debate, they wanted to privilege their opinion, but Paul tells them to love. And then to the Corinthians, some thought that their spiritual gifts excelled those of the others, that those that had the flashier gifts of tongues and miracles and prophecy were naturally to be the leaders, were naturally to be those that spoke on behalf of the body. And yet Paul reminds them, it is those parts of the body that we do not show to the outside that often rule the day. Often which society gives the least honor to that matters most. These were correctives and these were ways in which we were to live out Jesus’ commandment to love one another. Revel in the spiritual gifts that God has given you, yes, but use them for the benefit of the body, not just your own ego.

From our cultural vantage point 2000 years later, it’s easy to sit and almost look in judgment upon those early Christians and say, “Yeah, don’t you get it? Jesus changed everything.” But then when we get such feelings, such inner stirrings, we need to question them, interrogate them, if you will, and ask where they come from. Could it be, perhaps, that our culture places a value on our moment in time over against the past? One of the alarming things about our modern moment, in my mind at least, is that we have begun to devalue the study of history itself. We have more interest in the historical present of what’s in the then and now of what happened 30 minutes ago, perhaps, yes, but we are so now focused that we are unlearning the lessons that hard-won history has taught us. We think that with enough technology, with enough friends on social media, that we will be successful, and it will be inevitable because that has been our experience with cell phones and the internet and now with AI technologies, you can have a solid, reasonable answer to your question in minutes. You can satisfy your curiosity and move on to the next thing. It’s all so utilitarian, all so result-oriented. But my friends, God is not a God of results. God is a God of process. God values the how and the why as much as the so that. God values the journey as much as the destination and perhaps more so. God led the children of Israel through the wilderness. Forty years of wandering when that destination was just a few weeks’ march away if one took the direct route. Yet God knew Israel was not ready. God knew Israel was not ready.

I think that’s a question we need to ask ourselves. Honestly, sincerely, are we ready for what God wants to give us? Have we, as Jesus said, counted the cost of what that will mean? God has called us into a new vision of humanity. God has called us out of the world, transferred us into the kingdom of light, and then sent us back into the world with a mission. But do we really want to be part of that mission, or are we content with the trappings of Christianity and not the substance? Are we content with the group identity of calling ourselves Christian without experiencing the radical departure from society’s ways of viewing individuals and values and worth? Have we undergone the renewing of our minds that allows us to live into something different? These are questions we must ask ourselves. But let me say this, when we step away from how our neighbors view reality, when we step away from the values that drive our culture, it will not bring us praise, but it will bring us scrutiny, perhaps ridicule, and at least a bewildered amusement at the quaint, folk-like teachings of Jesus. Are you ready for something more? Are you ready to go beyond me to we, from I to us? Are you ready to sacrifice at the altar your opinions, your preferences, your privileges to be part of God’s new thing? That’s what it means to love one another. You cannot love someone else if you love yourself more. Love yourself, yes, but love your neighbor in the same way. Celebrate the successes of your brothers and sisters in Christ. Don’t compare yourselves to this or that teacher, this or that person in church. Don’t make yourself feel less than if you don’t have that gift or that talent or that skill because your value is not based on your service. Your value is based on your being, and that always and everywhere and in every circumstance is an unchanging quantity. Your value, fixed at your point of creation, was that you bear God’s image, was that you are human, modeled after the true human. You are a package of potential that God has put forth in the world as a catalyst for change. Brothers and sisters, live into that mission, live into that calling, live into your destiny, but do not turn from the left or the right when culture asks you to question whether love truly is the force that moves the universe. Love is, love was, and love will be. As Paul says, “Faith and hope, these things will pass away. Money and success, power and fame, those things too, but love will endure.” Brothers and sisters, let us love one another. Amen.