Thank you for the chance to be with you this weekend, and especially for having me preach during your services.  This is a great church, and I’m honored to be a part of it.  I hope you know what a fine church you have here so that you can take pride in it in a humble and healthy way.  The scripture lesson that we had read to us earlier in this service came from the first few verses of the 15^th chapter of Romans.  I am selecting for the text, the 2^nd verse:  “Each of us must please our neighbor for the good purpose of building up the neighbor.”  I simply translate that as building one another up.  Now in one way this seems rather simplistic, as we all know that we are supposed to do good to each other.  It doesn’t hurt, however, to remind ourselves of that again and again.  We heard a beautiful example of how to do good to each other in the children’s sermon earlier this morning.  It could seem that once we have heard about doing good a few times, then we could pass the message on.  It helps in this case to understand the complexity of the situation in which Paul was dealing regarding the early church in Rome.  He wanted them to do good to one another as well.  Now most of Paul’s letters do deal with problems that have emerged in his congregation.  So any time you feel that your church congregation shouldn’t have any problems or that you all ought to agree about everything, and everything should always run smoothly—then you need to see they way the Christians were in the first generations of churches.  Well, read Paul and you will find out that we have fewer problems than some of those congregations did.  And they managed to stay together and to create a church that has survived until the present time.  But it helps in each case, when we look at what Paul is saying, to understand something of the specifics of the problem.  Now Paul had never been in Rome, so he didn’t know as much about the Roman congregation as he did about some of the others.  But he thought very highly of it, and he is more complimentary to the church in Rome in this letter than he is towards any other congregations that he writes to.  But one problem that pervaded the churches (and he figured that it was a part of the problem of Rome) was how the Jews and Gentiles in the churches got along with each other.  And of course there were splits and divisions among the Gentiles and Jews as well.  Paul’s letter to the Romans not only includes his spelling out his overall understanding of the relations between Jews and Gentiles in the Christian community, but he also turns to some of the specific issues in the church.  In the preceding chapter, the 14^th chapter, Paul talks about some of these issues in detail.

 Now Paul preached a gospel of freedom.  And it was a very radical gospel of freedom.  I think if you heard Paul preach today, you would be shocked at how radical he is.  But some of the people had heard this message and had interpreted it in their own way, and were acting upon the freedom he proclaimed.  Now what Paul was speaking about when he spoke of freedom—most explicitly and especially in Romans—was freedom from the law.  Of course Judaism (Paul was a good Jew) was a religion of the law.  It doesn’t mean that there weren’t a lot of other things in the religion.  But the Torah was absolutely central to Jewish understanding.  And one finds the Torah primarily in the books of Moses.  These are the first five books of the Old Testament.  There are lots and lots of specific rules, regulations, and laws spelled out in those books.  Careful obedience to those laws has been a part of Judaism and still is today.  Paul believed that in Jesus Christ, a fundamental change had taken place.  Faith became possible through Jesus Christ who freed us from the law.  That is a very radical idea.  What does it mean to be free from the law?  Some of the people who heard him—we’ve learned as we read the 14^th verse—thought that meant that they didn’t have to pay attention to what day of the week it was or what day of the year it was.  All the ceremonies, especially for Judaism, in his time and for a long time before and after the Sabbath were extremely important.  Observance of the Sabbath had many rules and regulations about what you could do and what you shouldn’t do.  Some of the people who had heard Paul, said that they did not have to pay attention to that.  They said that they did not have to pay attention to any of those special days during the year.  One day is just like any other.  Everyday is a day in which we express our faith in Jesus Christ and the love that comes forth from that.  So they weren’t paying attention to the Sabbath.  That was rather offensive to some of the other Jews who came and worshiped with them throughout the week.  So the community was painfully divided over the issue of whether or not one should observe the Sabbath with special care and special reverence.  Another very important part of Jewish law had to do with what was clean and what was not clean.  Today you hear about what is kosher and what is not kosher. Kosher means the same thing: clean or unclean.  This was a very ancient way that people divided up things.  Almost all primitive peoples and traditional cultures have had a sense of what is clean and what is not clean.  It’s very important to avoid the unclean so that one can live a holy life.  Holy is often contrasted with what is unclean.

There were many things besides food that were divided into the clean and the unclean categories, but in this paragraph that Paul is providing in the passage that is our text, food is the primary item.  Food is so important. It makes a great deal of difference what we eat.  And I don’t think that Paul is saying that it didn’t matter what the people ate, but what Paul was saying was that there were those who said that they are free from the law and did not have to avoid what was unclean.  Gradually Christians in general accepted that view.  Today we don’t pay attention to the dietary laws of the Old Testament.  But many people, who had grown up as good Jews and were then persuaded that Jesus was the Messiah, came to this new community feeling that ignoring all of what had been so central up until that point was very offensive.  They thought that it was very important to continue to be good Jews, even as they accepted Jesus as the Messiah.  So those who flouted all those laws were expressing their freedom as Christians, and they could eat anything.  One of the issues was whether or not the food had been offered to an idol.  If you bought meat in the market, very often before you purchased it, as part of the preparation of the meat for sale, there would be a ceremony before an idol. Many Jews thought that if food had been offered to an idol, then one certainly couldn’t partake of it.  This view came with them into that Christian community.  For others, it didn’t make a difference.  Idols aren’t real; they don’t represent anything, so it doesn’t make a difference whether or not that food has been offered before an idol.  The meat is just as good to eat as any other.  Now there is another kind of law that Paul addresses that is more relevant to us.  These types of laws were very much part of the Jewish way, and we could say they were the moral laws.  The people in the Roman church thought that they were free from moral laws too.  Now that doesn’t mean that they thought it was a good thing to be immoral, but it does mean that they thought that paying attention to the way in which morality is formulated in a set of rules was completely unnecessary.  They simply needed to have faith and live out of faith and to love one another and to live out that love of one another.  If they did that, then they thought that they didn’t need to teach moral laws or have a set of rules that governed their lives at all.  Okay, these people were creating a problem within the church, because there were other people who felt that it was important to have moral rules and moral laws.  It was important to maintain some of these distinctions that had been part of their faith and belief.  This is the context in which Paul is speaking when he says that we who are strong ought to put up with the failings of the weak and not just please ourselves.  Each of us must please our neighbor for the good purpose of building up the neighbor.  Now here and in the other part also, Paul is first of all saying that he agrees with those who say that they are free from Sabbath observance.  We are free from the laws of the clean and the unclean. We are free from the moral law.  That which constitutes the Christian life is faith and expression of faith or faithfulness in love.  And if you are a believer, and if you love your neighbor as yourself, and if you love God with all your heart mind and soul, then you can forget about the law.  Just do the things come from that.  Paul believed that.  So those who heard him and were following that out had heard him correctly.  But one point Paul said they had missed.  It’s far more important that you express your love for your neighbor by not putting obstacles in the way of your neighbor.  That is how you show forth your Christian maturity.  By not acting according to the law and by violating the rules that are so important to other people, you can cause them to stumble.  So, yes you are strong.  Being mature in faith is another way in which this is described.  You’re right, you’re free from all that, but you are free to service your neighbor as well.  If you’re offending your neighbor, or if you’re flouting those laws in a way that offends your neighbor and consequently you slow down the process of your neighbor’s growth, then you’re not being Christian after all.  Then you have not heard me correctly.  So your task is to build up your neighbor.  Do not put obstacles in your neighbor’s way.  What does it mean to build up your neighbor?  Does that mean simply to conform to all kinds of things including those principles that your Christian faith has freed you from?  Well, it would probably mean that.  Paul often conformed to Jewish laws.  He didn’t think that he had to, but he thought that it was the practical, wise thing to do.  He didn’t want to create offenses that weren’t helpful to his cause.  So to follow the rules that seem important to other people may be the way of building up other people.  Nevertheless, if in fact that the freedom that these people were talking about is the truly mature form of Christianity, then clearly to build other people up would be to help them to live into that freedom.  So you do not go about building people up by simply conforming to their prejudices so as not to offend them, but you try not to put obstacles in their way.  What you do to help them is to become maturer.  Well, how do we relate that to the present situation?  So many changes have already taken place including the distinctions between the clean and the unclean.  I don’t think such distinctions have completely disappeared, but we don’t use that language about it. The place it probably hangs on the most in our churches today is in relationship sexuality. Some kinds of sexuality people may label with the word unclean.  A sexual joke is often described as dirty.  It says something about the lingering effects of this distinction between the clean and the unclean.  That would be another sermon; I’m not going to get into that.  Certainly in the area of morality, generation after generation, we have this tension in those who preach the Gospel.  Luther was a good example.  Luther told us that we were free from the law—completely free from the law, but within a generation or two, Lutherans were listing all the laws that we should have just about as much as anybody else.  There is a tremendous internal pressure.  I think our need to have a lot of rules has something to do with the way we bring up children.  Christians keep making rules, so the issue of being free from the moral law is one that continues to be with us to the present day.  Christian maturity is to live in love and out of love.  Christian faith is not so much having to obey laws in the sense that loving people requires your doing this, that, and the other thing. Then you measure yourself as a Christian against whether you’re doing this, that, or the other thing and not really against whether or not you love people.  I think John Wesley understood Paul extremely well, and John Wesley saw Paul’s message as a message of love.  What is sanctification?  It is the process of growing in love for neighbor and for God.  What is the ultimate goal of sanctification?  The answer is perfection in love.  I understand that you are going to be reading that and studying that or reading about it and working with it.  It’s love that constitutes perfection and not obedience to a lot of laws or rules—however useful and good they are.  Paul didn’t think that the laws were bad, but he knew that trying to obey the law all the time did not work.  We need to get past that.  You do what the love of your neighbor requires, and you don’t worry about the rules.  So I don’t think we have gotten past the problems of the Roman Church.  The same problems keep reoccurring in every generation.  However, there are other kinds of issues that are much more acute for us in later generations than they were in the Roman Church.  Extremely few people would participate in the Christian community in the time of Paul.  Being a Christian and being faithful to Christ was not the top priority in their lives.  It was a high price to pay.  They didn’t score any brownie points with the rest of society by being part of the Christian community.  In fact, the early Christians put themselves in considerable danger of persecution.  Paul very rarely talks about the problem of having people in the churches who don’t really believe, or don’t really care about being Christian, or who don’t give top priority to that.  But once Christianity became the religion of the empire, huge numbers of people came to the churches.  Their primary loyalty and devotion might very well have been somewhere else.  Well, in the modern world, this is a matter of the last three centuries.  Many people who sit in the pews of Christian churches have primary loyalties and self-identification with national interests rather than with being Christian or serving God.  We can see this by just reading history.  We see how the Germans fought the  French on issues—not theological issues—but we see how each side believed that God was on their side.  How could it be otherwise?  The claim that God is on the side of one’s nation has been a major idolatry or heresy in our church during many times throughout history. There are many other forms of this; nationalism is not the only one.  I come from the South, and the Cobb family was a slave-holding family.  And they wrote books on how slavery was okay. I think they were sincere, but it certainly seems in retrospect, that they were placing the southern way of life above their loyalty and their devotion to Jesus Christ and to God.  I’m afraid that was true of millions of us, and maybe it still is.  I’m not trying to say we have totally outgrown it.  I’m just saying this kind of situation has characterized the church in later centuries far more than it did in Paul’s time.  It is possible for us also to ask about the question of maturity—Christian maturity.  I think we could agree that in Christian maturity more and more of our lives should be organized around our faith in God.  All of our other devotions and commitments—even good commitments—should be understood in the context of our primary devotion to God as we know Him in Jesus Christ.  In this respect I think we can say that all of us in the Church have more growing to do.  At this point I think it becomes our task to build up others who are newer in the faith, weaker in the faith, more confused, and more mixed up in the faith.  That is part of building one another up. You don’t do it by flouting your freedom in the face of others.  You do it by gently suggesting, nudging, educating, and lifting up each other in worship services Sunday after Sunday.  Worship is where we focus our attention upon God.  Worship is the way in which all of us together can grow in maturity in our faith, while we subordinate our other loyalties to that.  There is always a risk in leading matters here.  I think this is Paul’s message for us today.  Paul tells us to build each other up. We don’t put obstacles in front of our neighbor, but we do try to draw our neighbor in the church toward a fuller and more complete commitment.  There is a great danger when we take this attitude toward our neighbor.  Paul doesn’t mention this, but I’m going to supplement.  If you don’t agree with me about what the implications are of putting God first in your life, then I’m inclined to think that you’re not as mature as I am.  You probably think that I’m not as mature as you are.  So it’s healthy to avoid terms that describe who is more mature in the faith.  It is best to take each other’s faith seriously.  We can do this by asking another why is it that he or she believes something when putting God first in his or her life.  We all know that there are consequences that happen politically, socially, economically, and personally regarding relations in your home and church families.  There are many issues over which we might disagree.  But when I think another way, then at that point I hope we don’t start looking down on each other.  I hope we won’t say that I’m the mature one and you need to grow to the point where I have arrived.  Maturity will consist of being able to listen to one another, being able to love one another, being able to learn from one another, being able to grow together, and being able to build up each other. May God bless you in the process of building one another up in this congregation?