Romans 14:1-12
Sermon
He was born in the Netherlands, apprenticed at Twinings in London, and worked in the tea industry in the Dutch East Indies before immigrating in 1955, settling in the San Francisco Bay area.
He was appalled by the quality of coffee here, and a decade later, opened his first coffee shop serving dark roast and espresso grade coffee in Berkeley. Alfred Peet’s apprentices took his technique, with his blessing, to Seattle, founding Starbucks.
And just like that, the ten-dollar cup of coffee was born.
Peet would eventually distance himself from Starbucks over ultra-dark roasts, and I would eventually get over the novelty and choose medium roasts. Truth be told, if I am buying coffee out, I’m more likely to choose Dunkin, due to both convenience and because Starbucks has become notorious for union-busting. And I’m a union sort of a guy, especially in this time of vulture capitalism when the billionaires exploit workers and destroy entire industries.
If I did go into a Starbucks, I could go to the counter and order a Barbie Frappuccino, a drink you will not see on the board above the baristas. It is part of what they call a “secret menu,” a pink Vanilla Bean Crème Frappuccino with dragonfruit and berry purée. Before Instagram and TikTok, we just called these special orders.
Secret menus are not quite as secret these days, often accessible through the apps on our phones that keep us tied to the consumer matrix, a true false consciousness. But with or without the Starbucks app on my phone, I cannot go into a Starbucks and order a ribeye… medium rare, with a baked potato and broccoli.
I have a tremendous degree of freedom as a consumer inside of a Starbucks or any other coffee house: no foam, an extra shot, soy not dairy. But there are boundaries to that freedom.
We don’t tend to think freedom when we think Paul, but maybe we should. He played a crucial role in freeing Gentile Christians from the Law, the 613 Torah commandments that controlled the lives of Jewish Christians. Though I specifically mentioned the role of the Cleanliness Code in the creation of sacrament during our last Wednesday School class, the best known examples of those laws are the dietary restrictions we know as “keeping kosher.” These rules list things that are absolutely prohibited, like scallops wrapped in bacon, lists things that cannot be mixed, like meat and dairy, so no cheeseburgers, and includes instructions on how food must be prepared, from the field and the pasture to the bakery and the slaughterhouse.
It is food that comes into play in our reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans. This is Paul’s only authentic letter to churches he did not establish and had not visited, and for that reason is more a theological treatise than a pastoral intervention, though the theology is quite pastoral as well.
Earlier, Paul had written to the church at Corinth. It may be his best known epistle. One of the issues the Corinthian church was wrestling with was whether or not you could eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols.
This sounds weird to us. Most of us are religiously descended from Judaism, where most sacrifices to Yahweh involved a small portion wholly burnt, and a significant portion that went to feed the priests, Temple staff, and their families.
In Greek practice, adopted by Imperial Rome and the cultural context for early Christians, much of the sacrificial meat went toward community meals, neighborhood feasts related to a festival or commemoration at hand. This may be the issue with which the Corinthians were struggling. It also seems possible, based on this text, that some of the sacrificial meat found its way to the resale market. In any case, Paul dismisses the conflict, stating that since the pagan gods are not real, there is no harm attached to the meat.
With his letter to the Romans, Paul again addresses divisions over dietary practice. It seems some in the community had adopted a vegetarian diet. Paul says this is not necessary, but also instructs the community at accept variation in practice. As long as the intention is good, “for the Lord” in Paul’s words, then there should be no judgment or disdain. He goes on to say the same thing about holy days, that some consider them exceptional, others consider them no big deal.
His standard is simple. Figure out what you believe. Be faithful to what you believe. Don’t worry about what other people believe.
In other words, Paul is encouraging the church to focus on unity not uniformity.
Let me say that again, because Paul is consistent with Jesus here. The Way of Jesus is about unity, not uniformity.
We often frame this sentiment using words misattributed to Saint Augustine:
“In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” Here, charity means love, not financial giving.
The phrase was actually coined by Marco Antonio de Dominis. De Dominis is an interesting character. As Archbishop of Split, he got caught up in a conflict between the Vatican and the Venetian Republic. He fled to England and the Anglican Communion, where he wrote his ten volume anti-papal treatise “De Republica Ecclesiastica.” Vain and worldly, worried about his position in England, he unwisely returned to Rome, where he soon found himself in the crosshairs of the Inquisition, and died while imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo. He would have benefited from more charity.
And honestly, the phrase might have died in that ten-volume grave had not a Lutheran theologian picked it up. Nine years in to a religious war raging across continental Europe a war that was sparked by the Reformation, Peter Meiderlin, writing under the pen name Rupertus Meldenius, produced a pamphlet calling for reconciliation and peace, and used the phrase. “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”
We now know that conflict as the Thirty Years War, so maybe the combatants weren’t paying that much attention to the pastor’s pamphlet.
Not everyone agrees about what is essential, and history tells us institutions rarely lean into charity, choosing self-preservation above all things. We’ll wrestle with some of this in our next Wednesday School session, when we will discuss Creeds and Councils. The church piled up rules, one on top of another. It truly lost sight of the very thing on which the church and all those rules rested, the love and selflessness of the gospel.
The Protestant Reformation leaned into freedom, at least as much freedom as they could conceived in the 16th century world of kings and popes, and especially leaned on Paul’s letter to the Romans. But it would take geography to create the sort of internal religious liberty we know today.
Congregationalism had already introduced freedom for individual congregations, hence the name of the movement. There were still boundaries, like that Starbucks menu, posted and secret, still occasional heresy trials and expulsions, but by-and-large, local congregations could do their own thing.
During the Second Great Awakening, a period of religious fervor in America, revivalism and isolation produced what came to be known as the Christian movement. Adherents aspired to Christian unity, and unity only lasts if there is liberty. They adopted what they called “the right of Christian conscience,” that is the right of individual Christians to decide what they believe, to interpret scripture themselves.
One early branch of this loose movement would eventually merge with the Congregationalist church, combining local church liberty with individual liberty. That denomination, the Congregational and Christian Church, along with the Black church expression of that Christian movement, the Afro-Christian Connection, would form three of the five pillars of our United Church of Christ. The rest of that movement would evolve into out closest partners in faith and mission, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
So you see, it isn’t just me who is weirdly embracing of religious diversity. It isn’t even just The Park Church, though The Park Church took a strange route to the party.
Religious liberty, the right for you to decide what you believe, for our congregation to decide what we believe, is in our DNA. And in Paul’s epistle to the Romans, an ancient and imperfect witness to the creativity and personality of the man who played such a key role in spreading the message of Jesus throughout the Roman world, and subsequently, throughout history, a message so powerful it still worked even when Paul got the details wrong. And Paul often got the details wrong.
Add on a layer of Friedrich Schleiermacher, some Horace Bushnell, a little Thomas K. Beecher, and you get this particular expression of the Jesus tradition, keeping community and leaning into action, not dogma, for the last one hundred and eighty years and still going strong, united, not uniform.
And that makes all the difference.
And for the record, I’m fruity, but I’m not Barbie Frappuccino fruity. If I’m driving up to Starbucks for a special order, it is more likely to be a Butterbeer Frappuccino. That’s my kind of magic. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
God of All Creation,
as we mark a quarter century since terror filled our skies,
we remember the dozens of Muslim victims on 9/11,
then the half million dead in Afghanistan and Iraq,
the eighty thousand lost when ISIS filled
the power vacuum we created.
We pray for the survivors of violence,
the families of the victims of violence,
the first responders and volunteers poisoned by the rubble pile
at the World Trade Centers,
pray for all who later became victims
of stereotyping hate and scapegoating violence.
Like us,
Jesus lived in a police state,
where the violence of occupation forces
could and did take lives,
took his life,
so we pray as he modeled for us, saying:
Our Father…