Listen to the audio of today’s Reflection:
https://soundcloud.com/hapearce/reflection-for-may-22-2025
Romans 14:1-15
The Weak and the Strong
Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters. 2 One person’s faith allows them to eat anything, but another, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. 3 The one who eats everything must not look down on the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not condemn the one who does, for God has accepted them.4 Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, a servant stands or falls. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.
5 One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind.6 Whoever regards one day as special does so to the Lord. Whoever eats meat, eats to the Lord, for they give thanks to God; and whoever abstains does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. 7 For none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone. 8 If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.
9 For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living. 10 You, then, why do you judge your brother [or sister]? Or why do you look down on them? For we will all stand before God’s judgment seat. 11 It is written:
“‘As surely as I live,’ says the Lord,
‘every knee will bow before me;
every tongue will confess to God.’”
12 So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God.
13 Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of a brother or sister. 14 As one who is in the Lord Jesus, I am fully convinced that no food is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for that person it is unclean. 15 If your brother [or sister] is distressed because of what you eat, you are no longer acting in love. Do not by your eating destroy someone for whom Christ died.
Before I came to Medina, I was serving a church in the city of Niles, between Youngstown and Warren. At one point, I put a message on the church sign that said, “Non-religious people welcome here.” A few days later, we got a call from some of the ladies at the Methodist Church up the street. They were complaining about our sign. They said we shouldn’t be having non-religious people at our church. I’m not sure why they would care about our church sign at all, but clearly something about it stuck in their craw.
A couple of years ago, in our Friday study group, we were reading an article about the great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The subject of the article was Bonhoeffer’s thinking that the true way of following Jesus was what he called “non-religious Christianity.” (I wonder if Methodist ladies in Germany complained to Bonhoeffer.)
The idea of both our church sign in Niles and Bonhoeffer’s essay is that being a follower of Jesus isn’t supposed to be a matter of being religious. It seems a little counter-intuitive at first, because we tend to think of being a Christian as one way of being religious.
The distinction is that being religious is a matter of doing certain things so your god will like you and bless you. But being a follower of Jesus means embracing the idea that God already loves you unconditionally, and died on the cross for you as an expression of that love.
Today’s passage from Paul’s Letter to the Romans can probably be seen as addressing that distinction between religiousness and following Jesus. It’s a passage that’s a little unsettling to some people, because when you think about it, Paul is questioning a belief that’s so widely held that most of us don’t even think about it. That’s the basic belief that God has certain religious practices he wants us all to follow. Most of us just assume that it’s true — some things are right and other things are wrong, and it’s the same for everyone. But in our passage for today, Paul makes the case that different followers of Jesus might actually be called to different standards of religious practice.
The specific practices Paul talks about in this passage are keeping dietary laws and observing the Sabbath and holy days. As you might remember, when Paul was active in his ministry, lots of churches had some members who had been raised as Jews and others who had been raised as worshipers of the Greco-Roman gods. For those who had been raised as Jews, maintaining a kosher diet and following purity laws was considered very important. Some Jewish Christians even continued to observe them after they started following Jesus. But to those who had been raised worshiping pagan gods, those Hebrew laws were a waste of time – or even worse, signs of a lack of faith in Jesus.
Paul has a reputation as a ‘moralist,’ so we expect him to say, “Here’s what’s right for everyone and here’s what’s wrong for everyone.” But instead, he writes something surprising: that it’s up to each believer to discern for himself or herself what God is calling them to do about these “disputable matters.”
And even more surprisingly, Paul describes those who strictly keep these laws as “weak” and those who don’t follow them as “strong.” That sort of turns on its head our traditional way of thinking, because we typically think of those who keep the religious practices most strictly as strong, not weak. And we’re definitely taught that we don’t get to decide for ourselves what’s sinful and what isn’t.
Of course, Paul would be the last person to say that followers of Jesus can just do whatever we want. But he urged his fellow believers to focus on the fundamental things of the faith – to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves. And when it came to the traditional Hebrew laws and practices, Paul himself kept many of them. But he said gentiles who come to faith didn’t have to. And he urged all of his readers to give each other some room on these matters. He writes that we’re all servants of Jesus, and nobody has the right to judge someone else’s servant.
There’s a great freedom in that, but Paul also urges us to practice that freedom responsibly. In his mind, that means respecting the different beliefs of others as a way of expressing love for them. Attitudes toward drinking seem to me like a reasonable example. Those who feel no call to abstain from alcohol shouldn’t mock those do feel such a call, and shouldn’t insist on drinking in front of a brother or sister who abstains.
Being a follower of Jesus isn’t about being religious – about keeping rules and doing certain practices to make God like us. Instead, it’s about doing what we think would please and honor God as a way of expressing our thanks for our new life in Jesus. And as we do, we should respect the ways of our brothers and sisters who believe they are called by God to different standards than we feel called to. Because maybe they really are called to different standards.
In fact, those who hear a different call from God than we hear might even be instruments through whom God is calling us to a different understanding of our own relationship with him. So God might be teaching us new ways of discipleship through each other.
Let’s pray. Lord, we pray that you will reveal to each of us what it is you’re calling us to do and to be as followers of your Son. And move in our hearts to lead us to give one another room to live out our calling so that the peace and harmony among believers makes your kingdom known to the world. Amen.
Every Blessing,
Henry
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