Day 237 - Righteous Hospitality

A Sermon delivered at First Presbyterian Church, Soddy Daisy, TN           August 4, 2013

Readings:
Genesis15:1-6
Romans14:1, 10-13; 15:1-2

On our previous two Sundays we explored Paul’s description of Christian righteousness in his letter to the Romans. We can use holiness, holy, and maybe religious as synonyms for righteous. But we need to appreciate Paul’s point that it is not something you earn, it is something you do. It is something you reveal naturally as a consequence of your faith. Paul states the absolute requirement for redemption in 10:9-11:

 “because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. The scripture says, “No one who believes in him will be put to shame. For one who believes (this) with the heart …is so justified, and one who confesses with the mouth is saved.”

Righteousness is a changed mindset that governs our behavior and reveals our Christian faith. Paul uses Abraham’s experience in Genesis 15 as the ultimate example of a righteous person. Abram believed God’s promise of children in spite of his and his wife’s advanced age and was reckoned righteous by his faith. If you only get one message from all Paul’s letters about this, that is what it ought to be, “Our actions reveal our Christian faith.”

We often quote passages from Paul that support our view of holy behavior. We use Paul’s indictment of things like greed, envy, adultery, promiscuity, and so forth to measure or judge the religious quality of others. But Paul’s main point is not to condemn these vices as sins (though they may be sins), Paul is waking us up to the fact that letting anything get in the way of Christian behavior is a sin. It diverts us from a focus on God and others. The sin is not the action. The sin is the state of mind that lets something other than Christian behavior preoccupy us. Anything that diverts us from that focus on holiness is a problem.

Paul uses the entire letter to the Romans to make it very easy to understand what being righteous means, because our whole relationship with the entire world depends on it. It is a personal matter for each of us – it reflects the certainty of our faith. Paul states it simply. If we are a Christian, we love God with our whole being and love our neighbor as we love our self. By loving God and being neighborly, or hospitable, we cannot bring dishonor on Christ or us because we ar e emulating God’s holiness. To do otherwise condemns us and offends Christ.

This is why we describe righteousness as having a vertical and horizontal character. In Leviticus 19:2 as a preface to the Commandments, The Lord tells Moses to tell the Israelites “You shall be holy because I AM holy.” Being righteous means being holy as God is holy.   The Lord has demonstrated his grace by sending Jesus to us to demonstrate God’s righteousness to the world. This is what we mean by the vertical part of righteousness.

Jesus is the ideal model of human behavior in the world.  He calls us to walk the way he walked in the world. This is what we mean by horizontal righteousness. It is the way we Christians should walk in the world. Paul’s message is holy behavior is a personal, internal matter of our mind for all of us.

Paul talks about this personal holy behavior as we walk in the world using the context of three relationships, (1) our relationship with the community of the world, (2) our relationship with governmental authority (or politics); and (3) our personal relationship with each other.

The first relationship is between the community and us.  Romans 12:3-21 is captured it and verse 3 summarizes it: “Do not think too highly of yourself.”  Paul reminds us that humility, the slave’s virtue, must be the primary mindset for us. We miss Paul’s point if we think humility is enough. Paul is talking about how we think about our self in relationship to the community.

If we have low self-esteem, God’s message is “You are righteous by your faith and will be an instrument of God.” If you are the opposite and think you are self-important, righteousness reminds you to tome it down because we are all equal in the eyes of God. Paul’s example of the parts of the body is the best example of this. We need each other and delude ourselves to think otherwise.

The second relationship is that between the person and government authority. We all like to use Paul’s quotation, “submit to the authority of the state” when we are on the side of the group in power but we are never very comfortable with it when we are on the other side.  In Paul’s mind, you cannot be holy unless you it in both cases.

Paul leaves a lot of questions not clearly answered. “Should a Christian ever oppose the state?” What about the fact that the government is an institution operated by fallible humans?  We have to sort through holding on to humility and conforming to his words “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God.”  But that first verse of 13:1-10 is a high hurdle. We did ask for human leaders instead of God’s leadership. 

(It reminds me of a fellow I used to work for in a company in my days as an engineer/scientist.  I had a small existing staff that was severely alienated, but could do quite the good job of solving difficult manufacturing problems. Like many engineers, they have an outlook and behave in ways some call "quirky independence." After my decades of work engineering management in research and development it became fairly obvious that a good engineer is productive in proportion the the freedom they have to do their work, including letting them vent a little steam sometimes. You learn to accommodate individuality and not let it become a burr in the saddle. My manager was far more interested in their conformity to his idea of decorum and proper attitude than productivity (he equated conformity and productivity- a bad idea in a technical operation).  One day in a discussion in his office,  he pulled his desk Bible and quoted this passage  from Romans on authority to me, saying that I had one problem, "you do not demand your employees submit to you."  Of course Paul has given us a double edged sword. Perhaps I encouraged my staff to think a little too highly of themselves, or as I intimated to my manager, perhaps I was building them up from the repression of my manager's attitude. So much for not thinking too highly of yourself, and the master being the slave.)

Paul says obedience is expected but we also know Jesus is Lord of all. When one is pressed into the corner where the state threatens our personal obedience to God by forcing us to turn away from of the greatest two commandments that demonstrate holiness; (1) to love God with all our being, and (2) to value and love every person the way value and love ourselves; it is our personal obligation to be loyal to Jesus, Lord of all, and suffer the consequences of our obedience as Christ did himself.  This is a very hard teaching, and one to undertake with a lot of prayer.

But we all could honor these first two parts of righteousness, having a changed mind that understands humility and not thinking too highly of our self is the most precious virtue, and the government is the human part of the rule of God, we might have a much more pleasant political and social environment.

This brings us to the third and perhaps most important part of holiness. I call this interpersonal righteousness or our behavior towards everyone else.  If we welcome people with a mind changed by our faith, we have fulfilled the whole essence of righteousness, hospitality. In our reading in Chapter 14 and 15 Paul explicitly uses Christ as the definition. Paul says in 15:7: “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” Paul makes it clear by using Christ’s example that “welcome one another” means “welcome everyone.” There is no way to escape that expectation.

How do we welcome people? Paul’s talk about eating food  or idols has part of the answer. We welcome people by what we do and what we say.

That issue began with his argument with Peter and James, “Can a Christian dine in the home of gentiles at a meal where the meat sacrificed to idols served?” The argument turns on the answer to the question, “Does a Christian need to adhere to the Jewish Law as a prerequisite for being a Christian?” The answer is “no,” you can eat food for idols with your gentile friends.  God said no food is intrinsically bad and a strong Christian can partake of any food, even food that a Christian Jew may refuse. You just cannot harm a weaker person by your behavior.

Jesus reduces the law to its practical effect when he answered the Pharisees and scribes in Matthew15:10-14. Hear these verses: “Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, ‘Listen and understand:  it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.’  Then the disciples approached and said to him, ‘Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?’  He answered, ‘Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.’”

Jesus in his oblique way warns us that our words can cause the downfall of another person and us. Our tongue can be a our own stumbling block. Jesus reserves his harshest criticism of stumbling blocks. He says their words are a millstone tied around their neck.  To be a stumbling block is dishonors the Lord.

Virtually every writer of the New Testament comes back to this matter of the tongue. James reiterates it in James 1:26-27   “If any think they are religious (Paul would say ‘righteous’), and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless. ²⁷Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

Paul had this same idea in mind when he wrote to the Romans as he did in his letters to the Corinthians, the Galatians, the Philippians and the Thessalonians.  In his ministry, Paul learned an agonizingly painful thing; when a Christian denigrates or attacks another person, especially another Christian over their belief, that person wounds Christ and is subject to judgment. The tongue that can praise the Lord can also dishonor the Lord.  

Paul knew one thing in particular makes the tongue a dangerous weapon, judgment. Paul said in Romans 14:13, “Let us therefore no longer pass judgment on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of another.” and followed in Rom. 15:1-2  “We who are strong ought to put up with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves.  Each of us must please our neighbor for the good purpose of building up the neighbor.”

We can put this interpersonal holiness in an understandable context by thinking about what and how you talk about others when you are in the presence of your family and other people. We have all heard the expression, “little pitchers have big ears.” Preparing for this sermon I read a mother’s lament on line,*  She was in an elevator with her young son who was wearing a Mickey Mouse hat. Someone asked him where he got the hat and he replied, “We got it at Disney World but mommy said the only other souvenir we got was my baby sister.” Another painful example occurred last week at the Free Press. 

After his boss had left for the day, the former editorial writer changed the title of his editorial to “Take your plan and shove it, Mr. President” a spiteful and implicitly unstated profanity in bold letters for every person including young people to read and copy. The owners of the paper had placed a quotation from Philippians (4:19) at the bottom of the editorial page that contained his editorial as a public declaration that reflects their understanding of God’s holiness, (Using verses as 'proof-texts' is always risky, therefore, I am adding the preceding verses 8-18 in the link and adding v8,9 below so you can put the quotation into context.):  verse8: Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable,  if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. verse 9: Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and seen in me, and may the God of peace be with you. And the newspaper quotes verse 19:  “And my God will meet your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.”  The former editor seems to reveal his idea of Christian righteousness as 'to proudly disrespect all persons, including the leader of God’s government and God he suggests to the world he represents his and the Philippians sense of holiness.' The paper fired him for it, but the act is done. Regrettably the paper unwittingly and the editorialist intentionally have dishonored God’s holiness and become stumbling blocks to others who might otherwise seek God.

We do not want any one, especially our own children throwing back at us some negative, judgmental comment we have made, or copying our poor behavior as examples of Christian holiness. That makes us a stumbling block, a millstone around our neck liable to be tossed into the sea.  Our tongue is a dangerous weapon, not just when we are aware we are in someone’s presence and can perhaps soften or correct our commentary but especially when we talk and do not know who is listening and being influenced by our words.

It is a hard job to always remember that Jesus despised and hated no one, and hospitality is our test of righteousness. This is the uncomfortable part of holiness, and I hope for all of us including me that hospitality is the thing we work on the most. Holiness requires a wholesale change of mindset. We all must pray constantly for wisdom, patience, forgiveness and resolve to sanctify our mindset by working constantly to build up our righteousness by building up our neighbor’s.

*note:  This url may or may not be an original version, as I found several variations on the story when I went back and searching for the source.