Easter and Welcome

"Easter and Welcome"--May 31, 2017

"Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions.  Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables. Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgments on those who eat; for God has welcomed them. Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another? It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand.  Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike. Let all be fully convinced in their own minds. Those who observe the day, observe it in honor of the Lord. Also those who eat, in honor of the Lord, since they give thanks to God; while those who abstain, abstain in honor of the Lord and give thanks to God.  We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the living and the dead." [Romans 14:1-9]

Hmmm... Easter means accepting people who think and live and live their lives differently from me.  Resurrection means... acceptance.   How about that?

I have to be honest with you, this is not the first place my mind goes when I think of Easter.  The obvious conclusions are something like, "Because Jesus is risen... we will live." or "Because Jesus came back to life, I have the hope of seeing again those I have loved who have died."  Maybe even, if the reflections we have shared in the last several weeks are in the right ballpark, "The empty tomb means that Jesus' really is Lord, and really does rule the universe from suffering love and self-giving, rather than saber-rattling and angry threats like the powers of the world doe."  Maybe those are conclusions we might all draw on our own from the news of the empty tomb.

But leave it to good ol' Paul of Tarsus to lead us in a direction no one expected like he does here in Romans:  the resurrection of Jesus means acceptance of others who are different from me. 

If that connection doesn't automatically make sense, let's watch again working backwards and see how Paul gets there.  Paul starts with the idea that Christ, who has died and risen, is Lord of all--of the living and the dead.  And that, in turn, means that no matter what circumstances we find ourselves, we belong to this same Jesus.  We are his. We are claimed. We are beloved.  We are precious.  That is true if we are alive. It is true even in death.  The key is that, no matter what, we belong to the Lord Jesus.

Now here is the move that comes as a surprise of grace. 

Paul says that people with all sorts of different perspectives, practices, and lifestyles can be living "to the Lord."  In Paul's day, the issues in the life of the early church that were on the apostles' mind were about whether to eat meat or not (meat which, almost certainly would have come from pagan markets and have been first used in sacrifice to pagan gods), or whether or not to continue observing special days (whether Sabbath or other festival days or whatever).  And while Paul clearly has his own opinions on the subject (Paul thinks it's fine to eat meat, even if it came from a pagan meat market, since none of the other "gods" out there are real), the amazing thing is that Paul can allow the possibility that other people can have different practices... and still be serving the same Lord Jesus. 

This is a radical move: Paul decidedly does not say, "It doesn't matter what anybody believes, and there are no good reasons to think one way or the other..." but rather he has a solid reason for thinking as he does.  And yet, and yet, Paul sees that if Jesus is the Lord of all--of the living and of the dead, of those who eat and those who don't, of those who keep special days and those who refrain--then what is important is not so much "being right" but the way that the same Lord Jesus can hold all of us.

This is a really big deal.  Elsewhere, Paul can talk about how God's love reaches across the divides of gender and class and ethnicity (in Galatians 3, he writes that there is no longer "Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female," but rather we are all "one in Christ").  But this goes even further. These questions, about eating or not eating, about observing special days or not, and such, these are matters that you could call moral questions.  These are questions people feel "right" and "wrong" about.  Either it was morally "right" to avoid eating meat, or it was morally "wrong" to tell people not to eat it.  These were questions that people felt strongly about in the early church--these were questions of their lifestyle, of their daily routine, of their way of life and their practice of piety.  And Paul, instead of just enforcing his opinion as "the-once-and-for-all-answer," says, "If Jesus really is risen from the dead, and if he is also Lord of all, then we need to bear with and love--and accept--those who think differently in their ways of striving to love and serve that same Lord.

It's funny--we can be so focused on making sure we have the "right" answers that we forget that Jesus claims us even when we don't have it right... even when we are sure we are right but turn out to have it all wrong.  Jesus' claim on us is bigger than the people who get 100% on their theology.  Jesus' claim on us is stronger than the differences between us.  Jesus' claim on us is more vital, more real, than whether we can see things from the same perspective as those we want to label "weak." 

All of that is true because Jesus is alive and risen from the dead.  All of that is true because of the resurrection.

In a world and culture like ours that gets so polarized so quickly, the resurrection itself--the news of Easter--does something to us to cause us to accept one another because the living Jesus is accepts us.

Today, celebrate the resurrection: love someone who thinks differently from you, and accept someone who is following Jesus but whose life and lifestyle look very different from yours. Jesus, after all, is the risen Lord of us all anyhow.

Lord Jesus, let your risen life enable us to see your love for all... even those we have a hard time accepting.