A statement appeared in the English newspaper, Daily News in 1906. There was a dictate from the local constable in a community in London. It read as follows: "The chief constable has issued a statement declaring that carol singing in the streets by children is illegal. It is morally and physically injurious. He appeals to the public to discourage the practice immediately." The next day, the great poet GK Chesterton wrote a little satirical piece in response to this dictate from the chief constable. It might, in fact, sound familiar in some ways to you.
God rest ye merry gentleman,
let nothing you dismay,
the herald angels cannot sing,
the cops arrest them on the wing
and warn them of the docketing
of anything they say.
God rest ye merry gentleman,
may nothing you dismay
on your repose will cities lies deep
silence broken only by
the motes horns melodious cry,
the hooters happy bray.
So when the song of children ceased
and Herod was obeyed,
in his high whole Corinthian
with purple and with peacock fan
rested that merry gentleman
and nothing, him dismayed.
You can imagine the controversy this caused coming from the pen of Chesterton but what he was doing was showing the absurdity of trying to silence children’s singing Christmas carols as if it were injurious to their health and their moral being. It was, I’m sure, on the part of the police constable a well-meaning thing. Maybe he was thinking of their safety, maybe he was looking at common good and the social order, or maybe he was just hoping he would have a quiet evening and not have to worry about children running around the streets. Who knows? But, clearly he had made an absurd decision and caused a lot of sorrow and grief. And in some cases like Chesterton, a lot of derision and yet, in many ways, many of us are not very far from the police constable.
By that, I mean we often celebrate and adhere to very unimportant things in life and we make them a source of division or of conflict or even of dissension. We take secondary things and we make them primary things. We hold onto them for dear life because of either fear of divine reprisal or maybe just out of an adherence to a tradition because that is the way that things are being done. Maybe it is part of our past, maybe it is a fear of the future but we hold onto secondary things as if they are as important as primary things and we’re no longer able to determine the difference.
Writing to the Roman’s in their magnificent book that I mentioned again last week; the Apostle Paul, is writing about a situation where that is happening. There is quarreling, there is dissension, there is division, there is judgement, there is finger pointing, and there are all manner of problems facing the Roman congregation and in the midst of it, Paul writes, he pleads with them from the depths of his being. I think the best way, to sum up what he was saying, was a dictum by St. Augustine of Hippo, who hundreds of years later said the following, and I have tried to subscribe to this every day: “In essentials, unity, in nonessentials, liberty, and in all things, charity. “
The Apostle Paul, in writing to the Roman’s is doing exactly that and he is making a distinction between the nonessentials and the essentials of the Christian life and he sees the nonessential things as being weak. One of the translations of the passage actually talks about those things that are and should be distinguished from others for not being important. In other words, there are things that we in our weakness cleave to and cling to because we believe they’re important, when in fact, they are not.
The Roman Church was a classic example. It was made up of diverse groups of people. It was made up, for example, of Jewish Christians; those who had taken the Judaism and become followers of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth and as new members of the church, they remain faithful to their Jewish roots. But, as you know, Jewish custom dictates that you maintain the dietary laws of Judaism as outlined in the book of Leviticus, particularly Chapter 11; and so, a faithful Jew adheres to the rituals and the rights and the laws that pertain to eating and the dietary fabric of life. They also celebrate special days. High days and holy days are important in the Jewish culture, not least of which, is one that we almost share with them: Passover. These days are important. They are often more important than other days because they’re days that celebrate what God has done. They’re a sign of faith.
But then, we’re also Gentile Christians who come from both the Roman and the Greek cultures and they brought with them their own unique dietary laws. There were many, for example, who were vegetarian. They were vegetarian because they didn’t want to eat the meat that had been sacrificed to the gods, to the idols in the marketplace, so they abstained from eating meat. There were others who were quite prepared to eat other meats and meats that Jews would not be willing to eat but saw those as being an integral part of their life and their culture.
Likewise, they had their holy days. Some of them were dictated by Rome, others from the Greek calendar. Either way, Gentiles had their own differences of opinion when it came to what you should eat and drink and what days should be celebrated. The church was sort of a melting pot. There was also another group of people. Paul calls these the strong, and they are those who had broken from such ties, who didn’t worry about such things, who didn’t make those things absolute but rather lived in freedom and felt that none of those things really mattered anymore. You can see that happening so clearly within the early church. Those who were strong belittled and judged those who were deemed to be weak, those that were following the traditions, the meals, the days, the holidays and they were standing in judgement of them.
Likewise, those who adhered to those things and to those laws, to a particular diet or a particular calendar, belittled and quarreled with those who did not adhere to these things. That is why the Apostle Paul, gets really clear and says; “The Kingdom of God is not about eating and drinking and about holidays and holy days, it is about righteousness, it is about joy, it’s about peace in the Holy Spirit.” Paul could not stand the dissension that occurred from things that were nonessential and he is imploring the Romans to stop this division, to stop this.
I’ll never forget some years ago having a conversation with a colleague of mine who served a church in New Brunswick. My friend told me the most bizarre story about his congregation and how there was man in it who was absolutely livid and obsessed with the fact that the baptismal font was on the wrong side of the sanctuary. He wrote to the session, he wrote to Presbytery, he wrote to the minister; he was always getting up at every congregational meeting and saying you have to move the baptismal font to the other side because the baptismal font should always be right under the pool pit, the word and the sacrament should go hand in hand.
Everyone ignored him and he just got more and more bitter and then he started to get followers. Then there was a storm. It was so severe that one of the trees next to the church fell and damaged the roof. One of the branches came through and destroyed the baptismal font. Now, you know where this is going, don’t you? The man said, “Do you see? Had you only moved it to the other side of the church, this would not have happened.”
Finally, the trustees, always very wise trustees, went to him and said, “Well, if you love this font so much, why don’t you donate a new one and we’ll put it exactly where you said you want it.”
He said, “Oh I’m not that interested in it that I’m prepared to pay up to do this.” I don’t know what happened to the font, by the way. The story just ended and my minister friend just threw his arms up.
Now, that might sound trivial, but that’s happened a whole lot more in the history of the church than we’re willing to acknowledge and I might admit, on some more silly and irreverent points, this man certainly sounded like the constable that Chesterton was writing about, but it happens all too frequently.
Paul, in saying this, asks us to concentrate not on the nonessentials but on the essentials. You want to concentrate on the things that matter. Paul is not saying, by the way, that one shouldn’t have convictions. He’s not suggesting that the Christian church simply be tolerant or that it just practice anything. On the contrary, he said that there is a place for you to stand for what it is that you believe in. There is a place to do that unlike what the Great Gertrude said.
Goethe said: ”Tell me of your certainties for I have enough questions of my own.” In other words, tell me what you really believe. I don’t mind certainties, Paul is saying. I don’t mind people having convictions. Let’s have those convictions, but this is his big point; let us make sure that they are convictions about essentials rather than nonessentials.
What were these essentials? The first essential, he said, is that we live, not on our own, but with someone who belongs to the Lord. There is a very famous phrase that I’m sure many ministers have used: “No man lives to himself and no man dies to himself.” We don’t live alone. We live in a community of believers. We live with the complexity of living as a community of believers. Not everyone is going to subscribe to our own view on something, particularly if it is nonessential, but the essential fact is that none of us lives to himself because we belong to something greater. We belong to the Lord. Let our belonging to the Lord supersede any trivial judgements that we make about secondary things. It is wise to heed this because sometimes, we ourselves, can be wrong even about nonessential things.
I read a story in a magazine about a woman who was about to board a plane and as we all do, she brought a magazine and some cookies for the flight and she’s sitting in the departure lounge and she gets engrossed with the magazine when all of a sudden she hears some rustling next to her and there was a fumbling, trying to undo the cookie package. He reaches in and he takes out a cookie and he eats it. Well, she looks at him with disgust. So, she says to him, well if he’s going to do that I’m going to teach him a lesson. She reaches in and she eats a cookie. He looks at her in disgust. Finally, he eats another one and she sees that they’re running out so she grabs two of them. Finally, there is one left and the man reaches in and he breaks it in half and he hands her one of them and he eats the other half and the package is gone. Daggers drawn; she gets up, she walks, her plane is being called, she sits down in the seat of the plane, she puts on her seatbelt, she reaches into her purse to get a Kleenex and gum and finds an unopened packet of cookies that she had bought. They were never hers in the first place but how often we make judgements about people when we are in error. How often we point fingers at people for holding convictions and beliefs and saying you can’t do that, you can’t do that. We won’t allow you to do that.
Can you imagine the Gentile Christian’s telling the Jews that belonged to the church you can’t celebrate Passover? What kind of a message would that be and yet, that kind of quarrelling had been made an absolute thing. Likewise, what Jewish Christian should be able to point to a Gentile and say, well you’ve got to follow the dietary laws of Leviticus? What is Leviticus when you’re from Rome? No, there is a common thing and the common thing that is shared is faith in Christ and it is that faith that we live, not alone with but together for no one lives to themselves but we live as part of Christ, the essential.
Augustine would say; in essentials, unity, in these other things, liberty. But there’s an even more powerful argument that Paul makes and it’s the one that really moves me. This is the most convincing of all; none of us die to ourselves. None of us die to ourselves, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. One of the sad realities is that there are people in this world who die alone. There is a sad reality that people even feel that they die alone, not only actually die alone. It happens all the time and it is a sad reality because it highlights the one thing that we as Christians know and believe. Namely that even though physical might happen, it isn’t an ultimate reality. None of us dies alone. We are in the Lord.
What Paul is getting at to the Roman church is to not just emphasize all of these secondary things that come and go, the meals, the holidays, the traditions, the things that you think are really important because in the end, they pale in comparison to the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. They don’t mean anything. In the end, when you’ve stripped it all away, if we believe that we do not die to ourselves but we are the Lord’s, then doesn’t it just put everything else in its rightful place? Doesn’t it just highlight the absolute absurdity and weakness of things that we cleave to and think are the most important things in life? Is there not a greater good here than that which we sometimes just see with our eyes?
For Paul, he knows that we are mortal. He knows the Christian community will come and go and things will change but he knows that there is one thing that he is absolutely certain about and that is that Christ, Jesus, has from his own death and resurrection, saved us from the one thing that is the ultimate.
I read a story, I was told it was true but who knows, about a father and a daughter who were walking in the prairies here in Canada, and as they were walking, the most terrible prairie fire began and prairie fires can happen from lightning or from many different things and when they start to go through a field, it can be terrifying. So, the father instructed the daughter to be careful and together they light a fire where they stood and they controlled the fire and they used their coats to extinguish it so there was a border around them that was completely leveled and completely burned, so much so that when the fire actually started to come towards them, when it reached them, it was extinguished and bypassed them because the land on which they were standing was already burnt and they were safe in the midst of the fire.
Paul saw those early Christians in the midst of a harsh and a judgemental world. He saw them understanding that they, like all humans, were going to face death but he also knew that the one who had already put out the fire for them had paid the cost for them and had saved them and that was the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He knew that that was the ultimate salvation and when you believe that, then absolutely nothing else that we cleave to and make important is important. When we’re confronted by the ultimate, the penultimate passes away.
What this is about is the last dictum from Augustine; “In all things charity.” In all things charity because that is a gift that is being given in love. That is a gift that is being given for life and therefore, in the end, all those Christians who have gathered in Rome, who have come from Jerusalem, Corinth or North Africa, all of them belong to Christ and therefore there is no room for dissension, no room for squabbling about nonessential matters. They pale compared to what Christ has done. In this world, that is so often fragmented, the talks about the breakup of nations, the talks about dissensions and separations and wars, is it not something different to hear what Paul says and is true? None of us lives to ourselves and none of us dies to ourselves. Therefore, we are called to kneel before the Lord. Amen.