The senior sermon of Cara Spaccarelli, Class of 2006 from the Diocese of Minnesota, delivered on September 15, 2005, in Christ Chapel

Romans 14: 5-12

I never considered Paul, shall I say, a liberated man. From silenced women to submissive servants to blatant insults of those who disagreed with him to a rather off-putting preoccupation with his own authority, I am not impressed. All in all, he just seems wound a little too tight for my taste. However, after a few years of disregarding him, I began to feel sorry for Paul. You know, it wasn't his fault that a bunch of letters he wrote to some people were immortalized in a text that leaves little room for culturally sensitive editing. It was time to ease up on Paul.

Paul is really a man all about liberation (pause), at least in theory. He speaks of losing one's self and finding one's self in Christ -- defining ourselves, not by our race, class, gender, habits, and beliefs (limitations as influential today as they were 2000 years ago); no, but by defining ourselves in Christ. Freedom from all things in order to be bound to Christ. "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." It may sound convoluted but Paul is not describing a biological transformation here but a spiritual one. The mystery of the unity with Christ that baptized Christians are meant to live out.

Today's reading is only an excerpt of his discussion of the relationship between the weak and the strong in the Christian community in Rome. The weak refers to the Christians who still clung to their Jewish identities as expressed in their obedience to the food laws and the holy day observances that Paul cites, while the strong are the Christians who saw their Christian identity superseding all other identities. By his classification of them as weak and strong, Paul clearly sides with the latter. Yet, he is clear to make room for both beliefs and habits, emphasizing instead that in all Christians do, they must most importantly honor God, reflecting a life bound to Christ.

I like to think that if Paul was around today that he would take a look at some parts of his letters and do a revision -- you know, Romans, 2nd edition. In addition to rethinking a few of his more inflammatory remarks, he would make his examples a bit more pertinent. Maybe in this passage he would reference our Christian self-identifications as Religious right or religious left, orthodox or liberationist, born again or just born. The essence of the message would not change -- your beliefs should come out of a life lived to God. But there's more. We only need to expand the lectionary reading a few verses to remind ourselves that Paul also insists that regardless of one's belief, they must act out of love for one another, not allowing their beliefs to be stumbling blocks to the unity of the whole community. To live and die in Christ is to honor God, depend on God and be a blessing in our love to one another. Those are some pretty broad strokes in a depiction of a holy life and one that opens us, liberates us from cultural, societal, and personal expectations that prevent us from embodying Christ.

Paul's vision gives us so much freedom in fact that we end up with a pretty diverse Christian body. This can lead to amazing opportunities for formation, as we influence and shape one another in our journeys. But it can also lead to much disagreement and division. Paul may have had an expansive view of the manifestations of the Christian identity, but he was by no means shy to share his opinion on beliefs and behaviors of which he disapproved; the simple fact that he labels one side weak and the other strong illustrates this. His letters express an intention to shape and form the lives of the early Christians --and much of that formation is to help one more fully embody a life in Christ. Aren't we to have the same desire to form each other and ourselves to reflect more deeply a life in Christ? And yet, when we seek to do this, we run against the exact danger that Paul warns against -- judging one another.

It is sort of passé for us to blatantly judge one another. Few of us say to someone, I condemn you or you are not a Christian or some other phrase having to do with someone's eternal destination that is rarely spoken from the likes of this pulpit. No, our judgment of one another is much more subtle. A consistent ignoring of another person's presence, conscientiously avoiding eye contact or rolling eyes . Or less visibly, simply making our mind up about somebody, putting them in a box that controls whether they can affect us. It is often an unintentional action, but a conscious one. It happens for a variety of reasons -- sometimes theological disagreement, but more often personality clash or difference of opinion on something that we have an emotional investment in or just simply a pattern that one falls in to. We are aware of the destructive impact that this can have on another, but less aware perhaps of the impact it can have on own selves.

A story that I once heard comes to mind here. A group of people walking a long one day stumbled across a snapping turtle attempting to cross the road. Snapping turtles are not known for their beauty. They are gray, often sporting a slimy coating of green algae and fronted by massive and sharp jaws. This turtle was uglier than most. It was grossly deformed due to a plastic bottle top, a ring about an inch-and-a -half in diameter that it had clearly acquired as a hatchling when it too was about an inch-and-a-half in diameter. The ring had fit around its midsection like a belt back then, but now, nearly a foot long, weighing about nine pounds, the animal was corseted by the ring so that it looked like a figure eight. The deformity was survivable at his current size, but a full-grown snapper could be nearly 30 pounds and the constriction would not be survivable then. So, they risked the fearsome teeth of the turtle and cut the ring.

And the snapping turtle, shaped like a figure eight, continued across the street. Nothing had changed. Except now the turtle had potential. It could grow into the ugly snapping turtle it was destined to be. It would take years for the animal to grow into normal proportions, maybe decades. Perhaps even in old age, the turtle would still be somewhat guitar-shaped. But it was now capable of transforming. (story is adapted from A Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McClaren)

Judging one another is so dangerous because it traps us in our own individual worlds, allowing us to live under the delusion that Truth is equated with what we think. And when our measuring stick of others and ourselves is our own convictions, it becomes very difficult to submit ourselves to transforming to God's measure. When we use our convictions, not simply to judge an action or belief, but to judge another person, it is like stepping through the plastic ring. It feels okay at first, maybe even comfortable. As we grow, it grows into us. It becomes embedded in our skin, contorting our transformation individually, and thereby communally, into the people of God. It traps us by refusing to allow us to grow - making our convictions more important than our growth in our life in Christ. How can we live in Christ, die in Christ, move and walk and have our being in Christ, when our growth is being stunted, deformed by the rings of judgment by which we choose to limit ourselves.

So here we are. A community of different beliefs, different identities of culture, class, and gender, different purposes in being here. For this year, we will live in close, Christian community -- at some point, most will say, too close, and at some point, most will say, too far. We are here, no matter what our role is on this campus to be formed into believers whose lives in Christ honor God and bless others with love.

It would be easy to approach one another's and our own formation with a live and let live attitude. God will form us along the way. We're just keeping each other company. This approach simply ignores the inevitable impact of how we inherently influence one another. As a community we are more than people who occupy the same space at the same time directed to the same broad goal -- we have an investment in all of us embodying a life in Christ. We are the people of God. And to do that, we have to be vulnerable to one another's influence -- to the divine wisdom and presence that each of us is bearing. And I'm not simply talking about warm and fuzzy formation but the kind of stuff that calls one another to accountability, prophetic voices, prophetic presences, and the willingness to address one another on both their strengths and weaknesses in ministry.

It would be unreasonable to think that there will not be times that we find ourselves in this process judging one another. The work and stresses of life, the debates over various issues, the simple complexity of living our days with the same people on the same block of land sidetracks us. It is so easy to get to that point. To be paying lip service to honoring God, and to be completely uninterested to loving others. And it is so easy to excuse it under burnout, stress, or frustration because of that (fill in the blank). But don't linger there. Stop. Reorient. Remember: We are here together, first and foremost, to live and move and have our being in the rhythm of Christ.