Throughout the summer, our Epistle Lessons have come from Paul’s letter to the Romans and I’ve pretty much let them slip by. But, the first two Sundays in September have us finishing Romans with readings from chapters 13 and 14. As Paul wraps up this letter to a church he had never met before, he puts to them a question that  every church eventually has to answer: what does it actually cost to live together as the body of Christ? Paul's answer comes in two parts, and neither is comfortable.

    The first cost is sacrifice. In Romans 13, Paul writes, "Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law" (13:8). Notice the word owe. Paul doesn't picture love as something we give until we're even — he pictures it as a debt that never clears. Most of our relationships run on an unspoken ledger: I did this for you, so you owe me that. Paul erases the ledger. Love isn't a transaction we complete; it's an obligation we keep paying, especially toward the people who will never fully repay it.

    The second cost is understanding, and Romans 14 is sharper here than it first appears. Paul addresses a real dispute in the Roman church between the "weak" and the "strong" — but it helps to know what those words actually mean. The "weak" aren't shaky believers; they're Christians who haven't yet grasped the full freedom the gospel gives regarding food and holy days. The "strong" understand that freedom clearly. And Paul's counsel to the strong isn't "you're right, carry on" — it's to voluntarily set that freedom aside rather than wound a fellow believer's conscience. Understanding and sacrifice turn out to be the same act, seen from two angles: the strong give up their freedom precisely because they understand what it would cost someone else if they didn't.

    Underneath both is the deeper reason no one gets to sit in judgment: "we will all stand before the judgment seat of God" (14:10). 

    Standing with God was never earned by which days we keep or what we eat — it's given by grace, through faith, on account of Christ alone. If that's true, the ground is level. No one has earned the right to look down on someone else's conscience.

    These two costs aren't unrelated to what we talked about in July, when we looked at Christian freedom in Luther's sense — free in conscience, bound to no one but Christ. Romans 14 shows what that freedom looks like turned toward each other: not "I'm free to do as I please," but "I'm free enough to set it aside for your sake."

    Neither comes naturally. Both are exactly what Paul says love does. As you hear these texts preached in the coming weeks, I'd ask you to sit with a simple question: where, this month, is God asking something of you — a debt to keep paying, a freedom to set aside, or a judgment to lay down?

                                                                              In Christ,

                                                                    Pastor Tom Vanderbilt