Genesis 50:
15-21
Romans 14:1-12
Our human
condition often has us treating people with contempt. We ignore our own
weaknesses and pick out other people’s to make us feel better. Yet God, who is
perfect and good and holy, does not pick on us and does not point out our
weaknesses. Instead, God loves us as we are and helps us to become better
people through that love.
As Christian
people, we are to be the same as God. We are not to hold people in contempt but
instead we are to love them and try to understand them. Paul gives several
different examples of the different ways people worship God and how sometimes
we use the different ways of worship to hold ourselves apart from other people.
We tell ourselves that our way of doing things is better than another
denomination and we have nothing to do with them. When someone in our church
has an idea to do something differently, sometimes we look down upon them
instead of thinking on what they are saying and why they are saying it. We are
supposed to be tolerant and loving as well as accepting.
In the same way, Paul tells us here in the
letter to the Romans that some of us are stronger than others, but in their
strength they must also be tolerant and accepting. He is addressing the problem
in Rome where there are not many Christians
and the few that there are have been fighting over whether to eat meat that has
been sacrificed to another god. Some of those early Christians saw nothing
wrong with eating the meat, they felt that no matter what god it had been
sacrificed to, they knew that our one true God would never be threatened by
imaginary gods and people’s sacrifices to them. Therefore they saw the meat as
safe to eat without blemishing their own belief in Jesus. Yet other early Christians
saw this as blasphemous because of the Ten Commandments that said there is only
one God and we shall not bow down before other gods. They felt that eating the
sacrificed meat was bowing down and worshipping these other people’s gods.
The point Paul
makes is that both are correct. Isn’t that interesting? He tells neither side
they are wrong, but instead tells them to co-exist in their rightness. The
reason they are both right is because of how passionate they are about their
belief. To the second group, to eat the sacrificed meat would be to falter in
their faith and they could not do that. So Paul tells the first group to make
allowances for the other’s feelings on this matter and to not push their
confidence that God would not mind about the meat upon the other. In this way,
he said that the first group of Christians was stronger in their faith and
could eat the meat without faltering in their faith, but to understand that not
everyone is that strong or that sure about their faith.
This passage
is underscored by the first text we read today in Genesis. Joseph’s brothers
were weak men. They were jealous and petty and vindictive in their younger
years and after their father died, they feared for their very lives because of
the way they had treated their brother Joseph. Many of us would have felt the
same fear. We have all done selfish things that have hurt other people.
Sometimes the person we hurt retaliates quickly, but sometimes that person
waits for just the right moment to seek revenge. We fear them and what they
will do. We worry about it and think on how they might hurt us back. Instead of
coming to the injured party with our metaphorical hat in our hand and an
apology on our lips, we plot ways to escape the outcome of our actions.
This is exactly
what Joseph’s brothers did as well. They still had not learned a lot about God
and about their brother in the time they had spent with him since he revealed
himself to them. So when their father died, they got together and began to plan
– the same way they had done when they were young and threw him into that pit.
They decided to use their dead father to promote peace and forgiveness through
what I’m sure they considered a minor deception.
But Joseph
knew his brothers. Perhaps he knew them better than they knew themselves,
certainly better than the brothers knew Joseph. Even though he saw through
their little deception, he did not hold it against them. He saw something that
his weaker family could not. Joseph saw the hand of God in all that had transpired.
Joseph knew that everything that had happened occurred because it needed to.
Joseph suffered as a young man so that God could put him in the position to
save thousands of people, including his beloved father and his brothers.
As all of you
are aware, today is the tenth year since the 9/11 attacks. There have been many
stories being replayed about that time, many personal events recounted and even
some untold stories have been shared. One story, about a security guard named
Rick Rescorla reminded me of the story of Joseph. Rick worked as the director
of security at Morgan Stanley in the South Tower. He was a dedicated man who held fire
drills twice a year no matter what and when he heard what happened to the first
tower, against orders to stay put, he put his emergency evacuation plan into
effect. He saved 2,500 people’s lives that day and gave up his own to do it.
The last glimpse anyone had of him, he was on the tenth floor of the South Tower and headed upstairs.
We are here
today because of people like Rick Rescorla and Joseph. These are people that
are willing to put others before themselves. They understand that life is not
just about taking all you can for yourself, but that sometimes we are meant for
better things. We are meant to be God’s workers. I believe that Rick was a man
that listened to the voice of God and even though his bosses told him to do
nothing, that everything was okay – he instead listened to his heart, listened
to the voice inside of him that said, “Get those people out of there. Now.”
I began this
sermon by telling you that we often treat people with contempt to make
ourselves feel better. We judge other people as lesser or ourselves as better
than them. I also said that God is holy and good and we become better people by
experiencing God’s love. A strong person, a strong Christian is one that knows
they are not perfect, but we see glimpses of perfection at times. When a person
sacrifices their life to save another, when a person gives up their dream job
so they can put food on the table, when any one of us gives up our wants to
help another person in need – that is God’s perfect love in action. There is no
time to be judgmental or hateful. There is no room for it.
9/11 was a
terrible, awful experience. And yet, I look at that time as a miraculous one as
well. So many people did the right thing that day instead of the easy, selfish
thing. Rick’s story is one of thousands. I’m not sure how God does it, but 9/11
was not a victory for the terrorists that attacked the United States. God was the victor that day because
even in the midst of all that destruction, God created goodness and mercy and
love so that when we look back ten years later, we can see faith and hope even
while staring at the awful pictures of pain and death.
That is the Christian legacy.
That is God’s love in action. Christ is always victorious. As a church, we
should learn from these things. It would be easy to hate all Muslims for the
actions of radicals. It is easy to judge harshly, but it is much harder to be
forgiving and loving toward everyone. But as Christians we hold in our hearts
that God is always the victor because as Paul said to us today in Romans, “For
we will all stand before God’s judgment seat. “‘As surely as I live,’ says the
Lord, ‘every knee will bow before me; every tongue will acknowledge God.’ So then, each of us will give an account of
ourselves to God”. Let those words
steady and strengthen you in your faith so that you may love even those whom
others would despise.
Amen.
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