The Enlightened Ones?
THE SIXTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Exodus 14:19-31 • Romans 14:1-12 • Matthew 18:21-35
At a Christian summer camp in the 1990s, I met a girl who’d gone to my junior high. She asked who my favorite teacher had been, and I named the biology teacher, who’d always let me visit his classroom before school and during recess. I got along better with the class’s tiny baby rats than with my fellow seventh graders.
But the girl at camp said, “I hated that teacher. I answered all the questions on one of his tests according to the Bible, and he gave me a zero.”
As a lifelong Episcopalian, this was my first encounter with someone convinced that you couldn’t accept the theory of evolution and still be a Christian.
It wasn’t my last such encounter, though. In college, I chatted in the cafeteria line with a guy who was fuming over the lecture in our humanities class: “That professor said the earth was more than four billion years old. Some of us say it’s only six thousand years old!”
Later, I heard that exact phrase—“Some of us”—in a Bible study for freshman girls. The girls in the group believed that women should never instruct men about theology or Scripture. I managed to speak up and say that if that were the case, then the female, assistant campus minister shouldn’t have given her talk at the campus ministry event the week before. One of the girls said, “Some of us think she shouldn’t have.”
***
Paul’s letter to the Romans deals with the problem of two kinds of Christians. I’ve heard these two types of Christians described as “the scrupulous”—who cling tightly and precisely to religious and cultural traditions—and “the enlightened”—whose understanding of freedom in Christ allows them to let go of those things [1]. These groups—the “scrupulous” and the “enlightened”—didn’t correspond to “Jews” and “Gentiles.” They each were mixed groups of Jewish and Gentile Christians, which disagreed about how to distill the Hebrew Bible to its most essential teachings, and about how strongly they should set themselves apart from the cultural mainstream of cosmopolitan Rome.
“Scrupulous” or “traditional” isn’t a perfect label for the Christians in the encounters I just described. Their biblical literalism wasn’t an ancient tradition, but a twentieth-century novelty. And the position of women in Christian churches has been a longstanding debate, never a settled question suddenly threatened by feminism.
But as for the label “enlightened”—I’ll take it!
In the seventies and eighties, Episcopalians launched an ad campaign to tell the world just how enlightened we were compared to other Christians [2]. One ad featured a beautiful baptismal font—like we have here—with the caption, “There’s a difference between being baptized and [being] brainwashed.” One ad featured an altar—like ours—with the caption, “Where women stand in our church.” Another had a picture of King Henry the Eighth that said, “In the church started by a man who had six wives, forgiveness goes without saying.” That ad paired well with the poster of Jesus on the cross that said, “He died to take away your sins. Not your mind.”
Other favorites are a little dated now, like the picture of a boxy TV set that said, “You shouldn’t have to go through channels to talk to God.” Another said, “God didn’t give his only begotten Son to be a spokesman for the moral majority.”
Still another showed a man with his mouth taped shut and read, “There’s only one problem with religions that have all the answers. They don’t allow questions.”
***
Now, as much as I enjoyed some of those ads growing up, I wonder: Was their purpose to attract new members, or to make Episcopalians feel smug as the enlightened ones?
I also suspect that every Christian who has ever read today’s passage from Romans thought that surely Paul was talking about them as the enlightened ones. Maybe this very morning, a preacher in a different church is saying that those Episcopalians, clinging to hymns and prayers hundreds of years old, and to their commemorations of saints on special days—they are scrupulous and unenlightened.
Whether or not today’s Christians correspond clearly to the various Christians in first-century Rome, Paul has some timeless guidance, like not despising others, no matter how we disagree. Paul removes from us all the burden of judging others, saying everyone will be judged only by the lord whose house they choose to belong to. This advice worked especially well for Christians in first-century Rome, who typically met in small household units and rarely if ever as a larger assembly.
But today, Paul’s advice falls a little short in some ways. Paul’s solution of agreeing to disagree, and of letting everyone “be fully convinced in their own minds,” doesn’t work so well in a nation where some Christians have enough political power to impose their own scrupulous convictions on everyone else, Christian or not. Acting like religion is mostly a matter of personal opinion isn’t so satisfying anymore.
Maybe we can look less to Paul’s instructions for Christians in first-century Rome, and more to the example of his life, when we think about how to be faithful to our own convictions among Christians with severe and consequential differences.
It’s a common misunderstanding that Paul, a scrupulous Pharisee who observed the entire Torah, was freed by Christ from that form of religiosity. What really changed for Paul was his attitude toward others. The book of Acts describes Paul as “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord” (Acts 9.1), but Paul’s encounter with Jesus freed him from that rage. It makes sense for Paul to instruct the Christians of Rome not to rush to wholesale condemnation, as he once did.
As a missionary, Paul also must have been thrilled to hone a Christian message much more marketable than the message of other evangelists, like Peter or James. Their message commonly came with fine print, like adult converts needing to be circumcised, or never getting to eat bacon again. A tough sell. But Paul’s message of new and transformed life in Christ came without this fine print.
How might Christ invite each of us to follow Paul’s example? Can we try to be less easily incited to judgment and rage, especially for the sake of larger goals and the common good? And can we rejoice to share a gospel that doesn’t come with fine print?
At the first session of our Inquirers class last Sunday, Evan shared his hope that everyone who walks through our doors would find a church that feels like home, whether that was St. Paul’s or not. Perhaps that hope resembles Paul’s own vision for Roman, household-based Christians. Ultimately, whether or not we at St. Paul’s can identify securely with the enlightened Christian households in Rome, or whether we come off as more scrupulous than we care to admit, it costs us nothing to wish everyone well in their search for a place to belong. For some people, though, they might need to hear from us about a form of Christianity that, unlike others, doesn’t get quite so much free publicity.
[1] These labels are used in the New Jerome Commentary.
[2] Read more about the project here: www.episcopalchurch.org/glossary/episcopal-ad-project
© 2023 The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas