When in Rome...Don't Do As the Romans Do

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Romans 12:9-21

I’m sure you have heard the phrase, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”  It’s been around since the 300’s AD and is attributed to St. Ambrose who was Bishop of Milan which is about 500-600 km from Rome.  The church in Rome had different fast days than the church in Milan.  St. Ambrose was advising Christians traveling to Rome to do what they do in Rome so as not to offend.  

Today, the phrase is often used to advise international travellers to be aware of the customs and practices of the cultures they are visiting so as not to be offensive.  Being an American who lives abroad and who has also travelled a bit and observed other Americans travelling, the phrase does not seem to mean that.  It rather seems to mean something akin to “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”  When in Rome do as the Romans seems to mean party hard like it’s a Bacchanalian feast.  Bacchus was the Roman God of feasting.  The feasts they celebrated in his honour made Ivy League frat parties look like a four-year-old having tea with her favourite teddy bears.

Ambrose’s advice was good advice for Christians travelling to Rome to visit other Christians.  God help you if you offended the Romans.  But I think otherwise, when it came to visiting unChristian Rome, your stereotypical American tourist would have fit right in.  Romans travelling abroad could be just as insular.  They thought that the way the Romans did things was the way everybody else should do it and they had a military to back it up.  As things were in ancient Rome, so also they are still today.  Things were run by a number of very wealthy families particularly the men heading the families.  Most people were poor.  Government was about as corrupt as governments can be.  Everything was “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”.  You had to be careful not to offend the reputation of another, or rather the inflated ego of another, or vengeance would be sought against you.  It was a very vengeful culture.

If I had to sum up Roman culture, I would say look at what Paul says here.  If my suspicion is correct, he has done a pretty good job here of encouraging Roman Christians to do the exact opposite of the Roman way.  Let me see if I can do the great reversal here.  The Roman way would have been more like:

“Feign love to get what you want from others.  Show a semblance of love only to your own family.  Trust no one’s motives for no one is good.  Only show honour to those of a higher social status.  Be zealous in making a name for yourself.  Always seek to climb that social ladder even at the cost of others.  Don’t rely on hope, patience, or prayer.  Only help the needy and show hospitality if there’s some gain in it for you.  If someone wrongs you, put a curse on them.  Only show sympathy to those from whom you have something to gain.  Always try to get others to do things your way.  Be overconfident and boastful.  Always try to get a foot in the door with those higher up the ladder than you and have as little to do as possible with people who are lesser than you.  Betray others.  It’s expected.  When your honour is offended you must seek vengeance by any means.  You cannot let an offense go unanswered.  Never show kindness to your enemy.  Rather, burn their house down.  Conquering is the Roman way and who cares if you have to do evil to come out on top.”

If my suspicion is correct, the way Paul is encouraging the Roman Christians to live sounds more like, “When in Rome, don’t do as the Romans do.”  Let love be genuine.  Love everybody the way you would love your family.  Do good.  Be zealous for what is right.  Be humble.  Bring honour to others, not just yourself.  Be a servant of the Lord.  Share what you have.  Show hospitality as a way of life.  Bless those who offend and persecute you.  Don’t curse or begrudge them.  Have empathy and show sympathy.  Return no one evil for evil.  Live honourably before everyone.  Be at peace with everyone.  Do not seek vengeance.  Let God vindicate you.  Seek the well-being even of your enemies, it will prick their consciences.  Conquer evil by doing good.”

The way Paul encourages the Roman Christians was as uncharacteristically Roman back then as it is uncharacteristic of life in today’s world of reality show drama.  Imagine if the world we live in was founded on things like humility, selfless love, peace, harmony, and putting the real needs of others first so that everybody has enough instead of this seek your own gain, win, build a privacy fence around your house world that we live in.

Here's a story to help your imagination:  A Western aid worker went to a village in southern Africa and one day decided to have one of those Western-style esteem building games for the children.  He put candy at the foot of a tree and told the children, “I want you to race.  Whoever gets to the tree first will be the winner and gets to have all the candy.  On your marks. Get set. Go." And off they went.  Unexpectedly, they all held hands and skipped off to the tree together.  When they got to the tree, they all sat down and shared the candy and laughed and had a good time.  The aid worker was shocked and asked them why nobody tried to win so that they could have all the candy.  The children said one word, “Ubuntu.”  “What is ubuntu?” the aid worker asked.  They answered, “How can one of us be happy if all of us are sad?”  There is no such thing as joy unless everyone shares it.

Ubuntu is a word from the Bantu people living in southern Africa.  It is one little word, but it takes several words in English to define it.  It means “I am because we are.”  No one is an island unto themselves.  Humanity exists as people in a web of relationship.  In that web the good we do builds everybody up.  So also, the harm we do harms everyone.  Thus, at the heart of what makes us human is interdependence, compassion, community mindedness, and forgiveness.  One person seeking their own gain harms us all.

Paul was unknowingly encouraging the Roman Christians to seek ubuntu in a place that had lost its humanity.  Though Rome called itself the greatest civilization ever, it was sorely lacking in anything resembling the image of God we are created in.  Little has changed for us today.  We think we are thus far living in the apex of human civilization, but... it should greatly concern us that more and more of those billionaires today are building doomsday bunkers.  The people who have all the candy are bunkering down in fear of some great cataclysm.  These are some crazy times.  But I am of the persuasion that the more we who claim Jesus as Lord, the more we live ubuntu in his name the more humanity will change for the better.  

In the first three centuries of the church, before Christianity was co-opted by the Roman Empire as its official religion, the followers of Jesus grew from a handful of disciples to a handful of households in Jerusalem to several millions of people spread all over the world.  St. Athanasius of Alexandria wrote in the mid-300’s that we know Jesus was raised from the dead because the worship of the pagan gods has all but ceased.  For two of those centuries Christians were outright persecuted.  But the Church grew nevertheless.  How?  Ubuntu.  While in the Roman Empire they did not do as the Romans did.  They picked up their crosses and followed Jesus letting their love be genuine, honouring everyone, and not seeking vengeance for the wrongs done to them.  Let us in these days of dwindling churches go and do the same.  Amen.

 

What We Worship, We Become

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Romans 12:1-10

You folks are probably going to think I’m stupid, but I think the movie Conan the Barbarian has as profound a message to it.  It first came out in 1982 with Arnold Schwarzenegger playing the lead role of Conan.  It was the movie that gave Arnold his entry into Hollywood and the rest is history.  I never would have thought that he would grow up to be Governor of California.  

Conan’s story begins with him as a small boy watching as his village is raided and destroyed by the Snake King played by James Earl Jones (so the movie wasn’t a complete loss.).  The children of the village were carried away as slaves.  Conan grew up to be a gladiator under the tutelage of the Snake King so there’s a bit of a relationship there.  He eventually won his freedom and you would think that would be great.  But unfortunately, Conan grew up hating the Snake King and he rather lived for the day when he could take his vengeance.  The day comes and Conan catches the Snake King undefended while he’s leading something like a political rally. Conan sneaks up and stands behind him, sword drawn, poised for victory but the Snake King turns and with the wisdom of Darth Vader (also played by Jones) he causes Conan to pause and ponder.  He says something to the effect of “My son.  I made you who you are.  I gave you the will to live.  When I am gone what will you have to live for?  What will you become without me, my Son?”  The implied answer to that last question is that if he takes his vengeance, Conan will become just like the Snake King.  Conan snaps out of it and does the deed.  Vengeance won.

I call the movie Conan the Barbarian profound for the way it portrays hate and vengeance.  You’ve likely heard it said that love and hate are the two sides of the same coin.  Love for another shapes us whether it be for parents, spouses, friends, etc.  It pretty much goes without saying that we tend to become a lot like those people whom we love and admire, one could even say idolize.  This is one of the reasons we need to tell our young people to be careful whom they choose as friends and to be mindful of who their heroes are and engage them as to why.  Love and adoration for someone or something can give us drive and shape our personalities and what we pursue in life; what we’re minded on.  Idolization will guide what we orient ourselves towards. For example, I taught myself to play guitar when I was eleven because I wanted to be like Paul Stanley from the iconic rock band KISS.  

Well, as it goes with love, so also it goes with hate.  Just like love, hate for another person or persons can and will shape who we are as persons and what we pursue in life.  Moreover, hate and revenge, hate’s counterpart to adoration, can take us over and destroy us.  There’s been some really interesting brain studies done in the last ten years showing that the desire for, seeking of, and attaining of revenge work the same areas of the brain addictions do.  Grudging and revenge seeking is an addiction.  Seeking and taking revenge is as harmful to ourselves and everyone around as are substance abuse disorders.  

What we love and adore we will worship, meaning we will devote our lives and efforts to serving them or it.  Just as love and adoration are at the heart of worship so also hate and vengeance are a form of worship.  Hate has the power to change and mold who we are.  We will become powerless over it if we do not seek to forgive.

Anyway, all that to say we must choose carefully who or what we worship for it will change us.  I think that maxim is at the heart of what Paul is saying to us in the first two verses here: “in accordance with God’s compassion, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship.  Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of what you’re minded on…”  These two verses are a strangely worded way of saying that the way we are to worship the true God is to live like Jesus, the true Son of God, in accordance with his nature of sacrificial, self-giving love and in so doing we will be transformed by the Holy Spirit to be like him.  

At the beginning of Romans Paul pointed out that the basic human problem is idolatry – the worship of things other than God.  He says that though it is obvious from nature there is a God, we choose to make our own gods from the things of nature and worship them so that we might pursue baser things for the simple reason of pleasure.  The Greeks and Romans had gods for just about every facet of life and they were obligated to worship them by some sort of sacrifice in the hopes of keeping them pleased.  We would call them superstitious and ritualized, but we’re not much different.  We may not worship golden statues (as does happen at certain golf courses) but we do devote our lives to things like gaining power, wealth, success, fertility, nation, family, immortality.  We even still worship stones and brooms, and even sticks and pucks.  Lord, have mercy on us.  Our devoting our lives to things other than God – Whoops. I forgot the unholy trinity of me, myself, and I – that false worship of false gods makes us subhuman.  

The Jews had sacrifices too, but the Old Testament sacrifices were not attempts to buy God off or keep God appeased.  Speaking simplistically, the Old Testament sacrifices were of two types.  One was simply giving a portion of God’s provision for us back to God as a means of giving thanks.  The other was basically a means of removing the stain of sin from us and restoring union between God and the people.  Sorry, I don’t have time to explain that fully.  Jesus’ death and resurrection and God’s gift of the Holy Spirit to us is the fulfillment of that sacrificial system rendering it no longer necessary.  In love, Jesus gave himself as the once and for all sacrifice in order to heal humanity of the disease of sin and restore union between God and humanity forevermore.  The Holy Spirit, God’s personal presence with us is making this healing union real in us as we, in thanks, live as Jesus’ faithful disciples.  We don’t conform to the world to our own demise.  We conform rather to Jesus and yield to the transforming work of the Holy Spirit.  

Paul writes that our presenting ourselves as living sacrifices is our reasonable act of worship.  Some translations say spiritual which doesn’t work because it creates a false dichotomy between rationality and spirituality.  I think what Paul is saying is simply that in accordance with God’s compassion (shown in Jesus), the only reasonable response is to offer ourselves as living sacrifices, meaning to serve one another selflessly in love as Jesus did.  Jesus said, “the greatest among you will be servant of all.”  So, Paul tells us l to let our love be genuine.  Be sincere in selfless love for one another.  Not a mess of obsequious, transactional, back scratching which would have been the Roman way.  No favour went unanswered.  If it did it would be cause for revenge.  We love with mutual affection, mutual love, we put each other first, out of love for Jesus.

To live in selfless love requires a lot of humility.  Paul pushes us to not think more highly of ourselves than we ought.  There is such a thing as healthy boundaries and we need to be careful that in our efforts to love that we not get walked on and taken advantage of.  Regardless, self-giving, sacrificial love will seem wasteful; like there’s nothing in it for me.  

Paul also encourages us to act according to sober judgement.  I know from my time in a former life that alcohol can make you selfish, reckless, and foolish in judgement.  Paul wasn’t talking about drunkenness or anything like that; though it’s a good example. Rather, Paul’s definition of sober judgement is acting according to the measure of faith given to us.  What he means is that we must judge our own actions and our motives by where they fit into our loyalty to Jesus.  To varying degrees, we all have a sense of loyalty to Jesus, I hope, otherwise we wouldn’t be here.  We must let that loyalty guide our actions.

Summing up, do unto each other, unto all people, as you would do unto Jesus.  Paul states that we are all members of one body.  In First Corinthians, he picks up on that by saying we are all members of one body, His body, Jesus’ body.  He lives in us and we live in him.  To love one another is to love him.  That is being a living sacrifice, that is our reasonable worship.  In loving one another the Holy Spirit works to transform our mindedness, our orientation in life from the self-destroying serving of false gods to life-giving serving of the true God.  

So, be careful what you worship, be careful what you devote yourselves to.  If it is not loving Jesus by loving one another in self-giving love, then it is idolatry.  The first thing that happens when we worship something other than God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is we lose our sense of compassion and empathy and become focused on ourselves and suddenly hate and revenge become our nature. Be careful what you worship for you will become just like it.  Amen.