In the fall of 1984, I went off for my freshman year at boarding school, which was one of the best—and hardest—things I’ve ever done.  

         My mom still isn’t over it, although she forgave me somewhat four years later, when I went to college about 150 miles closer to home and could call my grandmother to tell her that she’d be getting a thunderstorm in about a half an hour so she needed to go out and close her car windows. 

         She’s long said that if she had to do it over again, she would never let me go away so soon. 

         For me, though, boarding school was pretty great, overall.  

         The classes were hard, and there was a lot of work. The weather was lousy.  The food was even lousier.

         But even with all that, the hardest part for me by far was the dorm. 

         You see, I’m an only child, and so there are some basic things I’m not very good at: things like, say, choosing your battles, keeping your mouth shut, covering for each other against grownups…and, well, sharing in general – these were all things I had never had much practice with. 

         Especially the sharing.  

         Not that I was against sharing, or I hope, particularly selfish by nature.  

It’s that I just had no feel for when sharing was expected, or how it worked…and so I was a little bit of a social blunderer as I began my time in this strange, new world which, from what I could tell, was mostly run by kids. 

I should probably also admit here that, like many only children, I didn’t really think of myself as a kid—I mean, I had as much grown up conversation as I liked every single night from the start of forever. 

I could hold my own at a lot of dinner tables. 

I could talk about the politics of the offices where my parents worked like I was a guest on “Wall Street Week in Review” with Louis Rukeyser on Channel 13, which of course, like all people over the age of 7, I watched every Friday night. 

Unfortunately, when it came to questions like who was “hotter,” Joan Jett or Pat Benetar, I didn’t have as much to say.

 Unfortunately, as it happened, that’s what a lot of kids were talking about in the fall of 1984. 

And unfortunately, as I said, it seemed like they were the ones who were more or less running this new community in which I found myself. 

So there was a lot to get used to. 

In a funny way, a lot of my growing into mature adulthood required me to come to see myself as a kid. 

I had to learn that I was one small part of a much larger whole, and not just the opposite, which is what I was to my parents, for whom I was the sun, the moon, and the stars. 

I won’t detail the battles.  To tell you the truth, most of them were more like skirmishes, anyway. 

But one of the things that was hardest for me to get a feel for was deciding between the things that mattered and the things that didn’t (the phrase is Michael Gorman’s).  

In living together, what was it that actually mattered to me? And why was that again? 

And then on top of that, there was the even harder question for an only child to answer: what is it that matters to these other people with whom I am now sharing my life?  What are their wants and needs…and where am I in all of that? 

Slowly and painfully, I came to understand that life together involves asking those questions over and over and over—that asking them is part of life’s very rhythm.  

II.

Now, I’m not saying that the churches of ancient Rome were full of only children.  

But I will say there’s something that feels a little familiar to me about the challenge Paul seems to be addressing in our Scripture this morning.  

Because these nascent communities were apparently at loggerheads, particularly as they tried to work out the things that mattered from the things that didn’t.  

Two thousand years later, the debates Paul mentions seem ridiculous now.  

In fact, this is so true that it can be hard to make heads or tails of the passage we’ve read this morning, especially if you’re hearing it for the first time.  

I mean, it starts out pleasantly enough. 

“Welcome those who are weak in faith,” he says, “but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions.”  

OK.  

But then he goes on to talk about how some people coming to church will eat only vegetables, while others don’t.  

(MG: shrug.)

Next he goes into this thing about how some people think one day is better than another (hint: he’s talking about the Sabbath).  However, it turns out that other people don’t see much of a difference between one day of the week and another.  

(MG: shrug.)

I mean, thank God we in the churches don’t ever get caught up, anymore, in small things that shouldn’t be divisive but are, right? 

Don’t worry, I’m not about to spill any tea. 

Or correction: don’t worry, I’m not about to spill any of our tea, 2CC.

Because last week, as I was getting ready for this morning, I decided to ask people in other churches about this.   

About if they knew anything about things that shouldn’t be divisive but are, and about where the churches are with that here in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Three. 

Here is some of what they said: 

“Our church took 18 months to decide on a new carpet for the Sanctuary,” wrote one of my dear friends.  “By which I mean, they were deciding between ruby, Merlot, or Tasteful Maroon.” 

Another friend reported that because of a fight over space in the church refrigerator, the Hospitality Committee and the Fellowship Committee were refusing to meet.  

Another talked about the time they decided to use gluten-free communion wafers, which is something a lot churches are doing.  

Unfortunately, somehow someone at this particular church ordered gluten-free Communion wafers that were taco-flavored.  

From the faces you’re making, I see you have apparently had one of these somewhere.

 In any case, that happened, but then there was a fight about whether the church could go ahead and just throw the rest of the wafers away, or if the proper Christian thing to do was still to use them up until they were gone. 

At another place, there was such division around which shade of beige to paint a room that they had to have a full congregational vote in order to decide. 

I could go on. (I’ve got a lot more.)

But I think you will see the point that all these years after Paul’s letter to the churches of Rome, our churches still struggle at times to decide what matters and what doesn’t. 

Today, as it was back then, learning to ask such questions is just part of life’s proper rhythm.  

         What Paul asks us to remember in the asking is quite simple.  

         “We do not live to ourselves,” he says, “and we do not die to ourselves” (v. 7). 

         What’s changed irrevocably for us is that we now understand ourselves as part of a larger whole…part of a greater family…part of God’s universal call to build a world in which all are truly welcome.  

III.

         Of course, that always sounds really really nice.  

         The fact is that it pushes us.

         As the wonderful theologian Willie James Jennings admits, “The single greatest challenge for disciples of Jesus is to imagine and then enact actual life together.” (Belief Commentary on Acts)

         That sounds right to me, naming how much of a challenge it is for us “to imagine and then enact an actual life together.”

         For so long, church was an hour a week that we gave in the name of social respectability and of making sure we had a reservation in the event something awful happened. 

         But its deeper call has always been to something much more transformational than that. 

         It is a call to let our hearts grow. 

         As Jennings says, “Only in life shared, joined, and exchanged in desire of being made permanent, can differences emerge in their deepest beauty—as invitations to the expansion of life and love.”

         In a world which finds solace in its silos, church is a call to find joy and beauty and purpose in life undeterred – and in fact, enriched – across our differences. 

         Which is a very different way to live, but is the way that Jesus makes it possible for us to live.  

         That’s not to say that Jesus makes it easy.  

         To some extent, we are all recovering silo-holics.  

         We are all getting over the temptation to live as “only children of God,” rather than as part of a great family of faith.   

         But I think we all know what it is to long for a more open, more generous, more loving, more accepting way of life.  

         We know what it looks like when someone knows they don’t have to face the hard times alone, or grapple alone with the hard facts about themselves.  

         We know how much we need to know that we’re loved, and how eager we are to be loving in return. 

         This is what Paul wanted for the churches of Rome, and it’s what he wants for all of us today. 

IV.

How do we decide between the things that truly matter and the things that don’t, whether for ourselves or for our life together? 

When can we see some new challenge as an invitation to expand our capacities for life and love? 

Because that is God’s invitation. 

And it’s in those spaces that the Spirit is pleased to dwell.  

May we ever seek to be among them.  

Amen.