ROMANS 16: 16-20
16 Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the churches of Christ greet you. 17 I urge you, brothers and sisters, to keep an eye on those who cause dissensions and offenses, in opposition to the teaching that you have learned; avoid them. 18 For such people do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites, and by smooth talk and flattery they deceive the hearts of the simple-minded. 19 For while your obedience is known to all, so that I rejoice over you, I want you to be wise in what is good and guileless in what is evil. 20 The God of peace will shortly crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you †
CHURCH PRIMITIVISM
I’ve always found it amusing when new, independent church begins to come together and the leaders say, “We don’t want any of that denominational nonsense—our plan is to go back to Acts and be like the early church.” While I resonate just fine in sentiment, I know that the idea is pretty ridiculous. The assumption is that the early Church was wonderful, had their act perfectly together, and worshiped God in excellent style and perfect harmony. We know from Scripture—and today’s text—that this is not the case. The early church—even in its infancy—was shot through with problems, conflicts, and false leaders trying to worm their way into power.
We might long for what we imagine is the simplicity and minimalism of the early church, but in fact, it’s a lot like saying, “We don’t want any of this modern dentistry nonsense—our plan is to do as they did in Jesus’ day.” Good luck with that.
There are always troubles that follow puritans and reformers—the good-hearted idealists who think they have the solution to fix the broken church. By good-hearted I mean that they crave a church that is faithful, sincere, and holy unto God. The mistake is thinking that they have it within themselves to save the church. I’ll say it up front: there is no human-led salvation for the Church; there is no human-led salvation.
In our text today, Paul instructs the Roman churches to beware, to keep an eye on those who cause dissensions and divisions. Shun those who would divide the Church and draw followers out into some new manifestation of new and improved Christianity.
THE CALL TO UNITY
From the beginning, the church has been called to oneness. Jesus prays for it in John 17 and it is an earmark of authentic witness.
John 17: 20-21:
“I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
We are called to oneness “so that the world may believe”!
As to those threatening Church unity? “Avoid them,” says Paul.
Let’s be clear, this isn’t a simple, unilateral, irretrievable shun. It’s not for repentant people, for those willing to be corrected, for we all make mistakes. This isn’t a rigid, inflexible prohibition, but a guideline so that the Church adhere’s to the teaching of the Apostles’ and gladly rejects newfangled theologies that contradict orthodoxy.
We all make mistakes, and we should be honest and open about it. We should be quick to admit our mistakes and quick to forgive others. For many years, I have been a proponent in my leadership of what is call “the learning organization.” We are all learning. There is no real place for know-it-alls, experts, and perfectionists in the church, but it is a place for “learn-it-alls.” There is great grace in learning organizations, because there is room for error and correction. The learning church has a sense of humor—a kind of humility in knowing that we still have a lot to learn.
Contrast that with so-called perfect churches. Perfect churches are not very good about mistakes or those who make them. They tend toward arrogance, by which I mean that they feel they have nothing to learn from others.
This is true as well of arrogant persons—arrogant people are those who feel they have all the answers—all the best practices—and therefore are unwilling to be instructed. The book of Proverbs calls them fools.
Proverbs 1:7 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;
fools despise wisdom and instruction.
In Rome, there were those who felt their ideas were better than Paul’s, and they created dissension and division by artfully casting doubt on Paul’s teachings and the teachings of the Apostles. They did this to pull people away so that they would have disciples of their own, whom they could impress and exploit apart from the Church.
Today, we Presbyterians welcome dissent—it is one of our strengths—and we welcome challenges, but we rightly rebuke those who would divide the fellowship by introducing unorthodox teaching.
“Avoid them,” says Paul. they’re not serving the Lord (though they may say they are), but rather they’re gratifying themselves in the name of Christ.
Now I need to say more about the type of person who creates dissensions and divisions, and I can speak to this authoritatively, because I am—or have been—the type.
“IMPRESSIVE”
I have a pastor friend here in California who had a great office. It was large and there was a comfortable grouping of four, overstuffed chairs with an attractive coffee table in the middle—clearly the work of a professional decorator. It was the kind of place you wanted to sit down and spend hours talking and drinking coffee. I visited the new pastor of that church when my friend moved on, and I told him how much I loved that office. His response was lukewarm: “Yyyyyyyeah,” he said, “but it really isn’t very impressive.” I suspected this attitude might be a problem, and in time it was.
The pastor who seeks to be impressive can end up with a lot of great appearances but little under the hood. What the Beach Boys called a “no-go showboat.”
But this was me as well in my twenties. After graduating seminary and getting freshly ordained to my first church in Dallas, I sought to impress people. I wore a suit—a suit!—to the office every day, and the sermons I preached were less for the people in the pews than for my old seminary professors 1200 miles away. Perhaps it was just my insecurity—that I felt I needed to prove my right to lead—or maybe I was busy convincing myself that I was adequate to the task. Either way, I soon discovered that I was compensating on the outside what I feared was inadequate inside. I was seeking to be impressive, but no more.
The problem with trying to be impressive is that you serve a mask—one that can take over operations in time. When image matters too much, substance suffers. Those serving their own image—including congregations that serve their own image—can become so obsessed with their optics that they steer the church out of the Body of Christ entirely. When a congregation becomes all about being the “it” church, the popular church, the church with the best numbers and greatest success, then look out.
“Puritan/reformers”
When it comes to dissension and divisions, church history shows us that it is usually the puritan types who break away from the larger church. It’s the conservatives who seek to preserve purity or true practice in some form. So another divisive type we can name is the “Puritan/Reformer.”
These are the ones who come to [sarcastically] save the day, turn the church to true faith, true correctness, or to put the real fire back in the church.
Most pastors have a heightened sense of smell for the seeds of division. We know when factions are forming, when inappropriate alignments begin to take ranks. Dissenters tend to coalesce around charismatic revolutionaries intent on their own empowerment. They are critical of the church in general—not holy enough, not sufficiently aflame, in need of fixing—and they alone are God’s chosen to fix it. Part of my service to Christ is stopping those factions—disabling the possibilities of division—for we all should do what we can to stay unified in spite of differing opinions.
The pious leaders of revolt and their followers, like the armies of Absolom or those of Jeroboam, divide churches easily, drunk as they are on self-righteous zeal.
I know this kind of divisive type from the inside out, because in my 30s and 40s, that was me.
I had a widely-read blog (among presbyterian pastors and elders) and over thousand letters and/or editorials printed in the Layman, Presbyterian Forum, Monday Morning, which was a journal for and by Presbyterian pastors, and other publications of Presbyterian interest.
I was on ABC national news defending a radical group of preachers who were hurting business in downtown Pasadena, and took All Saints Episcopal Church to task in the Pasadena Star-News for their ridiculous political demonstrations. I created a flurry of letters through making fun of a new group of organized witches who looked more like Junior Leaguers than the Addams Family.
And I loved it—I defended my fiery rhetoric by saying that the pen is mightier than the sword, and whenever we pick up the pen instead of the sword, we are exercising the virtue of gentleness, no matter how virulent the writing.
I enjoyed criticizing the hypocrisies of my own denomination, the PCUSA. I enjoyed the set ‘em up and knock ‘em down polemics, and reveled in the constant reminder that the emperors of denominational offices had no clothes.
I really enjoyed the argument—I took pleasure in making mincemeat of my opponents’ writings, and fought the good fight of the evangelical faith against the hordes of Progressives who sought to politicize the church’s mission.
In 2004, I was appointed to the national Board of New Wineskins—we were the group that sought separation from the denomination. Three years later, I delivered the keynote at the national gathering where we launched the plans for a new presbytery that would exist in both the PCUSA and Evangelical Presbyterian Church at once. It was a plan to enable congregations who wanted out to get out.
Our blueprint laid the groundwork for ECO, the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians, the new denomination which has received several churches—the largest ones—out of this presbytery.
And now I’ve humble-bragged myself into utter shame, because I say now that it was all from sin.
Yes, I had good reasons for what I was doing—the PCUSA is flawed and in many ways broken, and I wasn’t wrong to say so—but I was wrong to do anything that threatened division or encourage others to consider division. The lie is that the newer church is the truer church, but we told ourselves the true church was the one breaking away.
Not anymore. I have been changed.
I see the offense it is to Christ, and though I am quite clear on the oh so many ways that the PCUSA is a messed-up denomination, I know God loves her and desires that she not be split. It is better to hold fellowship across the aisle with great differences yet celebrate in humility at the table than to break off in the false pretense of service to purity, wholeness, or correctness.
The motto of the PCUSA is ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda—the church reformed, always reforming. This is good news, because it means that the church’s self-understanding remembers that we tend to acquire barnacles in time.
Real reform happens from within, and it is a matter of clearing off the barnacles that the church accumulate through time in its interactions with a fallen world. We need to clear off the barnacles of pop-religiousness, of institutional loyalty (Wow, that was ironic!), and of all the things we love which stand in contradiction to the Word of God.
It is hard work, but it must be done. Very hard. We wouldn’t have barnacles at all if they weren’t tasty, sugary, and gold-gilded. Some barnacles give us a good, glowy, Christian feeling. American Christianity is replete in shiny, gilded, feel-good barnacles. We remove them, painful though it may be, in service to Christ and the Word written. We do not reform ourselves to popular ideas or new codes of pop-righteousness—we avoid them and stand sola scriptura—on scripture alone.
It is (not) Our work
The work of unifying and purifying the Church is not up to us; it is God’s work—the work of the Holy Spirit in our midst—which can not be engineered by us or controlled by us. We should beware those who try.
There is great arrogance in the churches wanting to “go back and be like the early church.” First, to do this denies 2000 years of the Holy Spirit’s work in the world! Second, it denies that they already belong to a larger body of Christ which includes many other Christians: Catholics, Orthodox, Baptists, and yes, even Presbyterians. It is arrogant because it says, in effect, “We are the True Church and we have nothing to learn from the rest of the Body of Christ,” or worse, “We have no regard for the rest of the Holy Spirit’s work up to the present day!” What could be worse?
Our calling is not to purity, but to humility. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are given to us for our own good—in order that we might grow into the image and likeness of Christ our Lord. The gifts are not ours to exploit or even to modify, as if we be so insolent as to think we can improve them by ourselves! No, the gifts are part of the Spirit’s work in us.
Paul says he wants us to be “wise to the good.” That means we should embody the fruits of the Spirit rather than seek purity, perfection, or impressiveness. The Church should be the WorldBank for peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control, faith, hope, joy, and especially love.
Yes, we must remain vigilant against bad interpretations of Scripture. We must beware false teachers willing to twist Scripture to feather their own nests or exploit the masses. I’m afraid we live among pseudo-Christians who are only too glad to twist the Bible in order to serve themselves. We stand against shallow interpretations and lazy literalism.
Finally, Paul assures us:
God will crush Satan under your feet.
Note well: GOD will crush Satan—not you and me, though He may use our feet to do it. The work is God’s alone, and Paul is saying, in effect, “I trust you will, with God’s help, overcome these temptations to division and remain one in Christ.”
As we are vigilant against factions and corrosive dissensions, let us be strong of heart and mind to seek the unity we know Christ desires for us! †