“Welcome anyone who is weak in faith, but don’t argue about disputed matters.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I was a pretty easygoing kid when I was growing up. I rarely, if ever, got into an argument with friends. I was respectful to other adults. I internalized early the importance of going along to get along. But at home, my sister and I fought like cats and dogs. We argued about almost anything. I antagonized her all the time. I love her now—and I did then too—but we mixed about as well as oil and water growing up. Sometimes it seems like the church kind of does the same thing. We fight amongst ourselves and over some of the stupidest things. We think that if someone is not just like us, then they can’t be a part of us. Natural human tribalism is alive and well in our midst. What are we supposed to do about that as we pursue the unity of Christ together? Over the next chapter and a half, Paul sets about offering some counsel on how we can get this often broken part of our lives together right. Let’s start digging in and see what we can learn about how to get along.

The Scriptures were not written with verses and chapters in mind. Those were added later. Much later in fact. Chapters came first in the early 13th century and were intended to make the Scriptures more manageable for study purposes for scholars and students. Verses came along specifically for the New Testament in the mid-15th century. Hebrew scribes had sometime before devised a verse-like system for their Scriptures. The Geneva Bible was the first edition that used both chapters and verses.

This doesn’t have anything to do with what Paul says here except to say one thing. Paul wasn’t thinking in terms of chapters and verses when he was writing. We see an apparent subject change like this and think, “Paul was starting a new chapter here.” We make a clean mental and contextual break between this and what came before it. Paul wasn’t thinking like that, though, when he was dictating his letters which means we always have to consider that what came before may have an impact on what we are reading now.

In this case, the last thing Paul wrote before this new section was to call believers to put on Christ, and to not make any provision to gratify our sinful desires. Well, one of our sinful desires is to include or exclude people based on a whole array of different factors. We group ourselves together with people we deem to be like us, and separate ourselves apart from people who are not. A more general label for this natural trend that has existed in humanity since we left the Garden is tribalism.

Tribalism by itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We should set our personal families apart from other families and do the things that are necessary to protect our families from harm or danger, and to perpetuate our family lines for the future. Tribalism is simply taking that good desire and expanding the group of who gets included in our family.

In a similar sense, churches should be at least somewhat tribal in their thinking. The Scriptures are clear and experience bears out as well that the church is not like the world. More than that, the world doesn’t like the church. We may be in the world, but we are not of the world. The ruler of this world is going to use all the means at his disposal to attack the church in order to see its mission undermined and its unity fractured and destroyed. We cannot let the thinking and moral expectations of the world slip into the church. We are to reflect the righteousness of Christ, not the brokenness of the world. We should be set apart from the world as holy–both different from and morally superior to the world.

As important as those distinctions are, however, within the church, tribalism should not exist. We are all part of God’s family. We are all brothers and sisters of Christ, the only begotten Son of God. Those who are in Christ are to be one in heart and mind and spirit. As Paul wrote to the Ephesian believers, we should make “every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit–just as you were called to one hope at your calling–one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” The unity of the church in Christ is to be comprehensive.

And yet…it is often not. We bring our natural tribalism into the church with us and divide ourselves in groups based on a whole variety of factors from skin color and national heritage to political preferences and voting patterns. This is not a new thing either. It has been a part of the church since the very beginning. We naturally gravitate toward people who are like us, who share our basic mindset about life, and away from people who are not, the ones with whom we disagree on matters of how to live out our faith properly.

Today this takes all sorts of different forms. Democrat versus Republican. Anti-vax versus pro-vax. Progressive versus conservative. Rich versus poor. Young versus old. Traditional music versus contemporary. Blue carpet versus green. Kansas City Chiefs versus the rest of the NFL. This pastor versus that. In Paul’s day, one of the major arguments that divided the church was whether or not it was morally permissible to eat meat that had been sacrificed to an idol.

The basic context was this. In the first century (and much of the ancient world), meat was expensive. Most people were poor. Therefore, most people couldn’t afford meat except on special occasions. Feast days were one of those occasions. As a way to show their devotion to a particular god, a wealthy person who had access to large numbers of goats or sheep or cattle would make a large sacrificial offering. Parts of the sacrifice would be burnt in offering, but most of the animals involved would be butchered up and the meat would be sold at a discount in the temple marketplace. This showy form of charity allowed for common people to have meat as a part of their diet. It also served to encourage them to align politically or socially with the wealthy individual, giving them popular support for other things they may have wanted to do in the city.

When the church came onto the scene in various pagan cities, whether or not to eat this meat became the hottest of hot topics. For those believers who had come out of a pagan background and who had grown up eating it, it really wasn’t a big deal to them. It was just meat. The gods were nothing, and having meat was an important and desirable part of their normal diet. For the Jewish background believers in the church, though, they had grown up with the absolute evil of idolatry driven deep into their hearts and minds. They couldn’t even imagine consuming meat that had been obtained through an idolatrous sacrifice. To do so aligned them with paganism in ways that were unthinkable.

So then, which was the right answer to the question of whether or not this was okay to do? Well, from a broad survey of his letters, Paul seems to come down pretty firmly on the side of those folks who thought the meat was okay to eat. Idols were nothing. Gods other than Yahweh did not exist. Sacrificing an animal to a god who didn’t exist in the first place didn’t somehow taint the meat. Besides, food was food. God had made that clear to Peter through the vision he had before being sent to share the Gospel with the Roman centurion Cornelius. What someone ate didn’t impact their standing before God.

So then, did these other folks who were so offended by the very concept of eating this idol meat just need to get over it and take a bite? Well, perhaps, but trying to force them to do something they considered morally impermissible was not the best way forward. It was not the most loving way forward. Because eating idol meat didn’t ultimately matter, whether or not they ate it didn’t matter. They may have been weak in their faith on this particular point, but that didn’t make them any less a part of the body of Christ. Jesus didn’t say anything about only welcoming people into God’s kingdom if they ate certain things. He welcomed everyone no matter what. Paul noted that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek and slave or free, but he might have also added vegetarian or meat eater to the list as well.

If the church is going to work like it was designed, we are going to have to learn to set aside petty forms of tribalism and to embrace one another in spite of our non-salvation-determining distinctions. Even if someone isn’t as far along in their faith journey as we are, they are still our brother or sister in Christ. If we refuse to welcome them, and instead settle for arguing with them about points of disagreement, not only will we weaken the church, we’ll likely drive them away from the church entirely. Thus Paul opens this new section like this: “Welcome anyone who is weak in faith, but don’t argue about disputed matters.”

That’s enough for an introduction today. Tomorrow, we will start looking more closely at Paul’s instructions for navigating these waters. Enjoy your Wednesday.