In today’s class, we are going to deal with fractions. It’s that time of year, after all, with the return to school, even if it looks a bit different this year. You probably didn’t think you were getting into a math class, but today, we need to deal for a bit with fractions.
Do you recall how to add or subtract them? It’s fairly easy if you have the same number as a denominator in both fractions. For example, 1/3 + 1/3 = 2/3. But it’s much more complicated if you have different numbers in the denominator, such as 1/3 + 3/4. Then, you have to find a common denominator in order to add the fractions. In this case, it’s 12. So 1/3 + 3/4 is the same as 4/12 + 9/12. So, it’s really 13/12. Are you with me? It’s technical, I know.
Eventually, after you have some experience with fractions, your eye develops a special sense for immediately looking at two fractions and determining how difficult it will be to find the common denominator. If the denominators are 3 and 6, it’s fairly obvious. If 3 and 17, not so much.
We could say that finding a common denominator is a way of finding common ground, of finding some base level of unity. This unity does not presuppose eliminating difference. When finding a common denominator, a new denominator must be found in order to add or subtract fractions. In other words, both denominators have to be changed to something else in order to find common ground.
It seems to me that the climate in which we live is one that is not good at finding common denominators. In fact, we seem to relish trying to prevent finding such common ground. We want 3/8 to stay 3/8 and refuse to add it to 2/9. Neither fraction will budge. Even more so, 2/9 will try its mightiest to make a common denominator with 8 by squeezing it into a 9, which is, of course, impossible. These examples might seem silly if the current state of discord in our world today were not so tragic.
And there are value judgments attached to finding common denominators, because we think of the least common denominator. We assume that any budging and any attempt to get two different denominators to a common place means a devaluing of standards and settling for something less than it should be. In a world of extremes, shared ground is abhorred. But to find a common denominator, it is essential.
When Paul wrote to various house churches in his Letter to Romans, he was dealing with seemingly incompatible fractions that were not doing a very good job at finding a common denominator. It’s not entirely clear what disagreements Paul was addressing, but there seems to have been a dietary component involved. It may have been a tension between Gentiles and Jews, with Gentiles expanding their food choices beyond certain restrictions, but I’m guessing it wasn’t quite that simple. I imagine there was a lot more going on beneath the surface of the tensions. This was about a variety of religious practices.
And Paul, rather interestingly, kept these differences oblique. Paul had no interest in fomenting further division. Paul had much more of an interest in encouraging a common denominator. The differences in practice and viewpoints to which Paul referred were more than whether one ate or abstained from meat. The differences in behavior had led to value judgments, and this had led to disputes.
Those who had no qualms about eating meat, for instance, were looking down on those vegetarians they considered weak. The unfair implication was that those who had to have so many bounds around their eating habits were elementary religious people, who couldn’t be trusted to color outside the lines. On the other hand, those who refrained from eating meat must have thought that the meat eaters were carnivorous reprobates.
The sad reality is that it doesn’t take great mental stamina to enumerate similar examples from recent history or current situations. The examples are manifold. The whole basis of Christian colonization of less industrialized countries has been rooted in this mentality. Those who were “better-educated” or more “sophisticated” ventured across the world to “civilize” others, to make them “better people.” Or think of the battles around acceptable ritual practices within the Church. And within our own Anglican Communion, tensions over who can be validly ordained are still creating unrest and threatening schism.
If we’re honest with ourselves, we will each locate ourselves in one camp. Perhaps you’re in the camp of “the weak.” Or maybe you’re in the camp of “the strong.” But either way we slice it, we will find a camp to belong to, and over time, we might discover that we are digging our heels in, deeper and deeper. 2/9 is insisting that it can be added to 3/8 if only the eight will become a nine. But we know that will never work.
When we examine many of the divisions among us today, we can be tempted to write them off as intransigence, immaturity, or stubbornness. It’s a secular world gone out of control, you say. But it’s much harder to dismiss differences of opinion within religious circles and within the Church. Here, we find people dealing with ultimate value judgments and arbitrating within moral territory. A step into the wrong camp can be the difference between heaven and hell. 2/9 insists that it should keep its denominator not merely because it dislikes 3/8, but because 9 as denominator is the right one.
It might even appear that Paul is of no help in such disputes. What we hear from Paul today is perhaps even confusing. “Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike. Let all be fully convinced in their own minds.” Well, thanks, Paul, but can you at least tell us which side is right? Or is Paul simply advocating libertinism or moral relativism? Surely, not the Paul we know!
We are so well trained to always expect a clear delineation between right and wrong. And we are so quick to attribute moral value judgments to various practices. Or is it possible that both sides—whatever those sides are—might be right and acceptable to God?
And yet if we read Romans carefully, we will find that Paul does not leave us hanging or give us mealy-mouthed advice. Paul shows us how to find the common denominator. And that common denominator is the Lord, the living God who holds loving discourse with us, who sends the Holy Spirit to direct and rule our hearts, and who endows us with the gift of reason and human intelligence.
Paul, this historically controversial figure, actually proves to be a generous thinker and one of the greatest theologians of unifying love, if we can only come to know him a bit better. So what does he have to show us about God?
Paul reveals the ways in which our denominators need thoughtful adjustment as we try to add and subtract fractions. Each of us is only concerned with making the square peg fit the round hole that we have constructed. If we hold a view, it must be the right one, whether it is about religious practice or how we vote or what denomination we belong to. If we believe it and if we are passionate about it, then God unconditionally supports it.
And so, rather than letting God become our common denominator, we have used God to justify the denominator we have created. As Paul constantly points out in his Letter to the Romans, this is the root of all evil. The source of unrighteousness is when we usurp the place that belongs only by right to God.
By looking with contempt on those whom we think to be more conservative than we are, we forcefully commandeer the authority of judgment, that precious defense of God’s righteousness that belongs only to God. And if we look at those more liberal than us and piously pray for the reform of their wayward souls, we once again, hijack the moral fulcrum of the universe, which is God’s judgment.
But thanks be to God that we do not have to judge! Thanks be to God that we are specifically charged with tending to our own house and getting it in order, rather than paying for a team of housekeepers to invade our neighbor’s house. Far from being a license for individualism, getting our own house in tidy shape respects the moral conscience of our neighbor and, more importantly, lets God be God. Thank God that the world’s judgment is in the hands of our God who is “full of compassion and mercy” and “slow to anger and of great kindness.” Thank God that final judgment is not in our frail hands.
Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. We cannot run from our common denominator. And this is good news indeed. This means that two seemingly disparate fractions can ultimately be reconciled through the common denominator of God’s gracious love and compassion.
This is no excuse to justify any kind of bad behavior, injustice, or moral evil. But it is a reason to find self-humility and try to assume the best about our neighbors, to try to see that if they are doing something in honor of the Lord, it might be acceptable to God. And if it’s not, perhaps God can still wring good out of it in some wonderful way. We run into evil when we dig in our heels, raise the flag for moral righteousness, and claim that God is on our side, and ours alone.
Jesus Christ is Lord of both the dead and the living. Through his life, death, and resurrection, he has left no corner of the universe untouched by his grace, and he has graciously adopted us into a family of all kinds of interesting and diverse fractions, who can be united and added together to make one living Body, his Body here on earth. And to add and subtract all these myriad fractions, we need a common denominator, and that denominator is God alone, whose generous love and abundant mercy is beyond that which we could ever ask or imagine. And let us give thanks that the last word is God’s, and God’s alone.
A Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 13, 2020