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City Year is an organization that places young people as tutors and mentors in struggling schools throughout the country. I was privileged to serve back in 2011-2012 as a City Year member in Washington, D.C.
Most of our work was done in the schools we served, but occasionally we would need to go by our office headquarters for meetings and other projects. In that office, I remember a wall with various politicians who had shown their support to City Year over the years at various City Year functions. There were pictures of the Obamas next to pictures of John McCain. There were pictures of the Clintons as well as the Bushes, both W. and H.W. if memory serves. In fact, there were many leaders in Congress on the wall from both sides of the aisle.
It may seem strange that politicians from both the Republican and Democratic Parties were on this wall, side to side. I don’t remember any of us in City Year much caring. At the end of the day, their allegiance didn’t matter. They were there to serve our students, our children. As City Year members, teachers, nurses, and others would say, in the words of our beloved Sawyerville here in the Diocese of Alabama, “It’s all of the kids.”
Paul would put it similarly but differently: “It’s all for God.” That’s the message Paul has for us this morning. The early Christians had things that divided them. There were those, who we should note were both Jews and Gentiles, who believed following God meant adhering to strict laws when it came to diet and other matters. There were also those who felt that such laws weren’t necessary, both Gentiles and Jews, including Paul himself, who once was the strictest rule-follower of them all.
What Paul tells us is that where you stand on these issues doesn’t ultimately matter. What matters is that wherever you stand, you give all the glory you can give to God. All that matters is that we are giving glory to God.
There are so many things, even today, that divide us. Unfortunately we live in a time where we are all divided more than we have ever been, especially politically and especially in America.
There is only one allegiance that matters to us as Christians: our allegiance to God. We are called to put aside all other affiliations and loyalties in order to serve God and to serve God alone.
To do that effectively, we need to be willing to put aside our differences. As long as we are serving God, and God alone, nothing else should matter. We have to be willing to set aside the differences we may have in order to come together and serve our Lord, just as we have to be willing to accept that sometimes God, particularly through the word of Scripture, is showing all of us where we are wrong, where we are not fully serving God alone, and what we need to do to fix our mistakes.
Our role as the church is to be an example and a shining beacon to the world of how we can all live together in community. We can show that by putting all other things aside except for our service to God alone. We do that in the hope that others will be drawn to us, because it isn’t really the church that people are being drawn to, but instead they are being drawn to God and a deeper service to our Lord.