Romans
Romans
Romans 8:31-39
So, we’ve spent some time watching Saul, the Christian hunter, turn into Paul, the founder of the church. Paul, more than any other single person, was responsible for the spread of Christianity into the world beyond Jerusalem. If you are a regular attendee of our worship services, you might remember that we talked about the destruction of Jerusalem. Let’s connect the dots here. If Christianity had not spread beyond Jerusalem in the years between 33 AD, when Jesus died, and 70 AD, when Jerusalem fell, Christianity might literally have been wiped out. Remember, nearly every living thing was killed in Jerusalem. Nearly everything—every building, every record—was destroyed. The Christian faith spread, just in the nick of time.
The other reason Paul matters so much is that his writings are the earliest writings in Christianity. Remember, the Gospels came much later. As the eyewitnesses and early believers were dying off generationally, and as specific “schools” of Christian thought developed, people finally sat down to share the good news. Long before that, Christians were gathering in house churches, combining their resources, trying to figure out how to live together, working to discern what they believed. In the middle of those challenges, Paul moved from city to city, planting churches, tending to them like a gardener, inspiring growth with powerful theology, and dealing with the most mundane of conflicts and challenges. Paul would give birth to the notion of justification by faith in one moment and then weigh in on what people should eat the next.
This is God’s “pit bull” in action. He had a mind that could go from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds, a mind that had been trained by the very best of educations that society could offer. He had an eye for translating theology into lived practice, an eye which had been honed by instructing people in the law and its guidance for a righteous life. He was tenacious beyond belief, working as a tent maker to pay his own way, surviving arrests and shipwrecks, and enduring through moments of rejection too numerous to count. The man just kept going.
This morning, I want to start to introduce you to some of those early locations for Christianity and the kind of things Paul did and said. Partly, I’d like us all to understand a little bit more of our shared history. Just as importantly, I’d like us to open ourselves to how things that Paul said and did can still speak to us today. Hear this clearly—not everything that Paul said still speaks. The man had his own issues, just like us. His culture had its own limitations, too, just like ours. Still, though, I believe that we can come to see some things more clearly about our own lives and our life together as a church family if we learn how to listen to him.
We’re going to start with Paul’s letter to the Romans, which is an interesting place to start. Every other letter that Paul writes that is in our New Testament was written to an existing faith community which, for the most part, Paul, himself had played a role in starting. Unlike all of those other letters, in Paul’s letter to the Romans, he is writing a letter of introduction on his own behalf so that he can visit a church that he has never seen. He really needs to connect to these folks so that he can have a toehold to begin to spread Christianity beyond Rome.
Since Paul didn’t really know these folks, it’s not surprising what unfolds. The personal greetings aren’t there. The follow up questions about issues from the past are absent. Instead, Paul, the man with the amazing mind, leads with his strength. In the span of a few pages, he grounds the Christian faith in the roots of Judaism. He “riffs” on the history of our ancestors in faith in a way that only someone who had been thoroughly steeped in that history could. Then, he makes this amazing turn…
From the start, I want to acknowledge that Pau’s letter to the Romans is so challenging that the best we are going to do is get a “whiff” of what’s going on. For two thousand years, Christian theologians have been inspired and perplexed by this letter. The roots of the Reformation, the time when the great fissure happened between the Catholic Church and the Protestants, rest in this letter. So, we run the risk here of having that moment where, having visited Mt. Everest, someone asks, “How was the mountain?” And, all you can answer is, “Tall…really tall!”
The most boiled down, over-simplified version of this letter runs something like this. For centuries, what was carved out was an understanding that faith meant fulfilling the law. God gave us the ten commandments. Over time, those commandments developed into many more laws, all of which are there to guide everyone in living a righteous life. We observe the Sabbath and keep the food laws and follow the guidance for life in community. We do this to fulfill our covenant with God. In the early part of the letter to the Romans, Paul makes it clear that he understands this covenant.
What is important to realize as he does this is that he is not only speaking to the Jewish roots of his audience, he is also speaking in a learned way to a group of people who live in maybe the most sophisticated place in his world. To put the matter in colloquial terms, he knew that Christianity could, “Play in Peoria.” Every other place he had visited seemed podunk compared to Rome. The question now is can Christianity “play” with people who are acutely aware of everything that the wider world has to offer. In other words, is Christianity destined to be a narrow branch of Judaism or is it a faith which will stand on its own.
Essentially, the turn Paul takes is this. He argues that while Christianity has its roots in Judaism, it is a faith which is available to all. You don’t have to be Jewish to be Christian. Instead, what you have to come to grips with is the truth that while the law was there to teach us how to live a righteous life, none of us were actually righteous. If you can’t fulfill the law, then you cannot stand and be justified before God. You don’t have a leg to stand on. If you can admit this, if you can own the fact that none of us can earn God’s love, then the possibility that opens is that justification is not earned but is God’s gift. We are justified as an act of grace on God’s part. We are justified by faith, not by works. The only thing we are required to do is to allow God’s grace to transform us into gracious, loving people. Instead of convicting us, the law now becomes our guide in trying to live a faithful life. The point of life is not to be righteous. The point of life is to live gratefully.
All of this might seem super abstract and esoteric. It’s not. All of us struggle with whether we are good enough, whether we have done enough, whether our lives will measure up in the end. It is so easy to fall into the trap of perfectionism, driving ourselves every day to try harder, critiquing ourselves every night for having failed again. We try so hard to win the love and respect of our friends and our spouses, our bosses and our children. The pressure we place on ourselves and the way that pressure is amplified by all the sources around us, from Facebook and Instagram to the latest commercials to the alumni magazine that reports the achievements of our peers, can be crushing. We don’t need priests and a temple to know that trying to justify ourselves remains a powerful human temptation.
Of course, the only thing harder than feeling like we’ve failed is feeling like we might make it after all. Talk about pressure! I remember the girls softball team in my high school. After stringing together dozens of victories and no defeats, they were relieved, just flat out relieved—to finally lose. The pressure built with every victory. I remember my friend who had always gotten everything right—the grades, the social graces, the life achievements—who then made a spectacular mistake. She was mortified but she was also relieved. It was brutal to live up to her own reputation, day in and day out. Find a really successful person with any kind of internal life and sooner or later they will tell you that they struggle with whether they are loved simply for their success: “Would these friends, my spouse, my children love me if I failed?”
That’s the real revolution that Paul is starting. Pretty much every religion that had ever existed had promised that God or the gods would love you if, if you made the right sacrifice, if you made the right choices, if you did whatever it took to earn the approval of the gods or of God. Do whatever it takes to win—in this case, to win God’s approval. What Paul says is that we cannot win what we have already been given. God chose to love us, simply because God chose to love us. Of course, Christ had something to do with showing that we are worth loving, even if we are broken. That love, though, is an undeserved, unearned gift.
The other thing about that gift, Paul says, is that it will never be taken away. God has decided to love us. Nothing can come between us and that love: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” It doesn’t matter how hard life gets. It doesn’t matter who opposes us. It doesn’t matter whether we succeed or fail on the world’s terms. What matters is that we remember what we’ve been given and that we try to live a grateful life.
To put it bluntly, we have nothing to prove. The verdict is already in. We don’t do what we do to show the world or our friends or our family or God, almighty, who we are. We do what we do because it seems like the grateful thing to do. We don’t walk around all full of ourselves, either, because we know that the reason we have nothing to prove has nothing to do with us. Our hope is that maybe our changed life might be some evidence of the presence of a loving God in this world. Our hope is that our efforts, every now and then, might be a part of God’s work in this world. In the end, though, God’s unconditional love is not something that makes me full of myself but instead is what finally sets me free from myself and a life of self-centeredness.
Imagine that you are playing the ballgame not to prove your worth to your teammates or to your coach or to your parents in the stands but simply for the joy of the game.
Imagine that as you go through life, you’re not keeping score of your victories and feeling the pressure mount to “keep the streak alive.” Instead, you are simply dealing with the needs around you and asking yourself, “What can I do to help?”
Imagine that you are not a “sinner in the hands of an angry God,” that you are not one misstep away from the scrap heap, but that you are loved, plain and simple, end of story. Wouldn’t that change everything?
Nothing can separate us from the love of God, not a bad day for the market, not the loss of your job, not any other worst case you can imagine. This is the life changing good news!