Remember Jesus’s parable of the father with two sons? It’s a practically perfect picture of Paul’s teaching in Romans 8 – a father, who embodies this life in the Spirit Paul describes, and two sons, both living according to the flesh: the younger one training at life in the flesh like it’s an Olympic sport; the older one pacing himself more. But make no mistake: he is just as much living in the flesh as his little brother, but with none of the fun. He is bitter as a too-green persimmon, biting his tongue to the very end, when he walks up onto that party the day his brother came home and all that seething resentment comes pouring out of him.
At the end is when the younger son wakes up to the fact that he’s already dead. Dead a son as he is, the younger one knows his father, or thinks he does. I am dead to him as a son, but I can still go back as a slave, he tells himself, while his brother never thought himself anything other than a slave – muscle and breath born to do the master’s bidding. People living in the spirit don’t know a difference between slaves and sons. There are only children, as Paul says in verse 16, children of God. Paul says the same in his letter to Philemon, which Sarah read and which I’ll preach after I return from my trip this fall. Romans will end someday. Children of God know who we are and we know whose we are. We know, as Richard Rohr writes, that we are not punished for our sins. We are punished by our sins. To live in the Spirit is to live inside the reality of a certain kinship, a connection between ourselves and the creator of all that lives and breathes and has being. In speaking of the Human-God relationship, Child-Parent is both the best and still far too small a metaphor for describing it – which makes it not useful for everyone, and for some too horrifying to consider. For some, brother-sister or friend-friend or student-teacher works better, because their in-the-flesh experience with a parent-child relationship is just too damaged, too frightening a metaphor to use in imagining how God loves us. To live in the flesh is, simply, to live outside the reality of that kinship; to choose, by default or design, to trust only that which the eyes and ears can see and hear, what the physical senses can touch and confirm. Which is actually very little when you think about it, isn’t it? We order our days on a great deal more than what we confirm with our senses moment by moment, don’t we? I don’t inspect my car for safety every time I jump in to drive somewhere. I don’t test the sturdiness of every chair I sit in, the sanitation of every spoon that goes in my mouth. We trust lots and lots of things, day in and out. How do we confirm the truth of the Spirit of God? the truth of our preciousness to God? the truth about how very, very loved we are? the truth about the persistence of that love, regardless of our resistance to it? Simply, friends, by living as if it is true. The same way we sit on chairs and drive cars we don’t test first. Just moving into the reality and discovering that in fact it does hold us up. To live in the flesh is to believe anything other than that we are precious to God – and then behave that way. To mistreat this life, this body, other people, this creation, is to disbelieve in our own preciousness, to believe it possible for anything to interrupt or disrupt or muck up that preciousness. Because we can’t. We cannot ruin the preciousness. Nothing we have done, nothing we might ever do, can change it. It is not ours to change, the truth of our belovedness, the truth of our value. It is a God-made truth, cosmic truth, not of this world. Human beings have too much self-interest ever to think up such an idea. Doesn’t keep us – both human beings and the church – from trying to remake this preciousness, this belovedness, in our own image – the image of our need to feel worthy. So we make divine belovedness something to be earned, rather than assumed. I remember when I had my first baby, and we got all these sweet baby onesies and sleepers for her. They were so soft and cozy, and I wondered Why can’t grown-up clothes be as soft and comfortable as baby clothes? Everything has to be a little bit tight, a little bit scratchy, and also pinch our toes, or we aren’t dressed appropriately. Have we done the same with faith? Created an environment in which if we aren’t slightly tormented we aren’t sure God loves us? What if – just imagine this for a moment with me – what if what God wants most for each of us, and for all creation, is that we be happy, safe and loved? Or even better, imagine this: what if what God wants most for each of us sentient beings is that we know we are to be happy, safe and loved? what if we need not feel guilty or ashamed for wanting it, because in wanting it for ourselves we agree with God that the very best life for us is one in which we are happy, safe and loved? It’s God’s prerogative, don’t you think, Susanne P. said this week in Bible study, to decide what God wants for God’s children? One of those questions that answers itself. If God wants to regard us as children instead of slaves, isn’t that God’s prerogative? If God should choose to love us without even the threat of punishment for our sorry ways, toward ourselves, toward each other, toward the planet, and toward God’s own self too, who are we to say God can’t or shouldn’t? God does not love us because we are good. God loves us – why, friends? – God loves us because God is good. And insofar as we can take that in, the God-given happiness already saturating nature will seep and soak and transform our grief and fear as well. There is no straight or easy path between life according to the flesh and life in the Spirit. Rather, it’s an invitation we accept, or not, in the everydayness of being human. Life in the flesh is exactly that: faith in human flesh to save itself. Which, stated that way, we know, is absurd. Flesh is forever dying and cannot save itself. And yet, and yet, the trickery never stops, does it? The compulsion to believe what is before our eyes in the moments when we are hurting or afraid? The anxiety and the want for immediate relief, combined with brain and body chemistry like dopamine and adrenaline, how are we not going to be drawn away from the Spirit? But the Spirit doesn’t beg; she only waits, like the father on his front porch in Jesus’s parable, waiting for his kids to come home to him. She doesn’t scold or fuss or harass us out of bed. She waits, and she waits, and she waits. There’s no amount of time she will not wait, for us to realize we’ve been in her lap all along. And when we do, friends, when we do, the kind of life we’ll have – I expect we cannot even imagine the kind of life together we shall have, my goodness! For the last, some lyrics from a Mary Chapin Carpenter song, an old one but still my most favorite of hers, called “Jubilee.” What she names “jubilee” I think of as this Spirit of God always here among us, around us, and within us. I can tell by the way you're walking You don't want company I'll let you alone and I'll let you walk on And in your own good time you'll be Back where the sun can find you Under the wise wishing tree And with all of them made we'll lie under the shade And call it a jubilee. And I can tell by the way you're talking That the past isn't letting you go But there's only so long you can take it all on And then the wrong's gotta be on its own And when you're ready to leave it behind you You'll look back and all that you'll see Is the wreckage and rust that you left in the dust On your way to the jubilee And I can tell by the way you're listening That you're still expecting to hear Your name being called like a summons to all Who have failed to account for their doubts and their fears They can't add up to much without you And so if it were up to me, I'd take hold of your hand Saying come hear the band Play your song at the jubilee And I can tell by the way you're searching For something you can't even name That you haven't been able to come to the table Simply glad that you came When you feel like this try to imagine That we're all like frail boats on the sea Just scanning the night for that great guiding light Announcing the jubilee And I can tell by the way you're standing With your eyes filling with tears That it's habit alone that keeps you turning for home Even though your home is right here Where the people who love you are gathered Under the wise wishing tree May we all be considered then straight on delivered Down to the jubilee She calls it “jubilee.” Paul calls it “life in the Spirit.” Call it whatever you like. Just call it, friends, call it. Would you pray with me?
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Father Richard Rohr says that bad theology is a lot like pornography. It has all the fantasy of a real relationship without any of the risk.* [*from The Divine Dance]
What is the fantasy – that is, the bad theology – at work in Romans, chapter 7? It is that the Law is necessary for righteousness. That’s the Bible talk version. The everyday talk version is that the better we behave – the more we conform to the rules – the more pleased God is with us; that it is possible to be good enough. What is the risk? Finding out the truth once and for all that we are pathetic failures at being good – not because we are weak, not because we are bad, but because we are human. Real relationship with God is grounded in the truth: the truth that God never has loved and God never will love anyone anywhere because they were good. God loves everyone everywhere because God is good. Let’s pray: For the truth upon whatever tongue you’ve laid it, O God, may we listen. For a glimpse of your Spirit in the most unlikely places, may we watch. So that our faith might find deeper breath – for this we pray, O God. Amen. In Romans chapter 7 the Apostle Paul is still making his case against the fantasy – as he says it, the insufficiency of the Law to accomplish righteousness with God. Everyone to whom he writes is a Christ follower, many of them from the same rule-loving religion as Paul, who have spread themselves some Jesus over the top of the rule-loving religion they’d always had. “No,” Paul says, “no.” The Law must be removed, not because it is useful for its own purposes but, rather, simply because it is no longer necessary now that we have risen with Christ. Paul’s first example is marriage. Note: this is not a text on biblical gender roles in marriage. It is an analogy of those early believers’ relationship to Jewish law, with some use for the church’s understanding of the difference between doctrine and faith. You are no more bound to the Law, Paul says, than a widowed woman is bound to her dead husband. The Law by its own design says that dead husband has no legal hold on her. The Law is no more use to you as a follower of the Christ than her dead husband is to her. Can he provide for her? Can he protect her? Can he give her any affection, any comfort? He cannot. Neither can the Law, Paul says. Only the risen Christ can do that for us. New Testament Professor Luke Johnson’s illustration of Paul’s illustration goes like this: The Law is like a prescription from the doctor. Sick people who go to the doctor and get a prescription generally don’t carry the scrip around believing the slip of paper will cure them.* [*from Reading Romans] The Law and the prescription are good for what they were meant for: putting a name to our trouble. But neither has any power to cure us or keep us well. Are you with me? The Law is dead as a widow’s husband, Paul said – this week and last – and we are dead to it. Which isn’t to say the church hasn’t been propping our own version of the Torah up in a pew and treating it like royalty for the last many hundred years – “Nobody’s perfect” – and quoting Paul in the teaching of it (verses 14-20): I don’t understand why I act the way I do. I don’t do what I know is right. I do the things I hate. The church affirmed that nobody is perfect while at the same time emphasizing that the closer we get to that perfection, the more pleased God is with us – until we didn’t know the difference between bad theology and good, what the Bible teaches and what it absolutely does not. At five years old I could have told you, specifically, what sorts of children please God most: children who share; children who are kind; children who obey; children who don’t talk back; children who are helpful. My brother said he heard a bad word and said it. My mother asked, “Do you think Jesus likes it when he hears you say words like that?” That is such bad, and it can be dangerous, theology. For all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is the conflation of the legal with the good; the result being – even church people struggle to know what the word “sin” really means. When I enter the phrase “remember their sin no more,” Grammarly always wants to make it “sins” – plural. Sin is not singular or plural. It is ontological, a state of being, a form of existence. Again, friends, God doesn’t love us because we are good. God loves us because God is good. Our ontological condition, if you will, is beloved. We are loved. “Faithful” is the state of living in conformity to our belovedness; “sin” the state of living in resistance to our belovedness. Sin is related to Law coincidentally. This is a point Paul makes strongly in verse seven, teasing apart the Law from sin. What makes something legal? Powerful people get it written down, codified. Generally, what is legal is what serves the interests of the powerful. What makes something right or good? It serves the interests of the whole creation; it conforms to the very the nature of God. To be legal does not make something right or good. Our country legally has children in prison camps, remember. Does anyone believe that reflects the nature of God? Slavery was legal in our country for a long, long time. Forms of it are still legal around the world. It has never been right. Discrimination has never been right. It was legal for a long, long time and, again, still is in many places. My colleague Reverend Dr. William Barber, who leads the Moral Monday movement, says that voter suppression laws currently on the books are THE greatest moral threat to American democracy. Wrong – and perfectly legal. Sin is related to Law only coincidentally. It’s possible to sin by obeying the law and to be good by breaking it. Sin is not calculated by our failure to keep our lives legal. Sin is calculated by our decision to resist our God-given status as beloved; to act, to live, in harmony with, at peace with, God’s goodness in all of creation; to swim in that river, to breathe that air. Are you with me? That we might conceive of redeeming ourselves by so cumbersome and unwieldy an instrument as the Law is a fantasy we’ve held on to for too long, especially given the alternative. If I let go of this useless thing that never worked anyway, Paul asks – to no one in particular, it seems to me, or maybe in a prayer – then who will rescue me? And it is as if he suddenly remembers, “Oh yeah!” – verse 25 – “Thank God! Jesus Christ will rescue me.” And that is what he goes on and on and on about in chapter eight. We will follow him there next week. Would you pray with me? My daughter and son-in-law had two ladies at their front door yesterday, sharing their faith. They showed them the article in the newspaper about the man who killed himself so horribly, right in front of the police, and they asked, Do you know why there is so much suffering? My son-in-law asked me what to say to answer that. I said “It’s not a mystery, Jeremy. There’s so much suffering because people are . . . jerks. (I might possibly have used a different word.) And people are jerks because they are afraid.”
And people are afraid, because they still don’t believe that there is nothing in this world to fear. Whether we live or we die, whether we are saints or jerks, the kindness of God has final say in this universe. And if we only believed that, heart, mind, soul, and strength, there’d never be anything to defend; nothing worth hurting another human being to have; no payoff in being a jerk. Suffering wouldn’t end, but the rates would plummet, and most of what was left wouldn’t feel like suffering. If the book of Romans is starting to sound a little repetitive, as if Paul says the same thing over and over, it could be because Paul is saying pretty much the same thing over and over. Which is what teachers do when they are teaching to mastery – instead of grade level, if you will. Repetition and reinforcement. Paul is repeating and reinforcing. If the church doesn’t master this new reality that God in Jesus Christ has re-created reality so that the kindness of God, that is the grace of God, has the final say in all that happens – if we don’t master that, heart, mind, soul, and strength – we, the church, will never function as the body of Christ in the world. To date, the church has been something of a slow learner. Great pockets of Christendom still function as if Jesus lived, died, and rose from the grave so that we would know to be nice to each other and help the poor and have something to do on Sunday mornings. All the while, Paul has preached his heart out to anyone who will listen that there is more: Jesus lived and died and rose from the grave so we wouldn’t be afraid, so that we would live like people who have no cause for fear and therefore no cause, no motivation, to be such terrible jerks. Jesus lived and died and rose from the dead, because God decided not to leave humanity to ourselves, to act our inevitable drama of self-destruction. We are a basketful of wretched sinfulness whom, against all reason, God chose to deal with kindly, mercifully, gracefully. Every word, you know, is a metaphor. And every metaphor limps, even the best ones. Sin and grace are Paul’s metaphors as he attempts to describe the human-God relationship. Sin refers to the way of life before baptism, before one’s realization of the re-creation of the world in Jesus Christ or, as we commonly say it, sin is the way of life before faith in Christ. Grace is the wide-open reality of God’s love that permeates every nook and cranny of every cell of every creature, plant, and rock of creation – every shimmer of light, every wisp of air, every drop of water, every breath drawn by whatever draws breath. Sin and grace for Paul in Romans 6 is a kind of before-and-after in one’s life, divided by the realization of faith. The dividing moment for Paul was on the road in Damascus. His life before was a project of genocide, executing Jews who believed in Christ. After, the project of Paul’s life, as he described it, was to be poured out as a sacrifice in imitation of what Christ has done for us – that the world might have a living, breathing presence of Christ in the world: the church. Paul says we must live always in the after in this new creation of the world in Christ Jesus. We cannot practice faith in Jesus while standing in the grave of the past. Of all we might find useful in this text today, I hope to find some encouragement for anyone who has ever had trouble believing the past no longer has any power over you. Because the word of the Lord on that subject today is, simply, “Nope.” Would you pray with me? Upon every heart still haunted by hurts from the past, O God, may your word be a healing touch. We all struggle sometimes to believe news this good, that we live inside the territory of grace, a land utterly without borders, where the past is a grave – a grave with no hold on us, where we are welcomed exactly as we are. Amen. Do you suppose Paul’s past haunted him? He was no victim, after all. He was a predator. Like a modern day ICE agent going from synagogue to synagogue, notebook in hand, talking to rabbis, wanting to know who in your congregation professes to believe in this Jesus fellow? Then taking that list to Jewish authorities and trading them for arrest warrants, which he then used to track down those people, arrest them, throw them in the jail, and have them executed. So yes, I suspect the memory haunted him. And yet, he still wrote and believed this: 3 Don’t you know that all who share in Christ Jesus by being baptized also share in his death? 4 When we were baptized, we died and were buried with Christ. We were baptized, so that we would live a new life, as Christ was raised to life by the glory of God the Father. And this: When Christ died, he died for sin once and for all. But now he is alive, and he lives only for God. 11 In the same way, you must think of yourselves as dead to the power of sin. But Christ Jesus has given life to you, and you live for God. Bushi Yamato Damashii calls himself a Buddhist monk and a friend of Jesus. If he was not a Baptist preacher at some point in his past I will eat … well … asparagus. Because he has the voice. In that voice that I could listen to all day, he says that the hurtful moments of our past no longer exist anywhere in the universe, except when we reconstitute them in our minds – something always done by choice, by the choice not to train our minds to stay here. Choose other, Paul says. In a moment in which you are tempted to go to that place of sin and death – a place dead and buried not because Dr. Phil said or your therapist said so, but because the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe made it so – think of yourselves as dead to the power of all that hurt, all that sin. Be here. Be now. Be alive in this life God has made for you. Don’t hear me hating on therapy – it’s good for what it’s good for. But there is no substitute for the spiritual discovery that God loves you and you are worthy of being loved, that you deserve the ground you occupy and the air you breathe, because God said so. Friends, please see how the pain of something, however overwhelming in its memory, can never render the truth untrue. Grief and sadness don’t have that power. Neither do guilt or shame or disappointment. They are feelings. Feelings are real. But the only power they have, we give them. And when, rather than believe the truth is the truth, we believe our feelings and the thoughts those feelings get us to thinking, we have returned to a grave to pray and plead for God’s help to get through life in a place God went to great length to get us out of. Remember those Hebrew slaves begging to go back to Egypt? Freedom sounded like a good idea, until they realized how much trust was involved, how little control over their own situation was allowed. For all our wishing to be healed of the past, and our frustration with the pain, some- thing about it draws us back, like peeling the scab off a wound. It hurts like the dickens but feels strangely satisfying too. Maybe it’s the comfort of being perpetually wounded. It’s unpleasant and inconvenient, but it’s also familiar, predictable, dependable. But is it? Or is that familiarity and dependability some- thing else we tell ourselves rather than believe the God who chose to look at humanity when we looked pretty much the same as we do right now – a mess on the verge of self-destruction – and said, “Nope, I love them too much for that.” Why, friends, why is it so hard to believe God loves you that much? Is it because to believe that you’d finally have to give up on changing the past? As if you could. Lisa occasionally shares my favorite quote: “I have given up all hope of having a better past.” Do you know the book 11/22/63? It is a novel by Stephen King in which a man named Jake goes into a diner owned by a man named Al who sells hamburgers for $1 because he is able to buy his meat at 1958 prices. Eventually Jake learns that Al’s basement door is a portal into 1958, and they conspire for Jake to go back to 1958 and thus change the course of history by thwarting the assassination of President Kennedy and thus preventing the Vietnam War along with the entire course of American history up to 2011. As with every King novel, the story isn’t over until the very last word on the very last page, where one is both deeply satisfied by the brilliant storytelling and sadly surprised to realize you knew the truth all along. Even in a fantasy, we cannot rewrite or redo the past. All we can do with the past is lay it to rest as gently and lovingly as possible. Release it, completely, knowing it has no power over us. None. Zero. Zilch. We live here, now, in a borderless land. “The territory of grace” one writer called it, also called the universe ruled by God’s kindness, populated by folks like you and me, all dressed up in these lives of ours – lives made new. Would you pray with me? My family has been together for the holiday. My household. My sisters. My nieces. My nieces' husbands and eight of their ten kids. Four of the kids and their parents stayed at my house. Kids played and played; they got in and out of the water; they ate their weight in sugar – which is to say that every night by bath time, they were soaked in that wonder- ful summertime sticky, sweaty, dirty stink that all kids get. A smell that I happen to love.
I first loved it in 1984 when I was a 20-year-old Baptist summer missionary in inner-city Chicago. It's the smell of happy, healthy, well-cared-for kids. Kids who play hard and who get baths on more days than they don't. 1984 was also the summer I first learned that kids – and grown-ups – who aren’t so healthy and well-cared-for smell dirty in a different, sadder way. I can’t stop thinking about those kids in the camps – 11,000 of them, give or take. Twice the number enrolled in Monroe County public schools. That we even have such a sentence as those kids in our prison camps is appalling. You know they aren’t getting baths and clean pajamas every night. And no doubt there is a stench – not from the kids, of course. The stench is rising from a nation that claims God’s favor while doing the devil’s bidding. Where a few profit from the torture of children and the rest of us simply stomach it. An abomination, to get biblical about it, no less than the nation described by the prophet Amos in chapter 5. An abomination: whatever is vile, shameful, detestable; putrid, even. That which God hates for its opposition to God’s purposes, which are: justice, of course, and love. Abomination is the $5 word, while sin goes for a dime a dozen. Sin is the “gift of Adam,” Paul calls it, compared to the gift of God in Christ Jesus – kindness, undeserved kindness, un-earnable kindness – for which the only faithful response is acceptance. Acceptance that, if we are willing to imagine it and then exercise the faith to do it, shall have us Living. Like. Kings. Shall we pray: We may fantasize about being powerful, O God, even as we decline the power we have in the moments faith is required, in the situations courage is called for. The beginning is to accept our helplessness, our need of you; to receive you as creator, savior, sustainer, of our lives, of our life together, and to let that be enough. Amen. Can the gospel really be this simple, friends? That the kindness of God has undone death. And not by accident, nor by the force of our wishing it so, but rather by design. By the design of the divine creator in the reality where we live and move and have our being. The kindness of God – also called grace – is more powerful than sin, more powerful than death, more powerful than the fear of death. Not only that, according to the Apostle Paul: this kindness of God enables folks who don’t especially like each other to be church together. Folks who ordinarily don’t get along so well ought to be able to go to church together. He is trying to make a church out of Jews and Gentiles, folks who believed themselves to be so fundamentally different from the other that shared worship and service seem impossible. We are just too different. “Two churches will be better.” Lots of folks are okay with that. Not Paul, who naturally assumed also to be speaking for God. Much of Romans is his philosophical argument with their reasons for resisting his theology of the One Church. They don’t know the Law, apparently one of the Jewish reasons they could not be expected to keep close faith with Gentiles. How would anyone know when Gentiles are breaking the Law if they never learned the Law itself? Paul manipulates their question a bit, it seems to me, to make his argument. But not so much that the text misses its mark. Sin came a long time before the Law, Paul says, going back not to Moses, or back to Abraham this time, but ALL the way back to Adam. Do you know what the name Adam means? In rudimentary Hebrew, “earth.” Ground. Dust. Creature made of dust. A highly embellished meaning is first of his kind, which makes me think of Game of Thrones. Nevertheless, at its most literal Adam means dust. Do you also know that Adam isn’t spoken of in the Torah as an individual person? He’s not a person, a character like Noah or Abraham or Moses. In writings outside the Bible, Adam is treated as a representative of humanity – that first of his kind usage again.* (*Luke Timothy Johnson, Reading Romans, Macon, GA: Smith & Helwys, 2001, p.92) Paul, on the other hand, treats Adam very much as a person in order to compare him to Christ, who for Paul was as much the first man as Adam. This stretch of comparison and contrast between Adam and Jesus can be a little maddening. Paul uses a rhetorical device that is frowned upon in preaching, using a negative example to teach a positive truth – Jesus did good in exactly the same way Adam did bad – the way coaches and choir directors show players and singers how NOT to shoot or sing. Paul says, All people have inherited both men’s bequests: from Adam, sin and death; from Christ, life and grace. Both of which are done deals. By the kindness of the creating God, dust drew breath and lived: Adam and Eve, born into a sinless, perfect world. Out of the kindness of the same God, they were given everything necessary; destined to live without toil; invited to trust the creator to feed them, rather than feed themselves. They chose toil, rather than trust. Toil unto death. Their children followed suit – unto death. In perpetuity, as it turned out. Jesus was born and drew first breath in a world polluted with corruption and stained with grief. He reissued the invitation to trust the one who created and had always loved them wholly, completely. Sticky. Sweaty. Dirty. Smelly. Christ – as much the first of his kind as Adam ever was – put to death and risen from dust, so we will live and rule like kings (my second favorite phrase of the CEV translation of Romans 5, verse 17). Other translations use the word dominion, not nearly as fun as live and rule like kings. Who doesn’t, in their own way, want to be a king? or queen? It is the fundamental plot of our favorite stories: lords and ladies; chosen ones; wizards good and evil; poor boys and princesses; even modern American politics. All of them are the same story – a set of characters vying for the one throne to rule them all. And where our own wishing to be king falls away, we are wishing for the perfect king or queen to take care of us. Candidate season is coming around – something like a hundred and fifty people are running for president – not one of them may suit our fancy, but some part of us, of almost all of us, is ever holding out hope in the idea of the perfect one, that secret confidence that there is a person, somewhere, about to go public with the exact skill set and personality and spotless record, to fix everything that's broken. Or maybe it isn’t a person we secretly are hoping for, but the safe and stable and prosperous world we think that person is going to create. We may not own that fantasy daily, but it’s there. For me it’s there. Anybody, amen? How’d we get so far from where we said we’d started, friends? If where we start is faith in Jesus worked out in our life together? worked out in our study of the scripture? worked out in our everyday communion with the Holy Spirit? Who’s been telling us this story, this fantasy, in such a way that we believe it? That some poor weak and broken fellow or woman, one just as screwed up, overwhelmed, and exhausted as you and me, is going to get us out of a mess we’ve spent generations working to build? Because there is the sad reality of kings. Kings and queens are people, down to the very last one. They get hungry, angry, lonely, and tired on their good days. On their bad, they take children from their mothers and put them into cages. But kingship has a certain beauty too – in its mythical sense, at least. The mythical king or queen cannot ever be overruled. So he – or she – is never overwhelmed. Imagine such a power as that, friends. A mythical sense of being king is Paul’s suggestion to us for how to think of grace, of what it means that God has been so very kind to us – so very kind to us in Jesus Christ. God’s kindness toward us cannot ever be overruled. Not by anything or anyone in this world. Meaning, by faith we’ve no cause for being overwhelmed! What if we believed that? believed it heart, mind, soul and strength? Believed that, since God has been so kind to us in Jesus Christ, life is something brand new, where we can do anything on behalf of or in imitation of that kindness and never, ever be afraid? For we’ve nothing in all the world to lose. Nothing worth keeping, anyway. To believe such a thing, it seems to me, is going to take lots of prayer. The kind of prayer in which what we ask for is to see and hear and feel and smell God everywhere. In the joyful and the broken. Paul’s language may be mythical – calling ourselves kings, for heaven's sake! But Jesus is real, friends, isn’t he? Death has been defeated and our destiny has been set down – hasn't it? The last word on this present reality has been spoken, whatever we choose to do. If to our shame we choose to live only unto ourselves, God’s kindness holds. Abomination upon abomination notwithstanding, God’s goodness to us holds. God’s will shall be done, with us or without us. Still, I think, kindness is the better course to take, kindness that stays on the move, grace ever shifting between and among us, rushing to the most broken places like all those healing blood cells to a wound. Only, only, only ever, friends, you sweet friends of Jesus, only once we are ready to believe that Jesus loves each of us here and now, without a single thing about us changed or different, will our hearts finally, rightly break for all the hate and the hurt in this land of ours. Only then will we truly lose our stomach for the hatefulness done to our brothers and our sisters in the name of God. Only then will we rightly raise our voice and find our feet and do as Jesus told us and made us able to do. Suffer the children to come unto me. Let us pray the day comes quickly. My first sermon title for today was “Gracefully Wrong.” Then I came up with sermon #2 with the title “Fantastically Kind.” The CEV uses “undeserved kindness” to translate charis. We have been given the fantastic, undeserved kindness of God. What shall we do with it? That is for sermon #3. You may have grown up in a house like mine, where work came before play; homework and chores before TV; kids old enough to drive are old enough to get a job. I’m an oldest child. If you know much about birth order, you know I took to these notions like a fish to water. I had a paper route from the time I was 12 until I was 15 – The Louisville Courier Journal. Before high school was over I had a résumé that included full-time babysitter, fast-food taco maker, and grocery checker. Until well into adulthood, the best hourly money I ever made was at the hardest work I’d ever done: detasseling seed corn in the Mississippi Delta. Farm work. I got sunburned and mosquito bitten. I learned to watch for snakes curled and sunning on cornstalks. I wanted to quit after the third day. My dad wouldn’t let me. He’d say things like, “So you think you are too good to do farm work? Work is the price we pay for the kind of life we want, and being prepared to work hard is what keeps a person safe and fed and healthy.” Are those things true? Sometimes. Not for everyone, everywhere. And he was altogether right in the ways he meant to be. But I overlearned. I let his good lesson on temporal things infect my understanding of all things, including faith. The lesson that we must earn everything we have isn’t useful in matters of faith. When it comes to faith, it’s worse than un-useful. It can be sinister, actually. There is such a thing as sinister theology. We know Paul is trying to lay a new foundation of loving, full inclusiveness in the church. But before he can do that, he had to rip up an old one that is already deeply rooted, that was religious for some (Jews) and is culture today for others (Americans). And the one footer of that foundation of deeply-rooted segregation and prejudice is this notion that the undeserved kindness of God, delivered to us in Jesus Christ, is something we deserve, something we can earn. Once upon a time I coveted having my own Le Creuset cookware. Purple Le Creuset. Every now and then I’d see it at Goods for Cooks and just sigh. It’s obscenely expensive, so I never got any. Then, one day in 2010 a woman I didn’t know e-mailed me and asked me to call her. I thought it must be a scam, but I did anyway. She told me a story. Her company was trying to clear old claims and she’d tracked down my e-mail. Because in 1953 my grandmother had bought a $1000 life insurance policy on my mother who was 18 years old. And single. And pregnant. My grandmother made herself the beneficiary. My grandmother is a story in herself. I’m sure she never told my mother this. 57 years later, I got a check that I cut into four. My siblings and I received an undeserved kind- ness from my grandmother and the Slovene National Benefits company of $460 – with which I bought two pieces of purple Le Creuset. My son uses the dutch-oven nearly every time he cooks. Amazing story, right? Now, suppose instead of using it, I put that cookware in my garage, unopened? That I read about it every day and sang songs about it once a week? That I prayed God would see me fit to use it someday? You’d probably call me crazy, eh? But bring that crazy to church, and we call it – what? Faith. Discipleship. Are you with me, friends? I cannot tell you how many blocks I’ve been around trying to figure out what to preach. This is all I have. Paul says we have already been made acceptable to God, and now, because of Jesus Christ, we live at peace with God. Until we get that, friends, about ourselves, no wonder we cannot open our hearts and lives to others. Either we live our life as this world describes – something to be pursued and earned – or we live the lives God has given us, fully, down to our toes, accepted, and at peace with God forever. My new favorite song this week is called “Too Good.” It says, It may be too good to be understood, But it’s not too good to be true. It’s not too good to be true. Would you pray with me? I had imagined bringing you some impressions from the CBF meetings in Birmingham, but I am going to hold them for our church council meeting next weekend, add some video to show you, and hopefully include Jodi and Laura Beth. For now, thanks for your generosity in helping Jodi and Laura Beth to travel as well. We enjoyed the trip and met some really lovely Baptist friends. For now, I want to take just a few minutes’ reflection on Paul’s conversation with the Romans on the nature of faith.
Would you pray with me? We’d rather be good than be patient, O God. We’d rather prove ourselves than believe you love us in our unworthiness. Give us the courage to ease up and let go, and simply trust you when you say you love us as we are. In your name, we pray. If always and consistently keeping the law of God were a real possibility for the lovers of God, there would be no need for faith, Paul says. God might have passed out the homework at Mt. Sinai and then just walked away, trusting Moses and his wagon train of refugees with the whole future of humanity. But God didn’t. God is not naïve, any more than humanity is trustworthy. In Eden humans had just one rule. They broke it. Moses was given ten. They failed at all those too. The Jewish scholars added 613, a hedge around the law to help them not break the bigger ones. Do you know why Jesus was sentenced to 39 lashes? It was because the law calls for 40 lashes and the hedge helps us not break the law. But if you are going to break it, it is better to break the law by doing less (39 lashes) than by doing more than the law calls for (41 or more). When Jesus summed up the 624 rules (Eden’s one plus Moses’ ten plus the 613 in “the hedge”) into just two rules – the ones he told us to remember – Do you remember? Love God with all your heart . . . – we still come up short more often than not. Amen? Interestingly though, in his discussion of the law, Paul doesn’t speak of Moses. Why, do you suppose, Moses is not ever presented in the text as the father of us all? That title is Abraham’s. Father of us all, a blessing, a light to all the nations back in Genesis chapters 12 and 17. Abraham had neither law nor Torah. All he had was – what? A promise. A promise of another homeland. He had a perfectly good homeland already, the land of Ur sitting on oil reserves to last a thousand years. The land of Ur in Abraham’s time is modern day Iraq. God promised and by faith Abraham obeyed. Picked up and moved everything he owned to the only scrap of land in all the Middle East with not a drop of oil below the dirt. Can you imagine how modern history would be different, if the Jewish promised land had been the land of Ur? Another rabbit for another day. The promise to Abraham was two-part: a homeland for his people, and people to become his people. As many as there are stars in the sky, God told Abraham. Children? Yes. And nations too. Remember nations – ethnee? Ethnicities, races, foreigners, gentiles. At the time the promise was given – here we come round again to Paul – Abraham himself was a gentile, uncircumcised. His name wasn’t even Abraham. Just Abram. Why all this explanation of Abraham, the one the early church called a friend of God (we know that from the apostle James)? Because the best rule followers among us can’t keep all the rules. We just can’t. And Paul knows the church needs to take this in, that faith always, always comes before law. Just as Abraham comes before Moses. Those of us who love the rules for the order and the structure and clarity we believe the rules convey not only cannot keep the rules; we can’t make rules fast enough to keep up with the chaos humanity is constantly conceiving. And yet, for some of us, our love of the rules is not swayed. Their presence comforts us: on paper; on stone in courthouse lawns; in the voices preaching their necessity and promising their enforcement. Amen? Paul does not say, Amen. Paul says, Faith. Whatever comfort and security, whatever hope and peace this world allows, whatever justice (also called righteousness) is available to God’s people is gained not by our success at keeping or enforcing rules, but by our acceptance of the same faith he offered Abram. Accepted not as wages paid to a worker, but as a gift given to the one who God has decided deserves it, whom God has called righteous. For no other reason than God wanted to. And see, there is the reason against which there is no argument. God wanted to. God can’t give us faith and walk away, of course. Faith is to our believing as air is to our breathing. Faith comes daily from God, if not every hour or moment. And faith has no other source, much as we might wish it so. We can’t earn it. We can’t buy it ahead, like groceries every Saturday. Faith comes new each day and only ever to the ones who show up to receive it, of course, willing to treat whatever is given as if it is enough. Because it is enough. It is enough, because God has deemed it enough. Actually, on their first date, it wasn’t Abram who showed up, but God. Dressed up like angels, just to emphasize the point that Abram truly did nothing to earn this gift of God. He was just home, watching Netflix, or whatever one did in the land of Ur 4000 years ago. I personally still like my plan better. Do you remember green stamps? My mother collected them, when she bought groceries and gas and things. She let me lick and stick them in those little books. We’d get about 100 filled and then go get a free toaster. It would be awesome to fill up little books of faith stickers to turn in for something useful – a healing maybe. Or some extra courage. Then we’d always know how much faith we had in the bank. But there is no faith bank. That’s not how God wants it, apparently. Not with Abraham, the friend of God. Or Jacob. Or Moses. Or Naomi or David or Daniel. Or all those prophets. Or Mary or John or Jesus or Paul. Or any of the thousands of other friends of God, who discovered what is always true between good friends: the very friendship itself is made of the faith God gives and the friends gratefully receive, day by day by day. Would you pray with me? Let’s pray . . . that our own little lives and our life together will be conformed to your law, O God. May this be our highest hope. For each of us to love you with our whole heart, with all our mind, all our strength and all our soul, to love each and every neighbor as we ourselves are loved by you. Amen.
Since there is only one God, he accepts Gentiles as well as Jews, simply because of their faith, says the Apostle Paul. Gentiles plus Jews equal the whole world. We divide the world differently – into Gentiles we like and Gentiles we don’t. God is God of Gentiles we don’t like and loves them like God loves us. They are our brothers and sisters, since God is one. We’ve agreed we’re monotheists, the Trinity notwithstanding. Maybe we aren’t as committed to all being included as we are to monotheism, as committed to one body as to one God – as if they are different. That God is one is not the problem, is it? It’s the “God is the same God of us all” part, the “God is the same God TO us all” part that has Paul’s readers up in arms, then and since. Now included. In March it was the Methodists getting all the press, remember? In June, Baptists take our turn. I expect you’ve seen the news this week that the SBC voted not to recognize the term gay Christian in reference to persons or groups – lest they fail to call a sin a sin. They’d have gotten better coverage were it not for a Baptist preacher in Tennessee. His shenanigans don’t bear repeating here. Honestly, friends, I’m with you in the horror and frustration. But when I can generate a sliver of compassion, my best guess is that he was terribly mistreated once upon a time. Such hate generally comes from deeply wounded souls, such venom from a soul begging not to be hurt again, a soul that may believe he is protecting others. Here’s the thing: God does not protect us by attacking us nor abandoning us, but by loving us and joining us where we are in this life. Including us in God’s oneness. Besides – unto what could God abandon us, if all that is, was made by God? is sustained by God? To whom or where can anyone be banished ever, if God is everywhere, if God is all that is? We’ve already agreed on that, remember? I will never leave you orphaned, Jesus said. Did he mean it is impossible? Around and around I go with these thoughts. They are my lens upon scriptures. Then we come to Romans – and Paul. Telling Jews they will not escape this brotherhood of theirs. This sisterhood. If there is only God and God is all there is, they are ALL my brothers and my sisters. We are made of the same stuff; your life, my life, our lives – atoms of the same living universe, just housed in different skins. Life made from the breath of God, conformed to God’s own image somehow. LeBron James and me: same stuff (go figure) which is the life which is God. The heart is a poor sermon writer, where sentences run on and statements read like questions when they are not. Truth is what I’m casting for – and catching very little. Yet gospel truth will not be grasped by my brain or yours. Nor faith. Faith doesn’t come to us intellectually. Faith lives on the ground in our hands and feet and mouths, in what we do, what we say, with these bodies – these lives – of ours. Paul preached to congregations not unlike us gathered here. Folks who worked and raised kids and fretted about the bills. Who believed in Jesus and wanted to be faithful – but had no small bit to learn about how. The gospel of Jesus Christ is how, Paul said. This is the entire syllabus. What measure of the gospel comes to life in and through the church is the measure of your faithfulness. The salvation of the whole world in the death and resurrection of Jesus – those are the words. The resurrected Jesus in the world today – that’s you. And you. And us together as we live it, those same gospel words now brought to life, measured in our unity – our conformity – to the love he’s given us, doled out to one another and our neighbors. Not in the flash and awe of programs, but in our contact with other human beings, however subtle and small the appearance. Popsicles and peanut butter sandwiches, for example; a whole building that smells like sweaty kids. Paul’s first reading congregation struggled to believe he meant them to love each other like family. Business partners, maybe. Acquaintances, okay. But family? Yes, family. Since God is one, there are no other parents. God is all any of us have, making us all kin, whatever else feels true, however much we don’t like it. Here we are, Rainbow Baptists sitting down with the ones from Tennessee, and we’ll do as we’ve been told or not. But the measure of our obedience will be the gospel serving that the world receives from us. Paul – crazy Paul – got saved, rescued like a swimmer drowning in devotion to a truth he did not understand. One God could have just one people, he was told. That part he got right. Your people are that people was the part his people mistook, the part he got saved from, then told to go save others. Since God is One and God only has one people, all people are God’s, Paul said, about a million times – a good lot of them in a letter to the Romans. In chapter 3, verse 21, he gets down to business, the Jesus part of his story. He’ll really pull it apart starting in chapter 9. For now, he simply says again: does God belong to you folks on the right? oh yes? How about you over on the left? Yep, you too. Does that mean everything you learned before about kindness, justice, and humility doesn’t mean a thing? For heaven’s sakes, no. Now it means more than ever. Would you pray with me, friends? One problem with Easter being late is how it bumps Pentecost into Bible School, leaving preachers like me in a bind about how to plan the service. The last two weeks of my online clergy groups have been all about how to incorporate the tongues of fire into our worship spaces. Now I get to post a picture that says, all you need are three sheets of styrofoam, ten cans of free paint and Susanne Parker.
Most of you will spend something like fifteen more hours here this week, so I want to be brief this morning. Brief, yet focused enough on Romans again to hear Paul echo the message of Pentecost, our oneness in Christ, our sameness. Not only that we are each just like the other, but that we are of the same one Spirit, a distinction that means more to me the more I contemplate it – and truthfully, the more I read the Eastern mystics, who have language for it that we don’t. More on that another time. Let’s talk a minute about the church at Rome in the time of Paul. I doubt emperors are much different than kings and presidents, as it has to do with their own popularity. The further they fall out of favor with their people, the more prone they are to find a scapegoat to blame and deflect attention. According to some accounts, in the late 00’s - 40’s CE, Jewish riots in Rome were causing such disorder and turmoil, Emperor Claudius felt he had no choice but to expel the lot of them from the city. They’d been expelled from Rome before, in 139 BCE and again in 19 CE. Why this time, you ask – food shortages? Pogroms? Supposedly they were in the streets about whether Jewish followers of the Christos should be allowed to worship in synagogues. Now does that sound right to you? Because that doesn’t sound right to me. Not that some might not have been upset about that? Arguing even. But rioting? Really? What do Christians get excited enough to protest about today? Abortion is the only one I can think of, that Christians don’t share with non-believers, that Christians are willing to go to jail for. However many Jews there were in Rome – a few thousand maybe? – realistically, how many were believers in Jesus? One hundred? Two hundred? Claudius needed someone to blame, and Jews have been the doormat of history forever – so he chose them, and they were gone. Gone for five years, until Claudius died and the new emperor took the throne. His name was Nero. What do you know of him? If those Jewish Christians had had any idea what Emperor Nero had planned for them, they’d have certainly stayed away. But they didn’t, so they didn’t. The Jews returned in 54 CE, and the Christian ones found a church that had moved out of the synagogue, was worshipping on Sundays and being led by Gentiles – Gentiles who didn’t agree that just because their Jewish brothers were back, church life had to rewind by five years. They struggled to figure out how to worship and work together. Gentiles believed they could lead as well as Jews. Jews felt pushed out by their church brothers/sisters, the same way they were pushed out by the Romans. You’ve no doubt read about the adjustment it was between men and women after WWII, the assumptions people made about men going back to work and women going back to homemaking and mothering. Men came home from the military and took over the jobs women had been doing for four years. (I read a similar article about the Civil War. For all the horror of it, women got a reprieve from childbirth, four whole years of not being pregnant.) Three years of the struggle goes by when the church in Rome receives a letter from Paul. It is hand-delivered by a woman named Phoebe, Paul’s partner in ministry, his agent, the one who speaks for him in his absence. Do you see how the delivery of the letter conveys the message of the letter? She arrives in his place. She reads the text. She explains the text. No doubt at the end they told her they really liked her dress. She is not simply a FedEx carrier. She is cantor, rabbi, preacher, and pastor. If they told her they liked her dress, it was only because they didn’t yet know how to address her as rabbi and preacher. It’s not clear if they recognized her as Paul’s administrator. And, we will learn, she is an administrator. The message she preaches in Rome is theologically true. It is also organizationally expedient. Both are Phoebe’s job. Paul believes his work in the east is done. He wants to open a new work in Spain. The only established churches from which to launch such a mission are in Rome. Egypt is getting started, thanks to the Apostle Mark, but is much too far from Spain. Carthage, in Tunisia, is much closer but still 100 years from having established churches. Paul needs the Roman church strong, and while the church since then has not always taken his advice, he chose solid theology as the source of that strength. Only insofar as you work out the trouble between you, will the gospel of God be evident in you. If you are not one in spirit, you bear no light to the One Spirit who is God, Creator, Savior, Sustainer of all that lives and breathes. Again, again, again, and yet again, Paul will speak of the righteousness of God: entrusted to Israel; for the benefit of the whole world. The way some parents take the money they earn and set up a trust for their children – the money belongs to the parents, but is not for their use only; it is for the benefit of those who come after. As Paul says in Romans 3:2-3 (slightly paraphrased): The Jews were entrusted with the scriptures. Because some were unfaithful with them does not nullify the faithfulness of God! Paul’s point being that the righteousness of God entrusted to Israel extended to the Gentiles from the beginning. And that righteousness, remember, is reflected everywhere in creation – most of all in relationships. Our relationship with each other, our relationship with creation, is right, is justified, when that relationship lines up with or is inside the margins of (justified margins, same idea) the righteous-ness or the right-ness or the justice of God. Our right relationships reflect, reveal, repeat, reproduce the righteousness of God. Thus, Paul’s prescription for the church: we are to love each other the way God loved us in Christ Jesus. As it has to do with this text, love them even if they don’t deserve it – since none of us deserved to be loved by God, and God loved us anyway. Hopefully our first two weeks in Romans have you reflecting on your prejudices, maybe discovering some new ones you weren’t previously aware of. I’ve realized how really prejudiced I am toward people I consider prejudiced. When I get going I’m amazed at how judgy my thoughts can be. Also, toward people who carry guns in ordinary places. The smugness in my heart and mind probably makes Jesus want to drink gin from a cat dish. (I’m borrowing this expression from Anne Lamott – from Traveling Mercies, I think.) Yet, Paul’s message can’t get through the doors – of our hearts or the church – until we’ve embraced our own depravity. Critical to these prejudices of ours is our confidence in our sense of difference. We’re too polite a people to say out loud that we believe we are better than others. When church folks say, there but for the grace of God go I, what are we saying? That could be me. But in my secret heart, I for one am also saying, thank God that isn’t me! We are grateful to be different! The difference is what matters to us! When I was in seminary around 1990, my teacher, Molly Marshall, was the first woman theology professor to be granted tenure at a Baptist school. A reporter from a Baptist publication asked her if she believed in the depravity of men. She answered, “Oh yes. And the depravity of some women.” She was joking to call out his sexist language – but inside is the reminder, We are a depraved species through and through. We act out that depravity every time we rebel against the righteousness of God, the rightness, the justice, of God. The whole system operates, is driven, by divine love. Love is the energy, the very air and light and water, of all that is. All we have to do to rebel against it is be unloving – in thought or word or deed, anecdotally or systematically. Creation’s not undone, of course. We are. We have thrown ourselves on the floor like a screaming toddler, maybe even broken things, or hurt something living, for the hope of being where no one of us can ever be: beyond the love, beyond the righteousness of God. God is always in place. Grace, salvation, gospel, goodness, love – all are always in place. Depraved means corrupted. Depravity is love corrupted. It’s a sorry choice in a situation so filled with possibility. But until we get clear on where we stand, each of us and all of us together, we will never appreciate what God has done for us. Which is what Paul talks about next. I hope to, with you, when we look at it. In preaching Romans, the idea is to bring you and me into awareness of our sameness to the church to whom Paul wrote. To us, “normal” means white, Christian, unquestioning our assumptions about everything. Part of childhood for me was the assumption that kids were a special class in that, even in really scary places like Vietnam, kids were safe. No one ever said this, it was just one of those things I figured out. I was always figuring things out when I was little. I am struggling to find the language for this, found only in socio-political-economic – not theological – writing. Yet it is here – in Romans. Wrapped in some ancient culture bindings. I beg your patience and your feedback as we proceed together.
Literally no one in Bedford, Indiana in 1969 would have called my mother a race activist. You remember the song “Jesus loves the little children, All the children of the world, Red and yellow, black and white, They are precious in his sight….” I knew that we were white people. I knew what black people were, because I'd seen them on TV. But I couldn't figure out red and yellow. So I asked my mother. But she would not say red people are the Indians and yellow people are Chinese. (“Chinese” meant Asian. Oriental actually.) I don't remember what she said, exactly, only that afterward I still didn't know who the red and yellow ones were. It was probably something like, “Oh Annie, it’s just a Sunday School song about how Jesus loves all kids the same. Now go play.” From which I gathered in my child brain that kids were all safe. Nothing bad happened to kids. Colors aren’t people, except in our language. And yet, the colors we assign to people have everything to do with what happens to them. May was a bad month to be a brown kid in U.S. custody. Another brown kid died in a detention camp at the border. A brown kid died in a motel on Walnut Street this past week, of starvation. He weighed 50 pounds. Nobody in this town had eyes on that little boy until he was dead. His siblings are now with strangers and his parents are in jail. It is truly offensive to hear kids referred to by color. And yet, color is the religious language chosen by our culture to speak of the universal love of God. The revision of the song goes how? “Jesus loves the little children, All the children of the world. Every color, Every race, all are covered by His grace.” I hope you are not sick of coming to church and hearing about race. Friends, we haven't even gotten started. Race is going to be nipping our heels every step we take through the book of Romans. The white American church got away with 400 years of not talking about it. But not on my watch, tiny as my watch is. What's amazing is that the white American church has gotten away with ignoring race while preaching and reading a text positively soaked in it. To say we don't see race is to say we have not read our Bibles. That does not have to be. I have a clergy friend who was horsing around at church youth group when she was a young teenager. Some boys were chasing her and she ran through a plate glass window. Her legs and arms and face got the worst of it. She had hours and hours of surgery. Hundreds of stitches. She's older than me, and still sometimes a splinter of glass will work its way through the surface of her skin. Race is likewise embedded in us, in our life together. It might work its own way out; but we must do the surgery, in our lives together as a church and as a country. We will, as Paul says in Romans 2 verse 12, perish; cease to be a church; cease to be a nation. We may still breathe, of course, but breathe some other kind of air – the air tinged with the wrath of God poured down on the people of whom God has finally had enough. By the way, I didn't have a bad week. I'm not in a bad mood. It is just that my assignment is this “Wrath of God” text in Romans and I have declined skipping it, while not knowing how to preach it. God loves us, and we don't need a book of laws to know so, Paul says in Romans 1:20 (CEV): God’s eternal power and character cannot be seen. But from the beginning of creation, God has shown what these are like by all he has made. That’s why those people don’t have any excuse. They know about God, but they don’t honor him or even thank him. Their thoughts are useless, and their stupid minds are in the dark. They claim to be wise, but they are fools. The other side of divine love is wrath – divine hatred. It's hard to hear. Not fun to say either. But what does it mean to say “God loves us,” if God doesn't care what happens to us? I have to believe God hates children being murdered – by fathers and by prison guards. If God doesn't hate the evil that happens to children, what trust do I have in God's love for me and mine? Maybe God is only disappointed. Whatever. I want a little more than that. I want the power of God exercised in love AGAINST child suffering to be as huge and overwhelming as God's love displayed in a rainbow or a waterfall. I want God to sigh with the same satisfaction when kids are well and happy as God sighed at the end of each day of creation. Creation as it was meant to be: rainbows, waterfalls and safe kids. Creation right and just, except for where we've wrecked it, sinned against creation, sinned against the creator, invoked the wrath of God. Beginning in Romans 1:18, Paul goes on a two-chapter explanation of why we all deserve to perish. Early on he mentions homosexual acts by men and women. Paul was not a fan of what he saw in his day. Nor would I have been. Sex for sex's sake, no matter who you're with, is not what it's meant for. Sex nourishes a relationship the way food nourishes the body. Both are gifts of God easily abused. He called it unnatural, though. He did. You know what else was unnatural then? Bathing regularly. Shaving your legs and armpits. Living past age 45. I don't want to skip this or get hung up here either. Just to point out, again, that the two verses that mention sex are in no bigger font than the five in which he lists all sorts of indecent things people do. Romans 1:29-32: They are evil, wicked, and greedy, as well as mean in every possible way. They want what others have, and they murder, argue, cheat, and are hard to get along with. They gossip, say cruel things about others, and hate God. They are proud, conceited, and boastful, always thinking up new ways to do evil. These people don’t respect their parents. They are stupid, unreliable, and don’t have any love or pity for others. They know God has said that anyone who acts this way deserves to die. But they keep on doing evil things, and they even encourage others to do them. That's page one of Paul's case for the wrath of God, all of which his audience probably appreciated, assuming Paul was talking about the same sorry folks they knew in their town too. They weren't wrong – just thinking too small. They assumed Paul was ONLY talking about their neighbors. Verse 12, where Greg began reading, continues the same thread begun in verse 1 of chapter 2: the hypocrisy of religious people. (Paul calls them Jews, which for us is both religious, nationalist, and ethnic. In application to ourselves and our own prejudices, this is why I keep calling us white, American Christians.) All these first eleven verses are so good, especially in the Contemporary English Translation – I really want you to hear them: Some of you accuse others of doing wrong. But there is no excuse for what you do. When you judge others, you condemn yourselves, because you are guilty of doing the very same things. We know that God is right to judge everyone who behaves in this way. Do you really think God won’t punish you, when you behave exactly like the people you accuse? You surely don’t think much of God’s wonderful goodness or of his patience and willingness to put up with you. Don’t you know that the reason God is good to you is because he wants you to turn to him? But you are stubborn and refuse to turn to God. So you are making things even worse for yourselves on that day when he will show how angry he is and will judge the world with fairness. God will reward each of us for what we have done. He will give eternal life to everyone who has patiently done what is good in the hope of receiving glory, honor, and life that lasts forever. But he will show how angry and furious he can be with every selfish person who rejects the truth and wants to do evil. All who are wicked will be punished with trouble and suffering. It doesn’t matter if they are white- American-Christians – or not. But all who do right will be rewarded with glory, honor, and peace, whether they are white-American-Christians – or not. God doesn’t have any favorites! Don't you love that? I love that! But I also know it got those folks' backs up, the same way our backs go up when we feel put on the spot for what is true about us but doesn't seem like it should be our fault. Was it those religious peoples' fault their religion had taught them to be so prejudiced? If we decide No, what does that matter? If we decide Yes, what does THAT matter? What matters NOW is will we do right, now that we know what IS right? Which is the heart of today's text: Gentiles who don't have the law (by “law” Paul is talking about Torah, five books of the 1st Testament) and yet are able to keep the law – the heart of it, the justice of it – while Jews who have the law (the books themselves, read and taught) do not keep it. Having – or sometimes Paul will say knowing the law – is neither here nor there; does not please God; does not make one right with God. There's that word “righteousness,” which is also justice. Knowing the law does not put us right with creation which, by design, is just. Brand new thoughts are hard, friends. Believing all your life that the world is one way and then discovering it is another – whew, that's really hard. It will get up inside every part of reality and probably never stop infiltrating. That's me when I realized how steeped in racist thinking, feeling, seeing, talking, believing I am. How the privilege that was once invisible to me is absolutely everywhere – in every word I speak from this pulpit, and the way we've read the Bible, just as Paul's Jewish contemporaries had read their Bible – even the ones who'd come to know Jesus – in such a way that reinforces our own worldview, in which we are not extremely privileged but, rather, extremely blessed. And the rub of the entire letter to the Romans is, y’all are gonna have to get over that. In verses 17-24, Paul expounds upon his brothers' and sisters' hypocrisy. The very things they preach ought not to be done are the very things they themselves do. Some things never change apparently. And in verse 25 he opens the topic of circumcision – a continuing argument in Paul's ministry, a particular point of the Law which some of his Jewish believers get especially wound up about. No more than half, of course. You get the joke, right? The circumcision argument is a joke in the way it's supposed to be about inclusion and yet excludes half the people concerned. Must Gentile men become Jewish in order to become Christian? Must gay people become straight to be Christian? Must non-western Christians dress like Westerners for church in their own countries? These have been real questions since the time when Paul wrote to the Romans. Two modern cases: The Claxons, Southern Baptist missionaries who were members here some years ago, told me about the conversations they had in the 1950's in Nigeria, when African families joined their churches and women wore skirts and necklaces and headscarves. Of course, ALL the American male ministers wished the women would also wear blouses. Some insisted that it was the Christian thing to do. Others, Neville included, were reluctant to insist – feeling like insisting on a blouse was the same as insisting on circumcision. However, some of the people they served circumcised little girls – also a cultural tradition. The missionaries also thought this through and decided they would interfere, as respectfully as they could, but with the mission of ending the practice. Emma told me it was very slow and difficult work. Do you see how followers of Jesus might come to the two conclusions that welcoming topless women to church AND interfering in a child-rearing practice are both exercises in equality among believers? Where the Bible says nothing about either, specifically? Each generation and location of the church will have its own set of conditions in which to work out Paul's teaching. Our ancestors in the faith can be helpful. Some of them in what NOT to do, others in what TO do. Always, always, always – we are squeezing and tweezing at the privilege and prejudice embedded within us and among us, resisting the gravitational pull to pretend we are fine. The end of verse 16 slays me. Here's 15 and 16 (NRSV): They who have no religion show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them on the day when, according to my gospel, God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thoughts of all. We can pretend as much as we need. We may fool others. We may fool ourselves. But the Lord knows exactly what's going on in here (heart) and here (head). God knows that we know what God requires of us. And if we could only see that doing what the Lord requires of us is THE answer to absolutely everything that is wrong in the world…. The law, as Jesus said it in Luke 10:27: “Love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind – and love your neighbor as yourself.” And my favorite, Micah 6:8. “The Lord has shown you, you humans, what is expected of you: to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with God.” No doubt it is a lot. No doubt the world won't care. But I still believe it is everything, friends. Positively everything. Would you pray with me? It is wonderful to be back. Many thanks to Deborah for filling the pulpit while I was away, listening to lots of preachers preach about preaching as moral imagination. Which “sap to syrup” boils down to telling the truth in a culture that no longer even pretends to value the truth. The gospel truth is what we tell: Jesus lived and died and rose, once and for all people – God's act in Jesus Christ, making plain what had always been true. Not politically true, but cosmically, divinely true: all persons are equal before God.
We know it and believe we believe it. However, we eat and sleep and breathe and read and think and work and walk around in a culture hell-bent to convince us otherwise. And by “us” I mean white Christian people. We aren’t much in touch with our own prejudices, keeping them fairly neatly tucked away, mostly from ourselves. Every time Paul writes in Romans first to the Jews and then the Gentiles, remember we're the Jews – the ones convinced that we are more right than whoever we think isn’t right; and very often, it is our faith or our theology telling us we are right. Just to open ourselves up a little more to the book of Romans, I want us to do a little meditation exercise. Ask yourselves – just to yourselves in your own hearts and minds – “who are the people I find most difficult to approach joyfully? gladly? From whom would I least like to hear opinions? With whom would I find it really challenging to plan a worship service? lead a Bible study? Who would I very much not like to go to church with? to sit next to in this worship service? to share table with on Wednesday night?” It might be someone specific – a personality that annoys you. It might be a people group – their moral choices are hard for you. Maybe it's their politics – but you do best when you can be apart from them. These are prejudices, friends – regard for other human beings on the basis of something other than their humanity. One of the privileges of the dominant group in any culture is that our prejudices don’t sound like prejudices. They sound like shared values. We may not believe some Nazis are good people or that black people aren't mistreated. But we do abide some degree of white supremacy, don't we? We abide the safety and the freedom and the opportunity white supremacy affords us. We abide the privilege that white supremacy affords our children. Privilege that will muzzle the gospel of Jesus Christ sometimes. Or distort it to our advantage, even. Interestingly, however, no one I heard at the Festival of Homiletics preached from Paul. Interesting in that it was moral imagination that drove his preaching. A devout Jew who met the Risen Christ and realized the “truth” about God he'd always known – wasn't. And you know what that is called? That's called conversion. Trading of what we in good faith believed to be true for what we learn is true, when new information and experience shows our hearts and minds so. And then changing our lives accordingly. But – there is much trouble with conversion. It doesn't stay put. Jesus is alive. And we are ignorant. And fearful. And we learn slowly. This is as good a place as any to stop and pray: That we might find our heart and lives' true home in you, O God, so that the truth spills from us without hesitation; that we might pray to know the truth and live like people who have prayed that prayer, with nothing to fear, nothing to protect, we pray now. Amen. So, Romans. The book is called Romans because it a letter written to the church at Rome. The next book is 1 and 2 Corinthians, called that because it is a letter written to the church at Corinth. Why is Romans before Corinthians? It's longer. Why is Corinthians before Galatians? It's longer. Paul wrote Romans from the city of Corinth, around 58 C.E. He had never visited the church in Rome. Church history has no record of how a church came to be there. The first seventeen verses of chapter one are the abstract of Paul's letter. He introduces himself as he wants to be known. He outlines his topics. He makes every effort to connect with them personally. Verse 1: Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God. Most English translations say “servant.” “Slave” is better. “Bondsman” or “bondservant” is best. Except “bondsman” means something different in English. A bondservant was an indentured slave who had paid their debt and was free, but instead of setting off on their own, asked to remain with the master – to trade obedience and labor for the master's care and protection, thus binding themselves to the master for a lifetime. Today we call this student debt. As a sign of the bond, they went to a priest, who stood the bondservant against a doorway and drilled an awl through the earlobe of the freed person, marking them as a bondservant. I am a bondservant of Jesus Christ, Paul says. I was free; now I belong entirely to him, called to be an apostle – his apostleship is a sore spot between Paul and the other apostles, to which we will get in later weeks – set apart for the gospel of God. The rest of verses 2, 3 and 4 are a brief summary of the gospel. But this word for the “set apart” phrase is what interests me most here. The Greek word is aphorizo, most literally “off horizon.” Who is off horizon? Someone on a different planet – right? – who sees the world from an entirely different perspective. People who look and see what everyone cannot. Having met the Risen Christ, Paul sees what he could not see before. Which links directly to verse three. Listen to me – this is so important in Romans. The things Paul could suddenly see that he couldn't see were two things, the two themes of this letter noted here in verses 3-5: the equality of Jews and Gentiles before God in Christ Jesus. Technically “every Jew and Gentile” counts as every human being, right? He could see the equality of all people before God in Christ Jesus. But he could also see – this is verse 3 – listen – listen – listen, that this equality before God was NOT NEW in Christ Jesus. Not for those who had been reading the prophets. Not for those who called Abraham their father. Not for Jews like himself. For them, the equality of all people before God had always been true. Verse 3 goes like this: the gospel which God promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures. I do wonder which truth blew Paul's socks off more? They are really one and the same. But it was only for one he was beaten and stoned and thrown into jail most times. Telling them they were wrong is what drove his Jewish brothers to violence. Can you imagine the audacity of suggesting that a 2,000-year-old faith system might have missed something? Something critical? That such a religion, even in good faith, might actually have maintained theology and practice that were racist? Or sexist? Or nationalistic? Exclusionary? And then used the holy scriptures as defense of such practice and theology? (This is supposed to make you laugh, in that grimacing kind of way.) In verses 5-6, Paul describes his ministry intention for coming to visit them: to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, 6 including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ. To preach the gospel to the Gentiles and to you. They can't say he didn't warn them. It will be a protracted argument throughout the letter, no doubt written not only for the believers in Rome but for those across all the churches he has preached. Romans – the scripture Paul didn't have, setting forth the gospel of God revealed to him by the Holy Spirit; received and sifted through his imagination and his years of obedience to it; heard and received in some places more warmly than others; heavily doctored in some places more than others. If only he'd had some scripture to point to and say, see, it says right here. What he did have was a Holy-Spirit-driven hunch that made him brave and made other people think he was nuts – the Holy-Spirit-driven hunch that drove him back and forth across the Mediterranean, leaving Asia Minor and Greece speckled with churches. The same Holy-Spirit-driven hunch drove him to compose most of the New Testament. Yet another 2000 years has gone by now, and I suspect most folks outside the church would scoff if we told them basic human equality is the very subtext of the New Testament. What do you suppose folks who consider themselves “churched” might say? Out loud I suspect they'd say, “Of course. Anyone can be a Christian.” Not untrue. Nor what Paul hoped we'd learn, it seems to me. Jew and Gentile are ethnicities, friends. Consider your list of prejudices. I suspect they are NOT fixed, in that those people could be more like you wish they were if they tried. All these traits are traits, fixed or fluid, mixed, chosen or assigned: sexuality; the amount of melanin in one's pigment; being a dork, as we've talked about before. These things are accessories. They carry no weight in our relationship with God. Only humanness itself has matter. If we could only imagine such a way of faith, such a way of life. Yet, we are blind. We are blind to our blindness. In his book Falling Upward, Richard Rohr writes, “Nothing can be called sacred that does not include everyone.” I had to put the book down and breathe for a minute when I read that. And try to remember anything I'd ever attended in a church that, by his definition, could be called sacred. I got a little sad and decided Richard Rohr had to be wrong. Then I remembered Richard Rohr is never wrong, and I got a little more sad because I couldn’t remember anything. So – what is sacred, then? Nature is the most sacred experience, I decided. Nature doesn't care if a person is rich or kind or pretty or cheerful. The sun will shine and birds will sing for anyone. And golden retrievers – they don't care who pets them. They'll go home with anyone who even looks their way and has a couch. The fact is, friends, church has missed some really important truth. It's hard to know. And absolutely necessary, if we hope to be found faithful. And we do, don't we? Don't we? We aren't just playing here, are we? More than ever, friends, I believe the only hope this world has is the righteousness of God woven into the fiber of creation. The other translation for righteousness is – what? Justice. The rightness of God and the justice of God are the same thing. Nature knows. Left to herself, nature functions rightly. Humans? We could. We can, if we ever choose to function as we were meant to, as Paul describes in verses 16-17, the end of the beginning of his letter to the church at Rome – and to us, of course. 16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.” Would you pray with me? |
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