Speaker 1: Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad you're here and we hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2: My name is Jeremy. I'm part of the team here at commons. And thank you for joining us with this, or in this season that we call Eastertide. We know that it is now two weeks since Easter. But as we talked about last week, the wisdom of the tradition is that we would celebrate resurrection for an entire season, not just one Sunday.
And so Eastertide is the fifty day period that follows Easter, and our goal is to remind ourselves that we now live in the light of resurrection, that God is at work to renew all things. Now, part of the beauty of this Christian liturgical calendar is how it flows from one season to the next season, and it links our experience of the world into the story and life of Jesus. And so even as we are celebrating Eastertide and resurrection right now, we are also at the beginning stage of the cycle that will bring us back to Easter next year. And so we shared this on social media this week, but after Easter was done, we took the palms from Palm Sunday, the palms that the children had carried into the room and that many of us folded into crosses, and we saved them. And as they withered and dried over the course of the last couple weeks, we actually took them, we burned them, we took the ashes, and we sifted them.
And then those are the ashes that we will mark ourselves with next Ash Wednesday as we begin the movement towards Easter again. And so in this way, we remind ourselves that until the final renewal of all things, we are perpetually in a cycle of dying and rising and experiencing the story of Jesus in our lives. And so, Ysin, as we are moving into a new series today, and we return to the book of Romans to pick up where we left off last week, at the same time, we recognize the depth and the beauty of this Christian liturgical calendar and how it invites us to embody ourselves in this story of Jesus year round. Life is not one note. There's ups and downs, and there's ebbs and flows.
And the Christian calendar is part of what helps us to remember and celebrate that rhythm in our lives. So it is Eastertide now, and it's time to celebrate. And so before we dive into Romans, let me begin by reading an Eastertide invocation. The strife is over, the battle done. Now the victors triumph won.
Oh, let the song of praise be sung. Alleluia. The three sad days have quickly sped. He raises glorious from the dead. All glory to our risen head.
Hallelujah. The Lord is risen. He is risen indeed. Let's pray. Our God and Father, we pause as we begin today to welcome your spirit into our conversation this morning.
That you might take words written thousands of years ago, words that have been debated and dissected and scrutinized for millennia, and you might help them come alive for us again today. Not simply as they were so many years ago, but as they are now, as they speak and interact with our world and our lives in this moment. May we come to see that these words we read point us to your word, your son who came and lived and died and lived again. Your son who is the only perfect image of the divine and who invites us even now to move towards him. And so as we do, God, we pray that you would help us to see ourselves in the light of your kingdom, that you would help us to see ourselves infused with the purpose and passion that you imagined for us when you created us, that you would help us to know that we are loved by God, and in that, we are called to become your holy people.
In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Alright. We have lots to cover today, and so I have cut all the jokes. We're gonna dive straight in, so bear with me here.
Because last year, we covered Romans one and two. Today, we need to recap that to get our feet under us, because our plan this year, over the next five weeks is to cover chapters three and four in the book of Romans. And our goal is just to do this with a segment every year for however many years it takes us to walk our way through this entire book. However, let's start by rereading the opening of this famous letter to the Christians in Rome. I'm gonna start in chapter one verse one, and I'm gonna read through to chapter seven today.
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God. The gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures regarding his son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and who through the spirit of holiness was appointed the son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead. Jesus Christ, our Lord. Through him, we received grace and apostleship to call all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith for his name's sake. And you also are among those Gentiles who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.
To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be his holy people, grace and peace to you from God our father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, in what we need to do today is recapture some of the big themes in the opening first and second chapter of this book so that we're equipped to dive into chapters three and four in the rest of this series. And to do that, I wanna look at four big ideas today. First, who exactly is this guy Paul who writes this letter and why does that matter? Second, what is this gospel or this good news that Paul talks about?
How does he imagine that? Third, what is the relationship between faith and faithfulness in Paul's mind? And then finally, we need to talk about this language of wrath and judgment that Paul brings in a little later in the opening and what that means for us as we engage with it. So the major themes that set the stage for what's coming, the book of Romans, and that is a lot to cover in one Sunday. I get that.
I know we're gonna move quickly, but, of course, if you are interested in diving deeper, then all of the sermons from last year are available on our podcast feed or our YouTube channel. Feel free to backtrack and listen if you want some more depth on some of these ideas. But first, let's start with this. Who is this Paul? We have two ways we can tackle this.
First, we have the story of Paul in the book of Acts. And then second, we have an introduction that Paul gives us here in the letter to the Romans. Both are important. So let's start with Acts chapter nine. And if you turn there, you'll read, meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples.
You might be saying to yourself, okay. Well, what does that have to do with Paul? But the story here is that our boy Paul starts off as a religious zealot in the pharisaical tradition named Saul. So they are the same guy. And we're introduced to him in acts chapter nine as he is literally going around and persecuting the people of the way as the early followers of Jesus were that when we talk about persecution here, we're not talking about he was mean to them or he made fun of them or he took their lunch money and made fun of them for believing in a giant sky ferry, something like that.
I mean, he was literally overseeing the execution of these Christians on religious grounds. This is a kind of persecution that we really know nothing of in Canada. Now, this is a kind of persecution that many Christians and truthfully, many other religious groups actually still do experience around the world today. But it saddens me when I hear people talk about the persecution of the church in Canada or North America because it's not the same thing. We may not always get what we want, but we diminish the very real sacrifice that many Christians give their lives for in other parts of the world when we talk about us being persecuted for our faith.
We are incredibly blessed here in the West, and we should not forget that just because we want to play at being the victim. That kind of shortsightedness in our language minimizes the suffering that many Christians really do experience around the world, and the suffering that many of us experience here in our lives as well. Now that said, the incredible thing about this story is that while Saul is still out breathing murderous threats against the Lord's disciples, he has an encounter with the risen Christ. Now, in some kind of mystical encounter, from the text, we get the impression he sees Jesus in some kind of a blinding light, but his companions that are with him don't see him. And Jesus speaks to him, and Saul is temporarily blinded by the encounter, but this is enough for him to completely turn his life around.
He goes. He spends time with the other disciples learning from them. He changes his name from Saul to Paul, and he becomes really without much question other than Jesus, the single most important figure in the early church. There are 27 books in our New Testament. 13 of them are attributed to Paul.
So that's almost half of our New Testament that is written in this guy's name. Now, why that's important is because one of the main things that drives Paul and his writing is that he has gone from this fanatical, zealous, Jewish fundamentalist to this transformed Christ focused all in for Jesus disciple. And a big part of what is driving Paul in his writings, particularly in the letter to the Romans, is that he is trying to find a way to understand just how his Jewish tradition and heritage has been pointing to Jesus all along. He's trying to find some way to make sense of everything that he has known and how it points to what he has now experienced in Christ. You can see a bit of this in how he introduces himself in this letter.
Now, Paul planted a bunch of the early churches in the ancient Middle East, but he didn't plant the church in Rome. And so in some sense, the opening of this letter is his first introduction to these people. This is what he says. It's an interesting exercise to think about how you would introduce yourself, but Paul says, I am Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God. Now a little bit neutered in English here because in Greek, this is basically a straightforward list of three things, and those things are Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called apostle, set apart for God.
This is what Paul thinks is important about Paul. And as I said, it's an interesting exercise to think about what you think is important about you. Like, how do you introduce yourself to new people? Do you lead with your job and with your family, with your grand purpose in life? I know it's a little intense to introduce yourself with, hi, I'm Jeremy, and I think I'm put here on this earth to help people rediscover a faith they didn't think they could hold on to in a modern world.
It's a little intense, so I back off from that, but something along those lines. Right? But what you think about you shapes a lot of who you actually become. And for Paul, his identity, his new identity is shaped in a really interesting way. He says he is a slave of Jesus.
So it's not a servant. It's not a follower, not a fan. He is 100% sold out and owned by the story of Jesus. That's what he says. Then he is a called apostle.
This is really significant language in the ancient world. It's like saying you're an ambassador. It's like saying that you speak on behalf of God. Paul says that he is both slave and apostle, and that is meant to be jarring language. It's like saying, I am nothing, and I am everything all at the same time.
This is part of the beauty of being connected to the divine through the story of Jesus. Because you come to realize just how big and beautiful God is, how beyond everything he actually is. And at the same time, you also know that he has created you and has a place for you, that God has infused you with purpose and passion and a part to play in his magnificent story. And so Paul is a slave and apostle all at the same time, but then finally, Paul says this, he is set apart for God's good news. That's our second stop today.
What is this good news with this gospel that Paul imagines here? And this one is important to get right going in because, as I said, one of Paul's main objectives in writing this letter is he's trying to make sense of how the Jewish story leads us into the Jesus story. And one of the things that makes Paul so fascinating is that he will try a lot of different ways to explain the same idea. He's actually a really good teacher that way. Sometimes, one way of talking about something doesn't quite capture all of it, so and you need to come at it from a different angle.
It's actually a very Jewish way of thinking and teaching. But what happens is that often it frustrates people who want to be more scientific and modern. Because it can be really hard to make all of those different angles fit together perfectly. Here's a hint, they don't always fit together perfectly. Because that's not necessarily always the point.
Paul is not a systematic theologian the way we sometimes want him to be. He is a Jewish teacher and a Jewish thinker who is very comfortable mixing his metaphors. This is why you will get Paul saying things like, work out your salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God who works in you to will and act according to fulfill his good purposes. And we look at that and we say, well, hold on.
Wait a second. Am I doing the work or is God doing the work? And Paul says, yes. Sometimes, some things will just simply always be a little bit mysterious when God is involved. Get used to it.
Make peace with it. As God is there to be found sometimes, especially when our lack of certainty creates space for him. And so in Romans, Paul is going to parse the gospel, the good news of God in all kinds of different ways to help us understand what it might mean. Jesus exposes the ugliness of our sin. Jesus chooses solidarity with the victim.
Jesus purifies us. Jesus pays our debts. Jesus invites us into a life of resisting evil. Jesus sabotages the power of sin to corrupt us. Jesus models a nonviolent way to stand against injustice.
He invites us into an expanding expression of God's healing and grace, which he calls the kingdom of God. All of that is good news. But when Paul says, this is what the good news is, this is what he returns to. The gospel of Jesus promised beforehand through the prophets in the scriptures, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and who the through the spirit of holiness was appointed the son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead. That's verse two, three, and four in chapter one.
So Paul is a theologian. He's a deep thinker, and we're gonna watch him explain good news in a thousand different ways so we can grasp it from a 100 different angles. But whenever Paul returns to the core of the good news, it is always the story of Jesus that he brings us back to. You see him do this again at the end of first Corinthians. He recaps the gospel in that letter and he says, there in the end of chapter 15, he says, this is the gospel I preach, That Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day.
That's the gospel for history and all of scripture points to the fact that Jesus lived and died and lived again. That's gospel. That's what we trust. That's the story we are now caught up in when we trust this incredible person of Jesus. It's not our explanations.
It's not our theology as important as all of that is. For Paul and for us as Christians, the core of the good news of God is this conviction. Somehow in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we are made at one with God. And so even though there are a myriad of different explanations and angles to help us make sense of that, this is what Paul always brings us back to. The person of Jesus who sits at the center of our faith, which is why we have to understand what Paul means when he talks about faith.
Because often, Paul means something slightly different than we assume. Now, a few verses later, in the middle of chapter one, he says this, for in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it was written, the righteous will live by faith. Now, we went over this in detail last year, but the faith he's talking about here is actually primarily the faithfulness of God. Be worded the same way in Greek. So think of it this way.
For in the gospel, which is the story of Jesus, the righteousness of God is revealed to us. A righteousness that is revealed by God's faithfulness from first to last, from the start of the scriptures to their culmination in Jesus. For just as it is written, the righteous will live by faith. And this last bit is really interesting here because it's quote or more accurately a paraphrase from Habakkuk. You see there, back in the old testament, prophet Habakkuk writes in two four and he says, see, the enemy is puffed up.
His desires are not upright, but the righteous person will live by his faithfulness. And there, in Habakkuk, the his faithfulness is understood to be God's faithfulness. That the prophet is saying to his people, listen, hold on. Continue to be righteous. Do the right thing even though your enemy seems to be winning all the time because god will not abandon you.
God will be faithful to you. You will live. But what's interesting here in Romans is that Paul has dropped the his, and he's made the passage even more intentionally ambiguous. It's almost like he wants the possibilities of both to be there. Were we living by God's faithfulness or our faith in him?
He wants both of them lingering in the air. He creates this collision of God's faithfulness to us slamming into our trust in him. And Paul is intentionally bringing that tension and that relationship to the surface here because those things don't bother him the way they do us sometimes. This is why for me, anyone who tries to read Romans forensically or tries to use Romans as a road map to understand exactly how God works is missing not only the point, but perhaps more importantly, they're missing the beauty of what Paul is trying to do in this letter. Remember, for Paul, the good news is the story of Jesus.
And more than anything else when you read Romans, Paul is trying to get you caught up in that story. That Jesus is the ultimate expression of God's faithfulness and commitment, his love to renew the world, and he wants you to have faith in that. Which leads us into the final piece that we need to get under our belts from this opening section before we dive into chapters three and four starting next week. Because Paul's discussion of God's faithfulness leads into his sometimes uncomfortable conversation about God's wrath. However, I think part of the reason we often get uncomfortable here is because we often misunderstand Paul here.
And what happens is we take the incomplete images of the angry God of the Old Testament, and we map them onto Paul's words here in Romans. However, as the opening to the book of Hebrews says, in the past, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these days, he has spoken to us by a son whom he appointed heir of all things and through whom all things were made for the sun is the radiance of God's glory and the only exact representation of his being. This is why everything changes for Paul when he meets Jesus. This is why Paul spends his life trying to show how the Jewish scriptures build and bubble and point to Jesus. This is why Paul says that the faithfulness of God is only fully revealed in Jesus because Jesus is the new perfect image of the divine.
Jesus is now the lens through which we see God. Jesus is the lens through which Paul reinterprets everything that has come before. And that means that when Paul speaks of wrath and anger, he is talking about that through the lens of Jesus, not through the lens of the Old Testament. And Paul basically forces us to recognize that if we take him in context. Now, chapter one verse 17, he says, for in the story of Jesus, the righteousness of God is revealed.
And then verse 18, the very next verse he says, the wrath of God is being revealed against the godlessness and wickedness of people. So couple things here. When Paul says the righteousness of God is being revealed, and then in the next sentence says, the wrath of God is being revealed. He's linking this together somehow. Somehow, in the story of Jesus, the righteousness of God is being revealed as God chose his faithfulness to save the world.
And at the same time, the anger of God is being revealed as he shows his faithfulness to save the world. That's Paul's point. That Jesus reveals to us both what God loves and what God hates. But this is the part we often miss. Paul is not saying that God's wrath is revealed against his world.
Paul is not saying that God's wrath is revealed against you and I. Paul is saying that God's wrath is revealed against all that breaks us down. Paul calls this the godlessness and wickedness of humanity. In Greek, it's Azabion and Adokion. That's something like ignoring the sacred and ignoring the just or justice.
But hear this, please. God is not against you. That's not what's happening here. The universe is not against you. Even when circumstances aren't working out for you, there is still always a benevolent force that sits at the center of everything, and he is personally invested in you and your story.
God is always for you. But what that means is that he is also against anything that hurts and injures and takes you away from him. The image here is not an angry God who's about to blow his top and toss you aside the moment you make a mistake. The image here is a God who would do anything to draw you close to him. And so his anger is reserved for anything that pulls you away from him.
Now, can't lose the teeth in what Paul is saying here either. A few verses later, he also says in chapter two verse five that because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath. The NIV says, against yourself. That's a bad translation. He doesn't say against yourself.
He uses a different construction that time, and he says something more like you are gathering up wrath to yourself or near yourself. So the King James and the ESV go with in their translation. The difference being Paul never says God's wrath is directed at you. He says God's wrath is directed at what hurts you. But he is also acknowledging that you and I, we can choose to gather into ourselves all kinds of unhealthy things that are worth God's anger and that will not be fit to stand in God's kingdom.
And so if we pull greed to ourselves, we gather selfishness in. If we get defensive and we let ego drive ourselves, then nothing will change God's posture to us. God will still be gracious, and he will still reveal his faithfulness to us. That's who God is, and nothing you can do will ever change that. But every broken thing that we gather to ourselves will still need to be dealt with for God's kingdom to come.
I think of the parable of the net that we talked about before Easter, where Jesus says that God's kingdom is like a net being pulled through the world, and it gathers up everything into the kingdom of God so that the good can be reserved and the evil can be tossed aside. And the more you have associated yourself with all that is evil and broken in a world, then yes, for a moment, it might even seem like God is against you. As all that is corrupt and broken within you needs to be burned away, but the revelation of his wrath against all that hurts you is only ever part of his faithfulness to you. God is love, and you simply do not have the power to change that. You can fill yourself with all kinds of things that frustrate and hurt and even anger God deeply, and Paul wants you to choose well.
But he is not trying to scare you here. He's trying to show you that God is so committed to you that he is against everything that hurts you. And so this is the starting point that Paul lays out in the opening chapters of Romans, which now provide for us the foundation for what follows in this letter. That Paul has a history as a fundamentalist zealot Pharisee who has a radical encounter with the story of Jesus that changes everything for him. That Jesus reveals the full faithfulness of God.
That God never for a moment intended to leave us on our own. And that because God loves us so deeply, he is always and fiercely committed to the destruction of all that destroys us. So, yes, Romans is a heavy letter, and it is full of some heavy theology, and we will have to do some heavy lifting to unpack it. But at the core of this letter is an inspired attempt to make sense of the mystery of God's grace extended to us in Jesus. And so as we prepare to dive back in this year, may you come to know who you are in the light of God's love.
Just like Paul, a lowly slave to the greatest story ever told and a royal ambassador of all the good unleashed in Jesus through us. Let's pray. God, help us as we dive into heavy writing and thought, and theology that works to parse out exactly what your good news means in the world, what it might mean for us, and how we might begin to wrap our heads around your story. Yet at the core of all of that, God, would you draw us by your spirit back to the center of our faith, that the story of Jesus is the good news of God, that you are love and there's nothing we could do to change that, and that you are so committed to your kingdom. Your imagination of this world renewed and redeemed and made right, that you are fully committed in your faithfulness to us, and you are equally committed to destroy all that which destroys your world.
God, would we get on side with your story and choose wisely so that we might participate in the creation of your kingdom brick by brick. Thank you for involving us in this incredible story. In the strong name of the risen Christ, pray. Amen.