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Romans 1:2-6
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
My name is Jeremy. If we haven't met before, I'm one of the people who hang out here. And last week, we started a new series. We were able to work through the first verse of the first chapter of the book of Romans, and all of a sudden, everyone knew exactly why this was gonna take us so long to get through this book. But that is okay.
Speaker 1:The plan this year is to cover the first few chapters of Romans, and then we will pack Paul away, and we will move on to something new. And then next year, we will just pick up where we left off, and we will just keep doing this however long it takes us to get through this entire book over the next few years. And that's a bit new for us. We haven't done a series like this broken up over, multiple years, but that's part of the fun, at least hopefully. Now last week, we did cover the first verse, and it was an interesting one because we got to see how Paul introduces Paul.
Speaker 1:Last week, I made a joke about how as a pastor, I sometimes don't want to introduce myself as a pastor. Sometimes people have expectations, about what that means, and so I like to slide that in a little later. But I was actually at a dinner this week with a bunch of high powered angel investors who, through some people in this community, are actually being mobilized to make some investment and mentorship of entrepreneurs in developing economies. Really fascinating stuff. But somehow, I ended up at this dinner, and everyone is going around the table introducing themselves and giving all of their impressive credentials, and it gets to me.
Speaker 1:And so I just stole my joke from Sunday, and I said, well, I'm Jeremy, and I impersonate Jesus for a living. And everyone laughed, and then they said, no. Really? What do you do? And I said, well, that's kind of it.
Speaker 1:It's a bad impression, but hopefully, it's getting better. And everyone laughed again, this time a little more awkwardly. And then we just quietly moved on to something else. But even before we got to Paul's self introduction, we talked a bit about his backstory last Sunday. Paul is this famous towering figure in the early church who went from persecuting early followers of Jesus to becoming very powerfully a follower and a leader in that very movement.
Speaker 1:Paul meets Jesus in some kind of an encounter as he is traveling to Damascus. And it's interesting because if you read that story in Acts, it seems like he has kind of a vision. The story tells us that Paul sees Jesus, but the men who are with him, they don't see him. However, as far as far as Paul is concerned, this wasn't a vision. It wasn't a dream.
Speaker 1:He met Jesus in the flesh. In fact, one of the arguments that he makes to defend his apostleship is that he is one of the very few leaders in the early church to have personally met Jesus. You can imagine. As new people are coming into the story and they're falling in love with Jesus and they begin to serve in their communities, some of them become leaders, maybe pastors, maybe even church planters themselves. Well, some of them, probably even most of them, they just weren't around when Jesus was around.
Speaker 1:And yet for Paul, his encounter on the road to Damascus, even if it was mystical, this was just as legitimate, just as real. It was just as significant as any of the time that Peter or John or any of the other disciples spent walking and talking and learning from Jesus. It's interesting here. When Paul introduces himself in verse one, he says he is a servant of Christ Jesus. Now if you read the rest of the letter or even if you look at some of Paul's other letters, you'll see that he almost always uses the term Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1:And so some have wondered if this inversion, this Christ Jesus is an acknowledgment of the fact that it was the risen Christ, The mystical Christ, the unconstrained divine Jesus who met and transformed and commissioned Paul on his way to Damascus. And so I wonder then what that might say about you and I today. Have we met Jesus? Because there are times when I doubt my encounters with God. Right?
Speaker 1:Did I just manufacture that moment? That the music was just right and my emotions were ripe. Was I looking for something that wasn't really there? And I think what Paul might say is hold on to what you know to be true. Because when and how and where we meet God, this is less important than that we do meet God.
Speaker 1:Even if it is this mystical encounter with the risen Christ. As Meister Eckhart said some eight hundred years ago, what good is it if Jesus came once unless he continues to come now? And so Paul meets Jesus. And Paul is changed by Jesus, and Paul starts to plant these faith communities that then worship Jesus. However, the church in Rome, the church he is writing this letter to, they are not one of the ones that he started.
Speaker 1:So these people receiving this letter and reading it, they don't know Paul personally. And so to see the way that Paul introduces himself to them, to see the way that describes Paul for them, it's an interesting window into this man. And what he says is, Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God. Now we talked about how this creates a really interesting juxtaposition. He actually calls himself more literally both a slave and an ambassador all at the same time.
Speaker 1:In Greek, these terms, doulos and apostalos, they are in many ways contradictory. And yet there is a beauty in this indignity because Paul sees himself as completely dependent on Jesus, weak and subservient and yet also called and tasked and given divine purpose to change the world. Now one of the things that I touched on at the end of the sermon last week, but I really ran out of time to properly explore, was this idea of how if we are servants and slaves and we are sent out into the world, that can be really intimidating. Alright. See, far from diminishing his role or his significance by calling himself a slave of Jesus, that what Paul is saying is that his story belongs to someone else.
Speaker 1:But that is precisely because he has been chosen and sent into the world filled with sacred energy to share God's story. And I think there are all kinds of ways that you and I have been chosen and sent. I think one of the disservices that we do to ourselves is we connect our sentness, maybe our calling, if that's language you're more familiar with, with our jobs. I think often we put way too much pressure on ourselves to be our job. Even too much pressure to do what we love, to find this perfect marriage between money and passion in our lives.
Speaker 1:Now sometimes that happens and it's great. It's a fantastic, beautiful thing when it does. I feel so incredibly blessed to get to do what I do for a living. It's awesome. But at the same time, maybe turning the thing that you love into your job would actually ruin it for you.
Speaker 1:And maybe the thing that you are passionate about, Maybe the way that you are sent to change the world. Maybe that is meant to be your hobby. Because here's the thing. Planting churches, this was Paul's hobby. Now it consumed him, and I have no doubt that he woke up thinking about it in the morning.
Speaker 1:I have no doubt he went to sleep at night dreaming about it. Paul lived to plant churches, but he also made tents for a living. And I wonder if some of us have been avoiding the thing that we were sent to do because we haven't quite figured out how to get paid to do it. And we measure the legitimacy of our passion based on the economic value that society subscribes to it. Listen.
Speaker 1:Maybe you are an entrepreneur and creating good sustainable jobs. Maybe that is what you were sent for. But maybe being a mom or a dad is what you were sent for. Maybe working a job that isn't your passion, but it's one that leaves you with the time and the energy to pursue what you do love in your downtime. Maybe that's what you were sent for.
Speaker 1:And maybe it's just one relationship with that one person that needs you right now, maybe that's what you were sent for. Because maybe you were sent for this just for a season. And maybe it won't be your life's mission, but it's the divine purpose that God has in front of you right now in this moment. And I think sometimes we spend so much time looking over our shoulders and comparing what we were sent for with someone else that we risk missing the moment that's in front of us. No one else has ever been you.
Speaker 1:You have never been attempted in the history of the universe. So don't measure what you were sent for against someone else. That's not going to work out well for you. Paul was a slave. His story was not his own, but that was because he knew his story belonged to God.
Speaker 1:And I promise, once you can figure that out, then you won't need to waste your sacred energy slaving away trying to impress anyone else. Because your purpose, wherever you find it, has a divine origin, and it is far too precious to compare. Now that's what I wanted to say last week, but I ran out of time. This week, verse two. So first, let's pray.
Speaker 1:God of our father Abraham and our friend Paul and our wonderful savior Jesus, would you remind us of the purpose and the calling that you have sent us for? Now even, maybe especially even, if that has become clouded or crowded or pushed aside in our imaginations. Would we come to see ourselves not in comparison to anyone else, but simply as the beloved child of the God who has infused some of his image into us? May we learn to carry your story with pride and character and excitement. And when we inevitably fall, and we bruise our knees, and we scrape our hands, and we feel our sense of identity begin to slip, then would you be present by your spirit?
Speaker 1:And to pick us up and lift us back on our feet, and to point us once again in the direction that you intended for us to go. May we come to sense that the sacred energy that bubbles up inside us, this divine purpose that we sense, this is a calling that you have given uniquely to us. And so when we do, may we find the courage to pursue it with everything that we have. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.
Speaker 1:Amen. Alright. Now I actually wrote a sermon this week, but then yesterday, at the last minute, I decided to split it in two. And so we are gonna work our way through verses two to six today, and then we'll leave seven to 15 for next week. And, again, now you see why it's gonna take so long to do Romans.
Speaker 1:Because after Paul introduces himself, he does this really neat thing in Romans that I think is really important, and so I really just wanted to take some time to talk about it. He says he has been set apart for the gospel of God. Now if you have any familiarity with Hebrew thought, you may have come across at some point the idea that holiness in Hebrew was the concept of being set apart. Kadosh is the word in Hebrew. Well, in the New Testament, there is a Greek word, hagios, that is generally translated holy.
Speaker 1:It was a very religious term and as sacred or holy, the way we use those words today. But this phrase here from Paul, this time he uses the word aphorosum. That's actually not a religious term at all. It was simply the idea of being set apart or tasked with a particular purpose. So even though it's not a religious term in Greek, it is very much meant to call to mind that Hebrew consciousness of divine holy purpose, and I like that.
Speaker 1:Maybe you have gotten this idea, perhaps from being around religion for a little bit too long that holiness is about what you don't do. That is a mistake. Holiness is what you do do. So avoiding sin, this is important. But on its own, that will never make you holy.
Speaker 1:Now only following Jesus into the purpose he has for you, only that can do it for you. And the key here is that Paul has been set apart to do something, and that something is to share the gospel. Now what's fascinating to me is that in verses two, three, four, five, and six, Paul is going to tell us as succinctly as he possibly can exactly what gospel means to him. And keep in mind here, this is Paul. Probably the most profound theologian to ever engage Christian thought.
Speaker 1:The same Paul who is about to enter into an enormously complex treaties on his theology and his understanding of gospel. And yet, when Paul articulates the good news of God, it is not theology he leads with. It's a story. Let me show you what I mean. He says, I'm Paul, set apart for the gospel of God.
Speaker 1:The good news that God 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 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.
Speaker 1:Now I get it. That is a long and convoluted passage. One of the things that you have to get used to if you're going to read Paul is that he likes to think in paragraphs, not sentences. As someone who likes to talk a lot, I appreciate that. But if I can be so bold as to paraphrase Paul here, this is what I hear him saying.
Speaker 1:The good news that comes from God is that everything from the very beginning has been leading to Jesus. The Jesus who came as the rightful king of Israel, the descendant of David. The Jesus who lived and who died and who rose again from the dead. That same Jesus who because of that is now lord of everything and who has invited all peoples everywhere including you into this incredible story. That is the gospel for Paul.
Speaker 1:Now the rest of Romans, all 16 chapters that follow will be some form of an explanation or an exposition or a tangent on that gospel story. There is always more to be said. But good news for Paul is perhaps surprisingly not an intellectual enterprise. You may need a theology degree or to understand Romans. It's pretty complicated.
Speaker 1:But you do not need one to understand gospel. And I think Paul gets this in a far more powerful way than we sometimes give him credit for. Theology is heavy. Gospel is simple. Here it is.
Speaker 1:Somehow in Jesus, God is fixing his world. And these are the points that Paul Paul feels are important to tell that story. Verse two, the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures. My paraphrase, everything from the very beginning has been leading to Jesus. Now remember here that Rome is a Gentile church.
Speaker 1:So there are almost certainly some Jews in the community, but it's quite clear that the majority here are new to the Jewish story. And so Paul starts by rooting them in something deep. In the Greco Roman world, there were all kinds of religions to choose from. And new cults were popping up all the time. Gods like Bacchus.
Speaker 1:He was a Roman reinvention of the Greek god Dionysus. Really popular around this time. He was the god of wine. Obviously, a popular guy. There were old classics like Isis and Osiris.
Speaker 1:These were Egyptian gods that had been adopted in Rome. There was even the imperial cult. Caesar Augustus, just before the time of Paul, had legitimated the worship of the emperors alongside the gods. So there are lots of choices in Rome, but Paul starts by saying that this Christ story, this is not the new hotness. This is not the new trendy thing in Roman spirituality.
Speaker 1:In fact, this is deep and long, and it stretches all the way back to the very beginning. There is something about remembering where we come from, remembering our roots. And, yes, they're old and sometimes they might be a little bit dusty. But when we gather and we recite the apostles' creed like we did in worship today, We sink ourselves in. And we say to ourselves that we are part of something ancient.
Speaker 1:There is only one story, and that story has been leading to Jesus. Verse three, his son who adds to his earthly life was a descendant of David. My paraphrase. Jesus who came as the rightful king of Israel. Again, Paul may be writing to Romans here, but Paul is still very much a Jew.
Speaker 1:And for him to know, to remember, to to properly celebrate the fact that the rightful heir and the just king, the faithful servant who had always been promised had finally, finally come. This was a source of deep satisfaction for him. And not just satisfaction in the sense of getting something that you want. It means something deeper than that. So maybe you order something from Amazon, and you expect it to arrive in two days because you have an Amazon Prime membership.
Speaker 1:And that means free two day shipping on anything even if it's small, even if it's just a jar of mayonnaise that you ordered one late one night. And sure, it's strange to order condiments online, but it was late and the grocery store was closed. And if you don't do it now, you'd probably forget, and then you wouldn't have mayonnaise the next time you needed it, so you ordered it. Right? We've all done that before.
Speaker 1:It's not just me. Well, when your mayonnaise comes, that's satisfying. I get it. That's not what I'm talking about here. This is more like having a loved one lost at sea.
Speaker 1:And a year goes by, and nothing is found, and the search is called off, and the funeral is finally held. And you grieve, and you cry, and you do your best to let go of that. And you want, you pray for that spark of hope to go away. And then one day, you're at your sink washing dishes in the kitchen, and they walk back into your home. And somehow, you always knew that they would, but it has been so, so long that you almost gave up hope.
Speaker 1:Remember that at the time of Jesus, it's been more than five hundred years since a descendant of David had been king in Israel. No Jew alive today even remembers the last king. For them, it's all just stories. And now Jesus comes, and Paul recognizes him for who he is and he's not the king that Paul expected, but somehow he's more. It's that kind of satisfaction.
Speaker 1:Verse four and five, who through the spirit of holiness was appointed the son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead. And through him, we received grace and apostleship. My paraphrase, the Jesus who lived and who died and who rose from the dead, the same Jesus who because of resurrection is now lord of everything. See, for Paul, Jesus is the rightful king of Israel. But he is so much bigger, so much more than anything Paul could have imagined.
Speaker 1:And see, this is the Jesus who brings the story of Israel to its climax, but it's also the Jesus who brings the story of the grace of God into view. And so in Jesus, we realize it's not just the Jews. It's not just the good people. It's not just the people who you and I might think deserve grace. Jesus comes so that everyone could have access to the grace and the purpose, the sentness of God.
Speaker 1:Now in verse four here, two quick things before I move on. Paul says that Jesus is appointed the son of God. That does not mean he wasn't the son of God before resurrection. The Greek word has a range a a semantic range of meaning that includes appointed, recognized, or declared. And so the idea that Paul has in mind is not that Jesus becomes the son of God, it's that he is revealed as the son of God.
Speaker 1:We we see him for who he is in resurrection. But second though, notice where Paul puts that emphasis. It's on resurrection. So the death of Jesus, the cross, this is the second most important moment in history. Now the Eastern Church might even say third behind the birth of Jesus.
Speaker 1:They might have a point because it's hard to have anything else without a birth. But the most important moment history, what changes everything, it is the resurrection of the Christ. History hinges not on a death, but on life. And that's important. Because verse six, for you also are among those Gentiles who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1:I paraphrase that the risen Christ has invited all peoples everywhere, including you and I, into this incredible story. See, Romans is heavy, and it's gonna get heavier and Paul knows it. But gospel is easy, and Paul wants us to live in that first. I like how Scott with one t McKnight says it. Because gospel is the story of Jesus that fulfills, completes, and resolves God's story.
Speaker 1:We dare not permit gospel to collapse into the abstract, destorified points in the plan of salvation. What he's saying here is that any attempt to explain good news that sounds more like a textbook or a transaction or a recipe and less like a compelling story that invites you to turn to the next page has somehow missed the point. And again, in the rest of Romans, Paul is about to unleash a torrent of ideas on us. Explanations and theories and scaffolding, all of it inspired by God to help us make sense of this incredible story. And it is all desperately important.
Speaker 1:That's why I'm a theologian because we need that conversation too. But if we miss Paul's clear and compelling encapsulation of good news going in and we begin to confuse our ideas about the gospel with the story of Jesus himself, then somehow we have missed the mark and that is sin. If the greatest theologian in the history of the Christian tradition starts with Jesus, then you and I, we dare not start anywhere else. Now look, there are people who love apologetics. That's cool.
Speaker 1:Trust me. I can hold my own in a debate too. But over the fifteen years that I have been a pastor, I have become convinced that no one has ever been argued into the kingdom of God. As important as clear thought is, it is only ever a personal encounter with the story of Jesus that has enough gravity to pull us in and then to keep us in orbit. Listen.
Speaker 1:Sometimes I recognize words like evangelism get a bad rap. And to be honest, it's not language that I use a lot. I think because sometimes when we talk about evangelism, we use language like winning people as if they were carnival toys that we could get by performing a task in just the right way. I was actually doing church planter assessments for our partnership of churches a couple weeks ago. And so we were looking at candidates who wanted to plant churches, and we reviewed their personality profiles and looked at their plans, and we decided if we thought they could do it.
Speaker 1:This is a little weird, but, you know, you wanna help people get on that good foot as possible. But one of the questions that kept coming up in these assessments was this, what's the normal natural way you lead people to Jesus? I kept thinking, man, I don't have a good answer for that. Maybe I shouldn't be a church planter. Listen.
Speaker 1:I have been a very small part of helping a lot of people discover Jesus over the years, and I am so deeply grateful for that opportunity. But I don't think it has ever been natural or normal. You know what? Strike that. It was natural, but precisely because it wasn't normal.
Speaker 1:It was unique, and it was personal. And it started in random conversations, and it went in all kinds of unexpected directions. It took sharp detours and sometimes a couple of U turns, and it was hard, and it was sad, and it was joyful, and it was scary, and sometimes it was all of those things all at the same time. It was someone's story interacting with the story of Jesus. But what it wasn't was programmatic.
Speaker 1:And sure, it was one foot in front of the other the same way we do anything in life, but it wasn't one, two, three, four. But if good news is simply Jesus, and if, like Paul, we can remember that all of our theology, as important it is, comes after Jesus, then that's a story that not only can I sign up to tell, it's one I'm dying to be a part of? You see, you and I, we're the ones who made evangelism a bad word by forgetting where it was supposed to start and trying to convert people into our specific slice of Christian theology rather than to Christ. And if we can go back to starting at the start, not here's Jesus and all the technical details you need to believe about him, but maybe something more like this. Here's Jesus.
Speaker 1:I'm really interested in following him. Do you want to walk with me for a while while I do? And that's a story that I think anyone who has encountered the risen Christ can participate in. Maybe somewhere in your heart, you have felt called, sent even to share God's story as Paul did. But you have struggled with how.
Speaker 1:Maybe you have felt ill equipped to help people come and discover Jesus because you didn't think that you had enough theology or background or training or authority to speak for God. If that's the case, then would you come to see in the greatest theologian to ever engage Christian thought that before it is anything else, good news is a good story. And the story that you have been sent to tell, it is nothing more or less than how you came to discover him for yourself. And if it's messy and it's awkward and it's not normal, then even better. Because the messy stories are always the best ones.
Speaker 1:Just ask Paul. Let's pray. God, help us to do hard work when it comes to our convictions and our theology, and to think it through and deeply engage our head just as much as our heart, but to never lose sight that the core of our faith, what we place our trust in, is the story of Jesus. And as we follow you, as we journey with you, we will learn and we will grow and we will mature. We will become more wise and shaped into the likeness of your son.
Speaker 1:But the thing that we place our faith in is the story of Jesus. How you stepped into history, and you became one of us, and you lived, and you died, and somehow you transcended that to live again, and that you invite us to become part of your story now. God, we want to do the hard work of thinking through our faith. But before that, we wanna journey into living our faith with you. And so help us to accept your invitation and to walk with you as we go.
Speaker 1:In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. K. We'll end here as we always do with this. Love God.
Speaker 1:Love people. Tell the story.