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Romans Chapter 11
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Right now, our writers and filmmakers and scientists and artists and business leaders, many with no explicit faith system whatsoever who are engaging the glory of God in creation and capturing it and rearticulating it and are entrepreneurially making more out of things anonymously experiencing God through all of that in ways that should put us, people of faith, Christians to shame.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 1:Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Commons. My name is John Van Sloten, and like some of you, I am relatively new to this community. For the past twenty two years, I've been a pastor, bit of teaching, writer here in Calgary. So in 2010, I wrote a book called the day Metallica came to church.
Speaker 1:They kinda did about hearing God's voice through pop culture. And then in 2017, wrote a book called every job a parable, which Jeremy preached about in the spring about experiencing God's presence at work. And then just last year, I finished a book entitled God Speaks Science about, you got it, God speaking and revealing himself through what science unpacks. So needless to say, I am really into the idea that God is revealing himself through creation. And over the past few months, I've been in a conversation with Jeremy and Commons about the idea of introducing this creation as revelation idea more directly, that concept to this community.
Speaker 1:And, so we came up with a plan for this year, preach a few a handful of times at the Inglewood Parish in here, and also lead a few pop up theology events. So you might have heard of this one, which is coming up next month downtown at the new library exploring faith and work. What I'm gonna talk about today is gonna set the theological groundwork for what's gonna happen there. Or this fall, we're gonna do one on faith and science during Beakerhead and do some off-site pop up theology conversation. And then if the flames go deep into the playoffs, for sure, we're gonna do sport and theology, faith, hockey.
Speaker 1:And for the record, as a Leafs fan, I'm still super excited about that flames thing. But very excited about these projects and what it can mean for our community here. Now, for this morning, we're gonna continue the series on Romans that we've been exploring. And today, we're gonna focus primarily on the last four verses of chapter 11 where Paul, not so coincidentally, ends up talking about the creating nature of God in a beautiful section called the doxology. A doxology is basically a cry of praise, spontaneous praise to God.
Speaker 1:And when you read the doxology I'm about to read, you get the sense that the writer of Romans, Paul, after having just articulated all this amazing truth in his letter about who God is and how God works and the beauty and mystery of how God turns things around and makes things new and loves people regardless of their every person, every place, everything regardless of where they come from. You get the sense that Paul having written all this stuff is at a place where he can do nothing but spontaneously burst out into praise for god. Amen. We got an amen from the back row. I just now solicited five more, didn't I, during the service?
Speaker 1:Maybe you've had those kinds of, epiphany, doxology, soul awakening moments when all of a sudden the lights come on and you recognize how good your life is. Or you've been in a really bad situation and then mysteriously it kind of turns in this new direction and you're blown away by the fact that things are better now. Or you've been in a deep deep deep hole and alone and not belonging anywhere when all of a sudden this feeling of comfort and presence draws near. And if you've been there and you're tracking with this faith journey, then maybe you've experienced in those kinds of moments, an awareness for just a second, a seeing of someone who's with you. It's like your eyes are opened and your ears are unstopped and you realize that God is near.
Speaker 1:And it's like you can see God for just a second for who God is and recognize this voice whispering in behind, ahead, above, through, within that very moment. And it's like time stops for just a second and you know you're not alone and you know that someone's holding you and you know that someone's holding everything. And if you've had that kind of moment, then you know what follows next. As a human being made for those kinds of experiences, made to know and experience God, you respond with holy silence or with tears or with a song or with action or with words, with words that can't even begin to describe what you've just experienced and don't come close to articulating what's happening in your heart, but you blurt out what you can. Like, thank you.
Speaker 1:You're amazing. This is so beautiful. Life transforming. Or in Paul's case, in this letter to the Romans having just written about the amazing end around truth where God mysteriously in such a godlike way calls the Gentiles to faith so that the Jews will see that the Gentiles are coming to faith and somehow creates envy in the hearts of the Jews because these outsiders are getting in before them, and that spurs them on to faith. Paul blown away by God's holding of salvation history blurts out these words.
Speaker 1:Oh, the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable his judgments. His paths beyond tracing out, who's known the mind of the Lord or who's been God's counselor, who's ever given to God that God should repay them. For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be the glory forever.
Speaker 1:Amen. And those four verses citing Old Testament references back to back to back to back and then in the penultimate line giving what for Paul must have been the fullest description of the godness of God that he could come up with, he says, writes, for from him and through him and for him are all things. All things. What does that mean? Before we try to answer that, it's best we pray in trying to discern what god's all things truth means.
Speaker 1:Let's pray. For from you and through you and for you are all things, God. The immensity of this thought is beyond comprehension. You're the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega. All that is comes from you, from your mind, your heart, your power.
Speaker 1:Salvation history is in your hands. All history is in your hands. Our histories are in your hands. And as you now hold us, God, whisper into our ears and look at us. Help us see you seeing us.
Speaker 1:And by your spirit, help us see reality, your reality for what it is. So that your kingdom may come on earth as it is in heaven. And your name be glorified now and forevermore. Amen. For from him and through him and for him are all things.
Speaker 1:And if God is God, then you have to give that to God. All things must surely come from God and be created through God and are ultimately mysteriously for God's glory. And if that's true, then all things in your life, how you're wired, who you are, the way you operate, and see the world as a human being, that comes from God too. And everything that's happened to you and that's happening to you and that will happen to you in your life has come to you through God. And if that's true, then surely all of that stuff coming through God is eventually for God in some kind of mysterious way.
Speaker 1:To him be the glory forever and ever. Amen. And yeah, there's a whole lot of mystery in making a statement like that. Holding on to God's providence, goodness in a world that's so messed up and broken where people are, you know, whose lives are failing because of poverty or insecurity or violence who get cancer and die. And you can say, yeah, this is what it means for human beings to be given free will by God but still And like Paul, we mere mortals will never fully understand the mind of God and why God chose this way.
Speaker 1:And for now, we're gonna have to live with the confusion of our lack of understanding and trust that what Paul says earlier when he wrote these words is still true. That we can know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him and who've been called according to his purpose. God works even through bad things to make good. Or like Jeremy said last year in this Roman series looking at this passage, it doesn't mean that God authors bad things, but God takes those bad things and makes them new. Maybe you've had that experience, a microcosm of that in your life.
Speaker 1:Maybe one day you'll have the ultimate look back before the face of God and know that truth. So it's a mystery and there's brokenness, but surely God does work through all things. And it's a big theme in the scriptures. I'm the Lord, the maker of all things who stretches out the heavens, who spreads out the earth by myself. Through Jesus, all things were made.
Speaker 1:Without him, nothing was made that has been made. The sun is the image of the invisible god, the firstborn over all creation. For in him, all things were created. Things in heaven and on earth visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities. All things have been created through him and for him.
Speaker 1:He is before all things and in him all things hold together. That's a bit of an all things arama there, but I overwhelm you with those quotes to make a point that God is more present to you in your life in all that you do than you know. And he is mysteriously god is mysteriously sourcing and is able to be experienced through the things you do and wants you to know that. And those doxological glimpses you've had in your life, maybe in a church, maybe out in Banff, well, they're microcosmic foretastes of what God has made you and I for all the time. We're made to know and enjoy God forever, says the catechism, all kinds of catechisms.
Speaker 1:We're made to experience and worship God through all that we do in every moment of life. And one day when heaven and earth come down to earth and we fully know God through all things that we do, we'll know that to be true. We'll know God through our relationships with other people and when we're playing sports and reading books and creating and learning and teaching and working, we'll intimately experience God in all of those things. And one day, we'll have that. And for now, I think God gives you foretastes of that forever eternal glory with him, with God.
Speaker 1:Through Christ, you, me, we're meant to experience God through all things right now. Through all of the things that were made through Jesus now. And that's a really important point. The Jesus who mediated salvation is the Jesus who mediated creation. Same Jesus.
Speaker 1:And even as you can personally know Christ through salvation and grace and knowing the love of God, you can know him through all of the things that were made through him in grace and in love and through everything that is now held together in him from Adam to archangel. In the Christian worldview, we believe that god speaks through what some theologians call two books, the Bible and creation. Read Psalm 19 or a 104 or the book of Job, which coincidentally takes 38 chapters of questions about why there's pain in the world and God answers Job with questions about creation and points him to animals and Leviathan and why things work the way they do and where snow and hail come from. God speaks through both of those books, creation and the bible. It's a very old biblical idea but he is moving through the work products that you create at your job as an accountant or a teacher or a Walmart greeter.
Speaker 1:Earlier in Romans, Paul wrote, for since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made so that people are without excuse. Theologians sometimes call that special and general revelation, special the bible general creation. Old old idea, but the renewing of that idea in my life over the past twenty years has led to more doxological moments just bursting out praising God, when that idea came alive in me again. So just last Monday, I had another one. I was reading a book, a short story written by Helen Marles Shankman entitled In the Land of Armadillos.
Speaker 1:And then the story, it's a sad story. She details the horrifying interactions between a Polish Jewish artist and a Nazi SS major who has conscripted conscripted the artist to paint a mural in his young son's bedroom. How nice is that? And while the SS major is out killing Jews, the conscripted artist is painting something for his son upstairs, scenes of shalom and peace based on a book the artist had written, a children's book, about an armadillo falling in love with a cockatoo, unheard of, and then move because they couldn't be in love where where they were at. They had to move to Paris and start a cafe where difference could be embraced and everyone was free from judgment and we could all just be ourselves.
Speaker 1:And so in the story, after one particularly difficult day of meeting out evil, the SS major comes home and enters the bedroom studio where the painter is painting one of the scenes from the story and time stops for him. And he takes in the unbelievable beauty of a newly painted scene and it's described this way in the book. Red armadillos tramped up and down blue hills and paraded past cotton candy colored shops in the village while blue cockatoos nested in the lofty branches of the baobab trees. At the cafe, all kinds of creatures sat together in fantastic whimsical combinations. A dog shared a table with a cat.
Speaker 1:A fish buttered a baguette for a canary. A bull wearing bifocals read as journal while his friend the sea serpent stirred an espresso. A pink pig in a striped shirt and a beret wearing poodle posed before tiny glasses of clear cordial. A crocodile shared a kiss with a hair. And stranger yet were the humans, a blue man with a striped face, a beautiful girl with scales and a tail.
Speaker 1:And reading those words, just had to put my book down and I couldn't help but think back to that kids animated film, Zootopia, those beautiful colorful scenes of interspecies unity and that powerful message of dealing with other indifference. Then, of course, the words from the prophet Isaiah from millennia before came to mind about the lamb laying down with a lion and the child pray playing near the cobra's nest. And every time that passage comes to mind, I'm reminded that Isaiah was actually riffing on some Sumerian poetry that was written long before Isaiah's time that he thought that was a beautiful image and then put into Isaiah, the raven utters no cry that poet wrote. The lion kills not. The wolf snatches not the lamb.
Speaker 1:Unknown is the kid devouring dog. Isaiah's truth was playing on God's truth through a Sumerian poet that lived before him that's now in your bible. If that doesn't mess with you a little. And maybe you've had a moment like that. You're in a non spiritual space.
Speaker 1:You're at work. You're doing something with someone who you don't know to be kind of into the faith thing. And all of a sudden, they say something and you know this is bigger than them saying something to you. Like, God is speaking through that person in your life in that odd place right now. And you know that you know that it's true because the moment feels holy.
Speaker 1:So anyway, I'm reading those words in that book describing this utopian scene and all of these other images from all these other places of the world as it should be are echoing through my imagination And of course, I'm believing that God is the author of all of these iterations and that all animals and people living in peace truth is God's animal and people living in peace truth. And that the spirit of God who hovered over the face of the earth, that creation is hovering over the earth right now and is hovering over this place and all of our lives all the time. And the spirit who longs for the world to be as it should be is whispering. Whispering to any artist, poet, or story teller who will listen. And of course, as I start to think about that, then Jesus and all of his teachings, don't judge, love your neighbor, do unto others, include others like how I include others, comes to mind.
Speaker 1:And then the apostle Paul joins the chorus. In Christ's family, there can be no division into Jew and non Jew, slave and free, male and female. Among us, you are all equal. For Christ himself is our peace who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility. And no sooner do I recall Paul's words when all of these contemporary justice reconciliation stories from the news start flooding into my consciousness.
Speaker 1:And as all of these spirit inspired echoes of God's unity and diversity truth are coming alive in me and coming alongside one another and dancing together and sitting in a cafe together. In my mind, I found myself surrounded by a swirling certainty that God really is mysteriously holding and keeping everything. God's unity and diversity truth has been echoing throughout the cosmos from its very inception and will forevermore. And the moment clearly was powerful and it was saturated with a sense of this is that and this is that and that is this and they're all echoing the same thing. This is what unity and diversity looks like or reads like or sounds like or feels like.
Speaker 1:And the experience of this this is that moment has been a crucial component of these two books coming together eliciting these doxological moments. As it surely was for the disciples when here the Jesus who they knew right in front of them teaching all these things was echoing all of the stuff they had learned growing up from their Bibles, the Old Testament. I mean, read their gospels and letters and look at the notes filled with citations from the Old Testament. Christ here, Christ there, oh my. This is that.
Speaker 1:The truth of Christ echoed in that Exodus story. The truth of Christ echoed in this Exodus story right now. Same truth, same Jesus. And in this letter to the Romans we're studying, Paul does the this is that math all over the place. Cites the Old Testament all over the place to make his point.
Speaker 1:And as I said in this doxology text, the first seven lines come directly from the Old Testament. God's paths have always been unsearchable. Everybody knows that. And God's mind always unknowable. And there's something about that this is that moment that opens your eyes or through which God unstops your ears.
Speaker 1:And it is like you step into the timelessness and spacelessness and godness of God for just a second. And know god's eternal purposes and power and omniscience and omni everything. Right there in a moment where god's truth here is the same as god's truth there. So years ago, I was in Grand Rapids, Michigan giving a talk at Calvin College and an old testament professor was sitting in the back row who I'm very intimidated by, but I didn't see him until after the talk. I wouldn't have even said a word.
Speaker 1:And he comes up to me and he want has something he wants to share and he says, John, I think I see what you're doing. I've spent my entire life connecting the Jesus of the New Testament to the Jesus of the Old Testament. You are connecting the Jesus of the New Testament to the resurrected Jesus today. Shouldn't we all be doing that? And for me, waking up to Jesus moving in the world today, it's it must be like surely it's like what happened to the two disciples on the Emmaus Road.
Speaker 1:When all of a sudden, their eyes are opened and they realized what was real. Or Mary at the tomb when she figured that the figured out that the gardener is her teacher or Peter in the boat when he realized that the guy on the beach was Jesus. This is that And the spirit of Christ is moving, never has stopped moving. From the creation of the cosmos to right now and forevermore sustaining and holding together all things. And I think God wants you to know that, not just abstractly but practically.
Speaker 1:So these library talks I'm giving in March, which you may or may not have heard introduced here, events link on the commons website, are not about some abstract theology of work where we'll talk about we have work for the common good or we're worshiping God in this way or or something else. It it it is about you figuring out how you uniquely image God in moments of flow where you're being you doing your work, knowing and experiencing God in that moment for you. And it'll be different for you and you and you, and we're just using a library as a kinda text that we can embody, to have that conversation. But it's about you finding a way to know God at work more. And I believe that God's revelation, the scope of his revelation is that immense.
Speaker 1:Years ago, I went to Kingsford, read a quote in a theology book from a theologian named Herman Bovink. I had been living into this for fifteen years and I read this quote. I couldn't figure out how he got this idea that God was doing in our church already a hundred and fifty years ago and it made me weep. Bob Ink writes that revelation while having its center in the person of Jesus Christ in its periphery extends to the uttermost ends of creation. It does not stand isolated in nature and history, does not resemble an island in the ocean nor a drop of oil upon water.
Speaker 1:With the whole of nature, with the whole of history, with the whole of humanity, with the family and society, with science and art, it is intimately connected. Revelation underlies all created being, and every moment of time beats the pulse of eternity. Every point in space is filled with the omnipresence of God. The finite is supported by the infinite. All becoming is rooted in being.
Speaker 1:The foundations of creation and redemption are the same. The logos who became flesh is the same by whom all things were made. The firstborn from the dead is also the firstborn of every creature. And the son whom the father made heir of all things is the same by whom he made also made the worlds. General revelation, this is the part that hit me, leads to special.
Speaker 1:Special revelation points back to general, like a pair of glasses. When you know God through the Bible in a clear, perspicuous way, and so far as you can do that, You can see God in the world, recognize patterns and ways of being. The one calls for the other and without it remains imperfect and unintelligible. Together, they proclaim the manifold wisdom which God has displayed in creation and redemption. So two books, one author made to co illumine one another so that we can know God fully.
Speaker 1:And I think Bob Ink is right that we cannot know God fully, the depths and the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of Christ of God apart from engaging all that God is saying through both books. All that God is saying through your work, through history, through mathematics, through art, through sport, through science, family, politics, nature and human nature. All of this stuff in its way, accordance with its kind, images God. C. S.
Speaker 1:Lewis once wrote, Every created thing in its degree is an image of God and the inordinate and faithful appreciation of that thing a clue which truly followed will lead back to him. Everything that is good and true and beautiful and right and lasting in redwood trees and black holes and seeds and human bodies and family systems and the arts and algorithms will lead back to him if truly followed. If truly followed. If if you're looking. If you have eyes to see and ears to hear as the prophet said.
Speaker 1:And what's kind of unsettling in all of this is that there right now are writers and filmmakers and scientists and artists and business leaders, many with no explicit faith system whatsoever who are engaging the glory of God and creation and capturing it and rearticulating it and are entrepreneurially making more out of things anonymously experiencing God through all of that in ways that should put us, people of faith, Christians to shame. Atheist scientists are experiencing God through the cosmos more than we do. And agnostic professors are unpacking God's wisdom at the University of Calgary in ways we haven't begun to touch in this sphere and this and that. And I'm telling you this because in the hope that I may somehow arise in you, arouse you. I'll try that again.
Speaker 1:I'm telling you this in the hope that I may somehow arouse you as Paul writes to envy. Even as Paul saw how god used Gentile faith to create faith and faith inducing envy in the Jews, could god be using the incredible world unpacking work of scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs to that same end for us, the church. So that we can wake up and really know who Jesus is and what he's done and what he's made. Why should all the scientists and artists and entrepreneurs and Nobel Prize winners have all the fun? And we claim to know this God through whom all things were made and we know his name and knowing his name, we can name his presence in the world.
Speaker 1:I I think we ought to be about doing that everywhere. We can experience God in the naming. And in those moments, again and again, burst out with doxology. Commenting on Paul's doxology in this text, theologian James Dunn writes, the feeling of Paul's doxology is of one who has been permitted to perceive something of God's ways with humankind but whose overwhelming impression is that the something is only a passing glance into the mysteries too deep to penetrate, to begin to penetrate, too vast even to begin to comprehend. And I don't think any of us have begin begun, even started into knowing the fullness of who God really is or just how much the spirit of Christ is moving in through and behind and before all things.
Speaker 1:And there's no end to God. So there's no end to this. We're going to be knowing God more and more and more and more, and we're going to die, and we're going get in God's face, and He'll hold us and welcome us, and then we'll get to know God forever and ever. Oh, the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable God's judgments and God's paths beyond tracing out.
Speaker 1:Who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been God's counselor? Who has ever given to God that God should repay them? For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him, to god be the glory forever. Amen.
Speaker 1:Let's pray. To you be the glory forever. Amen. God, we pray that entering into a world and a life and this afternoon, this week, a life going on where all things have been made in and through and for you and through which your glory and your presence and who you are can be experienced through which you might be whispering words of love or wisdom or understanding for our lives as we enter into our lives this week. By your spirit, open our eyes so that we can see new things and open our ears so that we can hear your voice, whispering, calling, comforting, directing, keeping, guiding, watching over, holding, relating to us through all things.
Speaker 1:We pray in the name of the risen Christ. Amen.