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Romans Chapter 10
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Love is not a limited commodity and that in fact, love is the most extravagantly common resource in the universe.
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:Welcome today. My name is Jeremy. I'm part of the team here. And if we haven't had a chance to meet in real life yet, then welcome to Commons, particularly in this time of year. Last year, super cold.
Speaker 1:Today, super snowy, but welcome to Calgary. We'll see how we do. This week, we are continuing our series in Romans, and today, we're gonna tackle tackle chapter 10. But just a warning here, we're actually gonna get through only a few verses today, but we'll get some of the major themes and ideas. But over the past few years, we've been working our way through Romans a few weeks at a time, and we have today and two more weeks in Romans in this series.
Speaker 1:And then after that, we're gonna switch gears and move into the season of Lent. And that's where we begin to prepare for Easter. And I know that it's cold outside, and it probably doesn't feel like Easter is on the way, but trust me, spring will come and life will return to the city. So you're looking forward to that. If you have a journal, you can always flip ahead and see what's coming.
Speaker 1:But our Lenten series this year is called the parables of grace. We're really excited about that one. If you don't have a journal, there should be one in the pews, or you can always pick one up at the back at the connection center. Those are free. They give you an outline of our teaching for the year, but also a lot of information about commons as a community.
Speaker 1:So feel feel free to grab one of those before you go. Now last week, we moved through Romans chapter nine, and we entered into a section of Paul's writing that's a little bit delicate here. We're listening in on a conversation between Jewish people talking about Jewish identity. And this is one of those spaces where those of us who are not Jewish need to be careful about how we appropriate Paul's language. We talked about this last week, but this section, unfortunately, historically, has led to some really bad theological interpretations.
Speaker 1:Something what we primarily call supersessionism or sometimes even replacement theology, but that has given rise to some really unfortunate antisemitic tropes within Christian history. And this is the idea that the Jewish people have been replaced by the church in God's imagination. And hear me here. We do have different convictions than our Jewish friends, But no one ever in the history of the world has ever been replaced in God's imagination. No person, no people group, no one you have ever met has ever been replaced.
Speaker 1:Because God holds every person as sacred within the divine heart. This is one of the things that we really have to keep in the back of our minds when we read Paul in Romans. Because the sovereignty of God is a really big deal for Paul here. An idea that God can do whatever God wants to do. But God's sovereignty for Paul is not the sovereignty to choose this or that.
Speaker 1:Not to choose this person, but not that person. To choose this people group, but not that group. No. God's sovereignty for Paul is the sovereignty to choose this and now that in a way that transcends the human limitations that we're used to. And let's be honest here, we struggle with decision fatigue over where to go for dinner.
Speaker 1:Right? Like there's too many choices and if we go for the Pad Thai, then we're stricken with FOMO over missing out on the tofu curry. No. That one's just me. Alright.
Speaker 1:Fine. I love tofu curry. But regardless, the struggle is that we agonize over these silly decisions because sometimes our options feel limitless, and we know our capacity is very, very limited. But, the truth for Paul is that God is not like us. And, Paul realizes that the sovereignty of God means that God is always able to choose the good.
Speaker 1:Love is not a limited commodity and that in fact love is the most extravagantly common resource in the universe. God's choosing of us says absolutely nothing about who God is forced to leave on the outside. So, God chose the Jews, but obviously not every Jewish person went along with the plan. Now, God chooses the Gentiles, the rest of us, but not all of us are ready for that grace. And this is where Paul focuses in today.
Speaker 1:What does it mean when God graciously chooses us and we defiantly choose to walk the other way? So, another heavy talk with Paul. This guy is not for light conversations, but let's pray and then we'll jump back in. Gracious sovereign divine, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden. Might we know ourselves today as you know us.
Speaker 1:Completely, transparently, and yet somehow fully and deeply loved. When we begin to slip back into our frame of reference for you. And, we imagine you picking and choosing having to leave one behind in order to love another. Might we be reminded of your essential difference. That you are love.
Speaker 1:Infinite and unstoppable and always able to choose the good. Let our trust be placed not in ours, but in your faithfulness to us. Your goodness, your grace, your unending commitment to healing and wholeness for us. Cleanse our hearts, heal our minds, hold our bodies close in your arms. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray.
Speaker 1:Amen. Now, today we have always choosing the best explanation, all about being zealous, walking away in the grace that chases us down. But first, a comment here on how I choose to read Paul. Somebody asked me last week, k. You made all of these different ways that we interpret Paul, different approaches to Paul.
Speaker 1:Why do you settle on the one that you do? And it's a really great question because it uncovers something that's always happening background whenever we read the bible. We are making choices about what we read. I try whenever we are dealing with a difficult or a controversial passage to give you a look at how Christians have read or interpreted things over the years. That's part of being intellectually honest for us.
Speaker 1:I never wanna expose you to just my perspective. But if I do have an opinion, I'll try to explain why that is. When we went through the various schools of thought when it comes to Paul, I tried to show you what I saw as some of the blind spots in other approaches and why I think the new perspective is helpful for us. But that said, we are always making choices when we read. And one of the things about reading Paul is that we're always reading Paul in situ.
Speaker 1:What I mean by that is that Paul is writing to specific communities with specific places and specific times, and he is inspired by spirit to speak to those communities as they navigate this world changing story of Jesus. But, that means that in one moment Paul might be encouraging a community, and in another he might be chastising one. In one moment he's dealing with a specific question or a situation, and in another he's trying to point to the incredible largeness of the story of God. And when we step back from that and we realize that we're not the original audience and that we don't always have all of the cultural memory and the context to experience the words that he writes in the way that his intended audience might have, we have a choice to make. And the choice that I choose to make when I read Paul is to read Paul through his most positive, most generous, most optimistic moments.
Speaker 1:If you were to see me in a moment where I was disciplining my son, that would be a really important window into my relationship with Ethan. I'm his dad, I love him. I want him to be safe, I want him to learn how to navigate the world around him in healthy ways. And most of the time that looks like guidance, it looks like friendship, but sometimes that's going to look like discipline. That's okay.
Speaker 1:That's part of my relationship with him. But at the same time, I would never want you to view all of my relationship with my son through the lens of the time that I had to be the bad cop. Fact, what I would want is for you to see those moments through the lens of our best moments. Moments where I'm investing in his story, and I'm playing with him, and I'm getting to know him, and I'm watching him explore the world around him because that's the story that actually grounds our relationship. And, yes, sometimes Paul is mad when he writes.
Speaker 1:Sometimes Paul is frustrated. Sometimes he's completely exasperated by the people that he loves, but that's precisely because he loves them. And if we take all of these snapshots of Paul and we read them through the lens of Paul's most frustrated moments, then I think we're going to end up with a distorted imagination of who this man is and what his relationship with these people is about. And so absolutely intentionally, I choose to interpret Paul through his best, most generous, most optimistic moments because that's how I want to be seen. I wanna see Paul desperately trying to make sense of the story of Jesus and reaching out with these grand sweeping declarations of grace.
Speaker 1:Moments like first Corinthians 15 where he says, as in Adam, all die in Christ, all will be made alive again. Or, Colossians one where he says that God was pleased to have the fullness of the divine dwell in Jesus and through him to reconcile to God all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven by making peace through his sacrifice. Is that Paul? That is Paul reaching out for the God who is always just beyond his grasp. And that's the Paul that I want to keep in mind when I see him having to be a dad and play the bad cop to save his kids from the hurt they don't see just around the corner.
Speaker 1:So I read Paul in the most generous light I possibly can because that's how I hope people are going to read me. And I think that we could also stand to do this for each other a little bit more often. When someone annoys us or someone disappoints us, maybe even when someone hurts us, do we immediately assume the worst about them and jump to the memories that confirm our skepticism about them? Or do we extend the generosity in how we interpret each other's choices? Look, protect yourself.
Speaker 1:Don't let yourself be abused by someone, but assume the best of the people near you. And, I promise you that will end up changing you for the better. Now, we still need to get to chapter 10. So, verse one. Brothers and sisters, my heart's desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved.
Speaker 1:And, this is exactly what I'm talking about here. Paul has some harsh words for his Jewish siblings in this section, but we need to see that grounded in his love for them. Now, we're also gonna see that Paul is going to keep talking about his Jewish friends, but he's gonna adjust his language here to address his Gentile audience in a new way. And you can see what I mean here. This is verses two to four.
Speaker 1:For I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. Since they did not know the righteousness of God and they sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness. For God is the or for Christ is the culmination of the law that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes. Now, Paul does this a little bit in chapter nine, but here he really switches into talking about them in the third person. And, it's not entirely clear what he's doing here.
Speaker 1:Is he now just totally switching to address the gentile part of his audience? Or is he doing something with a rhetorical device here? Kind of like he's looking at these people, but he's talking about these people over here. Either are possible, but the key for me is really about understanding that Paul is not actually talking about them at all here. He's talking about himself.
Speaker 1:Now, when Paul says, I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. This is all about Paul. And, the word zealous here is the word zealous in Greek. It's actually pronounced zeilos, but the joke's not as funny that way. The point being that zealous is actually an import from the Greek language.
Speaker 1:And we take it to mean passionate or fervent or deeply invested in something. But actually, most of its meaning comes from a political faction that Paul was at least tangently connected to in its proto form. And you see the zealots were a political party that broke off from the established tradition of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees. And, they took up arms against their oppressors in Rome. And their conviction was that if they were pure in their devotion, even to the point of persecuting dissenters and violently opposing oppressors, God would honor that and the Messiah would emerge from among them and Israel would return.
Speaker 1:Now, that doesn't break out into a hot war between Judea and Rome until about ten years after Paul writes. But in the late fifties, when Paul is writing these words, tensions between the zealots in Judea and Rome are getting more and more heated right now. Now, even earlier than that, in the thirties and forties, what would become the zealot party were the Jewish leaders who were very aggressively persecuting other Jews who deviated from their preferred forms of Judaism. And, that was Paul. Remember in Acts seven, we read that there's this follower of Jesus, a man named Stephen who's put on trial and eventually he is dragged out of the city and stoned to death.
Speaker 1:And, the witnesses who testified against him, they come and they lay their coats at the feet of Saul. Well, that is Paul. In Acts eight, Acts eight tells us specifically that Saul approved of their killing and he went about persecuting the followers of Jesus, dragging them out of their homes and putting them into prisons. And, you can imagine that the faction that sees that as acceptable slowly evolves, maybe devolves into the group that wants to openly revolt against their Roman oppressors. And so what happens is that only about five or six years after we think the letter to the Romans was written, the zealots, now led by the captain of the temple priests, a man named Eleazar, decide to stop offering sacrifices for the Roman Empire in the Jewish temple, and this provokes Rome.
Speaker 1:One of the things that you had to do in the Roman Empire was at the very least pay lip service to the worship of the emperor. And, Rome had sort of an arrangement with the Jews that as long as they offered sacrifices for the emperor, Rome would look the other way and pretend that they were sacrifices to the emperor. But, when Eleazar says, no, we're not doing that anymore, he's trying to start a war here. And, of course, Rome takes the bait. They see this as a sign that Judea is seceding from the empire.
Speaker 1:Governor Cestius attacks. He is surprisingly rebuffed, and this emboldens the zealots who actually take control of Jerusalem. They embark on a guerrilla warfare in the late sixties, until Nero sends in Vespasian and then his son Titus to crush the first Jewish rebellion and eventually destroy the Jewish temple in seventy CE. Now, that little bit of history is exactly what Jesus is talking about on Palm Sunday when he comes over the hill and he looks over Jerusalem and he sees the city and he begins to weep. And he says, if you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace.
Speaker 1:But now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come when your enemies will build an embankment against you. They will encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will not leave one stone on another because you did not recognize the time of God's coming to you. You see, Jesus knows that when you go to war, you get war.
Speaker 1:And, war is hell. Point being that this period from Jesus seeing war on the horizon in the thirties, to Paul persecuting Christians in the forties, to his transformation and writing of Romans in the fifties, to the first Jewish rebellion in the sixties, and the eventual destruction of the temple in seventy CE. This is a very volatile period of Jewish history. And all of this is what Paul has in mind when he uses this incredibly loaded political language to introduce his argument here. Tensions are rising and Paul sees what's happening.
Speaker 1:And, Paul knows how this ends because Paul has seen this happen in his own life. You start with good intentions, but you let your zeal drive you to extremes and it ends with violence and heartache. And so in quite a masterful stroke, he finds a way to pull together the current political climate and the rise of the zealot faction, the history of his people whose passion had become misdirected and exclusionary, alongside his own personal history of failure and the misguided use of violence in his own story. And, when Paul says, for I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, he's saying, look, can talk about that story because that story is my story. And, what Paul is saying here is that actually his story, this story, that story, it's really all the same story.
Speaker 1:That we did not understand the righteousness of God and so we sought to establish our own. And, this is a major theme for Paul. That God always chooses the good. That we always start in God's grace. That God always welcomes us back whenever we are ready, but if we choose, we can walk away from all of that.
Speaker 1:And this chasing our own path, or choosing to walk away, creating our own righteousness, this is what Paul means when Paul talks about the judgment of God. And, Paul has already developed this idea way back in chapter one of Romans. It was like three years ago if you wanna find those sermons online. In chapter one verse 24, he talks about how God gave them over to their desires. Or verse 26, God gave them over to shameful acts.
Speaker 1:Verse 28, God gave them over to their depraved minds. Even here in this section, he's gonna use that language again in eleven eight and say, gave them over to their confusion. But that phrase he keeps using and repeating, God gave them over, in Greek, This is the word, and the idea is to give over or to entrust to someone or something. So this is the same thing that we saw Paul doing last week with the story of pharaoh. It's not that God makes people do bad things.
Speaker 1:That's antithetical to the idea of the divine. God is only ever on your side. Now, the idea here is that when we choose what is wrong, God entrusts us to those choices. So, when I was 24 and Rachel was 23, and we were still working on our undergraduate degrees, and we decided to get married, and everyone around us thought we were nuts and they were right, they still had to entrust us to our choices. And you know what?
Speaker 1:It was all so much harder than it needed to be. Because honestly, we just weren't mature enough to be married yet, and we didn't know who we were as individuals yet. And plus we made things so much harder by the decision to immediately move to a new city and start new careers without any support networks as soon as we got married. And the judgment was that we suffered through it and we almost didn't make it. Now, we got help and we worked hard and we met with a counselor and God was gracious to us and through us, but God still entrusted us to our choices.
Speaker 1:God didn't abandon us to them. God didn't leave us on our own with them. In a sense, I think you could say that God even saved us from them by walking with us through them. But God still allowed us to choose. If I tell my son to stay away from the stove because it's hot and he chooses to touch the flame anyway and it burns him, then I'll be upset.
Speaker 1:But never am I going to want to pile more hurt on top of the fact that he's already injured. If there is anything that we should take from the frequency with which Jesus uses the metaphor of father to speak of the divine, is that God is like the best of our parental instincts, never the worst. And so Paul says, we did not understand the ways of God and so we sought to establish our own rather than submit. And God said, okay. Like, we'll try it your way and see what happens.
Speaker 1:And, I'll stay close as close as you let me for whenever you're ready to come home, but this is your choice. And, this is the fundamental paradox of believing in a good God who loves a broken world. That God always chooses us, and sometimes we don't choose God back. Paul says later in this chapter that God chose the Israelites, but not all Israelites chose God. Because love requires choices and choices make mistakes and mistakes need grace, And yet God remains faithful to us because that's the good news.
Speaker 1:Paul's argument here is essentially that we have all, all of us tried to make our own righteousness, whether that's the zealots who want war with Rome, just like the Israelites who thought their chosenness was to the exclusion of everyone else, just like I did when I thought I could force people into the kingdom at the threat of violence. And I told myself I was doing good. And I told myself it was for the greater good, but God's judgment was that God let me do it. And slowly over time, I became the kind of person who would do the kinds of things that I ended up doing. And I don't know if that resonates with you, but it certainly does for me.
Speaker 1:Because whenever I find myself going down an unhealthy path and I justify it to myself and I find ways to make it okay, what happens is that inevitably slowly it becomes okay. Like I justify my greed and then slowly I become a greedy person. And I justify misrepresenting myself a little bit, and slowly I become the kind of person who tells very tall tales and, let's be honest, lies. I draw one line and then another line, and all of a sudden I find myself boxed in and cut off from this expansive grace of Jesus. And this is how it works for Paul.
Speaker 1:You start down a good path with good intentions and passionate zeal, and you do your best. But if you don't constantly course correct, you end up somewhere you never intended to go. All of this happens to all of us regardless of how pious we are. And the only antidote for Paul is about knowing precisely where your righteousness is taking you. In fact for Paul, when righteousness and religion are the point, then we have already missed the point.
Speaker 1:And so he writes that our righteousness doesn't work, but everything changes when we realize that Christ is actually the culmination of the law. So that there will be righteousness for everyone who trusts. This is one of Paul's core ideas that it is the righteousness of Jesus, the faithfulness of Christ that opens a new way forward for us. That even when we find ourselves heading in the wrong direction, it's God's faithfulness in Jesus to do everything God can to get us and bring us back home. But the key here for me is recognizing that this world culmination is the word telos in Greek, and telos means end.
Speaker 1:It's where the NIV gets culmination. But it's important to know that it's not end as in the abolishment of the law or culmination as in the termination of the law. It's more like the end as in the purpose or the point. Like maybe you could say the fulfillment of the law as Jesus does. Paul's point here to his Jewish friends is that the law is good.
Speaker 1:It always was. Because rules are helpful and zeal is great assuming they lead you to be like Jesus. Because if not, if rules make you arrogant and if religion makes you violent, and if righteousness makes you pull away from people instead of lean into them, then it does not matter what scripture you quote to back it up. If your righteousness doesn't look like the grace and peace of Jesus, then it missed the mark and it took you away from God. This is what it means for us to have Jesus at the center of our faith.
Speaker 1:Religion is like looking through a glass darkly, but to see Jesus. To watch Jesus. To follow the way that Jesus moves to the world and interacts with the people who are near him. For Paul to see that Jesus is willing to die for what he believes in, but never to kill for it. This is the righteousness of God that takes the initiative and invades our world and saves us from all of our own ideas about what religion should be.
Speaker 1:See, righteousness was never about being enough, It was always about discovering who to trust. So when you find yourself at the end of that road that you never intended to go down and you feel the full weight and judgment of your choices. And perhaps like Paul looking around and wondering how you could have caused such pain. No. Now the good news for Paul is that this is also the place somehow strangely where God's grace meets you.
Speaker 1:It reminds you that you're loved and offers you the way of Christ as a replacement for all of your best and broken efforts. This is the good news for Paul. Your righteousness wasn't what you thought, but more importantly, God wasn't who you imagined. And imperfect and flawed, violent and arrogant, you are already perfectly loved. That is the righteousness, the love and the acceptance of the divine that once fully understood and metabolized will transform you into everything God imagines you to be.
Speaker 1:Trying harder won't save you. Knowing that you are already loved will change everything about you. May you know today that God is always for you. May you recognize God's judgment in your life as what awakens you. May Christ's righteousness come to hunt you down and become you, and may you then move to the world with the grace and peace that reflects the heart of God, once obscured in religion, and now revealed completely in the Christ.
Speaker 1:Let's pray. God for all of the ways that we have attempted to construct our own righteousness. And we've tried to manipulate the system or to threaten people into what we think is good for them. The way that we've tried to coerce things around us to get to what we imagined was a good end. Would you forgive us?
Speaker 1:And, when we see the judgment of our choices and we recognize the pain that we've caused, would you meet us even in that place with your grace? To remind us that arrogant and violent, coercive and manipulative, we are still completely loved. And that all of our best efforts have taken us down the wrong path, but your grace is what rebuilds us and heals us and shapes us and helps us to step into everything you imagine we might become. God for all of our best efforts, might we see that it is your love and acceptance in us and then through us that changes the world. And so as your grace invades us, might we leave this room in the grace and peace of Jesus interacting with those near us, not trying to shape them, but simply let them know they are loved.
Speaker 1:And in that, might we see your story born in the world. Might we change the world the way that you did. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.