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Romans Chapters 1 - 8 Recap
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
For Paul, Jesus has changed everything. And the entire world is being reconciled to God, and the way that you identify yourself with that story is to trust in the goodness and the faithfulness of Jesus. Welcome to the Commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week.
Speaker 1:Head to commons.church for more information. Welcome. My name is Jeremy, part of the team here at Commons. And, I've been out of town for a little bit, and that meant I had the chance to sit back and track with the podcast and to listen to what Bobby did with the second half of this friendship series that we just made our way through here. And I gotta say, I love where she took us over the last couple weeks.
Speaker 1:Some really important dialogue about forgiveness and boundaries and how we friend each other well even when things are difficult. We'll come back to that in a moment because I do want to recap that series before we move on. But a couple important community notes here. First, our AGM is coming up next month. It is happening on March 13, and you can find all of the details and the documents as they are posted at commons.church/agm.
Speaker 1:At that meeting in March, our members will be voting to confirm our budget and also to elect a new member to our board. Everyone though is welcome to come and participate that evening. We also wanna let you know that nominations for the board are open. You can find the nomination form at the same link, commons.church/agm. And those nominations go to a nomination committee who then receives the names and vets the candidates, and they will present a nominee to the community at the agm.
Speaker 1:Any member of commons can nominate any other member, and that forum will be available until the February. Second, I was away, and I was down in Denver meeting with the leadership from our denomination, the ECC. And while I was there, I was posting vlogs every day to our Facebook and our YouTube channel. And if you don't follow us online, we do create digital content regularly to supplement what we're doing here on the weekends. So you can check that out if you're interested.
Speaker 1:But I was there to finish the transfer of my ordination into the covenant, which I did. And I'm incredibly thankful for the affirmation of the board of ordered ministry of the ECC, which sounds kind of intense, but really it's just part of the leadership structure in this group of churches we participate in. They were very gracious both to recognize me, but also go out of their way to celebrate commons and what's been happening here. It's just really nice to be part of something that celebrates well. That said, I was also there to continue the conversation around LGBTQ inclusion in our denomination.
Speaker 1:And this is something that Commons wants to do better at, we but also want to influence in the larger church because we don't believe that people are theological problems to be solved. In fact, I would argue that when we come together and when we welcome and support and encourage each other as we are, even if we don't fully understand each other. And all of us learn and grow and become more loving, grace filled versions of ourselves. And our LGBTQ friends are incredible gift to us this way, and we continue to have much to learn from them. That said, that is a good segue to look back into our last series about friendship.
Speaker 1:And we covered a lot of ground in four weeks. We started by talking about our need for friends. And I know that sounds obvious, we all know we all need friends, but a lot of the research says we're not doing much about it. One study I cited suggested that it takes fifty hours of socialization to move from an acquaintance to a casual friend, another forty hours to move to a real friend, and then a further two hundred hours to move to a close friend. And if you're good at math, you know that that means you need to put in almost three hundred hours to make a new close friend.
Speaker 1:And if you're really good at math, you know that means that even if you can spend one hour a week every week with a new friend, it will take you almost six years to get close. And this is where we had to do some reading between the lines of the gospels. But if we're paying attention here, we can see that Jesus is actually making time and prioritizing friendships that are just for him. That's important because we all need those spaces where we can be comfortable being ourselves, comfortable with self disclosure. Do you see me?
Speaker 1:Do you understand me? Is my story safe with you? Am I ready to tell you what I see in you? And we saw this moment between Jesus and Peter where both of them share something vulnerable and sacred with each other. And it's beautiful, and yet, even that moment doesn't end well.
Speaker 1:That is exactly where Bobby followed up with a conversation around forgiveness. Because if we take friendship seriously, and if we invest our time, and if we open ourselves, we are inevitably going to be hurt. And I don't say that flippantly. Hurt is hard, and when someone you are friends with hurts you, it's even harder. But I love this idea that forgiveness can take some of our lowest moments and turn them into something to celebrate.
Speaker 1:When Peter denies Jesus three times, there's no one there to see it. And yet, we know it because forgiveness was what enabled Peter to tell that story. And I would bet that even in your best friendships, you have similar tragedies that have become comedies and victories and sources of strength because of what forgiveness was able to do for you. That left however one final conversation, a last hard conversation about unfriending. Because if Jesus had just pretended what happened, it didn't happen.
Speaker 1:Or for Jesus to not make it awkward by not talking about what happened. Or for Jesus to just ignore it and move on, that would actually stop reconciliation short of what it could be. And so Jesus has a hard conversation with Peter, but he doesn't write him off. He doesn't ghost him. He doesn't disappear.
Speaker 1:He's not mean to him, but he doesn't let the past go unsaid either. And as hard as it is sometimes, we have to fight for our friendships. But wisdom is also about recognizing that sometimes to forgive well, Micah is remembering that reconciliation takes both parties doing their part. And unless both parties are willing to do that, then sometimes forgiveness means moving on in new ways. Now, that was friendship.
Speaker 1:Today, we dive back into Romans, but first let's pray. Our God who is our friend, who cares for us, who leans in to listen to us, who makes time and space for us, might we reflect you in our care for each other. If we recognize our need for friends right now, might we make the time and invest the energy, look for the appropriate spaces to open our stories to those who might welcome it. For those of us who have friends, but we know that we haven't put in the work that we need to. Would we see our friends as expressions of your divine love?
Speaker 1:Might we dive in with renewed excitement. For those of us who find ourselves navigating the struggle of forgiveness and boundaries and change, might you guide and protect and lead us into healthy expressions of grace and peace. And now, as we turn our attention back to Romans and reprocess thought and theology and history, might we see in it all this invitation of friendship that you offer to us. And might all of our study help us to know you in new ways. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray.
Speaker 1:Amen. Okay. It was a long introduction with an extended recap, but guess what? Today, we dive back into Romans for the fourth year. This year, we're gonna move through chapters nine, ten, eleven, and twelve, but that means that we need to recap chapters one through eight.
Speaker 1:And if you're new to commons, a few years ago we decided we were gonna tackle the book of Romans. But in doing that we knew that like six months of straight Paul was gonna throw off the balance that we wanna have in a year. And so what we did was we decided to break this up over a series of years. And so each year, we pushed through a few more chapters, but together all of these messages build out a larger take on this really important letter that grounds a lot of what we understand as Paul's approach to the Jesus story. But today, we have code shifting some rethinking theological schools and the one community of Christ to move through.
Speaker 1:And it is gonna be a heavy day because this is a heavy book. There's a lot of ground to get under our feet as we dive back in. But this week, I was wrestling with my son who is five years old, and this is sort of his favorite thing to do right now. But when we wrestle, we will often come up with new moves to try on each other, and generally, we will name those new moves. My specialty is the drill punch, which is basically just tickling him in the stomach.
Speaker 1:But this week, he said to me, dad, I have a new move, and you will not be ready for this one. It's called the paper cut. And that made me a little nervous. I was like, don't know what's coming here. So I said, well, why is it called the paper cut?
Speaker 1:And he said, because paper cuts are the worst. And I was like, okay. Yeah. I'm not gonna argue with them. Here's the thing.
Speaker 1:If my son can find room to bring paper cuts into his favorite game, then even if you are here and all you want to do is love Jesus and love people, then I think we can find a way to make some of these heavy theological conversations at least engaging, if not fun. Now, don't know if you know Paul, but it's really important to understand some of his story. Because Paul is both a very religious Jew and also a Roman citizen. And that places him in a very unique category in the ancient world. He has an incredible grasp on the history of the Jewish people and their scriptures, but he also speaks Greek.
Speaker 1:He has certain rights as a Roman citizen, and he's very well versed in Greco Roman art and philosophy and rhetoric. And we see this in the book of Acts where he debates with both Jews and Gentiles, but he's very comfortable switching back and forth between different styles of dialogue depending on who's listening. When the Hebrew scriptures aren't working, he will just switch to quoting Greek poets. And we see this a bit in Romans as well, where Paul will speak equally to both the Jewish and the non Jewish believers in the city. We actually don't know a lot about the church in Rome.
Speaker 1:Paul didn't start it. He tells us that. But the fact is we don't know who did. And this is one of the really fascinating ideas when you think about how much of the story of early Christianity is just not recorded for us. I mean, someone started a church in the most important city in the ancient world.
Speaker 1:And it becomes one of the most important churches in the history of Christianity and we don't know who to give credit to for that. It's actually kind of beautiful in a way. But in chapter one, Paul starts the letter by acknowledging both of these groups in his opening salvo. In verse 14 he writes, I am obligated both to Greeks and non Greeks, both to the wise and to the foolish. Now, in English we miss some of the heat here Because what he says is that he's obligated both to the Helen and the Barbaros.
Speaker 1:Now, Helen meaning Greeks and Romans, but Barbaros meaning barbarians and babblers, backwards, backwards simpletons. That is a very Roman way of describing the world. Right? There's us and then there's the rest of the unenlightened masses. But then he quickly adds that he's equally obligated to the wise and to the foolish.
Speaker 1:And these are the terms Sophia and Anoetos and that's a very Hebrew way of describing the world. Sophia or wisdom is actually the feminine name for God in the Hebrew scriptures. And the foolish are a way of describing those who don't know that God. And so this is a guy who's very aware of his identity as a Jewish person, but is also aware of his ability to keep different feet in very different worlds. And how he can code shift between them when it's necessary.
Speaker 1:And there's something there for us about learning to remain true to ourselves. Knowing who we are, but also understanding who we're speaking to, How our words are heard by them. Speaking the truth in love, that's another line from Paul, that's not just about telling it as you see it. It's about putting yourself in someone else's shoes. It's about hearing yourself through someone else's ears.
Speaker 1:It's about adjusting your language to be loving above all else. And I know that at times when you read Paul, he can come off as a little sharp, prickly. But what has really helped me is recognizing these moments where we see Paul at his best. Deeply concerned with how his words will be heard and received and understood as loving and grace filled. And what's really fascinating about that is that if you know Paul, you know that his religious career does not start there.
Speaker 1:His story actually begins as a very zealous Jewish leader within the pharisaical movement, and his reputation is built as he goes out and he very violently persecutes the early followers of Jesus. In fact in the book of Acts he oversees the execution of at least one of the early Christians, a man named Stephen. Now Paul is going by the name Saul at that point in the story. And one day on the road to Damascus, another ancient city, he has an encounter with the risen Christ. And he becomes convinced that Jesus really was the Messiah and that Jesus really is alive and well despite his very public execution and death.
Speaker 1:And that obviously changes everything for Paul. You see for Paul, if the cost of sin is death and if everyone pays that cost, well if Jesus came back from the dead then that means that sin is defeated completely. But here's the kicker, everybody dies not just Jews. And that means that with Jesus' resurrection, it must mean the story of God has been expanded to all peoples everywhere. Sin and death really are defeated then life must have come for all of us.
Speaker 1:And this is what Paul is working through. It's what he's talking about in Romans five. He's rethinking all of his assumptions when he says that just as sin entered the world through one man Adam and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people. Well, then how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Paul goes even farther in another one of his letters.
Speaker 1:First Corinthians chapter 15, he argues, for as in Adam all die, in Christ all will be made alive. The idea for Paul is that if Christ didn't just come to complete the Jewish religious obligations as Messiah, he overcame the human condition as the Christ. That means now, ideas like ethnic identity, they can be important. Paul still very much sees himself as a Jew, but ethnic identity can't function as a barrier between people anymore. And this is really at the core of what Paul is trying to work out in all of his letters.
Speaker 1:The world is being reconciled to God, and none of our categories matter anymore. Now, there's a number of ways that theologians have tried to systematize Paul's ideas. And we have touched on them in previous years, but I haven't yet laid them out side by side. So here are the major schools of thought when it comes to Paul. There's something called the Tubingen School, and this comes from a group of theologians who were writing and teaching at the Tubingen University in Germany in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1:And what they saw was two major streams in early Christianity fighting it out for supremacy. There were the Judaizers like Peter, who wanted to maintain a very works based theology of doing the right things. And then there was Paul and his followers who had a faith based theology of believing the right things. Now, if you happen to be into nineteenth century German philosophy, you will recognize this as a Hegelian dialectical approach. Thesis, antithesis, conflict, synthesis.
Speaker 1:The problem here is that it vastly oversimplifies the dynamic we see in the New Testament. Don't get me wrong. Paul and Peter butt heads. They have their disagreements. We're gonna look at one later today.
Speaker 1:But to simplify everything down to two sides and one winner just doesn't make sense of the complexity that happens in human relationships. Paul and Peter are not opposites. They're colleagues. They're partners, but they're wrestling and they're working things out together. And it's really important that we don't buy too closely into these conflict narratives because what can happen is that all of a sudden we begin to see other churches, other theologians, other believers as our enemies instead of our siblings.
Speaker 1:And particularly in Protestantism, we have fallen into that narrative far too often as evidenced by the literally thousands of denominations that keep splitting off from each other all the time. Christianity was never meant to be a winner takes all kind of community. Now, second major school is sometimes called the archaeology of religion approach. This came from anthropologists and sociologists who looked at Judaism and saw it as a do the right thing religion. And they saw Greek philosophy as a think of the right way kind of culture.
Speaker 1:And they looked at Paul who does have one foot in both worlds. And so what they saw was Paul trying to Hellenize his Jewish roots. In other words, they thought that he was trying to Greek ify Judaism to make it more palatable to the non Jews that he spent a lot of his time with. Now the problem here is that it really doesn't properly acknowledge the deeply rabbinical ways that Paul thinks about Jesus. Paul never leaves Judaism behind.
Speaker 1:In fact, Paul does not even think that he is anything but a faithful Jew. Now, for example, at the end of Romans chapter four, Paul makes an argument for faith in Jesus, but he does that using the story of Abraham. And everything he says there requires not just a deep understanding of the Hebrew scriptures, but actually a deep trust in the way that Jews read the Hebrew scriptures. Now that was actually part two or part six of year two if you wanna go back and check it out, but it's important here to understand that Paul never abandons his Jewish identity. It's certainly expanded and transformed in Jesus but it's never abdicated.
Speaker 1:If anything, in Paul's mind, he's diving deeper into his Jewishness through the story of Jesus. Now, the last major approach is called the new perspective on Paul. It's not very new anymore. In fact, it became prevalent in the early to mid twentieth century. But what happened was that people started to take Paul's Jewishness seriously.
Speaker 1:And they realized that people don't just change their mind and then abandon everything they knew. We add to ourselves. We gather new ideas. We transcend who we were. But we also include all of our stories and our history with us as we journey.
Speaker 1:And so when these scholars started actually listening to Jewish theologians and Jewish rabbis and Jewish teachers what they realized was that the Hebrews never saw their religion as focused on doing the right things. In fact, the entire point of the Hebrew scripture is that God chose the Hebrew people because God loved them. Not because they were powerful, Deuteronomy seven seven. Not because they were particularly faithful, read the entire book of Judges. And not because they even really wanted God to lead them, read the book of first Samuel.
Speaker 1:But simply because God loved them. And so Jewish religion for Jews was never designed to win God's approval. Judaism was always only ever a response to God's love that had been freely given to them. And once we started listening to our Jewish friends, we realized that this dichotomy between faith and works doesn't really exist in Judaism, and it doesn't really exist in Paul's imagination. Because for Paul, doing the right things is nothing but the natural outflow from rightly knowing that you are loved.
Speaker 1:And so the question for Paul was never how do we get love. The question was what signals our participation in God's love. Now, in Judaism, that was a kosher diet and circumcision. But for Paul, if Christ's resurrection has crossed ethnic barriers, well then now we need a new signal. And for Paul, that is what he calls a justification by faith.
Speaker 1:And his idea is simply that we are marked in our relationship with God by our trust that the divine will do good for us. Now, the tricky part here with justification by faith is that it gets confused a little bit in English. And the reason is because in English, we use the words faith and belief interchangeably in a way that Paul doesn't. What we often hear is that you don't have to do the right things, but you do have to believe or think the right things. And, that's not exactly what Paul is saying in Romans.
Speaker 1:Paul is saying you have to trust the right person. For Paul, Jesus has changed everything. And the entire world is being reconciled to God and the way that you identify yourself with that story is to trust in the goodness and the faithfulness of Jesus. Probably the best way to understand what Paul is saying in Romans is to read chapter three verse 22 this way. That the righteousness of God is given through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ to all who trust.
Speaker 1:And therefore there is no difference now between Jew and Gentile. This is exactly what Paul has been saying since the moment he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. That the story of Jesus is so big, and the work of Jesus is so beautiful, and the victory of Jesus is so compelling that he has overcome sin and death and everything that divides us from each other and from God. And that's the good news that undergirds everything for Paul in his writings. The world is being reconciled to God through the faithfulness of Jesus.
Speaker 1:And if you can just trust that, then it will change everything for you and about you. Now, the tough thing is of course figuring out how to live that in community. Because everything that you and I have ever been told as human beings is that love is a limited commodity. And that the only way we can ever really know that we're in is to know definitively who's out. And this is what the early church struggles with, but let's be honest here, this is what we have all struggled with ever since.
Speaker 1:And in one of the most famous conflicts of the New Testament, we see Peter come on board with this idea. He has his own encounter with the risen Jesus in Acts 10, but then later, when some of his Jewish friends come to town, he decides to leave his new Gentile friends and go sit with his Jewish friends at dinner. And that might not sound like a big deal, kinda little junior high actually, but it's a very big deal for Paul. And one of the things we have to remember is that in in the ancient world, tables were not just for eating beside someone. Table fellowship was a way of acknowledging someone as an equal.
Speaker 1:That's why it's such a big deal when Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners and sex workers in the gospel. Because he's acknowledging them as his equal. As humans worthy not just of a meal, but dignity and compassion, compassion, welcome welcome and and respect. Respect. And so while Paul absolutely recognizes the significance of cultural practices, he doesn't wanna take Jewish markers away from anyone.
Speaker 1:But when those markers become barriers again, and they start to recreate the in groups and the out groups that Jesus overcame, the dude will not abide. And this is where he kinda goes off. In Galatians, he calls them foolish and deceived. He even says in chapter five, listen, if you think circumcision is so great, then why don't you go ahead and just cut the whole thing off? And if half the room winced a little bit, that's okay because the dude is not messing around here.
Speaker 1:The point is to recognize that we don't have to sanitize the New Testament. The story of Jesus changed everything for Paul. It flipped everything upside down for Peter. It reinvented the entire way that communities defined themselves over and against each other, and we still struggle with all of that today. Look.
Speaker 1:These debates in the New Testament about Jews and Gentiles and kosher diets and circumcision, they can all seem very distant and unnecessary to us. Like, perhaps fit for a history class, but not particularly helpful for our spiritual journeys. But the thing is, what we're seeing here in the background to all of these New Testament letters like Romans, it's a different set of categories, but it is still the same struggle that all of us wrestle with all of the time. This tension between our human nature that tells us we can't ever really know that we're loved unless we know who's not. Set against the good news that resides in the very deepest parts of our spirit.
Speaker 1:Knowing ourselves as loved requires nothing more than trusting that God is faithful to do good for us. Because here's the thing, Christianity was never about you getting enough of Jesus inside of you that God would love you. But the truth is Paul hardly ever talks about Christ in you. Now, what Paul is fascinated by is the idea of you in Christ. This incredible imagination of who you might become if you came to know yourself as wrapped up in the story of Jesus and the love of God.
Speaker 1:As Paul writes in chapter eight of Romans where we finished off last year and where we'll close off today. Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ. Because through Jesus, the law of the spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. The law that divides you from everything that God desperately wants for you. Let's pray.
Speaker 1:God, as we dive back into this book of Romans, with all of the thought and theology and history that comes with it. These categories that feel like anachronisms because they're so separated from our experience of the world today. Might you help us sift through it all to recognize this same human struggle that all of us feel? That I will never really know myself as loved unless I know who's not. And would you instead begin to replace that narrative with this idea that knowing ourselves as loved is as simple as trusting you to do good for us.
Speaker 1:That your love is infinite and inexhaustible. And that as that begins to sink somewhere deep into us, it will change the way that we engage with everyone. That we might follow Paul's lead and begin to tear down the walls and the barriers, the in groups and the out groups that we create around us. And that we might begin to actually see people the way that you do, is deeply loved and always welcome. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray.
Speaker 1:Amen.