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Romans 1:16-32
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
My name is Jeremy. I'm part of the team here, and it's great to have you here with us today. We find ourselves in the middle of a series on the book of Romans. And we are about to hit some of the heavy material today, some of the hard words of Paul. If you have been reading ahead, you might be wondering what we're going to do with the last half of this chapter and we will get there.
Speaker 1:If you are here and it's your first time, then I apologize because it's heavy stuff today. But it is also Pentecost Sunday. And as someone who has the roots of his Christian story in the Pentecostal tradition, I feel some not so small affinity with this week in the Christian calendar. Today, we reach the end of the season of Eastertide, and this is a week's long celebration of resurrection. Today is fifty days since Easter.
Speaker 1:Some of you are wondering where the time went. But we mark this moment by remembering the gift of the spirit. Now it may not always be overt, but we actually do follow the Christian calendar, the liturgical calendar here at Commons. Very early in the Christian tradition, our fathers recognized that rhythms and patterns and cycles were important to human life. Seasons of anticipation like Advent.
Speaker 1:Seasons of preparation like Lent. Seasons of grief like the build towards a holy week. Seasons to celebrate like Easter side and seasons to work and metabolize what we've learned. Seasons to work that into the fabric of our life like ordinary time. Ordinary time begins next week with Trinity Sunday, and one of my favorite things about the Christian calendar is the recognition of ordinary time.
Speaker 1:Ordinary is beautiful in the Christian Christian faith. But this is more than just dusty religious memory. This is a pattern for life that we acknowledge and we recognize the ebbs and flows of human stories. And so today is Pentecost Sunday, a week where we remember that we can be as intellectually honest and academically engaged and head invested as we want. But if we aren't also spiritually passionate and God guided and forward facing, then we have missed the movement of the divine in our moment.
Speaker 1:So Pentecost is not just for those wacky expressions of charismatic exuberance. I come from that tradition, and so I understand the profound beauty of it. Pentecost is for all of us. It's the promise that God is present with us this day. The guarantee that religion is not just about something that happened a long, long time ago.
Speaker 1:And the hope that God is continuing even now to guide and move and shape his church for tomorrow. Because that is what resurrection is about, life. So let's pray. Come Holy Spirit, rain upon dry and dusty lives, and wash away the sin and woundedness in our hearts. Kindle within us the fire of love to burn away our apathy and our ignorance.
Speaker 1:And warm us with the fire inside you. To bend our rigid path and guide our wandering feet so that we might be brought back to you. So we sink ourselves into the rhythms of your church, and we find stability and affinity and comfort in those patterns. Would you help to bring our faith to life? Bring vibrancy and vitality into shallow hearts, put new bounce and energy into tired legs.
Speaker 1:And as we turn our thoughts back to Romans today, in this brilliant letter inspired by your same spirit. May we come in to see even in the hard words of scripture, the grace and acceptance and deep desire for relationship that is the ground of being. May we turn to you. May we run to you, and may we incense the embrace of your spirit this day. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray.
Speaker 1:Amen. Alright. Last Last week, we made it through to verse 15 in chapter one of Romans. We got to watch Paul pull this neat little trick where he cozies himself up to the Roman church before pulling out the rug from under them just a little bit. He reminds them to celebrate the wins of others, to serve in ways that are mutually beneficial, and to welcome even those we haven't met as brothers and sisters in community.
Speaker 1:Everyone is loving this letter so far. When Paul says that I do all of this because I am equally obligated both to Greeks and to non Greeks. And the real trick here is this phrase non Greek, barbaros in in in the Greek language. Because that is essentially an ethnic slur. It was a way that Romans talked about non Romans.
Speaker 1:It was a way to dismiss them or belittle them or remind themselves how superior they were above everyone else. And Paul says, no. That That simply won't fly in the community of Christ. And if you want to understand how important this little moment in the middle of chapter one is, then think about later in the letter when Paul is reminding the Roman Gentiles that they are not second class citizens because they worship a Jewish Messiah. And then imagine try to imagine how differently that passage would be read after receiving this in chapter one.
Speaker 1:We are all one in Christ Jesus. This is just some really good pastoral work that Paul is doing here in the opening of this letter. Now today, Paul is going to walk us through terrible paradox of God's abiding grace and the freedom that he gives us to walk away from that grace. And it is a heavy week and I don't have many jokes, so we might as well jump straight into verse 16 here. Where Paul writes, for I am not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes.
Speaker 1:First to the Jew, then to the Gentile. For in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed. A righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it was written, the righteous will live by faith. And also, the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people who suppress the truth by their wickedness. Since what may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them.
Speaker 1: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. Now that's verses 16 to 20. In the next 12 verses through to the end of the first chapter, Paul is going to go on a bit of a rant. And he's going to list all kinds of sin and depravity and wickedness as he sees it. This is a reflection of a wrath or anger that God is being is revealing, Paul says.
Speaker 1:Now here's a couple of the highlights if you're taking notes. Maybe perhaps low lights. Who knows? But verse 22, for though they claim to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made by men. Verse 24, God gave them over to sexual desires and to sexual impure impurity.
Speaker 1:Verse 26, women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. Men abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Hang on to that. I will get there. I promise.
Speaker 1:Verse 29, they are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and malice. Verse 30, they are gossips, slanderers, God haters, insolent, arrogant, boastful. They disobey their parents. Verse 31, they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. And to close out the section, verse 32, they do all of this even though they know that those who do such things deserve death.
Speaker 1:Yikes. I mean, what happened to happy hippie Paul who just wanted everyone to get along last week? Can someone please get him a Snickers because clearly this guy needs something to eat? Well, as I said here, this is a heavy passage, but it is one that we need to face into. And my hope is that as we do, we'll see that Paul is still the same hopeful, helpful voice he was earlier in chapter one.
Speaker 1:We just need to work to make sense of the larger argument that he's making. Before that, however, let's talk about homosexuality. Because for some reason, that is the only item on this long list that anyone ever really wants to talk about. So let me say a few things here. First, this is not a sermon about human sexuality because this is not a passage about human sexuality.
Speaker 1:Can we at least be honest about the fact that there is a wide swath that Paul is cutting here. For Paul, homosexuality fits somewhere on the spectrum from murderers to children who disobey their parents. So that's number one. Let's not lose the large point that Paul is making about humanity by getting too caught up on one specific example he gives us. Second, we need to recognize that Paul is simply not speaking about the same type of same sex relationships we are talking about in our culture today.
Speaker 1:Now I've read many different interpretations on this passage and others. It seems clear to me, however, that Paul is condemning all of the homosexual activity he sees in his world. But at the same time, we know that the homosexuality Paul saw in his world was a very different, very damaging expression of sexuality. The idea of widespread mutual, consensual, monogamous, homosexual relationships simply did not exist in Rome. Homosexuality was pederasty.
Speaker 1:It was a form of Greek pedophilia. Or homosexuality was prostitution, a form of economic enslavement. Now, that does not mean you can make Paul endorse homosexual relationships. It simply doesn't do that for us. But it does mean that how we approach this conversation has to go a lot deeper than engaging with a single verse, six actually in all of the Bible that refer to homosexuality, without properly engaging their cultural context.
Speaker 1:Because in fact, right alongside murderers and homosexuals and children who disobey their parents, Paul also lists those who are without understanding or fidelity or love or mercy. And so if you don't show those, then you have no basis worrying about anything else in this passage to begin with. Finally, let me say this. We are part of a larger body of churches, a denomination that affirms the biblical image of marriage between a man and a woman. I was just at our dominational meetings this weekend in Toronto.
Speaker 1:I got back late last night, and we are still very much in discussion discerning how the spirit is leading us as a church in regards to this topic. But affirming a traditional image of marriage marriage does not mean that we cannot celebrate love and fidelity and commitment wherever we see them appear. The truth is my marriage does not live up to any kind of biblical ideal. It just doesn't and neither does yours. And so wherever there is love and there is commitment and there is fidelity, fidelity, then there is grace.
Speaker 1:And, I have to believe that that is only because God is present there as well. So, homosexuality is not really the issue here. It is simply an example that Paul pulls from his world. Humanity is the issue. And the highest question we can ask ourselves in any debate, knowing everything we know about God with Jesus as the face that he has chosen to show us, is how will my response bring more healing and wholeness and peace into the world?
Speaker 1:Now for us at Commons, that means that we welcome each other into community as full participants and full members with no strings attached. We want to celebrate wherever God is at work in our lives. Now, that is not a full and thorough treatment of human sexuality, but as I said, that's not Paul's point here in Romans. And so our agenda, at least for today, is to follow Paul's lead. And to do that, we have to go back to the first section that we read in verses 16 to 20.
Speaker 1:Because that's really the crux of his argument. Paul says, I am not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes. Now there's a fairly strong argument here that this phrase, I am not ashamed, is actually a literary device in Greek. It's called a. This is where the emphasis is actually reversed in the saying.
Speaker 1:And so the idea being communicated would be something more like, I am proud of the gospel rather than I am not ashamed of the gospel. This is not a minority view in this passage at all. Now, bible translation committees, they tend to want to be as literal as possible unless doing that would really mess with the meaning. But almost every scholar, every commentary on Romans rendered this phrase in a positive way. Here's a few examples from a few different translators.
Speaker 1:I am proud of the gospel. I have complete confidence in the gospel. I trust completely in the gospel. I rest rest my whole weight on the gospel. I lean against the gospel completely.
Speaker 1:That's really Paul's emphasis here. Now that certainly does not change the larger meaning, but it does subtly shift the tone. If I met you for the very first time, and I introduced my beautiful wife, Rachel, and I said, nice to meet you. This is my wife. I am not at all ashamed to be seen with her today.
Speaker 1:You might think that would be a little weird, and it would be. And yet for some reason, we sometimes seem to have adopted this posture in Christianity. Very adversarial. Our backup against the wall. We have sort of a martyr complex in North American Christianity.
Speaker 1:We're not ashamed of Jesus. Well, that's great. I'm not ashamed of Jesus either. I'm also not sure that anyone is interested in all the things I'm not ashamed of. They might want to know who I am or what I'm proud of.
Speaker 1:What I identify with and how I choose to live out my faith. But who you're not is really not all that interesting. One of the things that took me a really long time to figure out was that people weren't interested in who I wasn't. Now every teenager spends at least a few years trying to not be their parents. Right?
Speaker 1:You grow long hair. You become sullen. You communicate that your parents have no idea about how the world works. Come on. We all did it.
Speaker 1:Some of us just took longer to grow out of it, and some of us still haven't cut our hair yet. That's fine. It's okay to do that. But I actually spent the first decade of my career in ministry focusing almost exclusively on what I did not like about religion. And there is a certain audience for that.
Speaker 1:In fact, it's kind of easy to gather an audience for that. It's tangible and it creates clear lines for definition, but it's also because it's not generative. It requires the energy to come from outside itself. You need someone else to be your villain. You need someone to be against you so that you can proudly say, I am not ashamed.
Speaker 1:Don't get me wrong. Sometimes we need to do that. Right? Sometimes we need the backbone of our conviction. But here in Romans, no one is actually challenging Paul.
Speaker 1:No one is shaming him, and so I don't think that's actually his central point. I think he is saying, I am so deeply proud to be identified with the story of Jesus, And I am caught up into this story. I am his servant and his ambassador as he has said earlier. That's who I have become in Christ. You do not need an enemy to prove that you love Jesus.
Speaker 1:And listen, in the kingdom, everyone will know and understand and worship God. And so if you need a scapegoat to prove your faith, you better get over it because you won't have that option forever. This us and them thing isn't helpful. Now it's a small thing, but it's also important because if we start with an artificially adversarial posture going in, then you can bet that we will read the hard words that will follow with an artificially prosecutorial bent as well. Paul says, I am proud of the gospel because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes.
Speaker 1:For through the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed. A righteousness that is by faith. Now it's a tricky passage because there are essentially two ways this can go. And in the simplest terms, it comes down to how you want to translate the Greek word pistis. Do you want to say faith, or do you want to say faithfulness?
Speaker 1:Now the technical argument here, it revolves around the fact that pistis is in the genitive case in Greek, and that can be either objective or subjective. So you can get faith in God or you could get the faithfulness of God. The section you see in quotes here on the screen, that line, the righteous will live by faith. That's a quote from the Old Testament, Habakkuk two four. Unfortunately, if you go there for help, there's not much because the Hebrew could go either way.
Speaker 1:So the faith of the person or the faith of God, we don't know. And so because both of these options work in the passage and because prepositions in Greek are fluid enough that equally are grammatically sound, we have a choice to make. The first puts the emphasis on us. God's righteousness is revealed when we have faith, and that's how we find life. The second puts the emphasis on God.
Speaker 1:God's righteousness is revealed when he is faithful to us, and we live because of his faithfulness. Now it's important to remember that neither of those are exclusive. Whichever rendering you prefer, it is simply a question as emphasis, not exclusion. I don't know any single scholar who would argue that God is not faithful to his promises. I don't know any evangelical who would say that our faith and our trust is somehow unimportant to God.
Speaker 1:I would suggest though that the scholarly consensus right now probably leans toward Paul's emphasis landing on the faithfulness of God in this image. That's what he's getting at. The important part here is that Paul is setting up a very key contrast between verses seventeen and eighteen. So verse 17, God's righteousness is revealed when he is faithful and we live because of his faithfulness. Verse 18, the wrath of God is revealed against the godlessness and wickedness of people.
Speaker 1:Therefore, verse 24, God gave them over to the sinful desires of their hearts. Now when you read that the righteousness of God is being revealed, and then in the next verse you read that the wrath of God is being revealed, that should clue you in to connect those two things together. There's a relationship that is being explored here by Paul. And if you read this in Greek and you realize that the word revealed is the word or apocalypse or revelation, then you really know you should pay attention. That's an important word in Greek.
Speaker 1:And so Paul wants to compare and contrast the righteousness that brings life with the wrath that leads to death. Now if I can be a little more provocative here, I think what he really wants to say is that they are actually somehow the same thing. I'll quote Michael Bird here. The revelation of God's wrath is itself a manifestation of God's righteousness. Now we're gonna need to unpack that because it's very heavy, very theological, and it all sounds a little bit scary.
Speaker 1:And truthfully, it kind of is, but perhaps not in the way we sometimes think. And for me, the key is understanding our discussion about the faithfulness of God. Because Paul is saying that the righteousness of God is revealed. It's uncovered. We see it for what it is when we see that God is faithful to his promises.
Speaker 1:That's God's righteousness. So when God moves toward us, when God follows through even when we don't. When God moves to save us in history, that's where we see the righteousness of God. It is an active seeking posture where God leaves the 99 and he goes to track down the one. Or he loses a coin and he searches the house to find it.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's how Jesus describes the righteousness of God. Right? And Paul, I think Paul gets that. Remember, Paul was breathing out murderous threats against the Christians. That's Acts nine verse one, and that's an understatement because he was doing more than breathing out murder threats.
Speaker 1:He was actually murdering Christians. And yet, God tracked him down. And God looked for him, and God dragged him back into grace. If you have been searching for God, then I promise you, God is searching for you. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes, I think that we are working so hard to look for the divine in all kinds of bizarre places.
Speaker 1:That maybe what we need most is simply to stop and to sit and to wait so that God can catch up to us. God is not hiding from you. And when you're lost, sometimes you just need to stop because I promise God is pursuing you. And Paul gets that in a very profound, very personal way. God chased him down and brought him home.
Speaker 1:But what then is this wrath of God that he's talking about? Especially if that is somehow part of the graciousness of God. Well, two things here. First, in verse 18, whatever this wrath is, whatever this anger is, it is actually not against you and I. Hear this, please.
Speaker 1:The universe is not against you. Even if circumstances are not going in your favor right now, there is still a benevolent force that sits at the center of everything, and he is personally invested in you. The universe is cheering you on because God is always for you. Because what Paul says is the wrath of God is being revealed against the godlessness and the wickedness of you and I. So godlessness as in Greek means something like a lack of reverence or dignity.
Speaker 1:Wickedness is actually the word. That's the negative of, which is actually the word righteousness. And so the question here is that if the righteousness of God is revealed when God moves toward us, then how is the wrath of God revealed? And if you read Paul's argument, he seems to be saying that it is revealed when God gives us over to the desires of our hearts. In other words, God lets us have what we want.
Speaker 1:So if righteousness is an active posture that we see in God's faithful pursuit of us. And wrath is somehow the opposite side of that same coin, then wrath is the passive posture where God finally, fully allows us to walk away if we choose. And does that make God angry? Of course, it does. God is angry when he sees the godlessness and the wickedness that has become in us and that pushes and pulls and tears us away from all that is good in the world.
Speaker 1:That's what he's angry at. He's angry when he sees sin, damage, and hurt, and disconnect us from the source of life in the universe. That's what he's angry with. This is not some angry, vindictive, vengeful God that got Paul is describing. This is the God who's broken to the core of his divine being when he sees us turn our backs on what is healing for us.
Speaker 1:And so he's angry at what sin does to us. But eventually, inevitably, perhaps even in its own act of grace, he allows us to choose for our self because that's what love does. You see, it is the same commitment to search us out and invite us back toward him that somehow also brings God to his knees when we choose to walk away. Now here's the teeth of it that we can't ignore in Paul's words. Once God allows us, finally and fully to leave him, it's not that God stops loving us or stops being full of grace and forgiveness for us.
Speaker 1:That's who God is. Nothing you could ever do will ever change that about God. But at that point, when we have finally fully turned our back on him, the question is what's left to bring us back. This is what CS Lewis talks about in the great divorce when he says that the door to hell is shut from the inside. It's not that God changes, God never changes.
Speaker 1:It's not that he becomes vindictive toward us. It's that once you lose sight of the light, you get lost in the dark. And sometimes, some of us, we enter that door and we get really, really lost long before we die. And on our own, sometimes there is just simply not enough divine memory to help us find our way back to him. That's why God is angry about sin.
Speaker 1:That's why God reveals his wrath against our brokenness. Brokenness. And that's why one day God will completely destroy everything that separates us from him. Because that's what makes him angry. And Paul is overwhelmed with this story.
Speaker 1:I imagine he thinks of the years that he spent pushing away from God and pursuing his own agenda, living in his own hell, bringing more hurt and violence and pain into the world. Instead of the grace and the peace and the shalom that he's experienced now in Christ. And so he unloads on all of the hurt that he sees in the world around him. Those who claim to be wise, those who worship idols, those who are caught in sexual impurity, women in unnatural relationships, men inflamed with lust for one another, the envious, the murderers, the liars, the gossips, the arrogant, the boastful, and even all those kids who disobey their parents. But it's not a judgment against us.
Speaker 1:It's not he's not what he's saying. He's not writing us off. He's inviting us to turn the corner into something better. And so in whatever way you fall on Paul's list, because the truth is you do, may you know that you are not. You are never the object of God's wrath.
Speaker 1:That is reserved for all that hurts you. You you are the recipient of his righteousness that searches you out and brings you home. May you sense today the spirit of Jesus who has called us forward into resurrection, this Pentecost by his spirit, and who speaks and guides and helps us to interpret his word in the light of our present moment. Would that same spirit now lead you into all truth and perfect love so that you might come to know the wrath of God revealed against whatever separates you from the divine and the righteousness of God that calls you to be healed in his presence. Let's pray.
Speaker 1:God, help us to be so deeply captured captured by the image of infinite love and immeasurable grace and unending forgiveness that we would be able to engage honestly and clearly with the hard words of scriptures that also call us to recognize just how deeply sin and brokenness and hurt has damaged the human experience. Experience. May we come to know that you are always pursuing us, and that your righteousness is your faithfulness towards us, that you are calling us, you are searching us out, and you are bringing us back to yourself, and that you are revealing your anger and your wrath against all that is broken in the world. May we trust and believe that one day, all that separates us from you will be burned up and disappear so that we could walk fully and completely into your presence, to be healed and restored and made into the image you imagined when you created us. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray.
Speaker 1:Amen.