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The letter to Rome in its context.
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
God is love, period, which means that God can act in justice or God can act in mercy. It means that God can be angry at everything that hurts us and take action against it if that's the most loving thing to do. But God is never anything but love for us. Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here.
Speaker 1:We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information. There's always lots happening around the community. Commons.church and commons.life, our twin websites. Those are your best friends for keeping up with all of the opportunities to connect and contribute and share life with those around you.
Speaker 1:But, however, last week, we did it. We finished off Romans with a look at chapter 16. And for me, the most important thing to keep in mind in this final chapter of Romans is that this is Paul's postscript. Paul has finished with his agenda, he's checked all of his boxes, he has said everything he thinks he needs to say, and now he wants to say thank you. And as I said last week, sometimes I think, we think, or when we think we have nothing left to say, this is actually when we're at our best.
Speaker 1:And that's certainly the case for Paul. Because here behind the curtain what we see is a lot of gratitude expressed for women who have shaped Paul, Thanks for women who have contributed to Paul. Honor for the women who have partnered alongside Paul in ministry. And in the quote reel that has played before each sermon in this series, there's a quote from the scholar Kathleen Cooper. She writes in Paul's letters, can hear something more than his own genius, an echo of female voices, of conversations with the women who were his close collaborators.
Speaker 1:And throughout the series, a couple of people have asked me, what is that all about? I see this quote. I've never heard that before, and all I had to say was wait for it, and finally, we got it. As Paul commends the deacon Phoebe, he thanks his coworker Priscilla, he honors the apostle Junior. And this is Paul and the church at their best.
Speaker 1:No agendas, no barriers, no hang ups to get hung up on, simply gratitude and honor wherever it is due. Now, when it comes to women in leadership, there are of course passages in the Bible that seem to point in other directions. And so for a more thorough discussion on all of that, you can head to common or youtube.com/commonschurch. This week, I put together a bit of a longer look at some of those specific passages related to this issue and how we deal with them here. But for me, the key is to understand that in our earliest incarnations as the church, we were incredibly diverse, profoundly atypical, and defiantly outside the cultural status quo.
Speaker 1:And I truly believe that Christianity is at its best when we are radically fearless in the face of boundaries. Okay. Let's pray, and then today, we're gonna try to recap five years in twenty five minutes. Let's pray. God of all grace, who continues to surprise us with love.
Speaker 1:Would we be willing to push open doors, to knock down walls, to enlarge the capacity of our imaginations, to welcome people with the profound grace that you have invited us to. Right? We always remember that you look like Jesus, and that when our instinct is to close down and draw lines, our instinct to mark our boundaries rears its ugly head, your grace is waiting to welcome us back to the center, to recalibrate and reimagine, to return to those who need your love and to embody it for them. If we are the ones in need today, may we sense your love with us in spirit, but also here in this room and community. And if we are the ones safe in your embrace today, may we offer our arms as yours, trusting that you are present through us to each other.
Speaker 1:In the strong name of the risen Christ, pray. Amen. Okay. The letter to the Romans. Today, we are gonna pull back and look at some of the major movements of this letter.
Speaker 1:We have found ourselves down in the nitty gritty details, but now we kinda wanna see how it all works together. And to do that, we're gonna talk about Paul and his story. We're gonna look at the context in Rome specifically, and then it's going to be God's self revelation, the new humanity, and old old promise, and our unity in Christ. But, we'll start with some context here. And by the way, I have a ton of ground to cover today.
Speaker 1:So we are gonna get to work straight away. And just a heads up, I think this will be fun, but it might feel a little more luxury today just because of how much material we want to cover. So heads up, my apologies. However, we first meet Paul in the book of Acts. Despite that though, we have to understand that Paul's writings are actually some of the earliest in our New Testament.
Speaker 1:Luke and Acts are likely written together in the seventies of the common era and that is after Paul's death. So Luke is a biography of Jesus. Acts is a biography of the early church and that's largely about Paul. And so when we meet Paul in the story, he is sort of a rogue Pharisee who is going out and actively persecuting the early Christian movement. In fact, he has received permission to go to Damascus and try to root out any of these people of the way, which by the way is what the Christians were first called, which should tell us something about what it was that defined the early Jesus movement.
Speaker 1:It was not articulated theology. It was a way of Jesus that shaped the early church. This movement of people who lived out of the peace of Christ together. But Paul, who was going by his Jewish name Saul at the time, heads to Damascus to find these people of the way. And on his way there Paul has a spiritual encounter.
Speaker 1:A light flashes in his eyes and a voice asks why are you persecuting me? Paul is a little taken aback. He doesn't recognize this disembodied voice after all and he asks, who are you? And the answer returns, I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. Now this changes everything for Paul.
Speaker 1:But if Jesus is alive and if a man can die and live again, then everything that he has ever been sure about in his life is up for grabs all of a sudden. And so from there, Paul goes to spend time with the Christians and learn from them. After that, he sort of goes off the grid a little bit and he spends three years in Arabia just praying and listening and formulating all of these ideas that will go on to shape his ministry when he returns. And when he does, after that time away, what he finds is a fairly large influential church in Jerusalem that is still very heavily influenced by Jewish norms and they are expecting people to come there to worship Jesus if they want to know about him. Paul however takes a different approach and he begins to take the story of Jesus out of Jerusalem to anyone who will listen to him.
Speaker 1:And he begins starting all of these small Jesus communities all over the place in the Roman Empire. Now that creates some tension with those leaders in Jerusalem, but it's during this period in the fifties of the common area that Paul is starting churches and he is writing his letters. And it's tough to put all of the chronology together really neatly, but what we have is probably something like this. Where first Thessalonians, Galatians, first Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, second Corinthians, and Romans are written in that order between about fifty and fifty seven of the common era. Second Thessalonians, Ephesians, and Colossians may fit somewhere in there.
Speaker 1:Although there is some question about the authorship of those letters. And then we have first and second Timothy and Titus, are very likely actually written by someone else in the early second century, about one twenty to one fifty. Now they are definitely written in the first half of the second century because we know that Polycarp and Narenius quote these letters in the second half of the 100. So they're fairly early still. Regardless, understand this.
Speaker 1:The practice of writing in someone else's name, That's called pseudo epigrapha. And it sounds a little weird to most of us as modern audiences. But the idea of writing in someone's name, writing in the spirit of your mentor or your teacher, that wasn't considered deceitful the way we might think of that today. Today we hear that and we just think that sounds like lying. But at the time, this was actually a way to honor the legacy and the impact of someone that you deeply admired.
Speaker 1:So scholars debate this. There's no real consensus here. But understand that even those scholars who think that the pastoral epistles were written by someone other than Paul, they're not disparaging those letters or those authors, or they're not questioning their place or their authority within the canon of scripture. They're simply acknowledging that that was a different world with different rules around proper citation. There was no Turabian back then, and that's a joke for all the nerds in the room.
Speaker 1:However, back to Romans here. You can see that Romans comes at the end of what we call the undisputed Pauline letters, but Romans also probably comes before the secondary and Pauline letters. So in that sense, you can count it either early or late, whatever suits your perspective of how these texts came to us. But for a quick comparison here with the Gospels, Mark is probably written in the fifties, Luke in the seventies, Matthew in the eighties, and John in the nineties or maybe even later. So all of these Pauline letters are written right up there at the top around the time of the first accounts of Jesus' life.
Speaker 1:That means that Romans comes very early in the history of Christianity even though it comes near the end of Paul's life. Remember as we talked about last week, after this letter, he's arrested, he's brought back to Rome, and he's executed. So that's Paul's story. What's going on in Rome? Well, the big contextual piece we have to understand about Romans here is the expulsion of the Jews from the city of Rome in '49 of the common era by the emperor Claudius.
Speaker 1:Now that is right around the time that Paul is starting all of his churches. And Jewish people are being kicked out of Rome. And since Paul is starting churches all around the empire, some of those Jewish people become followers of Jesus. But then in '54, Claudius dies and the ban on Jewish people in the city expires and some of them return home. And what they find is a Jesus community in Rome that has sprung up in their absence filled with non Jewish people worshiping a Jewish Messiah.
Speaker 1:And so what we have in Romans is essentially a Gentile church with their own practices and customs now struggling to understand how to welcome back their Jewish neighbors. And Paul, as he tends to do, writes them a letter. And so Paul's big meta goal in Romans, just like it has been largely in his entire ministry career, is to help this community learn how to get along together in their difference. Not to be uniform, not to embody all the same practices, not even necessarily to agree with each other all the time. We'll see that later.
Speaker 1:But to learn how to live together as one community through the peace of Christ that unites all of us. Because for Paul, this is what Jesus has accomplished on the cross. This is why Jesus broke into his life to stop him from persecuting others because the cross has enabled a new humanity in the world. It's a new way for us to be human, now freed from sin, independent of our need to villainize and scapegoat each other. And so that's the lens that we want to read Romans through.
Speaker 1:How does this story of Jesus bring us together in unexpected ways, particularly in a city as diverse as Rome? And for that, we can now look at the four big movements in this letter, which are the revelation of God in chapters one to four, the new humanity that results in chapters five to eight, how this is the fulfillment of God's original promise from the beginning in chapters nine to 11, and therefore the unity of God's people in the light of Christ in chapters 12 to 16. So now, let's go back to the beginning. Let's work our way through. Chapter one verse 14, Paul tells us why he is writing to this particular church.
Speaker 1:He says, I am obligated both to Greeks and to non Greeks, both to wise and to the foolish, for I am not ashamed of the gospel. For it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes, first to the Jew and then also to the Gentile. For the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, which suppresses the truth in wickedness. Now, that there is actually a pretty good encapsulation of Paul's first argument or section in the letter, and it's essentially this. God is good, and God has intended for us to be good to each other, and we have not been.
Speaker 1:And so God intends to do something about it. That's the good news for Paul. Except sometimes we tend to get a little thrown off by some of his language here. Verse one eighteen. It's on the screen right now.
Speaker 1:The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, which suppresses the truth in wickedness. Now, some Bibles will say something slightly different here. Some will say something like, the wrath of God is being revealed against those who suppress the truth by their wickedness. But adding in the those and the theirs is an entirely interpretive decision because the Greek here is almost ruthlessly focused on wickedness. There's actually no pronouns anywhere in the passage at all because for Paul God is not angry at people at all.
Speaker 1:God is angry at what hurts people. Understand this. The anger of God, the wrath of God is not it is never against you. It is against everything that hurts you, including the sin within you that leads you to hurt the person beside you. And this is absolutely integral to understanding Paul's point in this opening section.
Speaker 1:Because what he's trying to do in chapters one and two is point out all of the ways that the Gentiles get life wrong. And then in chapters three and four, all the ways that the Jewish people get life wrong. But his point isn't actually to make any of us feel awful or afraid of God. His intent is to say, don't you see that God has now decided to do something about all of our suffering? See, a God who is love is absolutely angry when I injure myself.
Speaker 1:And a God who is love is, of course, upset when I injure my neighbor, but a God who is love can never be anything but love towards me. And sometimes, what I hear people say is, sure, God is love, but remember, God is also just. Or God is love, but God is also righteous, or God is also wrathful. And I won't say no. It's not.
Speaker 1:No. God is love, period, which means that God can act in justice or God can act in mercy. It means that God can be angry at everything that hurts us and take action against it if that's the most loving thing to do. But God is never anything but love for us. And that's actually Paul's point in chapters one to four that because God is love, God is now revealing God's self to be on the side of God's creation against all that which tears it down.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He employs some heavy language here because Paul is fired up about this. But it's not because Paul thinks God is against the church in Rome. Paul is hot precisely because he believes that the cross reveals that God is against everything that tears at the unity, the flourishing, the shalom of those in Rome. And he wants to let them know.
Speaker 1:But, that leads him to his next point, what a new humanity. So chapter five verse 10 he says, for if while we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of God's son, how much more having been reconciled shall we be saved through his life. Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man and death through that sin and in this way death came to all people because all sinned, consequently just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. Now again, getting this one right is important to Paul's overall project in Romans, but something we have to talk about here first, And that's the relationship between original sin and bad Latin. See Paul's point is that humanity has been mired in sin and we have been divided and dividing since day one.
Speaker 1:But now, if one person, Adam, could set us off on such a bad trajectory, how much more incredible would it be if one person could repair all of that damage and point us back toward the divine? That's Paul's point here. Sin is no match for salvation. Except somewhere along the line we kind of messed this one up, and the irony is we know exactly where we did it. In verse 12, what we read is, therefore just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people because all sinned.
Speaker 1:So Paul is making a contrast here between Adam and Christ, and all of that is pretty straightforward as we read it in the text except that way back in the fourth century, a very influential theologian named Augustine came along. And Augustine was a brilliant thinker and a devoted follower of Jesus. In many ways he was the most important person in Western Christianity since Paul, but he could not read Paul. Because Augustine didn't read Greek. And so he was reading an early Latin translation when what he found here in Romans five was a typo.
Speaker 1:See the Latin read, in this way death came to all people because in him all sinned. And so for Augustine, he's like okay so Adam's sin was somehow genetically passed down to all humanity. In him all sinned. And Augustine thought to himself, well how would that even work? And so eventually he said to himself, self I guess our sin is in our semen.
Speaker 1:That's not a joke by the way, that's what he really thought was going on. Of course that's not what Paul thought because that's not remotely what Paul said. Paul simply said that death comes to all because all sin. Now in technical terms what we are talking about here is the difference between original sin and ancestral sin. Although the truth is colloquially in church both of these just get lumped together and called original sin.
Speaker 1:But technically original sin is the idea that you are born guilty because of something someone else did a long long time ago. So even little babies are dirty and creepy and full of awfulness. Ancestral sin is the idea that you are born into a world that will inevitably influence you away from God because the world has been corrupted by sin. So you're not in trouble because of what Adam did. You're in trouble because the world around you is broken and it inevitably pushes you in all kinds of unhealthy directions.
Speaker 1:Now why that's important is because that leads us into Paul's concept of justification. We are justified or we are made right or we are healed through the faithfulness of Jesus. Now often, we talk about our faith in Christ. So does Paul that is super important to him. But salvation begins in the faithfulness of Jesus.
Speaker 1:Jesus who does not follow the way of Adam, who refuses to be corrupted by the world around him and therefore in the words of Paul, just trespass resulted in condemnation for also, also one righteous life, Jesus' life has resulted in justification and life for all. That's the gospel. There was once a humanity that was mired and stuck in the way of Adam, but now there is a new way, a humanity caught up in the way of Jesus, a new humanity drawn from every tribe, every nation, every language, every corner of every city including even Rome. In other words, everything is different now because of Jesus. The old has passed, the new has come, and you can now choose to follow the way of Christ.
Speaker 1:But, you may ask, well then Paul, what about all those years you spent studying Judaism and Torah? Was that all for nothing? And Paul's answer is no. This was always the plan. We just didn't always see it.
Speaker 1:And so Paul begins his next point, actually at the end of chapter eight, but he carries it all the way through the end of chapter 11. So in eight twenty nine he says, for those God foreknew, God also predestined to be conformed to the image of God's son. That Jesus might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters that knew humanity. For those God predestined, God also called. Those God called, God justified.
Speaker 1:Those God justified, God also glorified. And then in chapter 11 he summarizes the whole section saying, I ask then, did God reject God's people by no means? For I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham from the tribe of Benjamin. God did not reject God's people, those whom God foreknew. Now, the tricky part with this section and what trips a lot of people up is that they come to this passage without having read everything that we've just talked about.
Speaker 1:And if you do that, you're gonna read language like called and predestined and foreknew and you're gonna think what does that mean for me? That's because you live in a culture that has trained you to ask what does this mean for me? That is not how a Jewish rabbi like Paul thinks. That's not what Paul is doing here because Paul is not talking about people. He's talking about peoples.
Speaker 1:Remember? So it's not God foreknew you but not you. God called you but not you. It's God called the Jewish people. And that story, since Abraham was always predestined to expand to include all peoples.
Speaker 1:So Paul's not saying you were predestined, but you were not. Paul is saying this group was predestined, and now this group was going to be added to it. That's why Paul clarifies and says, look, it's not the Jewish people were chosen, but then God had to stop choosing them to choose the Gentiles. No. God is saying that God is slowly but surely choosing all of us eventually.
Speaker 1:The only question that remains then is whether we will choose God back. Because certainly, all through the Hebrew scriptures there are chosen people who reject God and there will be Gentiles who are now chosen who will do the same. Except that now, because of Christ, there is a new humanity where our chosenness transcends our differences. And this launches Paul into his final section of the letter, the one that we have spent our time in this year, the one about us. So in chapter 13, Paul subjects all of the laws and the regulations, all of the governments and the authorities over us to Christ.
Speaker 1:Paul says, look, obey the laws where you can, but don't expose each other to unjust recrimination. Protect each other, guard each other, and remember always that whatever other laws there may be, they are all summed up in this one command. Love your neighbor as yourself for love is the fulfillment of law. So play by the rules, but remember where your allegiance lies because love will always supersede the legal. Then in chapter 14, he builds this beautiful bridge between the Jewish and the Gentile sides of the community.
Speaker 1:Remember that's what he's trying to bring together here. And he uses the idea of eating meat and talks about our need to defer to each other. He writes, whatever you believe about these things, learn to keep it between yourself and God. Sometimes your silence is sacred. The really neat thing here is that you have gentiles in the community who have stopped eating meat fearing that it may have been sacrificed to idols before I got to them.
Speaker 1:But you also have Jewish people within the community who've just returned to the city after their expulsion and they're not yet comfortable seeking out kosher meat in the city for fear that might identify them as Jewish. And now all of a sudden you have Jewish people recognizing some of their fears in their Gentile neighbors. You've got Gentile believers now seeing their concerns reflected back in these newcomers to their community. And so now when Paul says defer to each other, accept one another, welcome each other into your homes regardless of whether you fully understand each other, This is a new and deep resonance within this community because our welcome is precisely how we learn from each other. So in 15, he encourages the community.
Speaker 1:He says, look. Together, you guys are strong. And together, you're wise to instruct each other and encourage each other, but you need each other for that. And so in the closing moments of 16, as we've talked about today, he lays down his agenda. He sets aside his teaching points, and he now just fully embodies everything he has invited this community to do.
Speaker 1:He is gracious. He is thankful. He's open and warm and welcoming and more than that, we now see the same Paul who once persecuted those who saw the divine in a way that he couldn't understand. Now welcome women who've been pushed aside. He honors Jews and Gentiles who have looked down on each other.
Speaker 1:He commends the rich and the poor, the secure and the vulnerable, and he makes room at the table for all of us. And he paints the picture of everything that this letter has been drawing us, inviting us toward. The God who looks like the welcome of Jesus. The God who refuses to allow our strife and our sin to win the day. The divine presence that knits us together and shows us a new way to be human.
Speaker 1:The creator who pulls together all the threads of all history into this tapestry of intent and purpose. The Christ who unites us in the peace of grace. And then pulls us slowly, gently, lovingly toward the way of God's son. Because this is Paul's agenda in Romans, to invite us to encounter the God who is at work breaking down everything that hurts us, who is recreating us in the image of the Christ, who has predestined our welcome from the very beginning, and who now calls us to live in the way of Jesus together. May the letter to the Romans be more than theology for you today.
Speaker 1:May it become a model for your growth. An example of learning that surrounds you, a picture of the community where difference can be celebrated as good. And in that, may we learn from one another as we walk this Romans road, may we all be transformed into the likeness of Christ. Amen. Let's pray.
Speaker 1:God of all grace, we have reached the end of a long conversation full of debates and arguments and ways of thinking and approaching what you're saying, tangents and rabbit trails, but in the end, we hope we are drawn back to the place that your servant Paul was. The inexplicable beauty of the Christ who unites us, who draws us slowly step by step toward the center and toward each other. May we accept one another, welcome each other, may we invite each other into our homes so that we can hear, we can listen, we can learn from those stories. And in that, may our imagination be expanded, be added to. May we see you more clearly because of those around us.
Speaker 1:And in that, as we embrace your kingdom and grace, may we begin to live out the way of Jesus in our lives. In conversations, in transactions, in everything we do, may we be transformed into the way of Jesus. And may your kingdom come in the small slice of this world that we occupy because of it. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.