The past two weeks I have been a bit more in "lecture mode" in my preaching - and began with some apologies for doing so. I was at Christ Church, Fitchburg on Trinity Sunday and basically "preached" on the Nicene Creed - since the Trinity is not a Biblical idea. And then this past week I did an overview of Romans at Church of the Atonement in Westfield.
In both cases I got a lot of "compliments" at the door. Now some of this is attributable to kindness and hospitality, I realize. But I also have long wondered whether we could do with more "teaching sermons" at a time when people are hungry for something beyond what they got in Sunday School. While this won't become my "go to" style soon, perhaps this overview of Romans will help preachers and parishioners alike to hear the epistle in new ways over the next fourteen Sundays.
One of my favorite collects in The
Book of Common Prayer will come at the very end of this long season after
Pentecost, twenty-three weeks from now. It goes like this:
Blessed Lord, who caused all
holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read,
mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast
the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior
Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for
ever and ever. Amen
This is a core-value for
Episcopalians – a part of our DNA. We don’t tend to say things like “The Bible
Says.” Rather, although more cumbersome, we believe that we approach meaning
when we hear and read and mark and learn and digest – AND also that Scripture
points us toward the living Word of God, Jesus.
Over the course of a year we read a
lot of Scripture in our worship. And we do so with a sense of purpose, with a
plan. We are in the midst of Year A, when the focus is on Matthew’s Gospel.
Over these summer months, however, we also will be reading from Genesis for a
while and from Paul’s Letter to the Romans for even longer. In fact, today marks
the first of fourteen weeks in a row – that takes us well into the fall – of
reading from Romans. This sermon will be a little bit different than most I
preach and probably from most you are used to hearing. It’s a kind of preview
on how to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest those epistle readings in the
weeks ahead, regardless of whether or not Sandi chooses to preach on them. My
hope is that as you hear this letter unfold, today’s sermon will give you some
help in hearing “good news” from this first-century document and maybe even, by
God’s grace, to encounter St. Paul again as if for the first time. That begins,
for me in seeing Paul in his context: as a faithful Jew, of the tribe of
Benjamin, from Tarsus.
Think about the impact of place on
your own life, especially during your most formative years. It makes a
difference whether you grew up in a small town in northeast Pennsylvania or the
south-side of Chicago! How has that particular place shaped the person you are
today, and left its mark on you? How does it continue to shape the way you see
the world?
Tarsus no doubt left its mark on
Paul. It was at the crossroads between the eastern and western worlds, making
it pretty cosmopolitan. Located near the Mediterranean, it was a thriving place
where hard work was rewarded. And it was a kind of college town: think Northampton
or Amherst. We might say that you can take the boy out of Tarsus, but you can’t
take Tarsus out of the boy; and it seems clear that Paul remained pretty
comfortable with multiculturalism, was extremely hard working, and was also
highly educated. [1]
Paul alludes in some of his letters
to a recurring problem; what he calls a “thorn in his side” that stayed with
him his whole life. Scholars have long speculated about what that might have
been, often telling us much more about themselves in the process than about
Paul. Most of us deal with our own “thorns,” so projection is easy enough to
understand. But it seems to me that a theory at least as credible as any I’ve
read is that perhaps Paul suffered from chronic malaria, since malaria was
rampant in Tarsus. The recurring symptoms would have included profuse sweating
and fevers and vomiting and severe headaches that would have come and gone over
the course of Paul’s entire lifetime. We can’t know for sure, but as a theory
it reveals a “shadow side” of being from Tarsus.[2]
If I were to give you a quiz today,
and ask you about Paul’s “conversion,” my bet is that most of you would tell me
something about the story we get second-hand from Luke in Acts: Paul became a
changed man on the Road to Damascus. Right? He had been persecuting the Church,
but then he had this dramatic encounter with the risen Christ. He was blinded,
but then he saw. He repented, and then became a Christian; going on to then
write all those letters, including Romans.
But when Paul tells us about his
faith journey in his own words, in a first-person narrative in the eleventh
chapter of Galatians (1-17) —his autobiographical version turns out to be a lot
less dramatic than Luke’s story. After his encounter with the risen Christ, he
tells us that he went away to think and ponder and pray about what had happened
to him for three years. He then
emerged to have a heart-to-heart with Peter and James in Jerusalem, and then he
goes away for another fourteen years
before beginning his public ministry. My point here is not that you can’t
integrate these stories, but rather that Luke tends to focus on the dramatic
event (and we do too) while Paul’s own story seems to focus on the lengthy
period of discernment and trying to sort it all out and live into it.[3] Even if there was a sudden, dramatic turning—an
“epiphany” that occurred at a datable moment in time—conversion happens over a much more extended period of time.
Paul
was a “church planter.” He would go and start a new congregation in a place
like Corinth or Thessalonica and then organize them into house churches,
educate them for ministry for a year or so, and then move on to the next city
where he would do the same thing all over again. From time to time he’d
correspond with these communities and send along his greetings and pastoral
advice, especially when things started to get out of hand. Paul had a lot of experience with church conflict. All of his other
letters in the New Testament were written to congregations that he knew, and
that knew him; and you see this in the informal parts of his letters when he
says things like, “tell Chloe I said hey!”
Romans
is different, though. This letter was probably written from Corinth, but it’s addressed to people that Paul has not yet met,
although he does tell them he would like to get there someday and thinks about
doing so often. (See 1:11-15) Clearly, Paul knew something about the Church in
Rome and they knew something about him. Even so, Romans is a kind of letter of
introduction; some scholars have even described chapters 1-8 as Paul’s
“theological last will and testament.” Paul is telling them how the gospel has
changed his life and changed the way he sees the world; and he is suggesting
some ways that it might change them also.
Enough,
for now, about Paul. Let’s talk a bit about the people at the receiving end of
this letter, living in first-century Rome: the imperial, administrative, and
economic capital of the world. Think Washington, DC and New York wrapped up
into one. The people who came to be followers of Jesus there, setting up small
house churches composed of both Jewish and Gentile Christians, still lived and
worked and were educated in this Roman context. They were shaped by Rome—not
Tarsus, not Westfield. The Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians there
coexisted in a rather uneasy relationship that often involved misunderstanding
and stereotyping of the other group. First-century Jews had been taught to divide
the world into basically two groups: Israel, i.e. God’s chosen people, and everybody else—the nations, the goyim. Usually the “everybody else”
tended to be bigger and stronger nations like Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and most
recently, Rome. When you tend to divide the world into “us” and “them” and when
you are weak and they are strong, that brings with it a whole worldview that is
hard to let go of. Gentiles also tended to divide the world into “us” and
“them” but the lines were drawn very differently. For Gentiles, the world was
divided into civilized people, who
were cultured and educated, and
barbarians (which literally means ‘bearded’) who were not. That latter
group included, but was not limited to, Jews.[4]
So
imagine for just a moment what it would be like to be a member of one of those
first-century house churches in Rome: a congregation consisting of people
shaped by each of these competing worldviews. Imagine Darius, a “civilized”
Gentile- Christian who has been raised to look down his Roman nose at those
uncultured barbarians, sitting at a brown-bag lunch and eating his totally
un-kosher prosciutto on ciabbata bread sandwich. Next to him sits Moshe, whose
grandmother would be turning over in her grave if she knew he was sitting next
to a goyim. Imagine them and their
family members trying to plan the menu for the annual parish picnic, make
decisions together on vestry, or choose music for worship, and you are quickly
relieved of any naïve sense that the early Church was free of conflict where
everyone sat around holding hands and singing “kumbaya!
Diversity
(in the first and twenty-first centuries) holds within it the seeds of radical
transformation, to be sure. But working through old prejudices is difficult and
challenging work and we should never underestimate the very real challenges
that these Christians in Rome faced. When Paul tells the Church in Rome that
there is no longer Jew or Greek, he means it; but he’s talking to people who
know just how hard it is to live into that reality. Paul’s theology is not the
abstract systematic theology of a tenured religion professor—not that there is
anything wrong with that! Paul’s theology is always contextual: scripture,
reason and tradition intersect with a particular context, in this case those
house churches in first-century Rome. He is a pastoral theologian; his theology
is more like “theological reflection” that is rooted in the everyday challenges
of congregational life, of trying to live into the call to be “in Christ.” The
language and metaphors for this reflection are rooted in Paul’s life as a
faithful Jew, trained as a Pharisee. (Remember that for Paul, “the Bible” means
the Old Testament, period; not the gospels which would be written later and not
these letters of his which it would be hard to imagine he saw as on the same
level as “the Law and the Prophets.”)
“Romans was
written to be heard by an actual congregation made up of particular people with
specific problems.”[5] Over the course of these fourteen weeks, see
if you can find the time to simply sit down and read the whole letter in one
sitting. And then as these readings that come to us from Romans, over time, try
to see our way beneath the texts to those real people. Paul reminds them, and
us, of the love of God and that nothing in all of creation can separate us from
that love. He challenged them, and us, to confess that “Jesus is Lord” and then
to live that way.
For
today, that is likely more than enough. Let me conclude just by re-reading a portion
of today’s epistle reading again, and let it sit. A normal sermon would have
started here but as promised this isn’t exactly a normal sermon and I’m out of
time. But maybe you can close your eyes and see Paul, and see that house church
a little bit, and imagine them listening to these words for the first time:
Hoping against hope, [Abraham]
believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what
was said, “So numerous shall your descendants be.” He did not weaken in faith
when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was
about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s
womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew
strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was
able to do what [God] had promised. Therefore [Abraham’s] faith “was reckoned
to him as righteousness.”
[1]
See here, too, Borg and Crossan.
[2]
Borg and Crossan.
[3]
See Brother Kevin Hackett’s sermon at: http://ssje.org/sermons/?p=856
[4]
See A. Katherine Grieb’s The Story of
Romans: A Narrative Defense of God’s Righteousness. I am profoundly
indebted to Dr. Grieb for many of the thoughts and ideas of this sermon.
[5]
Grieb.
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