Sermon: The *Other* Romans 13

First Presbyterian Church

August 27, 2023, Pentecost 13A

Romans 13:8-14

 

The Other Romans 13

 

 

I suppose it might be a surprise to some that the reading from Romans 13 given as today's Revised Common Lectionary epistle reading includes the last half of this brief chapter, but not the far more infamous first seven verses. Certain religious leaders have, over the centuries, tended to interpret those verses as a mandate that all Christians are to obey whatever government is put in authority over them, no matter what they do, and that such authority can basically do whatever they want. 

Suffice to say that myriad problems lie in that interpretation. First of all, it's not at all a given that Paul is speaking here of governmental authorities; the Greek words Paul uses suggests he is referring to military leaders, not civilian. Others suggest Paul is referring to religious authorities - leaders of the synagogue, for example, for those Jewish converts among the church's number. Even more of a problem is that nowhere in this passage does Paul speak at all about what authority the leadership in question has; the passage contains no instruction to authority figures of any kind at all.

Furthermore, those religious types who do point to Romans 13 in such a manner are sometimes awfully selective about its usage - they aren't necessarily interested in enforcing that bit in verse 6 about paying taxes, or for that matter enforcing any of this if the government in power is one they don't like. An interesting very recent example of that latter phenomenon is the case of a Pennsylvania woman who was part of the mob that attacked the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Her interesting (to say the least) defense was that as an ambassador of Christ, she was immune to laws. The judge, apparently not ignorant about the Bible, apparently responded by citing - you guessed it - Romans 13:1, "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities...". At least she got famous by being featured on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.[1]

In the bigger picture, though, one of the biggest problems with such an obsession with Romans 13:1-7 is that it tends to drown out the hard-hitting teaching of Romans 13:8-14. Continuing with the theme expressed so vividly in chapter 12, Paul charges his hearers with a devastatingly simple command: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.” 

There it is. All of Paul’s wrangling about the law and its insufficiency to save us; about the power of sin in our lives and the needfulness of God’s grace to overcome it; about presenting ourselves as living offerings and being transformed by the renewing of our minds; and in the end, it comes down to loving one another, which of course echoes what Jesus had already said. 

Remember Jesus’s words in Matthew 22:39 Paul rolls up instruction from the Ten Commandments into the mandate to “love your neighbor as yourself,” and caps the teaching with the powerful conclusion: “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” In fact Jesus spoke something similar in the gospels of Mark 12:28-34, and in Luke 10:25-28 the same concept is quoted as well, this time by a lawyer in response to Jesus, and leads to Jesus's Parable of the Good Samaritan as an exposition on just who that neighbor might be. In other words, Paul had plenty of support for making this claim on his hearers and readers. 

It still may catch us off-guard, though, after all the earlier parts of Paul's writing to the Romans about how the law can only show us our sinfulness, or about how the law "brings death," or about how the law "brings wrath" back in 4:15, or any number of other criticisms of it in the earlier chapters of this epistle. In fact, what is happening now in this discourse is that the law's benefit can be declared and received, now that love is understood to be "in charge," so to speak. To understand that "love is the fulfillment of the law" is to understand the law's place in the life of a follower of Christ at long last. The law, rather than being an instrument of wrath for the zealous enforcer, is an illustration of "what it looks like" to live in the grace of Jesus, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, to borrow that familiar blessing from Paul's earlier letter to the church at Corinth.

The portion that follows addresses something that hasn’t come up so much in Romans so far but is a consistent part of Paul’s thought. Among many other things, Paul’s faith is apocalyptic – not in the sense of unavoidable future disaster that tends to cling to the word these days but in the sense of expecting an imminent return of Christ. It didn’t work out that way for Paul, clearly, but his point still holds true: live like it could happen any time now. Live honorably, live in light, live in Christ. And of course, to live in such a way is inextricably bound in the love Paul has extolled in these chapters of this letter.

Now here's the really challenging thing about this love. It shows up everywhere, in everything we do. It shows up in our gathering for worship like this, yes, and one would hope it shows up in the mission or outreach we do in this community as well. But it also shows up in how we, say, conduct the business of the church, right down to writing the checks and paying the bills and all those mundane things that make my eyes glaze over. It shows up in how we do session meetings or committee meetings or any such thing, amongst ourselves or out in the community. If we're really living in this love that God so loved the world with, if we're really living in the love that animates so much of what Paul is writing about in this letter, it really does affect how we do anything we do. And it should be noted that while Paul is writing to the Roman church corporately, as one location of the body of Christ, it also filters down to how any individual member of that church, or any church, would or will conduct himself or herself. We'll see an example of that in the next chapter, in next week's reading, in which Paul needs to address one particular issue and how it changes how the people of the Roman churches conduct themselves towards one another It changes everything we do. 

That love for one another is part of why we gather together like this, why we gather around this table to share bread and cup, why we give of our time and resources for those served by the CUFF meal, or those ravaged by Hurricane Hilary out in California or the Maui wildfires, facing years of recovery. It’s why we’re there for funerals and the receptions that follow, for weddings or baptisms or confirmation or the addition of new members; it’s why we don’t cut ourselves off from the community in which we live. It's even why we take special care in examining ourselves as a church and also the town in which we live, preparing ourselves as a church to seek out and call the right pastor to help us all the more live in and live out that love within the body of Christ and in the community around us. 

“Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #203, Jesu, Jesu, Fill Us With Your Love; #451, Open My Eyes, That I May See; #729, Lord, I Want to Be a Christian

 

 

 

 

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[1] Numerous sources, cited in Christoph Heilig, The Apostle and the Empire: Paul's Implicit and Explicit Criticism of Rome (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022), 114-15.

It doesn't quite work like that, Linus...

Sermon: Love Out Loud

First Presbyterian Church

August 20, 2023, Pentecost 12A

Romans 12:9-21

 

Love Out Loud

 

What does love look like?

It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men.

This is what love looks like.

 

This quote is attributed to Saint Augustine, one of the great ancestors of the church, who lived from 354-430. If nothing else it demonstrates that for a very long time, the Christian church has understood that any claim to live in the love of Christ will of necessity be visible, made known not in words but in deeds of compassion directed both at one another in the body of Christ and to any who suffer, whether “Christian” or not. Christlike love doesn’t get to be selective.

This reading from Paul’s writing to the Romans, continuing Paul’s encouragement to his Roman readers and hearers, moves even more directly in this direction, showing to his listeners “what it looks like” to live in the love of God that redeems the human body and renews the human mind. In many ways the most similar passage to this in Paul’s output is no less than the famous “love chapter,” 1 Corinthians 13, which captures Paul at his most poetic and even ecstatic as he unfolds the beauties of love. The present passage passes over similar ground; the principal difference is that in Romans, Paul narrows his focus to how this divine love looks specifically when it is lived out in the body of Christ. 

Unfortunately, most biblical translations don’t quite capture this powerful description because of a Greek grammatical choice. Certain verb forms in Koine Greek can be ambiguous when a verb is omitted, implied rather than made explicit. The beginning of verse 9 is such an example; were you to read it in a word-for-word translation it would simply say “love without pretense.” Most translations assume an imperative verb: “Let love be genuine,” says the NRSV, while the NIV uses "Love must be sincere." However, a reading as an indicative verb – “love is without pretense” – captures in some ways what Paul is encouraging on his hearers in a way more consistent with his ongoing teaching that all of the life they live in Christ, their very redemption as living offerings and transformation by the renewing of their minds, is itself dependent on the same love of God. Like that redemption and that transformation, this “love without pretense” is itself a gift of God, “not the result of works, so that no one may boast,” to borrow from the letter to the Ephesians.

With this in mind, the series of maxims that follows becomes more clearly a description of the love of God lived out in the body of Christ, and “what it looks like.”

Before that chorus of the characteristics of love, Paul amplifies his initial statement. His language in doing so is strong: “hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good.” The word really is that strong; other possible translations include such vivid words or phrases as “abhor” or “utterly detest.” More than just “dislike” is at work here; the rejection of evil really is an active and emphatic and visceral thing, much as “holding fast” to the good implies an active and vigorous dynamic rather than merely passively “being good.” And this, Paul teaches, is characteristic of genuine, unpretentious, un-hypocritical love. 

What follows from here not only reflects Paul’s description of living in love, but also shows one of those two poles of such un-hypocritical love: hating evil and holding fast to what is good. Altogether, these maxims remind us that living in love, far from a quiet and passive private emotion, is active and vigorous, something that can only be done “out loud” - something churches struggle with both then and now.

Paul isn’t making it easy here, presumably because he knows from experience. Remember, this is a man who has seen the inside of a few prison cells in his career, and in at least a few cases it was because that prison cell was the only way to keep him from being harmed by those opponents of his mission who aimed to shut him up once and for all. He had, in short, known persecution. He had faced what any sane person would call evil, and he had faced it from his own people, because he had chosen to follow this call God had thrust upon him back on that road to Damascus.

So, alongside fairly easy instructions such as “do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord,” or “contribute to the needs of the saints, extend hospitality to strangers,” or “rejoice with those who rejoice,” there are the more challenging traits of living in the body. “Weep with those who weep” isn’t necessarily hard, but it is hard. “Live in harmony with one another” gets challenging at times. Sometimes we can get caught wanting to “claim to be wiser than you are,” even realizing we’ve already been warned against that earlier in the chapter.

But then things get really hard. There are those that prompt the accusation that the preacher has “done quit preachin’ and gone to meddlin’.”

Take this statement: “if it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.“ Sounds challenging enough as it is, but it’s still our tendency to weaken it, to reduce it to a “don’t make trouble” instruction that we can keep quietly and without anybody noticing. Trouble is, that’s not what it is to live transformed by that renewing of our minds. Like these other instructions, it’s not passive. It requires active doing. 

Maybe it’s captured best by Clarence Jordan, preacher and founder of Koinonia Farm, established as a deliberately interracial farm and community in south Georgia at peak of the Jim Crow era. Jordan’s unique contribution to biblical instruction was the “Cotton Patch Gospel,” a combination of scholarly translation of most of the New Testament with a striking re-contextualization; what if these events had happened and these letters had been written in the American South of his time? The “Cotton Patch” translation of this verse captures vividly the active sense of Paul’s instruction, perhaps because Jordan himself had experienced it vividly in his own life at Koinonia: “If it’s possible – that is, from your side – WAGE PEACE WITH ALL MANKIND.” (That last phrase, by the way, is in all caps.) 

WAGE PEACE. Not a passive, unobtrusive thing at all, living transformed by the renewing of our minds. It’s active. It gets in the way. It interferes with the established interests. It does not resign itself to the “peace” of a racially and economically stratified and walled-off nation or society. It doesn’t acquiesce to the powerful oppressing and exploiting the powerless. And that’s hard. 

And it only gets worse from here. “Bless those who persecute you”? “Do not repay anyone evil for evil”? “…never avenge yourselves”? “If your enemies are hungry, feed them. If they are thirsty, give them drink”?

And then the capper: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Seriously, God, how could you let Paul write anything so crazy as that? Here we go again with the active, “out loud” stuff. It’s one thing to talk like that in the safety and comfort of our own sanctuary; it’s quite another to do so when someone is glowering at you and brandishing a semiautomatic weapon. And yet this isn’t a passive life we’re called to live in the body of Christ; we live in this love among ourselves, yes, but we also welcome the sojourner and extend that good even to those who hate us. 

Seriously, this kind of thing makes a preacher reconsider his or her vocation.

Mind you, this set of instruction isn’t through yet; there's more in chapter 13. But mercy, it’s challenging enough just going this far. And it reminds us just how far that transformation has yet to go in each of us or in all of us. And yet this is what we are submitting to, this is the call we are accepting in our lives, if we claim to be any part of the body of Christ. 

To love actively; to be committed to Christ and to one another; to be always ready to reach out to those most in need and to defend those most persecuted; to be active in naming and calling out and utterly detesting and abhorring and hating evil, even when it rears its head right next to us, and yet to feed the hungry enemy; this is what it looks like when we truly submit ourselves as living offerings, and are transformed by the renewing of our minds instead of being conformed to the world.

And man, oh, man, is it hard. It’s hard to believe. It’s hard even to imagine. And it’s certainly hard to trust.

Nevertheless, Thanks be to God. Amen, anyway.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #14, For the Beauty of the Earth; #372, O For a World; #313, Lord, Make Us More Holy

 

 

Admittedly, it's sometimes easy to feel like Linus after reading this passage...

 

 

Sermon: To Be Transformed

First Presbyterian Church

August 13, 2023, Pentecost 10A

Romans 12:1-8

 

To Be Transformed

 

So what’s the point anyway?

Well, yes, but what of it?

What does any of this mean to me?

What am I supposed to do with all this information?

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of one of those long and winding lectures and been waiting for the speaker to get to the point, you might have asked one of those questions or something similar. Or perhaps in some cases you’ve had such a question thrown at you – perhaps by one of your children? You might have wondered this about a class in school or a job assignment, or maybe even a sermon on occasion (though I hope not). 

It’s fair to suppose that maybe even some of the Romans to whom this letter was addressed, the Jewish and Gentile community of followers of Christ hearing this letter read as a part of their assembly for worship, might just have started wondering the same thing after a while. Paul (who, remember, had never been to Rome and whom most of the Romans had never met) certainly had a lot to say, and had constructed some serious and intricate arguments about sin and human weakness, the grace of God and the love of Christ, and his own feelings about the rejection of Christ by many of his fellow Jews (in what we know as chapters 9-11). By this time it’s entirely possible that those hearing the letter were beginning to wonder “OK, but what’s the point of all of this? What difference does it make? What am I supposed to do with all this?”

Well, now it’s time for the “so what.”

Not surprisingly, Paul introduces this final stretch of the letter with a great big transition word. In Greek it’s ουν (“oun”), which we translate as “therefore.” Paul used that word at the beginning of chapter 8, but this is the big one: everything that has come before leads to this. All the intricate and heavy teaching that has come before? Now this is what it looks like in “real life.”

Beyond the opening word, the first two verses of this chapter serve not only to make the transition from teaching to application, but they also provide the foundation for the descriptive material to come. In this platform Paul deftly makes clear that the life for followers of Christ to live is not merely a “private” matter of the heart or the mere checking off a list of beliefs to profess; it is all-consuming, changing the way we live in both body and mind.

Paul’s first exhortation challenges his hearers to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice.” Two things should be clarified here. While we might get hung up on grisly images of sacrifice, the act of sacrifice took many forms in ancient Israel and other religions of the time, many of which did not involve the sacrifice of an animal. You might get a clearer image by using the word “offering” here. Also, you might remember how Paul spent a lot of time earlier in the letter lamenting the fallen condition of the human “flesh” (or σαρχ, “sarx”); here Paul is using not that word but the other “body” word, σομα (“soma”), the one that referred more specifically to the physical human body. So this is not some mere spiritualized exercise; this is an instruction that our whole physical self is to be offered up to God. 

The very next verse, though, looks to a different kind of surrender: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.” It’s not enough for body or mind to be submitted, but the whole together. We are a package deal, so to speak. But it’s not about being made super-smart or some other kind of mental prowess; our minds are to be transformed to “discern what is the will of God”: to see, at least some tiny little bit, what God sees, or how God sees is the whole point of the transformed, renewed mind. And so much of being a disciple of Christ starts with this.

Perhaps it is not an accident that, after those exhortations to make our bodies into living offerings and submitting our minds for transformation and renewal, Paul’s next exhortation is to something like what we would call humility. That’s a word we often use badly or even abuse, misunderstanding it as a kind of self-abasement. Novelist and Presbyterian pastor Frederick Buechner captures that misuse:

 

Humility is often confused with saying you’re not much of a bridge player when you know perfectly well you are. Conscious or otherwise, this kind of humility is a form of gamesmanship.

If you really aren’t much of a bridge player, you’re apt to be rather proud of yourself for admitting it so humbly. This kind of humility is a form of low comedy.

True humility doesn’t consist of thinking ill of yourself but of not thinking of yourself much differently from the way you’d be apt to think of anybody else. It is the capacity for being no more and no less pleased when you play your own hand well than when your opponents do.

 

Even this, though, doesn’t completely capture what Paul is encouraging upon his readers and hearers in Rome. It’s not super easy to capture in words, but what Paul is encouraging here is that each of us should see ourself, in Paul’s words, “with sober judgment” – or “in your right mind,” so to speak, not distorted by arrogance or hatred nor by despair or shame. 

In short, there is no room for assuming any kind of superiority – or supremacy, to use a sadly common word these days – to anybody else who is a child of God. My job is at least in part not to think too much of myself because I have the gift of being a preacher, or of being a cancer survivor (so far), or of being white, or male, or middle-aged, or a hybrid-vehicle driver or an introvert or any number of other attributes that I might be guilty of elevating as an object of pride or a means to exalt myself above others. Your list will look a little different, but you get the idea. The things we do don’t win us extra merit in the eyes of God. We’re not in this for brownie points. 

Indeed, even the thought of judging our individual selves “on our merits” doesn’t hold water if we’re truly thinking with that renewed mind from verse 2. It’s not about anything but seeing ourselves and one another as those who have received gifts from God, “according to the measure of faith that God has assigned” as Paul puts it, for the purpose of living together in the body of Christ. There’s a lot hinging on that “renewing of our minds,” nothing less than our very ability to be the Body of Christ.

Even our ability to present our own bodies as a “living sacrifice”, our ability to be members of the Body of Christ here in Independence or anywhere in the world, hinges on this transformation.  Our living in the Body depends on the renewing of our minds. All those lovely spiritual gifts in verses 6-8 start with what happens in verses 1-2.

Up to this point in the letter Paul has been trying to teach the Romans a myriad of ideas about the law (as he understood it), and its susceptibility to sin; and about the grace of God and its sole power to defeat sin and to bring salvation to us. Now here is the key to living in that grace, to being “more than conquerors” living in the love of God from which nothing can separate us, as Paul wrote in Chapter 8.  

You see, there are certain things a renewed mind, a mind thinking with “sober judgment,” discerning God’s will, cannot do. A renewed mind doesn't cling to the things of the world. A renewed mind cannot live in fear, and it certainly cannot wallow in suspicion of those who are Other, who are somehow Not Us.  A renewed mind cannot see itself as superior because of accidents of birth or ability to check off a list of do’s and don’ts. A renewed mind will never presume that "I alone can fix this" when it comes to the body of Christ, whatever the thing needing fixing may be. A renewed mind will never assume that wealth equals righteousness, or that one country is any more special to God than any other, or that our way of doing church is the only way of doing church.

A renewed mind, a mind utterly transforming the way we think and live, discerns the body of Christ equally in a city slum or a shack in the woods.  A renewed mind discerns the pain suffered by the oppressed (whether we have ever witnessed it or not), the despair and anguish of the poor and forgotten, the sins of pride of the privileged and elite, and weeps for all of them.  

And perhaps hardest of all, a renewed mind is not something we can do.  Note that Paul says “be transformed by the renewing of your minds”, not “be transformed by renewing your mind." It doesn’t happen just of our own initiative; we can’t just “change our minds” by ourselves.  Only in turning away from and renouncing our own willfulness and control can our minds be renewed by the same saving, loving, transforming grace that delivers us out of sin and restores us into full relationship with God.  

Too often we don’t want to give up our way of seeing the world, of dividing the world into Us and Them; but a mind submitted fully to the love of God, the fellowship of Christ Jesus, and the power of the Holy Spirit learns to see the world through the love of God, the fellowship of Christ Jesus, and the power of the Holy Spirit.  

And then, only then, are we no longer conformed to the world, with its scorekeeping and supremacy and walls. Only then do we really start to live as anything at all like the Body of Christ.  

Let your mind be renewed, and the Body will follow.

For the renewing of our minds, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #722, Lord, Speak to Me that I May Speak; #432, How Clear Is Our Vocation, Lord; #720, Jesus Calls Us

Transformed, yes, but ... not like this.

Sermon: Too Deep For Words

First Presbyterian Church

August 6, 2023, Pentecost 9A

Romans 8:26-39

 

Too Deep For Words

 

What do you do when you hear music without words?

Maybe you’re the particularly blessed type, who can simply listen and let the music take its course through your soul. Probably, though (if you’re like most people), you try, consciously or not, to “fill in the blank.” Your mind starts to create a story to go with the music.  Or perhaps it begins to invent a poem, in which the words fit to the tune you hear.  Or possibly, if you’re a more visual type, your mind conjures a picture or scene that plays out as the music moves along.

Either way, we modern-day humans have a sharply defined inability (or most of us do, anyway) to let the music simply be music.  We somehow develop the idea, perhaps unspoken but no less powerful, that the music has to mean something, something that we can somehow encapsulate in words or maybe in pictures.

Felix Mendelssohn begs to differ with you.

Mendelssohn was of course one of the outstanding composers of the nineteenth century.  He was known, among many other things, for the “Song without words,” a type of piano work that was very much in the form and structure of a song – relatively brief, with a clearly defined melody and accompaniment. The only thing missing from these “songs without words” was, indeed, any kind of sung text. 

Mendelssohn wrote at least four dozen such “songs without words” in his brief lifetime.  A few of them have descriptive labels attached to them; for example, some are labeled as “Venetian gondola songs” because they so strongly resemble the songs sung by the gondola drivers in the canals of Venice.  Most of them have no title, as Mendelssohn presented them.  A few were given labels after their publication, in some cases even after Mendelssohn’s death, by editors or critics or others who felt that the music had to mean something, something that could be captured in words, or sometimes just to sell more copies of the sheet music.

In a letter to a relative Mendelssohn very specifically rejected this idea.  As he put it, he believed that words were insufficient to the task of capturing what music meant: to him; words (many or few) were “so ambiguous, so vague, so subject to misunderstanding when compared with true music, which fills the soul with a thousand better things than words.”  He continued, “The thoughts that are expressed to me by the music I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite…this, however, is not your fault, but the fault of words, which cannot do better… .”

I can’t help but suspect that the Apostle Paul might have at least nodded knowingly at this idea that Mendelssohn expresses here.  At the very least he might have acknowledged that Mendelssohn’s idea that the music he loved was “too definite” for words sounded a lot like what Paul himself writes here in verse 26 of this eighth chapter of Romans:

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. (NRSV)

 

I admit that phrase – “sighs too deep for words” has haunted me most of my life, probably since some sermon I heard as a child.  Back then I wondered what that could possibly mean; being a wordy little kid I couldn’t really imagine how something could be “too deep for words.”  If you couldn’t say it, how could it be real?

I’ve grown up since then and I have at least some small idea of just how silly that childish thought was, even before I ever read Mendelssohn’s own description of his view of music.  Oftentimes this sense, this deep-rooted wordless sighing has been a part of my life in times of trouble; the death of my mother, later the death of one of my sisters, or my own diagnosis of cancer more than a decade ago.  Occasionally it has been experienced in more joyful times; our wedding day, for example, or a particularly profound musical experience.  Sometimes it has come in moments of struggle or uncertainty; the period of time when I was considering giving up the teaching career I loved to jump off the cliff into seminary stands out there.

Indeed, sighs too deep for words.  Even when my soul tried to fit words into my feelings, their insufficiency and inferiority became painfully clear.  Why does this happen?  Why did I get cancer that I could survive, and others don’t?  The words collapse on their own uselessness.  Sighs too deep for words.

I suspect you can search your own lives for times when you’ve known that experience of sorrow, or joy, or struggle, or uncertainty, or relief for which words could not be found or did not even exist.  It’s one thing to know the experience of that kind of experience, one “beyond words.”

But it’s a whole other thought, something different altogether, to know that the Holy Spirit does that for us.  

For indeed that is what Paul tells us right here in verse 26: “that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”  When we cannot find the words to pray rightly, whether in our joy or sorrow or need, it isn’t that the Spirit gives us words to say.  No, it is that the Spirit steps in for us with its own wordless, unspeakable sighing.  

Just a few verses earlier, starting in verse 22, Paul writes of all of creation “groaning in labor pains;” not only creation, but we ourselves, “groan inwardly” while we wait for the adoption God has promised to each of us, of which Paul spoke in verse 15.  Paul has also already spoken of the Spirit bearing witness with us, in our times of crying out to God, even as simple a cry as “Abba! Father!”  In our unfinished spiritual state, when we cry out for we know not what or even when we cannot cry out, the Holy Spirit, the Comforter Jesus promised us to send after he was gone, is at work in us and with us and for us, bringing our petitions before God even when we cannot rightly articulate them or know what they are.  

And it is from this knowledge, this promise of a Spirit that intercedes for us beyond our capacity to know or understand, that Paul can exult throughout the rest of this chapter in the unspeakable love of God.  The God whose Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words is the God who relentlessly works through all that happens to us (even the awful stuff) for our good, not eliminating suffering or pain from our lives but blessing and sustaining us through it; this is the God who created us and foreknew us and made us to be part of the family of God; this is the God who, even though we could be charged with all of the corruption and weakness sin can muster, instead intercedes for us, not even withholding God’s own Son, that we would be reconciled and restored; this is the God who justifies, who saves, who redeems and restores; this is the God who loved us and loves us and will love us so profoundly and so unspeakably that Paul can practically sing out in joy that nothing – not death or life or angels or rulers or dark powers, nothing can separate us from that love.  God meets our sighs too deep for words with love too deep for words.

For that, dear brothers and sisters, even though the words themselves are painfully inadequate, let us never fail to say, Thanks be to God.  Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #263, All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name; #188, Jesus Loves Me!; #840, When Peace Like a River

Sermon: Family Resemblance

First Presbyterian Church

July 30, 2023, Pentecost 8A

Romans 8:12-25

 

Family Resemblance

 

 

I’ve been married to Julia for almost thirty years now. Occasionally during those years of marriage I’ve been present when she sees relatives, family friends, old teachers, or others whom she hasn’t seen in many years. One thing that happens frequently in those reunion situations is that someone is very likely to make a remark about how much my wife looks like her mother.  

We’re accustomed to looking for family resemblance of some sort. Whether it is in a child, newborn or adult, in whose face we see the features of mother or father; or the grandmother who sees in a grandchild’s tantrums or misbehaviors the very same tantrums or misbehaviors the child’s mother – her own daughter – threw when she was a child; or more unfortunately, the grown son who falls into the same destructive patters of behavior that brought his “old man” down.

In the case of Julia’s resemblance to her mother, though, it’s always a little bit difficult to stifle a chuckle when some aunt or uncle says to her that she looks just like her mother. You see, Julia was adopted. The arrangements were made well before she was born, and – after an extended stay in the hospital due to premature birth – she went home with her parents, parents who would adopt another daughter about three years later.

You would never know this, though, just by observing the family. There is no sense in which the way my wife interacts with her parents gives away any lack of blood relationship. They love her, and she loves them, in ways you would never be able to distinguish from those of a “natural-born” daughter and parents. They are, simply put, a family, and blood relationship or lack thereof simply doesn’t matter.

To think about adoption, as we know it today, might be just the thing to help us get into Paul’s instruction here in the eighth chapter of Romans. For one thing, adoption was not an uncommon practice in Paul’s time, particularly in the city of Rome, the location of the church Paul was addressing in this letter. Now adoption didn’t work exactly the same way legally in Rome as it does here and now, but there is an important similarity; one who was adopted into a family gained the right of some part of the inheritance of that family. To be adopted did not signify any kind of lesser status; all of the benefits of being a son in a Roman family were extended to adopted sons every bit as much as to natural sons.  

Thus, for Paul to write in verse 15 that we have not received a “spirit of slavery, to fall back into fear,” but a “spirit of adoption,” is extremely important, and would have carried a world of meaning to Paul’s readers that we need to understand ourselves as well. Part of that involves clearing up verse 14. 

Paul of course is writing to a church in Rome that contains both male and female members. Given this diversity in the church, it might seem odd that in verse fourteen, Paul uses rather different language that doesn’t really reflect the makeup of his addressees. Unlike other verses, which use a Greek noun that refers to “children” both male and female, Paul here really writes “all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God (emphasis mine).” What’s going on here? Are the women being left out? Did Paul revert to the sexism of which he is so often accused?

As Paul might say, “by no means!” Here Paul is making use of his readers’ understanding of the legalities of adoption and family ties in Rome. Both natural and adopted sons received part of the inheritance of the family, but daughters typically were married off, and their lot was cast with the family into which they married. So, by Paul referring to “sons” in verse fourteen, he is emphasizing the degree to which all of his readers, and all of us – male/female, Jew/Greek, slave/free – participate in God’s inheritance. We are all part of God’s family, which is to say we are delivered from the sin that bound us before we received “adoption” into God’s family. It all sounds great until verse 17.

Paul continues from where we left off back in verse 15, pointing out that our very crying out to God is the very same Spirit bearing witness to us that we are indeed children of God – and here Paul uses that noun for “children” that includes both sons and daughters – and goes on to say that if we are children of God, we are heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ … “if, in fact, we suffer with him, so that we may also be glorified with him.”

Huh? What’s the deal with suffering? Nobody told me anything about suffering? Nobody said you had to suffer to be adopted, did they? Maybe we feel like we don’t understand what Paul’s talking about here.

Except…when we think about it, we do understand what Paul’s talking about here. To be adopted into a family means that the child shares in everything that family has. The inheritance, yes. The joys that the family experiences, of course; but we also share the sorrows, the struggles, the failures, the setbacks and discouragements and sufferings. When my wife’s grandmothers died, several years apart, it was no comfort to her to think that she was adopted, not really “born into” this family. The grief and pain was every bit as real, as painful, as if she were their “natural” granddaughter. She was spared no suffering for having been an adopted child.  

And so it is to be adopted into God’s family. The difference, though, is that the scope of “family” here is an awful lot broader than we might be accustomed to thinking. The “family of God” does not stop at the walls of this church. It does not stop on this side of Main Street, or at the borders of Independence or Montgomery County or Kansas or even the United States. And when any part of God’s great grand worldwide adoptive family suffers, we suffer.

When rockets fall from the sky and destroy homes and villages, we suffer, even if it’s not our country. When children flee across the desert from murderous drug gangs or drown in barricaded rivers, we suffer, even if they’re not our children. If we have truly received that “spirit of adoption,” if we are truly and fully among the children of God, we suffer when any part of God’s family suffers. We don’t smell the stink of the bombs or feel the heat and thirst of the desert, but we suffer because God’s children are suffering. When any part of our family suffers, we all feel pain. That’s how families are. We feel pain when any of God’s children suffer, if we really are part of God’s family.  

As if that weren’t enough, Paul goes even further starting in verse 19. After talking about children and heirs and joint-heirs, suddenly Paul shifts gears and begins to speak of creation. Now it is creation that has suffered bondage, creation that was “subjected to futility” as Paul puts it. All of God’s good creation lives in anticipation, “groaning in labor pains.” Indeed our family-of-God-ness is bound up not just in other people, but all of creation as well; when any part of creation suffers, we suffer, if we really are part of the family of God. Creation suffers disasters both “natural” and man-made.  When hurricanes or tornadoes slam into populated places, we suffer. When earthquakes shatter whole towns or cities, or when heat waves paralyze cities or towns or states, we suffer. But also, when earth is abused, when air is polluted, when rivers are poisoned, mountaintops demolished, seas become dumping grounds with more plastic than fish, we suffer with God’s creation.  

Finally, Paul comes to the climax of his mini-argument here.  All of this talk of adoption and inheritance and family and suffering, for Paul, boils down to the indispensible fact of our hope in God.  

All that has come before points us to the very thing that allows us to find ourselves in the “spirit of adoption,” and to bear the suffering that God’s family suffers. Because the good news, the gospel that is Jesus Christ, has already been proclaimed and delivered to the world, we are able to live into our adoption, to live like a child of God, an heir of God and a joint-heir with Christ. Because of that gospel, we can live in a world of suffering, and feel suffering because others suffer, bear one another’s burdens and share one another’s sorrows, without losing hope. We can know the pain of the world without despairing.  

Hope is, of course, a very tricky thing to experience. As Paul points out, hope is all about what we can’t see. It would sound very silly if a child woke up on a Christmas morning and ran to the living room to see a shiny new bicycle parked beside the Christmas tree, only to continue moping around the house saying, “gee, I hope I get a bicycle for Christmas.” Hope is about what we don’t see yet. Hope is about the anticipation of what is to come, the joy not yet fulfilled but still to be fulfilled. We, along with all creation, “groan inwardly” while we wait for the redemption that is, right now, our hope.  

Paul lives throughout this letter in the tension between what is now and what is not yet, between what we know and what we wait for. No one has to tell us that our physical lives are not yet redeemed. No one has to tell us our physical bodies are not yet redeemed. We still get old, still get cancer. The world still spins out hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes and heat waves. Children still get killed, rockets and bombs still fall, yet...

We know the salvation of God. We know ourselves to be adopted into God’s family.  It is not easy to wait with patience, as Paul prescribes, but it is the very hope we have that allows us to wait with patience. We don’t know when or for how long, nor can we really know what “redemption” looks like, if we’re at all honest with ourselves. And yet, the hope is part of that inheritance, a share of which is ours by adoption into the family of God.

And the more we live into that hope, the more we live into that adoption, the more we know our family to be vast and unbounded, the more we know that we are all together bound up with one another and with all of creation, the more we pull ourselves away from the things that bring suffering to others…the more we start to look a little, just a very little, like our adoptive Brother in God. The more we manage to be not merely “Christian” but more “Christ-like,” the more we live into our inheritance of hope, … then the more we finally, even as adoptive children of God, start to take on just a little of that family resemblance.

For a spirit of adoption, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #475, Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing; #318, In Christ There Is No East or West; #360, Christ Is Coming!

Sermon: Therefore...

First Presbyterian Church

July 23, 2023, Pentecost 7A

Romans 8:1-11

 

Therefore...

 

If the previous chapter, Romans 7 – “I do what I don’t want to do, I don’t want to do what I do” – was marked by linguistic difficulty and a person shift to make a composition teacher weep, today’s reading from the next chapter does one thing exactly right in terms of written composition and exposition: it starts with a wonderful topic sentence.

“Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

Not only is it fair to call this a spectacular topic sentence for today’s passage; it’s quite possibly the pinnacle of this whole epistle. The first seven chapters of Romans point to and lead us toward this truth; everything in the rest of the book follows from it. One might argue that a wise preacher would stop here. I could just go ahead and say Thanks be to God. Amen. And be done with it. It’s that good as good news.

But no, not quite. There’s a reason Paul didn’t stop here, and there’s a reason a wise pastor can’t stop here. As good a word as it is, this sentence -- “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” – is not, in fact, the end of the story. In many ways it’s only the beginning. 

You see, this isn’t a detached, abstract reflection floating about in some undefined ether or atmosphere. This is a direct statement, with a concrete, tangible, and even unavoidable effect on the lives of those who are, as Paul says, “in the Spirit,” who “live in accordance with the Spirit,” or for whom “the Spirit of God lives in you” or “Christ is in you.”

Paul goes about saying this in so many different ways, but all of them point to a same basic idea; namely, a life that is so bound up in Christ, so completely occupied by and contained in the Holy Spirit that there is no longer any room for the sin that had previously occupied and dominated what Paul has so far called “flesh.”

A word of clarifiction about that: when Paul uses that word “flesh” (the usual epistle translation of the Greek word, σαρχ (sarx), he isn’t referring merely to the human body – for that he uses another Greek word, σωμα (soma). No, when Paul speaks of “flesh” (or sarx) he is referring specifically to the human in its sin-occupied condition, the human who does what it doesn’t want to do and doesn’t do what it knows is right to do – the "wretched man" human of Chapter 7. 

So it’s not about human bodies being all sinful and irredeemable; Paul will make that clear in verse 11. Reminding his readers of the One who was once dead but lives forever, Paul goes so far as to say that “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.” It isn’t about “conquering” or “subduing” our mortal bodies – which, after all, are every bit as much a part of God’s creation as all of nature around us – but of no longer being enslaved to or bound by the sin that once held sway over those mortal bodies. And if we are truly in the Spirit, or in Christ, then that power of sin can no longer hold that sway. 

Even the Law is redeemed. Remember how Paul spoke of even the good Law being twisted by sin? With sin no longer having power over us, as verse 4 says, “the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled” in those who are in the Spirit.

In short, we are set free – not by anything of our own doing, but by the action of God, in Jesus Christ, working in us through the Spirit. Sounds very Trinitarian, doesn’t it? Paul never does articulate a specific doctrine or idea of the Trinity, but sometimes he sure sounds like it.

Notice how in the central section of today’s reading, it almost seems as if Paul’s focus has shifted. Whereas in previous chapters Paul has spoken so much of the flesh – that sin-dominated body – now he begins to speak of our minds. Take verse 5: “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.” That wonderful first verse of the chapter, in other words, is no excuse to disengage. Quite the opposite: now that there is no condemnation, the challenge of living in the Spirit begins. 

You might remember the story, told in Acts 9, of how Saul, on his way to Damascus to root out other Christ-followers, was overwhelmed by an appearance of Jesus on that road, losing his sight for a time and being convicted of the sin of his ways. Saul doesn’t respond to this dramatic intervention by disappearing. He does go away for a while, after a few early attempts on his life, but by Acts 13 Paul (with the new name) is back, and the rest of his life is devoted to the proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ. The news of “no condemnation” was no resting place, but the beginning of a new and challenging life for Paul himself, as it is for any of us who are in the Spirit.

Paul will have a lot more to say about what this “no condemnation” means for us, particularly in chapter 12 of this epistle and after, that great stretch of this letter where “the rubber hits the road” as Paul begins to speak of what the life of one who is “in the Spirit” looks like. But for now he wants us to examine where our minds are focused. Are our minds focused on the things of the flesh? And let’s not confuse that with mere bodily pleasures – the “things of the flesh” include such earthly pursuits as riches, power, fame, and so many of the things the world calls good. It doesn’t take a whole lot of looking to see how many of those around us – even those who call themselves Christians, even those who call themselves Christian leaders – have given themselves over very publicly to these “things of the flesh.” They strut about in the halls of power, glorying in their “unprecedented”[i] access to presidents and congressmen rather than rejoicing in being in the Spirit. Anyway, Paul does not have a good word for those whose minds are set on “things of the flesh.” Don’t overlook verse 6: “To set the mind on the flesh is death.”

Fortunately, that verse continues: “…but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” “No condemnation” is not an end, but a beginning; a beginning of a life lived in the Spirit, lived with Christ living in and through us, wholly submitted and obedient to the freedom of God, and serving God in perfect freedom.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Praise be to God. So what's next?

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #366, Love Divine, All Loves Excelling; #285, Like the Murmur of the Dove's Song; #286, Breathe on Me, Breath of God

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[i] Adelle M. Banks, “Conservative evangelicals revel in their ‘unprecedented’ presidential access,” via Religion News Service, 19 July 2017, religionnews.com/2017/07/19/conservative-evangelicals-revel-in-their-unprecedented-access-to-the-president/ (accessed July 20, 2017, via Twitter).