My Old Sermon Blog

I am a meat-eater. I have tried a variety of meats, including rattlesnake. I regularly told my children that bacon and sausage are a Christian privilege, arising out of our freedom from Jewish dietary laws forbidding consumption of pork.

Yet many years ago Beth and I found ourselves scrupulously reading labels and trying to prepare a meal that contained absolutely no animal products of any kind, forgoing even milk and eggs. We were hosting guests who were seekers whom we hoped to show the love of Christ as we welcomed them to our home for dinner. What we generally felt perfectly free to eat was for that evening not allowed on our table.

Something like that vegan meal was what Paul had in mind as he continued in Romans 14:13-23 his discussion with the Romans concerning the eating of what was likely meat first offered to idols then sold in the public market. Abstention from wine may have been a spiritual discipline among some of the Roman Christians. What he wants to show now is that the scruples of others, even if not strictly required of us, may become binding on us by the implications of having come into the people of God through Christ.

The center and heart of the passage is verse 17, “For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” Here in the midst of a totally practical problem of how to relate to Christians with different dietary rules, Paul goes back to what he said at the beginning of Romans 5 about God’s gift of justification or righteousness leading to peace and to joy through His love poured out into hearts through the Holy Spirit.

In other words, what Paul has to say about getting along in spite of differences in the Church is firmly grounded in what he has already said about faith and justification in and through Christ. Christian moral direction is based in Christian doctrine about how it is that we are justified in Christ through faith.

As chapter 15 verse 1 clearly shows, Paul writes from the point of view of those who are “strong” in faith and realize that “everything is indeed clean” as he says in verse 20. In such strong faith, we are free to eat or drink whatever we like (without overindulging and committing the sins of drunkeness or gluttony). But for the sake of others in the Kingdom our diets may be restricted in various ways.

So the diet of the Kingdom of God is to eat or drink whatever you like, only so long as doing so does not trouble your own conscience (verses 22-23) or the conscience of a sister or brother in Christ. We might all be healthier if we followed this diet recommendation.

These figures may not be exactly right, but I recently heard that President Obama has something like a 40% approval rating, but that Congress itself has a 14% approval rating. We Americans are very good at disliking the government and authorities which, according to popular political theory, we in fact choose for ourselves.

So this week we get to consider how Romans 13 speaks to how we relate to government as Christians. Verses 1-7 speak so strongly about submission to rulers and taxation that some scholars like to think that they were imported into Paul’s text by a later editor. In any case, the verses do seem like a bit of a surprise entry into a new topic.

However, Paul is simply extending what he says in Romans 12:18 about seeking to live at peace with all to living at peace in a community under government. And what he says about taxation is followed with a general principle in verse 8 about paying one’s obligations, recognizing that the highest obligation is love.

I do not see in these verses any room or allowance for the vitriolic verbal abuse some citizens of our country hurl at government leaders of either party. And I especially do not see the possibility of a Christian attack on the idea of government in general (i.e., “government is the enemy”). Instead, we have Paul calling for followers of Christ to demonstrate their trust in God by living peaceable, orderly, and in the verses that follow, loving lives in the society around them.

Paul’s assumption, which appears throughout Scripture, that rulers/authorities are appointed by God and serve His ends, runs contrary both to the delusions of tyrants who believe they rule by some inherent right (by right of divinity in Paul’s own time) and our own democratic conviction that our leaders are chosen by popular election. Instead, leaders rise and fall by the often mysterious workings of divine providence. So what kind of political conversation might result if we began with the assumption that the people in power are people God placed in power for His own reasons?

The text is of course also difficult because along with the assumption that God has placed authorities in power is the further assumption that they do God’s will by upholding good and punishing evil. Yet that was not wholly true even, or especially, in Paul’s time. The cruel and insane Nero was the emperor sitting on the Roman throne, Pilate put Jesus to death, and Herod Agrippa the king over Jerusalem committed incest and was finally kicked out of the city by his subjects. So subjection to an authority does not depend on the authority’s character or political practice.

Of course, there is ample biblical evidence for the justice of resisting authority that opposes the direct will of God or which causes great harm. Paul himself resisted authorities which told him to cease preaching the Gospel.

So this text alone will not settle all our questions about how Christian people relate to and interact with governments. Nonetheless, it makes it clear that governments and authorities have a place in God’s plan and that generally we are to live quietly and peaceably, obeying and respecting those authorities.

The rest of the chapter with its emphasis on love as the sum of the law and a way of life that reflects light rather than darkness carries on the thought that Christians in society are to live in a manner that is irreproachable. We are to be what Jesus told us we are, light in a dark world.

This Sunday’s text, Romans 12:9-21, brings us to aspects of Christian behavior that are at the same time the most basic and the most difficult. At the heart of the Gospel message is the proclamation that God loves us in Christ and therefore we are to show a similar love to each other, a love that extends to showing forgiveness by refusing to retaliate and doing good for those who hurt us.

Verses 9 to 13 might be grouped with what precedes as applying to Christian behavior among and toward other Christians, in the Church. Verses 14 to 21 however turn our eyes outward to our relationships with those outside the Church, in particular, but not only, with those who “persecute” us or do us harm.

Behaving as these verses ask is hard enough that we are amazed when it is actually done in deep and profound ways. There is a terribly beautiful story coming out of the Armenian Christian experience of Turkish oppressions and genocide. A Turkish officer raided and looted an Armenian home, kiling the parents and giving the daughters to his soldiers while keeping the oldest for himself to rape. This woman escapes, becomes a nurse, and later finds this same Turkish officer as one of her patients. She gives him extraordinary care and he recovers, one day finally asking her why she did it. Her answer is, “I am a follower of him who said, ‘Love your enemies.'”

If we are ever to rise to to such heights of Christlike forgiveness and love, then my guess is that we will need to start with smaller acts of doing good to those around us who do us arm. Things like delivering a plate of cookies to the neighbors who kept us awake with a loud party or a kind word and nice tip for the restaurant server who was rude might be good practice for a habit that would help us be more like Jesus when the hurt is truly profound. And even those little acts of love toward the seemingly unloveable can be awfully difficult.

In verse 20, Paul quotes Proverbs 25:21-22 about such acts of love toward enemies being like heaping burning coals upon their heads. What both the proverb and Paul seem to have in mind is the burning of remorse as the good deed touches their conscience and helps them realize their sin. Doing in good in return for evil will be good for one’s own soul, but it also has the potential to redeem the souls of those who receive such love. It may help generate a turning point by which they discover their own need for God’s forgiveness in Jesus Christ.

May such burning love ignite and spread in us all.

There’s an obvious switch of topic and emphasis as we turn from Romans chapter 11 to Romans chapter 12. Broadly speaking one could say that Paul moves from the theoretical to the practical, from the doctrinal to the ethical. He’s been talking about what Christians believe. Now he starts addressing how Christians behave. But it’s not quite that simple.

First of all, we need to see that Paul understands what he’s been saying all along about the unity of Jews and Gentiles in Christ, in the new Israel by faith in Christ, to have ethical, behavioral implications. Moreover, all the discussion of law and sin made it clear that Christians are “dead” to sin and are expected to live in a new way. And, in chapter 12 and following it’s clear that Paul feels free to continue to draw on theology and doctrine to support the practical direction he offers.

In our text for this week, Romans 12:1-8, Paul sets the stage for all the rest of his ethical injunctions, etc. He puts “therefore” right at the beginning in verse 1. He sees his ethical pronouncements as the direct outgrowth of the theological picture he’s been painting. Specifically, he is convinced that God has ushered in a new order of things for those who are “in Christ” through faith. They are part of a new people, a new Israel, and that newness will appear in the way they behave and relate to each other.

After calling Christians to regard themselves as sacrifices to God and to have a new mind, Paul introduces in verse 3 his favorite image for the Church, a body with individuals as members. Because the word member is so familiar to us as a person who belongs to an organization, we miss the jarring note felt by Paul’s original readers. All the word could mean in his time was “body part.” By using this language Paul coined a new usage of the word and meant to convey a radical sense of belonging in the church. We belong to the Body of Christ in the sense that body parts belong to the body. They are owned by and subservient to the whole.

Maybe that last thought about radical belonging enough to reflect on for now as we think about this text. It’s a deep and profound challenge to our modern sense of individuality and our feeling that “membership” is something we possess individually rather than the idea that the Body possesses us. It’s was a new way of looking at things in Paul’s time and still comes across as new in the face of an “old” established modern individualism.

 

Over the past eighteen years of living in Oregon I’ve learned a lot about roses. It’s not because of my own interest in and study of roses, but because of my wife’s. When she discovered how wonderfully roses grow and bloom in western Oregon’s mild climate, she became a rose gardener of the first order.

One of the interesting things Beth taught me is that almost every cultivated rose today is the product of grafting. The root stock is one sort of rose, while the main stems and flowers are another sort grafted on to the root stock. There are several reasons for this horticultural practice, but in general grafted roses are healthier and produce more blooms than the same varieties grown from their own roots.

At the center of Romans 11, our text for this Sunday, is the image of branches being grafted onto an olive tree. As part of Paul’s argument concerning the Jewish people in relation to faith in Christ, he uses this image to picture how Gentiles have been included in God’s people. He pictures Israel as a cultivated olive tree, with its roots in God’s election and grace to them. Now through Christ, it’s as if some of the cultivated branches have been broken off and branches from a less desireable wild olive tree have been grafted in. That’s us, the Gentiles.

Paul’s point is that Gentile Christians have no grounds for boasting or arrogance in regard to Jews. They are the root of the whole tree of faith. Yes, many of them rejected Jesus the Messiah and were then “broken off.” But Israel remains at the heart of God’s plan and at the root of the Church.

The whole chapter calls for a careful balance in Christian attitudes toward Jewish people. On the one hand, any prejudice or anti-Semitism is completely and absolutely unbiblical and un-Christian. As verses 30-32 emphasize, we Gentiles come from stock just as disobedient to God or more so. On the other hand, it must not be glossed over that many Jewish people did and still do reject Jesus and thus removed themselves from the people of God. It is only by faith in Christ that they can be grafted back in (verse 23).

Thus it is perfectly appropriate (even if not politically correct) to pray for and witness to our Jewish friends. They will not be saved without Christ.

This also means that we need to eschew two misguided interpretations of verse 26, “And so all Israel will be saved…” One one hand there is the liberal, universalistic understanding that literally every Israelite by birth will be redeemed, whether or not they have accepted Christ. This is completely contrary to the picture Paul has been painting throughout the whole letter to the Romans and contrary to his own pain expressed at the beginning of chapter 9 regarding his lost fellow Israelites.

On the other hand, there is an interpretation which makes “all Israel,” mean something like “most Jews alive when Jesus returns.” This is the dispensationalist, “Left Behind,”, Tim LaHaye, rapture theology which wants us to believe that Jesus will return twice, with a seven-year tribulation in between. During that time, in the absence of the raptured Gentile church, we’re told that Jews left on earth will convert to Christ until they number 144,000. But considering that there are an estimated 13-15 million Jews in the world today, 144,000 is a small percentage, not most of them.

What’s more this whole end-of-time picture for the salvation of Israel contradicts Paul’s own agony in chapter 9 over the fact that most of his people will not be saved. It hardly seems adequate to interpret the promise “all Israel will be saved” by pointing to the redemption of a limited number at the end of history. What about all those lost in the centuries before that happens?

No the best interpretation is to stay in line with Paul’s whole scheme of thought to this point. In chapter 9 verse 6, he’s already said that “not all Israelites truly belong to Israel.” In what follows and in Romans 2:28 and 29, Paul has already made clear that he is redefining Israel and what it means to belong to Israel. With the coming of Christ to have faith in Jesus is to belong to the “true Israel.” So the promise that “all Israel will be saved” is the promise that God will save everyone who believes in Jesus Christ, a promise that was repeated several times in last week’s text from Romans 10.

The close of the chapter invites to reflect on “riches and wisdom and knowledge of God” in creating His wonderfully variegated and subtle plan to bring people of all races and nations to Himself in Jesus Christ. As recipients and beneficiaries of this plan we have no reason to boast but only to marvel at God’s genius and mercy.

Back when I was first feeling the call to pastoral ministry (age 15-16), my then pastor, a dear saint named Monty McWhorter, assigned me a whole host of Scripture to memorize. It included the last few verses of this week’s text, Romans 10:5-15. I still remember verse 9 in the flowing phrases of the KJV, “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”

Verse 9 in those days was often identified as part of the “Roman Road” to salvation, a list of verses from Romans leading a seeker from conviction of sin to the gift of God in Christ to this verse as the basis for an act of receiving Christ by speaking aloud and believing in one’s heart.

This evangelistic use of Romans 10:9, taken out of its wider context, helped fuel a widespread evangelical understanding that salvation and life in Christ was primarily an individual matter of just believing (and publicly acknolwedging that belief) in Jesus. That understanding was particularly encouraged by a superficial reading of the preceding verses 5-8. Verses 5 appears to contrast Moses in Leviticus 18:5 calling for salvation by doing the works of the law with verse 6-8 suggesting something more of a professed heart religion, i.e., faith.

But once you realize that verses 6-8 are an extended paraphrase of more words from Moses (in Deuteronomy 30:12-14), it’s not so easy to see the text as pitting Old Testament works religion against New Testament salvation through faith. Paul understands Moses in Deuteronomy 30 to be saying what he himself is saying, that the Law is in fact being done now by those who are renewed and regenerated by receiving the “word” in heart and mouth by faith in Jesus Christ. So there is a continuity with Old Testament religion rather than a disjunct.

Thus once again those who want to imagine that Paul completely eschews any notion of good works as part of salvation are hard pressed. Faith in Christ is an active, working faith. Faith is a kind of obedience, as the catch phrase of the book in Romans 1:5 and 16:26 makes clear. No, we don’t earn our salvation, but neither do we “just believe” in order to be saved. We confess that Jesus is Lord and begin to live out His lordship in our lives.

One of the ways Paul experienced Jesus’ lordship and was obedient was in his own calling to share the Gospel with the Gentiles. As a young person experiencing the first stirrings of a call to preach, I resonated with Paul’s appropriation of Isaiah 52:7 in Romans 10:15, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” It seemed a passage I might claim for myself if God was truly sending me to share the Good News as a pastor. And my heart is still stirred by that text set to Handel’s gorgeous music in his “Messiah.”

Yet that promise of beautiful feet is not exclusive to professional preachers. And the progressive questions of verse 14 and 15 are a call to every Christian to bring the good news to those who haven’t heard and have not yet had the opportunity to hear, believe, obey and live in Christ.

So feet and mouth, which we usually try to keep apart, come together here as the active means of expressing the faith which God has placed in our hearts through Christ Jesus.

I returned today from a 3-week “mini-sabbatical,” for which I am deeply grateful to our congregation and to the Lord. It was a peaceful time of prayer, reading, and relaxing and recreating with family.

Now, here I am looking at one of the most difficult texts in Romans and trying to get ready to preach it in just a couple days. Romans chapter 9 is complicated and controversial. It’s probably the biblical heart of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, but that misguided doctrine is not at all what Paul is concerned with here.

Chapter 9 arises because Paul’s overarching concern in Romans is to show how God’s promises to Abraham and thus to the Jewish people are fulfilled and completed in Jesus Christ and in the larger family of faith created by the work of Christ.

Part of getting straight on this chapter is to see that though Paul illustrates his points with Old Testament characters like Jacob, Esau and Pharaoh, he is not talking about individual salvation. His aim, instead, is to show how God’s promises and plan through Israel are not thwarted by Israel’s disobedience. God is able to bring off His purposes through an awesome offer of mercy received by faith.

So verse 16 is the heart of the chapter, “So it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who shows mercy.”

Still and all, it’s a lumpy mercy (playing on the image of a lump of clay Paul uses in verse 21). Israel in disobedience and rejection of the Messiah takes its lumps. Still and all, the promises to Israel are not void and God will have mercy on a remnant, and “whoever believes in him will not be put to shame,” (verse 33, paraphrasing Isaiah 28:16).

As Paul’s arguments unfold further in chapters 10 and 11, we see that we as Gentiles have no basis for gloating over the lumps Israel takes. We are all lumpy and all in need of mercy. Part of the point of the clay illustration is that we all, Jew or Gentile, come from the same sinful material. It is by God’s grace that we are made anything better.

Someone said to me today, “I’m having a really hard time seeing God’s hand in this.” The person was dealing with family issues that have no clear pathway to healing, no obvious route to resolution and peace. I sympathize. Such depth of interpersonal pain does make one question God’s activity and plan in it all.

Yet in our text for this Sunday, Romans 8:26-39, Paul sums up his whole argument regarding the work of God’s righteousness in a glorious expression of confidence and trust in what God is doing.

We’re starting with a couple verses, 26 and 27, which may seem like they better belong with what has gone before, because they pick up the theme of the work of the Spirit and inward groaning which was expressed in verse 23. Yet connecting these verses about the intercession of the Spirit when we don’t even know how to pray, makes the affirmation of verse 28 that much more powerful, “We know that things work together for good for those who love God. . .”

A comment by St. Chrysostom is apt: “When Paul speaks of all things he mentions even the things that seem painful.” Even that which seems as though it can’t be the hand of God are being worked together by the hand of God for our good.

I haven’t read the Rob Bell book Love Wins. It’s one of those volumes which you feel like you’ve read even if you haven’t, just because so many people are talking about it. His title might be a good title for this text, but I’m not sure the slant is the same. As near as I can make out, Bell wants to explore the possibility that God’s love wins over even those who don’t love Him. It’s certainly a possibility to be explored biblically and theologically.

However the point of our text is that the love of God triumphs in the lives of those who do love God, triumphs even over circumstances and powers which might seem to separate from His love. God’s love may be victorious over us, but it is clearly victorious for us when by the grace of Christ we love Him.

The love of God is demonstrated, as Paul has already made clear in chapter 5, in the work of Christ. God gave up His Son. God made us righteous through His Son. God raised His Son from the dead. All of it is on our behalf, out of love. How can we suppose, then, that that same love will be anything but victorious over whatever hard and painful circumstances we find ourselves in?

My prayer for anyone who reads this is the same as it was for the one who told me today how hard it is to see God at work. May you feel the love of God in and through it all, the love in and by which Christ suffered, died and rose again. That kind of love can’t help but be victorious.

There was little condemnation for Casey Anthony. Yesterday she was pronounced “not guilty” of murder by a jury of her peers. Though she still faces some jail time for lying to the police she will be free very soon. Yet despite being free of legal condemnation, Casey’s verdict has unleashed a firestorm of informal condemnation through Facebook, Twitter and all sorts of blogs.

The problem is that though the legal system has declared Anthony innocent many people don’t believe she really is. My own sense is that we will probably never know the truth. It remains an unanswerable question.

You could raise a similar question about Paul’s declaration of innocence in the first verse of our text, Romans 8:1-11, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Perhaps God has in fact declared us innocent and taken away the death penalty for our sin, but are we in actual fact guiltless? It seems like the answer is no. So what makes Paul’s theology of atonement any different from a faulty jury verdict? Shall we simply rejoice to go scot-free, regardless of our actual guilt? Sometimes our doctrine of grace sounds like that.

However, Paul follows his “no condemnation” declaration with a clear indication that, while we may rejoice and be confident in our “not guilty” status before God, there is nonetheless a dimension of transformation in Christian experience. Verses 3 and 4 say that God actually dealt with sin through His Son, “so that the just requirements of the law might be fulfilled in us.” In other words, God’s “no condemnation,” the divine “not guilty” pronounced upon us through Christ is not meant to be a perpetual legal fiction about Christian believers.

The transformation from people who are “not guilty” only by a declaration to genuinely holy, “not guilty” people takes place as we find ourselves as verse 1 said, “in Christ.” We are in a new place.

My neighbor and I were talking about fishing and I told him about a recent fishing trip in Colorado, starting out poorly in a river swollen and muddy with snow melt, then moving to much better fishing in a little private lake. My neighbor remarked that our rivers were also “blown-out” with the runoff this year. Then he paused to correct himself and say, “But it’s better than floods in the Midwest and 118 degrees in Phoenix. We’ve got it better here than anywhere in the country.” That’s exactly the spirit of what Paul is celebrating at the beginning of Romans 8.

Here Paul distinguishes our new place from our old place by the term “the Spirit” versus the term “the flesh.” Lots of ink has been spilled to clarify that by “flesh” Paul is not simply talking about our physical nature, our bodies. You can see in the promise of verse 11, that “he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies. If bodies as such were evil, God would not promise to resurrect them.

It’s not being physical that gives rise to sin, it’s living in a fleshly mindset that focuses only on this present material world and fails to give consideration to God and work of His Spirit in us. “Flesh” for Paul is the whole way of thinking that is in opposition to God. When we place our faith in Jesus Christ, a process begins which moves us from that realm of thought and experience into a new realm which is according to His own Holy Spirit.

Verse 9 says, “But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you.” That’s how it is that “no condemnation,” “not guilty” is ultimately pronounced over us. There’s evidence. That evidence is our new life by the Spirit, a life which is no longer hostile to God, but hostile to sin.

There’s much more to think on with this text. It’s the prelude to the central and greatest chapter of Romans. Any thoughts from anyone out there?

As the A-Team’s irrepressible Hannibal Smith would say, “I love it when a plan comes together!” For me this week it’s the plan to preach through Romans and in the first part of the year push those texts into the mix with the assigned readings from the lectionary. It works out beautifully for this last Sunday of that strategy. The Gospel lesson for June 19, Trinity Sunday is Matthew 28:16-20 and the Romans text up next is chapter 6:1-11. And both center around baptism.

In Matthew it’s the command to baptize with the Trinitarian formula, “in the name of the Father and of the Son of and of the Holy Spirit,” which makes it a fine text for Trinity Sunday.

In Romans 6, baptism is the route by which we die with Christ to sin and then are raised into a new life.

The texts fit nicely together once we realize that the “new life” into which baptism raises us in Romans 6 is none other than the holy life of God Himself as three persons sharing one life together in the Godhead. It’s that life of trinitarian sharing and love which we are given in Christ.

Verse 12 puts in succinctly by saying that we are “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” That phrase “alive to God” means alive to all the possibilities of living in the divine social life of harmony and peace while being distinct persons.

I’m part way through Charles Portis novel Masters of Atlantis, a send-up of secret societies and all the pseudo-historical and pseudo-scientific nonsense associated with Masons and Rosicrucians and lost continents like Atlantis and Mu. Portis has fun picturing various silly initiations into these secret orders, with recitations of absurd secret doctrines, eating of figs, and ridiculous processionals and handshakes. All of these machinations leave the initiates as weak, foolish and sinful as they were before engaging in them.

Paul’s point is that our initiation into the Christian faith is no sham show like those of a secret society without any tangible change in our lives. Baptism is a huge transformation, from death to life, and from the ways of sin to the ways of righteousness in Christ. That’s why he answers the charge that we might go on sinning in order to make grace abound with such indignation. That’s unthinkable if our initiation into Christ is the true transformation it’s meant to be.

Eastern Orthodox theology, looking to Irenaeus, speaks of Christ “recapitulating” humanity. This is the direction of Paul’s thought in our text for this week, Romans 5:12-21. Jesus is the New Adam, a restart of the human race in faithful obedience to God through the Cross and Resurrection.

Paul revels in contrasting the blessing of the new Adam in bringing us grace and life with the curse of the old Adam, who brought sin and death to humanity.

As I continue with the year-long study of Romans, this text falls on Pentecost and the connection is tenuous. However, there is a theme in the text here of dueling kingdoms. Death reigns (vv. 14, 17, 21) through Adam’s sin, but in Christ we are brought over to a kingdom of life and grace (vv. 17, 21). Thus there is in Christ a restoration of the original human sovereignty over life and creation. Those who receive grace and righteousness in Christ “exercise dominion in life” (v. 17).

One place where we’ve lost dominion or control of human life is in our failure to communicate well with one another. Our diversity of language is a biblical image of the breakdown of human community (Genesis 11). The Pentecost story of everyone hearing and understanding the preaching of the Gospel, regardless of native language, is the promise of the restoration of community and communication across human barriers of race and nationality. It is a vision of dominion over speech being returned to the human race.

I’m sure other connections between the Old Adam/New Adam contrast and the Pentecost story could be made. Anyone out there have thoughts about it?

The street was wet, the trees were dripping and the morning of our big church yard sale had arrived this past Saturday. It had rained in the night and a gray sky seemed to promise more showers. We could have held the sale indoors, but its effectiveness would be hugely reduced by a crowded space and the lack of outdoor visibility. After deliberating for a few minutes, my wife Beth made the call: “Carry those loaded tables out to the parking lot. We’re going to try it.”

There was a bit of grounding for the hope Beth exercised in that moment on Saturday. The forecast was a 20% chance of showers and it wasn’t raining right then. The thing was that once the time came, the move was made from simply hoping it wouldn’t rain to living in and acting on that hope.

The transition from chapter 4 to chapter 5 in Romans is a sizeable shift both in style and content for Paul’s argument. Up until now he has been largely concerned with exihibiting how it is that both Jews and Gentiles are included in the covenant righteousness fulfilled in Jesus. His answer was to point to Abraham’s justification, his being reckoned righteous through faith in Genesis 15. In the same way as Abraham, and in completion of the covenant with Abraham, faith in Jesus Christ brings both Jew and Gentile into the covenant people, Abraham’s family.

Now with chapter 5, Paul begins to explore what comes of justification by faith in Christ in the life of God’s covenant people. If we are reckoned as righteous in Jesus, what does that imply now for how we live? Chapters 5-8 unpack the answer to that question, dealing with some of the implications of being reckoned righteous through faith because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Our text for this Sunday, Romans 5:1-11, offers the initial celebratory claim that our status as justified by faith gives us unprecedented hope. We have an unshakeable ground of hope in the love of God (verse 5), demonstrated in the fact that Christ died for us “while we still were sinners” (verse 8).

Hope for those justified by faith in Christ centers in the fact that we are at peace with God (verse 1) and need not fear His wrath (verse 9) and that we have been reconciled to God (verses 10 & 11) by the atonement of the death and resurrection of Jesus. We are not God’s enemies anymore, but His friends. This all harks back to and becomes the answer for the wrath of God seen as the sentence on sinful humanity in the latter part of chapter 1 and the first part of chapter 2.

So the first result of justification is that we are blessed with a sure and confident hope. That hope calls for lives of dedication and sacrifice that go well beyond taking a risk on the weather. That hope also shows up cheap counterfeit hopes like Harold Camping’s numerology. We don’t base our faith in salvation from God’s wrath on our ability to calculate some secret Bible code. We base it on what has clearly been done by God, that Jesus loved us enough to die for us while we were still weak and sinful.

And, unlike the rapture that didn’t happen last Saturday, such hope in what Jesus has already accomplished on our behalf “does not disappoint us” (verse 5), because it is grounded in the gracious love poured out on us and in us through the Holy Spirit.

By the way, beside no rapture, there was also no rain here on Saturday. So our sale was a huge success and we felt very blessed. But that should only call us to remember the greater, more sure blessings we have in Christ, and live in true hope in Him.

She pats his hand and wipes some drool from his lips. My heart aches as I watch an old dear friend being cared for by his faithful wife. His Alzheimer’s has taken away his ability even to sit. So he is strapped into his chair. He says a word or two, but I can’t converse with him.

My friend’s wife faithfully sits alongside him and carries the conversation as she looks after him. Some of what she says even seems to put a smile on his face and he seems at peace. Praise God for this woman’s faithfulness to the promises she made in marriage decades ago. It makes all the difference in the world to how my friend will experience his last days on earth.

An even more incredible faithfulness to a promise is Paul’s subject in Romans 3 and 4, and as he arrives at our text for this Sunday, Romans 4:13-25, the promise comes sharply into focus. It’s God’s covenant promise to Abraham and as Paul has been arguing all along, that promise includes not only Abraham’s physical descendants in the Jewish people, but the whole world.

Here in this text Paul wants to celebrate the full scope and power of God’s promise and His ability to keep it. That’s why Paul’s mind turns all the way back to the original creation at the end of verse 17 as he tells us Abraham believed God “who gives life to the the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”

God’s covenant with Abraham and ultimately with us is an extension of His covenant with all creation, to redeem it and establish it as His kingdom. So the promise which Abraham believed and which is fulfilled in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is really a promise kept from the beginning of creation.

The “justification” here, the faith being reckoned to Abraham as righteousness is the declaration of inclusion in that single promise which God is keeping to His creation. It’s God’s work to put humanity back in the right place, into His plan and promise for the whole world. And verses 23 and 24 tell us that the same reckoning is our as well, when we in faith believe in God as the one who raised Jesus from the dead.

My friend’s wife can only keep her marriage promises as the old vows say, “until death do us part.” But God’s faithfulness to us in Jesus Christ includes us in a promise that has the power to carry on even beyond death. In that promise given us in Jesus’ resurrection we live in and for a new life in God’s kingdom that will be everlasting. May we be faithful to our own part in that great promise.

“It was nice to see the lights on in your place. We’re always glad to have the ‘Wee Bits’ visit.”

“The ‘Wee Bits?'” I asked.

“Yes,” said our talkative neighbor by our cabin in northern Arizona where we vacationed last week. “We call you the ‘Wee Bits’ because of your sign, you know.”

Then it dawned on me. Over our cabin door hangs a sign added long ago acnknowledging my mother’s family’s Scottish roots. It reads “Wee Bit o’ Heaven.” Hence, the members of our family (and anyone else who uses our cabin) are now together known as the “Wee Bits.” That sign has become our family identity, at least to the more permanent residents of that little cluster of homes in Oak Creek Canyon.

One of the great issues for Paul in the letter to the Romans is what constitutes family identity for the people of God. In chapter 4, he takes that up in regard to Abraham, especially concerning the question of whether it’s a matter of fleshly, physical ancestry.

In Romans 4:1-12, Paul is concerned to show that belonging to the people of God is not by physical descent from Abraham, but by sharing in the covenantal status into which Abraham entered in Genesis 15. Paul especially focuses on Genesis 15:16, “Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.”

The focus in interpretation of this chapter often moves to verses 4 and 5 and the insistence that Paul’s central point is that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to us through faith and is not attained by works. However, in the larger context, Paul’s purpose is to show that faith is the gateway or door by which anyone, whether physically descended from Abraham or not, may enter into the same righteous covenantal relationship Abraham himself had with God.

Just as our Arizona neighbors see anyone who enters under the “Wee Bit o’ Heaven” sign as a “Wee Bit,” God sees anyone who comes to him with faith like Abraham’s as part of Abraham’s family.

Therefore the key message of our text is in verses 11 and 12, that both uncircumcised and circumcised are children of Abraham, through faith. That’s the insistence in verse 12. Hebrews don’t come into covenant one way and Christians another. Everyone comes by faith. And we are all one family. As Paul will reiterate again at the end of 4:16, Abraham is the father of us all.

Ultimately for Paul, the point is that Jesus died and rose, not just to forgive us our sins and secure us a place in heaven, but to bring us into that great family of faith, that gracious Covenant which God is making with the world in order to redeem the world and transform it into His kingdom. Then this whole earth will also be a “Wee Bit o’ Heaven.”

It was called the “Roman Road to Salvation.” I learned it as a child, a series of verses, found skipping around the letter to the Romans, that would provide reason and motivation to accept Christ as Savior. It began here in this week’s text from the second half of Romans 3, with verse 23, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

From this little statement of the universality of sin we skipped over to 6:23 and a pronouncement that death (eternal death, it was explained) is the result of sin, and the promise that eternal life is God’s gift through Jesus Christ. Then it was back to 5:8 to gain the understanding that this gift of life comes to us through Christ’s death on the Cross. Finally, forward again to Romans 10, verses 9, 10 and 13 to discover that all that was needed for salvation is to call on the Lord in faith, to confess aloud that Jesus is Lord, and to believe that God raised Him from the dead.

All in all, the “Roman Road” is not a bad summary of the Gospel, though it plays a little loose with Paul’s own purposes and train of thought in the selected texts. Its use as an evangelistic tool reflects a day when there was a wider respect for Scripture even among those who hadn’t yet committed their lives to Christ.

The fact is, however, that one might stay right here in the vicinity of Romans 3:23 and find a pretty good exposition of what is central to Christian belief and what is essential for salvation, especially in 3:25. There we have Jesus as the atoning sacrifice for our sins being received by faith. Not too much more is needed, although Easter should remind us that the Atonement is not complete without the Resurrection (which Romans 10:9 calls us to confess).

One important point to get clear on in this text in particular is that it is the same Greek word family, dikaiosune (noun), dikaioo (verb) which is translated alternately by “righteousness” and “justify.” A particular and classically Protestant theological bent is partly responsible for this bifurcation in English translation, not wanting to parallel the noun “righteousness” with a verbal form in English like “to make right.” It comes from the theological conviction that “justification” must only be an imputation, a declaration of righteousness, but not an actual infusion or gift of righteousness, i.e., a “making right” or transformation of character.

The same traditional Protestant theology drives a debate about the word hilasterion in verse 25 (“God presented Christ as a hilasterion, through the shedding of blood.”) The translation of hilasterion as “propitiation” is favored as signaling an aversion of God’s wrath from persons who remain in character sinners, while the alternative, “expiation”, is denigrated as falsely implying that the atonement involves an actual removal of sin from sinners (rather than just a declaration of righteousness). The TNIV cops out nicely with the phrase “a sacrifice of atonement.” The word also points to the Old Testament image of the “mercy seat,” the kipper or “cover” of the Ark of the Covenant.

In any case, in Romans 3:21-31 we hear Paul insisting again that there is now clearly only one way to righteousness (justification) and that is in Jesus Christ through faith. The polarization between Jew and Gentile over the role of the Law evaporates in the face of the need both have for a righteousness which comes from God through faith in Christ.

The thing is that there was always only one way to righteousness through faith. Once again we need to realize that the transition from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant in Christ was not a transition from works to faith as the basis of righteousness and relationship with God. It was always faith that put one right with God. As Paul will show in chapter 4 via the example of Abraham, that faith was demonstrated by performance of what the law asked, even when the law itself was not yet present. There’s a congruity between Jewish experience and Christian Gentile experience of justification by faith. That’s Paul’s point in declaring, “for all have sinned,” and in verse 24 “and all are justified freely.”

That’s also the point of the end of verse 25 about God’s forbearance with “sins committed beforehand.” He leaves them unpunished because He is looking ahead to the atoning work of Christ as verse 26 indicates. He forgave the prior sins looking ahead to the demonstration of His justice (righteousness) in the present. There’s not one sort of legalistic justification going on before and then a new one in Christ. Everyone, both Jew and Gentile, and Jew living by the law before Christ, is justified by the one faith which looks to Christ and His atoning work.

So Paul is able to talk about a “law” of faith in verse 27 and confidently assert in what follows that God is the God of both Jews and Gentiles because He relates to them in the same way, on the basis of faith. Moreover, in verse 31 he makes it clear that faith does not nullify the law, but that faith is the fulfillment and completion of the law. The law by which Jews lived prior to Christ centered in and was built around the same idea of justification by faith.