Romans in Miniature

          One of my favorite plays is “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, (Abridged).” In it, three actors rush through almost every one of the Bard’s sonnets and plays (other than Coriolanus) in two short acts.

         I’m not going to do something that ambitious today, 
but I would like to go through the high points of Romans with you all 
in a single sermon. 
Romans in miniature.

 

Prayer

         Romans in miniature.

         Paul begins by knocking down some incorrect religious assumptions.

We are not made right with God and God’s family based on: 
-our family history or family tree,
-our length of time in this or any religious community,
-sinner’s prayers said or good works done,
-being the brother or mother of a minister,
None of that.

 

         We’re made right because God acted first, 
God has already worked out our salvation, 
our relationship with God and with neighbor, 
in Jesus Christ.

         The Christian response to God’s free gift to us 
is often described in Protestant tradition as “Faith” or “Belief”.
Faith gets at a spiritual and emotive aspects of this response to God’s grace, 
and Belief gets to a doctrinal and mental aspect. 

         But try this one on for size, 
Trust.
Trust is another way of talking about this response, 
that perhaps bridges the gap between those two descriptors
—faith and belief. 
         It also uplifts the mutuality and relational aspect of grace’s effect on Christians
—we trust Jesus because Jesus is trustworthy.

         Yes, God is trustworthy, 
worthy of our trust.

 

         Imagine you’re traveled 1,000 miles by train, 
and your parents promised to pick you up at the train station. 
Are they trustworthy parents? 
If so, you expect them to be there to pick you up. 
So too the God found in Jesus Christ
—trustworthy!

 

         God is trustworthy, 
but humans are a little dodgy, 
we’re ambiguous creatures. 
We’re Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 

It is this conflict within us that Martin Luther King Junior called 
the “schizophrenia of man.”
ours is that internal conflict that author William Falkner says, 
“alone makes good writing, 
because only that is worth writing about, 
worth the agony and the sweat.”
It is this conflict that Jungian psychologists 
call the “realization of the shadow self” 
and Freudians discuss as the interaction 
between the Id and Superego.

 

         Paul describes us as perpetually enslaved to something, 
as traitorous mercenaries who belong to an occupied country…

         We’re like that guy in the Gospel, 
we’ve got debts no honest man can pay.

 

         And yet, Paul assures us the Holy Spirit acts on our behalf
—that the Spirit allows us to trust that every debt is paid. 

         That through Christ a spiritual D-day is occurring, 
and our sighing struggles and prayers 
are a sort of re-enlistment in the resistance
and an investment in the renewal of our liberated country.
         That the Spirit is our adoption papers; 
instead of enslavement to Sin, 
our relationship is that of adopted heir of God!

 

         And all of this is done in community.
-The Spirit’s acts are discerned most clearly in the Church.
-The ambiguity of being human is most apparent when worshipping with fellow sinners!
-trust in God is lived out when we bear one another’s burdens.

 

         Now, Paul is writing this letter to a very particular community
—the Churches in Rome at about the year 56.
-Seven years after all the Jews (including the Jewish Christians) 
had been expelled from Rome by the Emperor. 
-Two years after they’d been allowed to return.

 

         Paul writes his letter to the Romans for one reason—Reconciliation.

 

         In Rome, the divisions between Jewish Christian and Gentile Christian 
came out most fully at mealtime.

The Traditionalist Jewish Christians
—Paul calls them the Weak
—refused to eat Meat, 
because it had been sacrificed to Pagan Idols.

The Liberated Gentile Christians
—Called the Strong by Paul
—went ahead and ate this meat, 
assured that if there is only one God, 
then the Idols are nothing.

         These divisions may sound silly today
—but they were issues that could make or break 
the Christian community in Rome…or anywhere else. 
         Issues of Traditionalism and Liberty at tension in community
—that’s nothing new, nor something old that doesn’t happen anymore.

 

         The Weak had return to their Roman Churches in 54 or so
and find everything changed. 
         It doesn’t work like it did before. 
They lack the vision to value how the Spirit had worked among the Gentile Christians in their absence.

         So, they resort to being judgmental, 
their prejudices betray them!
They need to go back to the font of faith and recommit to trusting God, 
so that even in the world as it is, 
they will be able to see God at work, 
and join in that work.

         God has not abandoned them… 
No! God always goes on ahead of us!

         Paul encourages these Traditionalists to be curious, 
and to look carefully
at their fellow Christians and to try, really try, 
to see how they are honoring and giving thanks to God in a new way.

 

         At the same time, Paul does not pull punches 
with the so called “Liberated Ones”—the “Strong.”

         He affirms that they’ve rode the chaos 
of the emptying of the Rome Church, 
back in 49, 
in a faithful way.
They’ve read the Spirit’s calling more faithfully 
than the Traditionalists who recently returned…

         And, he warns, getting it right doesn’t make them righteous… 
in fact, if they aren’t careful it’ll make them fools!
They must not despise or discriminate against their siblings in Christ!

         The danger of innovation and being ahead of the curve 
is that you can overload the consciences of those who aren’t there yet. 
You are obliged to be in regular discernment about your intentions
—are my intentions good? 
Will my choices be mimicked 
in ways that make a mockery 
out of the Christian faith?

         To put it plainly, Paul is saying that being right 
in such a way that you ruin someone else’s ability to trust God, 
is always wrong!

 

         He prays that the Spirit will 
transform judgment into curiosity 
and overthrow discrimination with discernment.

 

         And that’s Romans in Miniature… 
-Trusting God’s Generosity. 
-Human Ambiguity 
-The Spirit Acting.
-Reconciliation in Community.

Amen. 

Unpacking A Definition of Church

 

A while back I offered a definition of Church and then promised to unpack some of the terms I used. Here is that promised post.

The Church is a body of diverse and fallible people who are stewards of God’s grace.

That grace is found most completely in the person of Jesus Christ, who is our crucified Lord, revealed to us by the Holy Spirit.

Our acts of stewardship consist of proclaiming the good news of Jesus as both crucified and Lord in word and deed, and worshipping together in ways that allow us to continue to trust in Jesus.

 

Diverse—American Lutheranism has never been a monolith. The ELCA is a merging of multiple streams of Lutheran people from a variety of places and cultural milieus. For that matter, ELCA congregations are located in a wide variety of contexts, each with their own complexities in how ministry happens. As such local contexts matter, and how ministry is done will vary greatly from place to place.

Fallible—We are a church of both saints and sinners, and as such there needs to be gentleness and understanding for those who fall short, mechanisms in place for mutual accountability, and strong rules in place to counter abuse when it occurs at any level in this church. There ought to be ways for relationships to be restored that aren’t overly convoluted or painful (it ought to be noted Matthew 18 is in the ELCA’s current constitution). At the same time, there do need to be ways to hold people to account. Functionally, our three-fold expression of Church model can leave gaps in accountability, which seem to be there for litigious reasons.

Stewards—It ought to be foremost on our minds that the church exists only because the Holy Spirit wills us to exist. As such we are always caretakers, never sovereigns. This attitude will hopefully ensure we never allow God’s work to be hijacked by national mood or political ideology. It is God’s mission, given to us by grace. There is always a temptation to identify the Faith with whatever system or ideology is “winning” in the culture at the moment. This is the “City of God” problem, what happens when Rome falls? What happens when the Cold War ends? What happens when the Counterculture goes mainstream? What happens when the “Christian Nation” candidate loses? If the Church has remembered who our Sovereign is, none of these things will threaten us existentially.

God—Who is revealed in the canonical scriptures, affirmed in the historical creeds, reaffirmed in the Augsburg Confessions and the Book of Concord, and continually at work among us, beyond us, and ahead of us.

Jesus—Human and divine, whose ministry is witnessed to in the 4 canonical Gospels, who transformed the life trajectory of Paul of Tarsus, and whose resurrected life continues to shake people up in analogous ways to this very day.

Crucified—The way of Jesus is the way of the Cross. He relativizes all understanding of authority—he is the King who refuses the crown, the religious authority who is rejected for being inclusive. All power talk must be interpreted in light of what the powers, religious and secular, did to Jesus Christ. His one command was love, his last action before his death was washing feet. We must always look for God in the last place we would think to look, and recognize that God is concerned first and foremost for the least, last, and lost.

Lord—The type of authority Jesus practices relativizes all other ways of wielding power and exercising leadership. His Lordship is directly connected to the Kingdom of God—that is the experience of God reigning in the world as described in Jesus’ various parables on the subject. When wrongs are righted, when the small are mighty, when forgiveness and mercy are obviously paramount. We as a Church endeavor to lead like Jesus and bring about the Reign of God here on earth, even as we await its coming as we pray.

Holy Spirit—The Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, “the silent sovereign” has been with the Church since Pentecost, always going ahead of the Church, always rousing us to be Christ’s body in the world whenever we would be more comfortable just being some people gathered together on occasion. In our baptisms we receive the Holy Spirit, who is most fully active in our life when we participate in moments of the Church catching up to what God is already doing in the world.

Good News—The good news is that Jesus is Crucified Lord and all that implies for the world. His life, death, and resurrection having an ongoing impact upon all that exists.

Word—The joint proclamation of the Kingdom of God and the Good News. This is most clearly done in the Lutheran Church via reading and interpreting the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament. This interpretation ought to be done in a way that involves “Law and Gospel,” that is, using the scriptures to test the justness of our present world and our own actions and intentions, and then also hearing it as a freeing word for us today. This is also done through study of scripture both individually and in community. Getting a handle on what the scripture meant in it’s historical and cultural context allows us to imagine more clearly what God is saying to our historical moment and culture, without this scholarly and creative interpretive movement the Word can be badly misused.

Deed—There are many and various ways to serve our neighbors in need. All of them should be done in ways that point to Jesus’ unique authority and to the reality of those Kingdom Parables. Two examples that have bore fruit are: Feeding ministries of various sorts—in fact some Synods require every congregation to participate in a ministry that feeds people, healing ministries—be it sponsoring a hospital or hosting a parish nurse. These both are in continuity with Jesus’ ministries.

Worship—As witnessed in both Luke’s Gospel and the Didache, Christians traditionally worship in a way that contains four movements: gathering together as a community, reading scriptures, sharing a thanksgiving meal, and being sent out into the world as the re-formed body of Christ. There are well thought out documents that outline best practices from both Lutheran perspectives (The Use of the Means of Grace) as well as an ecumenical ones (Baptism Eucharist Ministry). Worship is faithful when it strengthens our trust in the God we meet in Jesus.

Trust—The Christian response to God’s free gift to us is often described in Protestant tradition as “Faith” or “Belief”. Often times Faith gets at a numinous and emotive aspect of this response to God’s grace, and Belief gets to a dogmatic and cognitive aspect. Trust is another way of talking about this response, that perhaps bridges the gap between those two descriptors. It also uplifts the mutuality and relational aspect of Grace’s effect on Christians—we trust Jesus because Jesus is trustworthy.