Proper 11 Year A
Deacon Richard Buhrer
July 17, 2005
Jacob’s ladder and the parable of the wheat and the tares: so much sermon fodder in one day’s readings. Thin places, finding God in dreams, Jesus teaching us to leave the judgment to God and forebear with everyone in the Kingdom. All worthy topics for preaching.
But in addition to these readings about the mothers and fathers of our faith and the parables that Jesus used to teach the crowds, over the past several weeks we have been reading St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. This is the first of Paul’s epistles in the New Testament. Any guesses why it’s first? It’s first because it’s the longest. It’s a “hard word.” Much of the Protestant Reformation and all it’s horrible wars were fought over the interpretation of this epistle.
It’s unique among Paul’s letters because it is addressed to a Christian community that he had never visited. In the year 19 the emperor Tiberius expelled the Jews from the city of Rome and later they were allowed to return. The return occurred during Paul’s ministry. The young church in Rome was largely comprised of Jewish Christians, some of whom Paul had met in other cities before they had returned to the city. Paul is expecting to come to Rome and wants to establish himself with the community there. Consequently he writes this letter and sends it to Rome by means of a courier, Phoebe the deacon, a woman engaged in ministry in the early Church. Parenthetically, the greetings that Paul sends to individuals of his acquaintance at the end of the letter is one of the most convincing passages documenting the role of women in the very primitive church, recognizing their public ministry.
Paul’s letter itself deals with three great dichotomies: Jew versus Greek, Faith versus Law, and Spirit versus Flesh.
Paul is concerned that this largely Jewish community will consider themselves morally superior to the Gentile converts to Christianity. So the letter begins with the common rabbinical accusation against Gentiles: Sexual immorality. But Paul is clever (if not devious) in doing this because after hooking his audience with the old arguments they are familiar with, which form the basis of their sense of superiority he immediately accuses them of being sinful—so that all alike begin from the equality of sinfulness. No one in the Christian community has any basis for self-superiority: “All alike have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” The temptation in our time to moral superiority is probably in the great divide between liberal and conservative in the Church. Whatever our political and theoretical prejudices, neither party is superior to the other in the issue of sinfulness. All alike have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. All alike are in need of redemption. All alike are in need of the mercy and love and grace of God to fulfill the mission given us by the Gospel of Christ.
Related to this distinction between Jew and Greek, is an opposition in Paul’s thinking between Law and Faith. In Paul’s thinking, the Law brings with it an awareness of sin and imperfection. It does not bring life. Paul looks back at the story of the relationship of God and humankind and finds that prior to the Law, there was the faith of Abraham. Even the testimony of the Torah tells that this faith, trusting God to fulfill his promise, even in the light of apparent impossibility, was “recond to him as righteousness.”
Luther interpreted this to mean that we were saved by attribution: by God looking at us through the lens of Christ, in Luther’s example: like snow on a dunghill. Paul probably means something more like transformation: by our trusting in God’s promises, we are transformed and conformed to the likeness of Christ.
Now it is important for us to realize that Paul’s ideas about Law and the Jewish devotion to the Law are two different things: Jews observe the Law because they see it as a gift from God and a means of imitating God. It is for them a vehicle for union with God. Paul’s assertion that the Law is inferior to faith has formed at least part of the basis for the centuries-long persecution against the Jews. The world is still suffering from the consequences of this great sin of anti-Semitism: the disorder in the Middle East centers around the Jewish state and the leaders of the Jewish state are so little able to trust and participate in justice and peace for the Palestinians, at least in part, due to the ages of hatred, murder and persecution that they have endured. And all of Christendom bears a share in the responsibility for this seemingly unending suffering.
The final dichotomy in this letter of Paul is that of Flesh versus Spirit. We easily confuse this with the distinction of matter and spirit that we have inherited from Plato and other Greek philosophers. This belief: that matter is bad and the spirit is good, has burdened the Church through long ages. But this belief is not consistent with the Christian belief in the Incarnation: God loved matter and bodies and humans so much that he chose to immerse his very self in matter and bodies, living and dying, and all that is associated with mammalian (and human) existence.
So what does Paul mean in describing this distinction: Flesh and Spirit. The Rabbi’s taught that there was both a good and an evil impulse in every human being. They called this the yetzer ha rah and the yetzer ha tov. This is very close to what St. Paul means: That there is this impulse that Paul calls the Flesh which draws us away from God, that leads us to devalue and abuse our bodies, and sets us at odds with each other. On the other hand, there is an impulse that St. Paul calls Spirit that leads toward God and impels us to value and care for our bodies, and to be at peace and in union one with another. And in the light of this we should indeed seek the one and shun the other.
In another place, Paul says: “19Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, 20idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, 21envy,* drunkenness, carousing, and things like these:… By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 23gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.”
Now the word fruit has a couple of levels of meaning: It means what we probably first understand it to mean: the product of organic growth and fertilization in a plant: like the fruit of a strawberry vine. But in the original Latin, a fruit was a thing to be enjoyed. So the fruit of the Spirit is both the result of organic growth in us in the presence of the Holy Spirit and a thing to be enjoyed for its own sake.
In today’s reading Paul introduces another distinction that we should attend to: The Jewish expectation of God’s blessing was a peaceful and prosperous life: all of this is summed up in the Hebrew word “shalom.” We usually translate this as peace, but it really means much more than peacefulness, prosperity, joy. Paul (and Christ) do not promise that. They offer something quite different from this: If we embrace suffering in imitation of Christ on behalf of the Gospel in this life, we are promised joy and peace and glory in the life to come. In the Gospel Jesus says: Whoever leaves home or lands or family for me will receive measure for measure tamped down and overflowing in this life and persecutions beside. Paul offers much the same in today’s Epistle:
18I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.
19For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God;
20for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope
21that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
And he counsels us to live in hope, hope of things yet to be revealed. This is not exactly pie in the sky when you die, but rather seeing our life together as a foretaste of the glory yet to be revealed, when we and the whole creation will obtain complete liberty.
So let us pray today for light to understand the teachings of the apostle Paul, for grace to accept the hard words and the bright words of his teaching. To be ever willing to repent of sin when we become aware of it. To pray for peace in the whole world and reconciliation between those who hate and fear each other. To pray that we will be faithful to the gospel, will embrace the Spirit and struggle against the World, the Flesh and the Devil and that we will finally, with the whole creation obtain the freedom of he glory of the children of God.
