Romans 1-4

Romans 1-4

 

We’re covering the book of Romans for the next four weeks.

St. Paul
From the catacombs of Rome
4th century

I’m going to start out with some background that I think is important.

Some of you might know this, so it’ll be a bit of a review.

But I think it’s important to understand the letter.

This’ll be a little hybrid sermon/class thing.

Don’t worry, I’ve done this before!

 

So the letter to the Romans is written by Paul, the apostle,

to the Christian Church in Rome.

Paul did not start the Christian church in Rome.

There are 9 letters from Paul to various churches in the bible.

And Paul had started most of them.

It’s unclear who did start the church in Rome.

Maybe one of the Romans who were in Jerusalem on Pentecost.

Paul had never actually visited Rome before this.

He would be imprisoned in Rome twice, but that was later.

 

Paul would have written this letter while he was in

Corinth, in Greece and it was delivered and read

to the church by Phoebe, a deacon.

 

Romans is the first of Paul’s letters in the bible

coming right after Acts, but it’s not first because it was the first written.

The epistles or letters of Paul are put in order by length,

and Romans is the longest of the letters

of Paul that they had so it’s first.

 

Romans was probably written in the mid 50’s  55-57.

So about 20 years after Jesus was crucified and risen.

Thessalonians are the earliest letters,

and they probably were written in the late 40’s.

 

Paul is writing to the church in Rome for two reasons,

1. because he hopes to use the church in Rome as a jumping off point for his western ministries

 2. And most importantly, to heal a rift which had arisen in the church there.

 

A little context for Paul. Before he was a Christian,

Paul was a Pharisee, a Jewish religious leader,

who was tasked with maintaining a pure faith,

and his main job had become punishing

Jews who had converted to Christianity.

 

Then he had a dramatic visit from the risen Christ,

and he was converted to the Christian way.

His Christian ministry was mostly to gentile pagans

to teach them about Jesus and to start their churches.

 

The church in Rome was made up mostly

of Jews who had been converted to Christianity

and practiced it more as facet of their Jewish faith

than a whole different religion.

They kept the Jewish laws, including circumcision and dietary laws.

 

And there were also pagans

who had converted to this Judeo/Christianity.

In the early church, as we see in other writings,

there was a lot of discussion as to whether

Christians should still keep Jewish laws

and practices, or could they forego them.

Even though he was Jewish, Paul was of the mind they could forego them.

 

The church in Rome was apparently working this

out for a while and were worshipping together

for the first 10 or so years of the church there.

 

But then Emperor Claudius expelled all the

Jews from Rome in about 41.

He saw them as rebels and instigators.

This happens a lot to Jewish people throughout history.

 

After 5 years, Claudius died (or was probably murdered,

Roman emperors rarely died natural deaths)

and the edict ran out and the Jews were allowed to

return to Rome and therefore the church there.

 

But after 5 years, the church had changed a lot.

There was no longer the Jewish influence of the church

the Gentiles had left behind Jewish customs and laws

they weren’t making men get circumcised,

they weren’t following dietary laws,

and they were worshipping Christ with a lot of

Roman and pagan influences.

 

The Jewish people who were the leaders of the church at one time,

and the main influencers of theology and practice

and who had a lot more power in society before they were expelled,

now had the least power.

They had probably lost their customers, if not their businesses,

they may have lost their land, maybe their homes

so they didn’t have much civic power then either.

And the gentile Christians were now more in line

with the dominant Roman culture so it was

easy to marginalize further the returning Jewish Christians.

 

This unsurprisingly  led to conflicts.

The Jewish Christians returned wondering

what happened to the church they left.

They come back claiming that they are the

rightful owners of the church and Christians

must follow Jewish laws and customs.

 

And the gentile members claim that they

are the rightful owners now and everyone

should do it their way to really be Christian.

 

Then people start to dig in their heels

they start judging other people, and calling other people names,

saying that God doesn’t like them

and that they’re the reason everything is going

to heck in a handbasket.

We know how disagreements go.

Human nature hasn’t changed at all.

 

Who better to deal with the Jewish/Gentile

disagreement in churches than Paul

who had one foot in each reality?

 

This is the backdrop that Paul is writing his letter to.

 

Just one aside, I think when we think about

“the Church in Rome” we often think of gold

gilded cathedrals like St. Peters.

But that’s not what we find in the first century.

The church in Rome was in people’s houses    

and Paul was addressing the whole conglomeration

of house churches in Rome

 

In chapter 16, Paul says

Greet Prisca and Aquila, my coworkers in Christ Jesus, 

 who risked their necks for my life,

to whom not only I give thanks but also all the churches of the gentiles.

Greet also the church in their house.

 

Priscilla and Aquila were a Jewish Christian

couple who are mentioned in Romans, 3 times in Acts,

and in First Corinthians and second Timothy.

 

Paul was not writing to a strong, powerful church

(which only started to be strong and powerful after the 3^rd century. )

Paul was writing to a powerless church marginalized people

who were in a sect of a religion that the Romans didn’t like

who were living in fear of the brutal Roman empire.

And their very presence and actions,

merely in the fact that Gentiles and Jews working together,

was suspicious in Roman society.

 

So it’s ironic how the book of Romans has been used.

At best, it’s been used to call people to a strictly spiritual personal salvation.

Which ignores the context it’s written in completely.

 

And, at worst, it’s been used to defend empires, 

ignore the cries of the poor and marginalized,

condemn LGBTQ people, condemn Jews, 

and basically be call for blind obedience to the state.

 

That is not what this letter was, for Paul or the people who heard it

and if you’ve been used to hearing Romans

or Paul this in either of these ways,

I hope you can be open to hearing it in a different way.

 

And if you are just happy, happy to have Romans be a completely spiritual

book about getting into heaven, I hope you’re open to thinking about it a little differently.

 

Onto the letter.

 

Paul’s objective is to bring this young, conflicted church

together on equal ground.

His objective was not to settle the argument

and say who was right and who was wrong,

his objective was to bring them together again into one church.

And he does this in a grand way in the first few chapters.

 

Paul starts every letter with a nice introduction:            

Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus,

called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God . . .

To all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I thank God for you.

Then he apologizes for not having ever been there in Rome

in person.

 

And right after the introduction , before we even get out of chapter 1,

he gets into some meaty stuff.

In verse 18,                                                                                                                                              

 

¹⁸ For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those who by their injustice suppress the truth . . .

Which is a very confusing sentence, isn’t it?

He starts out talking about a kind of an abstract group who, early on, rejecting God

“They exchanged images of God for  images

resembling a mortal human or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.

 

This is not just some unconnected doctrine for all times that he’s dishing out.

The readers would have recognized the Roman history of pagan worship

that they were all steeped in as residents of the center of the Roman Empire.

 

 

And right here, already in chapter one,

I have to stop, and digress, and take time to address  a passage that’s been so misused

by the Christian church to condemn same-gender relationships.         

 

It reads:

²⁶ For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. Their females exchanged natural intercourse^[e] for unnatural, ²⁷ and in the same way also the males, giving up natural intercourse^[f] with females, were consumed with their passionate desires for one another. Males committed shameless acts with males and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

 

I have an extensive explanation of Greco-Roman sexuality and

family structure which I will NOT give you right here,

but I can break into without much provocation.

 

But I will give you the short version, which is that what Paul is referring to,

and what was known in the Greco-Roman world, was not consensual,

same-gender relationships like we know them now.

That was not prevalent enough or known enough at the time for him to even comment on .

 

What was prevalent in the pagan world was using sex as part of worship in pagan temples.

Sex as formalized initiation processes for young men, actually teenage boys,

to get into politics or business.

And what was very prevalent was forced, sexual assault on slaves.

Which was overt and also absolutely socially acceptable.

That’s what Paul was commenting on.

 

Jewish men had their own sexual permissiveness that would

not be acceptable to us these days.

But Paul wants to accuse the dominant Pagan, Roman culture

at this moment in the letter, so he uses this example to distinguish

it from Jewish culture.

 

Regardless, what he’s describing is not loving same-gender relationships.

or even consensual, mutually gratifying encounters.

He is describing sex without relationship, without concern for the other person.

Sex for ritualistic purposes.

He’s describing sexual violence.

I think all of us can agree that all of it is unhealthy

and not what God intended for sexuality.

 

And when Christians put all their focus on same-gender

relationships and condemning that as sin,

they seem to forget the condemnation and objectification,

and power disparities and coercion, assault, and sexual violence,

which was truly the point of what Paul was focused on.

 

Here ends the digression.

 

Of course Paul goes onto describe other things:            

injustice, evil, covetousness, malice.

Envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, gossip, 

slanderer, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil,

rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

But those fire and brimstone pastors don’t seem to quote Romans 1

condemning those things in our society do they?

 

Everyone hearing this letter would have recognized this as a description of

Roman paganism, Roman culture, and especially the Roman ruling class

the emperor and their families.

 

Paul tells the gentile Romans that with that kind of background,

they have no place to judge people

Chapter 2

“¹ Therefore you are without excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others,

for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge,

are doing the very same things.”

 

The Jewish Christians must have been feeling pretty good right now,

hearing up to this part of the letter thinking that Paul was on their side.
But Paul goes into them pretty quickly, right at the start of chapter 2

 

He basically tells them, “You Jewish people know the law, but you ignore it.”  

 

you, then, who teach others, will you not teach yourself? You who preach against stealing, do you steal? ²² You who forbid adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? ²³ You who boast in the law, do you dishonor God by your transgression of the law?

 

(Temple robbers are not actually stealing things from temples, but those who profit off of temple worship, like making and selling pagan idols. )

 

He recalls the story of the Torah and the rest of the Old Testament,

which showed that Israel was just as

sinful, idolatrous, and morally broken as the rest of humanity.

 

Circumcision indeed is of value if you obey the law, but if you are a transgressor of the law your circumcision has become uncircumcision

 

Paul says that In fact, Israel could be more guilty than the Gentiles because they have the law of God and should know better.

 

So everyone is guilty. No one is worthy.

All good Lutherans should be able to see where this is going.

  

That’s when we get to the famous quote in chapter 3

 

For there is no distinction, ²³ since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; ²⁴ they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, ²⁵ whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement^[f] by his blood, effective through faith. 

 

I must say I was bogged down this week reading the dense,

first two chapters and trying to decipher what Paul meant,

and reading this line from chapter 3 is like

a breath of fresh air of clarity.

 

I’m so familiar with it I know it by heart.

And when I first heard the Lutheran interpretation of it

of Article 4 in my Lutheran confessions class

it inspired me to become a pastor.

It’s like a comfortable chair.

 

It was the inspiration for Luther’s criticism of the Roman Catholic church

and the scripture that propelled the Lutheran Reformation.

 

“No one can earn the glory of God,

but we receive it as a gift through Jesus Christ.”

 

This has, since Luther’s time, been understood to mean salvation.

Just eternal salvation. Just entry into heaven.

You can’t earn it, Jesus cross gives it too us.

Which is grace and it has brought many people to faith in Jesus.

 

And Luther used it to talk about dying and getting into heaven,

because the Roman Catholic church, which Luther was speaking out against,

was always talking about getting into heaven.

They used heaven and hell and purgatory as a threat,

and Luther took that threat away. Good job Luther.

 

Unfortunately though, I think, Lutherans haven’t taken this much

further than that. It remains an individualistic sort of

legal transaction between each person and God.

And I think when we stop there, we miss a lot of what Paul really meant in his letter.

 

The Biblical Scholar NT Wright said that

this Paul’s intent in Romans, and specifically Romans chapter 3,

was not just about individual salvation, but it was about belonging.

It was about inclusion in God’s story and God’s family and about diversity in it.

Which would make more sense in the context of the conflict this letter was addressing.

 

NT Wright says:

Justification by faith is the "badge" or marker that an individual belongs to the community of the Messiah. Anyone who believes has their sins forgiven and is welcomed into the same covenant

 

Because inclusion is based solely on faith in the Messiah, Jewish and Gentile believers are on equal footing. Justification creates a single, multi-ethnic family, proving that Gentiles do not need to follow the Torah to be part of God's people.

 

A community whose membership that’s not based on race, or birthright.

Where everyone is equal, Jew and Greek.

That’s Paul’s vision for the church in Rome

 

And this meaning of belonging is obvious,

if you actually march on to Chapter 4 and don’t stop with Chapter 3

like most Lutherans do usually.

 

Paul talks about Abraham and his covenant with God which we heard earlier.

Abraham, the father of all Judaism, wasn’t able to have children, but God promised him

that he would be the father of many nations

and that his descendants would number

more than the stars in the sky.

 

For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. ³ For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed^[b] God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” ⁴ Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due. ⁵ But to one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness. 

 

That’s a lot of words to say,

that this promise wasn’t given to Abraham because he followed the law

or did the right things –actually this promise came before the laws were written and

before circumcision was even commanded –

This promise was given to him and received by faith.

 

He believed in God’s promise and it was given.

Faith created the family of God, and faith creates the new family of God,

both Jew and Gentile, around the death and resurrection

of Jesus Christ and God’s promises.

 

Paul was not talking about just dying and going to heaven.       

In this letter, Paul was talking God creating a new community,

and about belonging to a new family in Christ.

 

A community that’s not based on religion, or race, or ethnic heritage,

or birthright, or social status, or gender, or income, or sexual identity.

That’s the vision.

The kingdom of God on earth.

 

This message, that Paul and the believers

were spreading and acting out was radical at the time.

It was disruptive to everything that Roman society was built on.

The gospel of Jesus, actually lived out in the world was revolutionary.

And it still can be today.

 

 

Next week we’ll look at chapters 5-8