The Third Sunday of Pentecost Genesis 6; 9 – 22; 7: 24; 8: 14 – 19

Sunday, June 1, 2008 Romans 1: 16 – 17; 3: 22b – 28 (29 – 31)

The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 7: 21 – 29

For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

Romans 1: 16

“I am not ashamed of the gospel,” thunders Paul in our reading from Romans this morning. God is on trial and Paul like a zealous defense attorney is not about to let God be slandered. God is accused of breaking God’s promises and Paul will have none of it! God keeps God’s promises.

We hear today a part of a letter Paul wrote to the church at Rome roughly twenty years after the Resurrection. The letters of Paul are the earliest writings we have in the New Testament. All of the gospels were written later. In all we have thirteen letters attributed to Paul, seven of which are generally acknowledged to be written by Paul, the other six being written by followers of Paul. The letter to the church at Rome is widely affirmed to be from Paul’s own hand and is, perhaps, Paul’s most sophisticated theological treatise.

The church at Rome was a mixed community of Jews and gentiles. And the church in Rome was struggling. The Jewish Christians continued to follow the law of Moses and to observe such practices as male circumcision. The gentile Christians knew nothing about such rituals and felt no need to observe the Jewish practices. You and I perhaps can imagine their situation if one Sunday following the sermon, Haywood announced an altar call and invited anyone who would like to make a personal profession of faith to come to the front. Those among us who come from Baptist traditions would no doubt, be somewhat familiar with that practice; those among us who come from other traditions would probably be, at a minimum confused, at worst, horrified!

For the early church, creating a common life between Jews and gentiles was far more complicated than attempting to blend a Baptist tradition of making a mature affirmation of faith through altar calls and an Episcopalian tradition of confirmation as an adolescent following infant baptism. Creating a common life for the early church was much more difficult than trying to figure out whether we should baptize first and then instruct folks in the faith or whether we should instruct folks in the faith first and then baptize. Creating a common life for the early church meant nothing less than puzzling through what exactly made God’s chosen people, chosen.

For thousands of years, God’s chosen people, Israel, were chosen to keep the law, the law Moses had given to them from God. Male circumcision was the mark God had given Israel to set Israel apart from all the other nations, to distinguish Israel as God’s elect, God’s “light to the nations.” Circumcision marked the people of Israel as the people of the covenant. As God was holy, so, too, Israel was to be holy. Obedience to the law of Moses manifested Israel’s holiness and circumcision was the first act of obedience for a male child. And now, among other things, Paul says gentiles wishing to join the church do not need to be circumsized. Was God changing the rules?

Paul begins with the good news that God raised Jesus from the dead. “For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, ‘The one who is righteous will live by faith.’” In these verses, Paul tells the church at Rome why he is writing: to let them know that the Resurrection is God keeping God’s promise to rescue the whole world. God’s power is always and only, a power that rescues, that delivers, and in the Resurrection God has rescued both Jew and gentile. God shows no partiality between Israel and the rest of the world. And neither should the church at Rome.

Paul’s insistence that the gospel is good news for all people and not just for Jews was a radical and disconcerting message. If God was now opening the kingdom to all people, was God breaking his covenant promise to Israel, the chosen people? Was God changing the rules of the game, so to speak? If God was changing the rules, can we trust God not to change the rules again? And if God was not changing the rules, then did not the gentiles need to become like Jews and be circumsized? On trial in the church at Rome was the very trustworthiness of God. Can God be trusted to keep God’s promises?

“Yes!” says Paul emphatically. In fact, God alone keeps promises. Israel has not been faithful to the covenant. Israel, no less than the gentiles, has fallen short of the glory of God. And Paul reminds the church at Rome that before God, there is no distinction between Jew and gentile – “since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Neither Jew nor gentile has any ground upon which to stand before God, no one can “boast.” Only one is holy and that is Jesus. Israel is not holy, the gentiles are not holy, only Jesus is holy. Jesus did what neither Israel could do nor what the gentiles could do – be wholly obedient to God. Neither Jew nor gentile has any ground upon which stand before God, no one can “boast,” Paul says, before God.

New Testament scholar Kathy Grieb tells us the gentile Christians in the church at Rome understood themselves as “Greeks” – a civilized people different from the “barbarians,” uncivilized outsiders who did not speak Greek. The Jewish Christians understood themselves as Jews, the people of God, different from the peoples of all other nations. Much like we ground our identity in our family or place of birth or what we do for a living, we, like the Christians in the church at Rome, do not all share bonds of blood or birthplace or vocation. What we share is our common faith that Christ died for us, that “in Christ, God was reconciling the world (and not just a part of the world) to himself” in words Paul writes in a letter to the church at Corinth.

Paul challenges the early Christian community in Rome and us, to remember that what brings us together and what ultimately keeps us together is God’s trustworthiness, God’s faithful keeping of the promise God made long ago to restore the goodness of God’s creation. Paul challenges us to see the life, death and resurrection of Jesus as the very revelation of God’s faithfulness to the covenant God made, first with Noah and then with Abraham, to redeem all of creation.

“Trust,” Webster’s Dictionary tells us is “assured reliance on another’s honesty, fairness, friendship, etc.” Trust is a way of living in the world convicted God will bring things round right. Trust is the ability to take all of life seriously but none of life as the last word. Trust is what we do when we give up the belief that “life is what you make it” and accept the truth that if indeed, we could make of life what we wanted, we probably wouldn’t want what we got. Trust is the freedom to love others without expecting them to rescue us, because that job belongs to God. Trust is the freedom to be loved knowing no one save God will love us perfectly.

Paul was not asking the folks in the church at Rome to trust one another; Paul was asking them to trust God. They, no less than we, could not know the mind of God. The Jews did not expect God’s Messiah to be crucified and the Greeks could not begin to imagine a God who took flesh. All in all, just about everyone was taken by surprise by God. Building a common life given such different beliefs was, I can only imagine, fraught with tension and suspicion.

Why was Paul so insistent to get into the middle of all that? Paul was on his way to Spain and Paul needed the support of the church in Rome. If the church in Rome could not get it together, he would not have the means to plant other churches, to preach the good news that God in Christ has rescued all of us – rich and poor, male and female, Jew and Greek, wise and foolish. God has broken all barriers between us and God and calls us to live together in witness to this good news. Paul needed the church in Rome to be one, as God is one, not for their sake but for the sake of the rest of the world.

You and I live in a world that is terribly afraid there is no God and we have no one to count on but ourselves. And if that is not bad news, I am not sure what is. Paul reminds us we have good news to share in word and deed and that is why our common life is important. We do not seek to build a life together in order to find a sanctuary away from the stresses and strains of life. We seek to build a common life because we need one another to proclaim the good news that God is faithful and is even now at work, restoring God’s good but fallen creation. If that is not good news in this world, I am not sure what is.