PROPERS: PROPER 9, YEAR A
TEXT: ROMANS 7:15-25a
PREACHED AT ST. JOHN’S, PASCAGOULA, ON SUNDAY, JULY 9, 2023.
ONE SENTENCE: Paul’s message in Romans is clear: The Gospel is for all; cleanses all the past; and is a message of hope.
It is an utter delight to close my time with you with the second lesson today.
For the next two months, your second lesson each Sunday will be from the sixth book of the New Testament – Paul’s Letter to the Romans.
In my opinion, Paul’s Letter to the Romans is the high point of Christian scripture. The well-known Anglican Bishop, N. T. Wright, compares it to the highest mountain, unmatched by any, providing an expansive view of God’s realm.
Profound Christian figures have been inspired by this letter. Augustine, Martin Luther, Karl Barth and others have been touched by the Letter to the Romans.
The 15 chapters of this letter provide a magnificent overview of Paul’s theology. And Paul, as you may know, was not a simple thinker or apologist. He was a very bright, very well-educated Greek Jew. Before his conversion on the road to Damascus he was viewed as a Pharisee’s Pharisee – a peer to his contemporary Gamaliel.
Paul, as you know, was originally named Saul. He experienced conversion to Christianity just a few years after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. After taking some time to marinate in Christian theology, he embarked on three missionary journeys. It was during that time that he wrote his various letters to churches around the Mediterranean.
It was on his third missionary journey that he wrote his Letter to the Romans. He was in Corinth and the year was in the early sixth decade of the first Christian century.
Since I will not be with you for the coming lessons, I want to highlight the key themes of the next several passages.
Today, Paul is addressing something we are all familiar with – the human condition. It is the fact that each of us, despite our best intentions, will sometimes do those things we would not do. It is an integral part of human nature, and we cannot help ourselves. He labels that tendency as sin.
In a plaintive cry, Paul writes, “Wretched man that I am! Who will save me from this body of death?” In other words, how can the gulf between the broken human condition and the divine nature of God be overcome?
Paul answers his own question: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” In other words, that gulf between human nature and the divine is spanned by the gift of Jesus.
Paul is writing to the Church in Rome. He knows that it is a mixture of people and groups. Some are Jews, who have faithfully attempted to follow the Law. Others were gentiles, who had no regard for the Law.
Paul sees them as one and the same. All are under God’s grace and mercy – recipients of the divine gift of justification – being made right with God. He had made this clear in his earlier Letter to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free.”
Paul is making his point by this letter – the gift of justification is for all people.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is what I consider the high point of the New Testament: Paul’s assurance of hope. Keep in mind this is the same man who has been shipwrecked, imprisoned, beaten, and scorned. Yet, he sees hope.
He recalls all that he has experienced, and he anticipates martyrdom to come. But he writes these words: in all these things we are more than victorious through him who loved us. “8:38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
This is Good News for all of us. If Paul can look on his life – the ups and downs, the highs and lows, his life as Pharisee and his life as a Christian missionary – and see himself embraced in the God of love, we should do the same.
Paul wrote this remarkable letter nearly 2,000 years ago, to a people he had not yet met. It speaks clearly to us today.
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