Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
Romans 1:1-7
Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, 2 which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, 3 the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh 4 and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, 5 through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, 6 including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ, 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.
Hello! Thank you for allowing me to come to your fellowship. My name is Paul of Tarsus, but you probably already knew that from my accent. I was born and raised there. As a boy I would go down to the docks and watch the ships come in and unload all sorts of treasures from all over the world; spices, fine wines and oil, and fine linen from Egypt. I can still close my eyes and smell the bay and the oceanfront, and hear the sea gulls’ cries as they tried to steal a fish or two as the fishermen unloaded their nets.
But I couldn’t spend all my time at the docks. As the son of a well-to-do Jewish family, I was made very aware that we lived in a city that was not itself one that honored God, and I took my task of showing righteousness to the gentiles VERY seriously. It was thus my responsibility to study Torah, and I did so under Gamaliel, a wonderful teacher, a HARD teacher, who taught me to love the word of the Lord with all my heart, with all my soul, with all my strength, and with all my mind.
I memorized what needed to be memorized in record time, and could tell you what law you had broken the second I saw you break it, as well as what you needed to do to redeem yourself, what sacrifices, what prayers, what rituals. Anyone could come to me and I could answer with chapter and verse. It was simple, really. I was a guardian. I relished the responsibility of monitoring the activities of the Diaspora community in Tarsus and making sure that our righteousness before God was never really in question. We had a clear set of rules, and keeping them would bring us closer to God. The Gentiles of Tarsus were, if you’ll pardon the expression, not worth the bother. I don’t mean anything personal, but … well, I was one of the chosen people, and I had to watch out for my own.
As a young man, I heard of a prophet, a teacher named Y’shua Bar-Joseph, a carpenter, making the rounds in the region of Galilee, and occasionally heard from a traveler from that region, who spoke of a man who could command the waters and the wind to be still, who could turn water into wine and could heal, who could cast out demons, make the lame walk and the blind see … I was intrigued, for I heard that in one of his sermons he said he came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. That phrase alone predisposed me to cautiously accept this man as a righteous prophet in the same spirit as Ezekiel and Samuel, Jeremiah and Isaiah, to name a few. Fulfilling the law certainly could only mean keeping it.
As time passed, however, I began to hear troubling things about this Y’shua, this Jesus of Nazareth. Things that more and more, convinced me that he was not a true prophet at all, but rather a dangerous heretic, who needed to be stopped. He ate with sinners, prostitutes and tax collectors; he even spoke to a Samaritan woman. He performed acts forbidden on the Sabbath. Granted, some good may have come from a healing, but couldn’t it have waited until just a few hours later?? If you start making exceptions, you quickly find yourself on a slippery slope, and then what good does it do you to know the letter of the law down to every jot and tittle?
I remember the day I heard he was, himself, forgiving sins. Why, the NERVE … the sheer … chutzpah, believing yourself to be capable of forgiving sins when we all knew that the only one who is able to forgive sins is the Lord God Almighty, and then only after an acceptable sacrifice on the day of atonement … that was the greatest heresy to date. He had to be stopped. Shortly after that I heard of a terrible commotion at the Temple during Passover, and I must tell you that I was not surprised when I heard it was this Jesus who was responsible. He even called himself the Messiah. When I heard that, I knew then that he would not last much longer. To call yourself ‘King of the Jews’ when the Jews already had a King, and that one appointed by Caesar, well, he had overstepped his bounds, and as many who went before him, his days were numbered. I have to say, I breathed a sigh of relief when I heard he’d been crucified. I shuddered a little, for to die on a tree is to die a cursed death, one from which there is no redemption. I thought there might have been some good to his teachings, but that last detail, the way in which he died, so unclean, so humiliating, so painful, so public … so final.
I was a little saddened, if only because his actions and death reflected on the Jewish people in the eyes of the heathen people of the world, and they could not see that we held the truth to how to please God, by following his commands and keeping his laws, this Jesus’ teachings were a threat to the purity of our way of life. Nonetheless, I knew that with his death, his followers would disperse, and we could get back to the business of monitoring and keeping ourselves clean and holy.
I was astounded when I heard rumors, then reports that this Jesus had supposedly risen from the dead! Our teaching had always been that, yes, there IS a resurrection, but it is one to come at the end of time, a general resurrection of ALL the faithful, not just of a single individual. When we finally heard it from the lips of one of his followers, one named Stephen, we could not contain our fury, and I gladly held their coats while the man was stoned to death outside the city walls, as it should be.
So disturbing were the reports that he appeared and had spoken to the women and to his disciples … the women who were as much a part of his band of followers as the men (that was another thing, by the way … he paid way too much attention to women …), so infuriating were the continued proclamations in the synagogues and in the streets that I became obsessed with the need to cleanse the chosen people of these parasites, these impurities, these heretics, and took it upon myself to begin to ferret out these followers of ‘The Way’ myself by searching door to door in Jerusalem and bringing them bound and throwing them in jail until they recanted what they had been proclaiming and turned back to the pure way.
I heard that there were followers of The Way outside of Judea in other nearby cities. When they were reported to have been seen and heard in Damascus, I went to the leaders and chief priests of the temple in Jerusalem and asked for a commission, a letter giving me authority to find, detain, and return to Jerusalem any followers of The Way that I found there, and it was quickly granted to me.
I left early in the morning on the day after the Sabbath, knowing myself to have been purified and confident in my mission and knowing what to look and listen for, knowing what questions to ask these followers of Jesus, so as to catch them in their deceit and heresy. We walked hurriedly; there was no time to waste. I had traveled the road to Damascus many times, and we were coming around one of the last bends in the road, around a low hill outside the city, when I saw him.
To say ‘he appeared to me’ does nothing to encompass what the event was, and barely begins to describe it. I could tell you what he was wearing (a simple robe). I could tell you how his feet looked (a little dusty), and how he moved his hands gently, and with purpose), but it still wouldn’t get across to you what I felt. We came around the bend, walking fast; he was standing there, looking straight at me, on a low rise right next to the road, where it cut close to the hillside, so he was a little above me. I had seen him at a distance a couple of times in Jerusalem, before he was crucified, and I thought he looked familiar.
‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’
I was UNDONE. I was stunned, amazed, shocked, all those words and more rolled up into a single emotion. It felt like an almost physical blow, I could not breathe, and I felt myself falling to the ground. The light around me grew brighter and brighter, until I could not keep my eyes open. I knew who he was, of course; I had seen him from a distance a couple of times in Jerusalem, before he was crucified. But I asked anyway:
‘Who are you, Lord?’
His answer came back:
‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.’
Those who were with me said they could hear a voice, but could not see him. I’ve thought so much about that over the years, and I’ve come to the conclusion that they couldn’t see him for one of two reasons, either they weren’t looking for him, or he wasn’t speaking to them … yet.
In that instant I knew that the Jesus whose followers I persecuted was in fact who he had claimed to be. That he was standing there and talking to me proved beyond a shadow of a doubt to me that he did indeed rise from the dead, and confirmed all that he’d said – and equally as importantly – done during the time he was teaching and traveling around Galilee.
In an instant, he opened my eyes to how blind I’d been. I could feel my eyes, they were open, but I couldn’t see anything at all. Funny, in a way, it made it gave me a chance to realize in an all-too-real way what it was like before, to have my eyes open but to not see what was right in front of my face all along.
- I realized I’d been wrong about the resurrection.
- I realized how sinful we ALL are, even the most righteous of us all, especially ME.
- I realized that his crucifixion WAS that perfect and acceptable sacrifice for ALL of us, for the sins of the world, not his own, for he was without sin.
- I realized how twisted my understanding of salvation had been, that it COULDN’T be based on strict obedience to the law, because all the law does is show how UNrighteous we all are. That keeping the law was not the way to salvation, but that it is by FAITH that we are saved, it is a gift from God.
- I realized that the way we live our lives here on earth is not to be guided by a set of laws, by keeping separate from the world, despising gentiles as sinners and unclean, but to be guided by the Love of God and showing that love to our neighbors, and to be guided by the Holy Spirit.
I realized most of all that Jesus Christ, my Lord and Messiah, came not only for the Jew, but for the Gentile, and that was where I stepped in. Jesus showed me that I was the person whom he had decided would be the one to bring his message to the Gentiles. And I myself was going to live out and understand what it means to put the requirements of the law to the test and find them lacking. To realize in my heart of hearts that nothing I do, nothing I strive to accomplish, will make me any more worthy of salvation, that it is by God’s grace alone that I am saved, and what I do is in response to that.
Let’s pray.
No comments:
Post a Comment