Having Been Set Free

 

Sunday, June 29^th, 2008

Proper 8/ Ordinary 13 A/ Pentecost +7

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Romans 6:12-23

Theme: Freedom from sin, living towards righteousness

 

 “¹²Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. ¹³No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. ¹⁴For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. ¹⁵ What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! ¹⁶Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? ¹⁷But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, ¹⁸and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. ¹⁹I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification. ²⁰When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. ²¹So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death. ²²But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. ²³For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

 

I was surprised, honestly, by the brief essay on the back of our bulleting this morning.  Pleasantly surprised.  Dwayne Hastings, who is vice-president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, states that “men operating out of a Judeo-Christian worldview founded the United States not as a Christian nation, but a nation where all men and women would be able to practice their faith freely while respecting those in authority over them … they valued the freedom they had … and constructed a form of government that encapsulated that liberty.” 

 

If you’ve had a chance to read the essay you may have caught that I left out two of the original words in what I just said.  The two words come right after the phrase “valued the freedom they had” – they are the words “in Christ”. 

 

While I would wholly affirm that we have freedom in Christ that DOES have an impact on the freedom we experience in ALL areas of our lives, I would have to step away from including that as a blanket statement with regards to the framers of our constitution.  It is simply not the case that they were all Christians.  They WERE, to a man, secularists  -- not that they did not believe in the place or the INFLUENCE of faith in public life, but in the sense that what they were aiming for was a society that was not governed by a pseudo theocracy – an agglomeration of the church and state that ended up doing a disservice to both in one fell swoop.

 

But the message this morning is not about the history of our country – though it certainly touches on that – it is about the freedom we have in Christ, so on with the task at hand.

 

To review, we’ve been following Paul’s argument towards his conclusions about what it means to be alive in Christ and dead to sin – the issue that he is wrestling with – and I DO mean wrestling – he struggled with this himself – is the presence of sin in the life of the believer. 

 

After his discourse in the verses just before these – what we read last Sunday – on being dead to sin and alive to Christ – we actually are continuing in his exposition of his case.  He is completing the thought. 

 

Though we do have history of slavery in the United States, we have no immediate experience of it.  We don’t know what it is like to be owned by another person.  That was a reality in Paul’s day that you and I can’t really begin to understand.  Some of us may have had work experiences where we FEEL like we could RELATE to the slave experience, but at the end of the day, we invariably had the final word – even if it meant quitting that particular job. 

 

The point Paul is making in this section of the passage speaks out of that daily experience of slavery – to be in a condition where you have NO say in what you do, where you go, who you speak to, NOTHING in your life is yours to command.  Paul is saying that that is what OUR condition was like in regards to sin before we chose to make Christ our Lord.  That we were slaves to sin – we had no pull, no sway, no influence on the decisions and choices that resulted in our sinning because we had no power to countermand those choices – it was a pretty concrete and down to earth illustration for the people of the church in Rome because they were equally aware – perhaps in some cases MORE aware of it than even Paul himself.  There’s a fair amount of certainty in saying that some of the members of the church of Rome were slaves themselves, who had been granted permission to attend services, or there’s an equal likelihood that some of the folks there were slave owners themselves – in either case, they would be able to fully appreciate the description Paul is providing of being a slave to sin and a slave to righteousness – to obedience. 

 

It seems with last Sunday’s argument about being dead to sin and alive to Christ, or a slave to Christ NOW in the wake of being a slave to sin BEFORE they knew Christ, Paul is dwelling at the extreme ends of the spectrum – life and death, slavery and freedom … is that warranted?

 

After all, what we will begin to see is that, for all his arguments about BEING dead to sin and alive to Christ, or about being a slave to CHRIST now, and no LONGER being a slave to sin … we still have to deal with sin in our lives AFTER surrendering them to our new Lord and master – Jesus Christ.  That is the question that has vexed theologians for the last two thousand years – SCHOLARS wrestle with the problem – much LESS those of us who are run-of-the-mill Christians, just working at being faithful to Christ each day we wake up. 

 

It’s at this point that we get to step back from the immediacy of the problem – not the seriousness, not the troubling aspect of it, not the discouraging aspect of it – but the befuddling part of it – and remind ourselves that this whole business of following Christ is also traditionally called a journey – a pilgrimage … it is a process by which we draw (hopefully) constantly closer to our destination, but which we will probably not reach in this life. 

 

As Christians, we have split personalities: the old self and the new self.  The old self used to be in charge, the new self is that which is surrendered to the Lordship of Christ.  The old self didn’t vacate the premises the moment we decided to make Jesus our Lord – in some areas of our lives, maybe – but certainly not in all of them.  

 

And what is in some cases our constant battle, we find ourselves exhaustively fighting with a self that refuses to recognize defeat.  And we, being creatures of habit, are prone to fall into old ones that correspond to the old self rather than the new.  It is difficult, it is subtle, it is completely rational and logical, and reasonable to expect ourselves to do this.  It is also one of the most difficult aspects of living out our faith – to be so given to MAKING our faith a reality, only to be confronted with, not an overwhelming, powerful enemy that we didn’t expect, but one which we had hoped to have defeated long before NOW and with which we are all too familiar. 

 

The framers of the constitution knew the old self they were up against:  State-sanctioned religion.  They knew that an imposed faith is hard pressed at best to become genuine faith at all, and that the only way for faith to make a truly PERSONAL change on an individual level – and THUS to hopefully begin an ever-growing change on a societal level that faith HAD to be FREELY chosen, freely followed, freely maintained. 

 

God asks for no less.  God never forces us to choose.  Even after we’ve decided to follow Christ, our experience shows us that we do not lose the capacity to sin.  For some of us, that is so stating the obvious that it borders on the absurd.  For others of us, we have to wrestle with the possibility that what we had assumed all along to be Christian virtues were anything but.  We are faced with the need to unmask the old self that has hidden behind old attitudes, old thoughts, old practices and habits … and somehow lulled us into believing that they are acceptable to God when in fact they are antithetical to what Christ taught and lived.

 

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton? 

 

It means that we can’t let our guard down.  Yeah, that’s exhausting, and it is constant.  But we are dealing with an enemy that DOESN’T tire, that doesn’t really sleep, that is constantly on the prowl, looking for someone to devour.  It is our own old self.

 

So how do we train ourselves, how do we prepare, how do we grow into being able to, with the Holy Spirit’s help, overcome that old self?  For one thing, we start early, if possible.  That is why we have Sunday School, that is why we have the extended session for children during worship.  That is why we have events to bring our children and youth together and continually engage them in the learning and practicing of our faith.  Not to make it a tradition to follow, or an automatic reaction, but to instill in them a love for scripture and for God in Christ that would direct their actions and thoughts through to the point where they would make the decision for themselves to make Christ Lord of their lives. 

 

Let’s pray. 

 

Growing up in Chile, any time a family or an individual in the church went on an extended trip, the Sunday before they left we would have a moment in the service where we would send greetings to the church or churches they would be visiting in their travels.  It was a normal part of the life of the church – it kept us connected to sister churches up and down the country (not a lot of ‘across’ in Chile!), and in a not-so-subtle way reminded those of us who were travelling that we were not going as isolated individuals, but that we were going – wherever we were going – in representation of our local congregation, and by extension, our Lord.  We were ambassadors. 

 

This coming week we have two groups going out from Jerusalem:  those who are going to PassportKids mission camp, and those who will be attending the National Gymnastics meet in Kansas City, Missouri, both children and adults.  I’d like to ask everyone who is here who is in either of those two groups to come to the front of the sanctuary. 

 

I’d like us today to speak the congregational benediction to those of us who will be traveling – as representatives of both our church family and of our risen Lord.

 

May the Lord bless you and keep you

May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you.

May God give you grace never to sell yourself short;

Grace to risk something big for something good;

Grace to remember that the world is now

Too dangerous for anything but truth

And too small for anything but love.

So may God take your minds and think through them,

May God take your lips and speak through them,

May God take your hearts and set them on fire

FOR Christ our Lord.

Amen.                                 

 

Lives To God

 

Sunday, June 22^nd, 2008

Proper 7/ Ordinary 12 A/ Pentecost +6

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Romans 6:1-11

Theme: Living the life of the resurrected Christ

 

 “¹What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? ²By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? ³Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? ⁴Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. ⁵For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. ⁶We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. ⁷For whoever has died is freed from sin. ⁸But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. ⁹We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. ¹⁰The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. ¹¹So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

 

What does it mean when we read in Paul’s writings that we have died to sin and how exactly does that play out in the way we live on a daily basis? 

 

Let’s take a look at the question on a purely concrete level.  What happens when someone dies?  Can they continue to interact with their surroundings?  Can they continue to contribute – in whatever form they have in the past?  Are they able to continue in the activities and relationships they were involved in while alive?  Remember, this is in purely concrete terms, not metaphysical, not emotional or spiritual. 

 

I think we all understand the answer to the questions to be a solid ‘no’. 

 

In our passage this morning, Paul is addressing the question in the face of some teachings – diametrically opposed to each other – that were cropping up in the wake of the spreading of the Gospel.  

 

On one extreme, we had the Legalists.   Those who believed that, despite what Jesus said and taught, there was still a requirement within the living out of our faith that we had to keep certain laws – having to do with marking our bodies, with diet and dress and actions and activities … in truth, the laws in question reached into every aspect of the lives of those who held to them.  It was, according to them, necessary to adhere to the letter of the law in addition to believing that Christ was the Messiah in order to obtain salvation. 

 

At the other extreme, there were those who believed that, in a response to the Law being proclaimed null and void, and grace becoming the arbiter of salvation – that is, the way by which we obtain salvation – rather than through adherence to the laws of Moses, and since grace is made available to us even when we sin, then if we sin MORE, we would receive even MORE grace – more forgiveness, more love, more faith, I suppose.  The central idea was that it was not necessary to follow any given set of moral guidelines; all that was necessary was to believe that Christ was the Messiah and that was enough for salvation. 

 

Both extremes reveal a lack of understanding of what the Gospel was about.

 

The first, legalism, ignores the power of grace freely offered to transform a life and virtually eliminates the reconciliatory act of God by demanding that completing a predetermined set of requirements is a prerequisite for admission into the ‘in’ club.  You do, look, act, speak, and sound like we do, and you are ‘in’.  It can be said of first century Pharisees and twenty-first century fundamentalists of any given stripe.  It shuts down the movement of the spirit to be expressed in as many ways as there are children of God. 

 

The latter, antinomianism, ignores the Gospel’s call to living a life of meaning, of impact, of making a difference and of BEING different from the prevailing culture.  It is deaf to the demand of the Gospel to live a life of holiness, of living away from, out of, beyond and above – sin.  It actually calls for a life that in some ways revels in it – not because that is a good thing in and of itself – it recognizes that sin is wrong, and can be destructive, but because of a stunted understanding of a central truth of the Gospel – that God loves us even in the midst of our sinful lives – despite them – and carries that truth to an illogical extreme – where the ‘trigger’ for God’s love is sin.  And that is not the case. 

 

God’s love would exist whether sin existed or not, whether evil had entered into the world or not.  It was, after all, God’s love that prompted creation to begin with.            

 

So Paul is arguing against both extremes.  And the central point of his argument is the resurrection of Christ.  It is through just that resurrection – a definitive event – a pivotal event – the form in which the sacrifice of Christ is spoken of – he spells it out in verse 10 – “once for all” – the grammar used conveys the sense that it is of such universal impact that the only way to describe it is that it is a once-and-for-all-time event, never to be repeated. 

 

But beyond that, it is an event that is central to our understanding of what Christ’s claim is on our lives.  Paul writes that just as we died with Christ in our baptism, we also rose with him to a newness of life – it is part of the baptism litany in some churches to include that phrase as the baptismal candidate is lowered into the water and is then lifted out of the water. 

 

It brings a degree of significance to the act of baptism that reminds us that we are not only expected to live a changed life, but that we are to live the life of Christ himself.

 

So the question quickly becomes:  do we? 

 

Do we face down injustice, do we defend the oppressed, especially the religiously oppressed?  Do we ask the questions that get people thinking about what it means to truly love and serve God?  Do we befriend the sinners and tax collectors – or their modern-day equivalents, or do we limit our relations to be solely with ‘respectable people’? 

 

Do we extend ourselves?  Do we open ourselves to ridicule regardless, if doing what is right might result in that?  Do we go out of our way to help the needy, the hungry, the homeless and the poor? 

 

Five years ago today, Eddie Heath stood here and spoke of God bringing something about that was beyond our ability to even imagine.  There was a newness in what we were embarking on together that I think all of us were yes excited about, but also more than a little apprehensive about.  Looking back on the last five years, I have to agree with him.  Speaking for myself, these five years have flown by.  When I look around the room and see your faces and think back on what it felt like to see you and not know you then, and what these last five years have done to allow us to get to know and love each other, to sit together and joke and laugh and eat and learn and argue and cry together; to gather in emergency rooms or labor and delivery rooms, or intensive care units, to wait through surgeries or to meet in funeral homes, the newness of life that it has meant for ME has been a wonderment.  Yes, there have been a boatload of new experiences, but that kind of comes with the territory. 

 

The newness of life that Paul is speaking of goes beyond even that; he is speaking of the kind of life that comes from a changed heart and a changed mind; the kind of newness that comes from an entirely different place in the motivational well of our souls: the newness of life that is born of unselfish, redeemed and redeeming love. 

 

What does this mean for us, for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton, today?     

 

It means that we are called to examine our reason for believing what we believe and for doing what we do – to keep our finger on the pulse of the heart from which our actions are born – and to make SURE that the source is the wellspring of eternal love – the heart of God.

 

Let’s pray.  

His Love For Us

 

Sunday, June 15^th, 2008

Proper 6/ Ordinary 11 A/ Pentecost +5

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Romans 5:1-11

Theme: Christ’s living in and Through Us

 

 “¹Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, ²through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. ³And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, ⁴and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, ⁵and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

⁶For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. ⁸But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. ⁹Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. ¹⁰For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. ¹¹But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

 

When a passage starts with the word ‘therefore’ you have to understand that you are stepping into the middle of SOMETHING; either an argument, a discourse, a coming to a conclusion, you are going to be reading forward into the ‘then’ part of an ‘if-then’ statement.  It just so happens that the way the lectionary separates scripture, we inevitably happen occasionally to begin in the middle of something. 

 

In this case, we’re not far removed from what Paul was trying to convince the folks he was writing to about in the first place – we touched on it last Sunday – salvation by Grace through Faith in Jesus Christ – good for Jew and Gentile in equal measure.  So he is coming to a transition point in his letter. 

 

But sometimes scripture translations throw a hurdle in front of us.  We’re reading along, perfectly at ease with concepts like grace and faith and justification, and suddenly there’s this hurdle in the road that we have to work our way around – either jump or climb over, or walk around … though that probably isn’t allowed, really – or we have to work our way THROUGH the word, the term, or the thought. 

 

The word – and the concept in this case – is “boast”.

 

I don’t like the word ‘Boast’.  It smacks of egoism, of shallowness, of selfishness, of trying to impress others by virtue of what you have accomplished, or purchased, or obtained somehow.  A solid synonym for it would be ‘bragging’.  So it is disconcerting to find Paul speaking of it in an affirming sense in the passage this morning – “we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God”… and again in the very next phrase: “but we also boast in our sufferings.” 

 

I had to stop on that word and explore it in a deeper way before I could get on with the rest of the passage. 

 

It turns out – and I was kind of expecting this to be the case – HOPING that it would be, anyway – that in the sense that it is being used it is pretty far removed from the standard assumed definition that we have for it in the English language.  It has nothing to do with bragging and much more to do with rejoicing than anything else.  The phrase used by the commentator is ‘Christian exultation in the grace and glory of God.’  One scholar translated it in what is probably a more accurate rendering of the thought behind the use of the word in this case:  “Let us glory in our hope of sharing the glory of God.”  It does sound a BIT redundant, but it states more clearly what the thought behind the word is.            

 

So we jump the hurdle and move on, keeping in mind that we’re not bragging, we are rejoicing – we are glorying in the hope afforded us by the Gospel.

 

Paul goes on to give us this wonderful … three-part stepping stone –  “suffering produces endurance, ⁴and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, ⁵and hope does not disappoint us”.  What a wonderful turn of phrase! 

 

As I was reviewing the passage for today, I considered for a minute to make the title for this morning’s message “And, And, And” and focus on this phrase in particular – it is that strong and that compelling a string, but ended up with what it is; perhaps for another day. 

 

It is, though, something we need to pause on for a minute.  Because it leads us into what I think Paul is highlighting in these couple of paragraphs:  how our lives are to be like Christ’s – but not only LIKE Christ’s … in a very real sense, we are to LIVE Christ’s life in the present day. 

 

You’ve heard me say it before; we are to be Christ’s presence to the world that we live in on a daily – even hourly basis.  So to say that we are to live the life of Christ is just another way of saying the same thing. 

 

If we engage the suffering in the world – that is, engage and don’t deny, or gloss over, or explain it away by glibly saying “it was God’s will”, then we can face the world on God’s terms.  We UNDERSTAND that the world is broken.  We UNDERSTAND that things are not as God intended them to be.  We UNDERSTAND that our call is to bring healing to the world – to mend the broken, to make whole the shattered, to give hope to the hopeless, to comfort the … suffering.  In doing that, in facing the reality of a broken world, we develop character – but understand the character we are developing – we are developing the character of Christ in our lives.  If we face the suffering head on and ask ourselves how would Christ have responded in this situation?  We open ourselves up to allowing the spirit of God to shape us … to mold us into who Jesus was and who God wants US to be.  So as we grow the character of Christ within our own, we assist in the birth of hope through the action of the Holy Spirit – “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”           

 

Paul reminds us in the next paragraph that Christ died for us not because we deserved to be died for, but because God love us that much.  He almost chases a rabbit there in verse 7 – where he says, ⁷Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die.  It seems so … human … so, commenting on his own thought process – it makes the reading that much more PERSONAL, in my head. 

Verse 8 I think holds the heart of the argument Paul is making here: 

 

⁸But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.

 

He is underscoring once again the undifferentiated fact that, first, God’s love was for everyone, not just Jews, and second, that we are ALL sinners – no exceptions – Jews and Gentiles alike. 

 

And he goes on – to emphasize it – if we are reconciled through faith in Christ and his sacrifice on the Cross, if that reconciliation happened while we were, in a sense, enemies of God, then how much more of a difference is it going to make in our lives now that we are FRIENDS of God??

 

Do you see the void that has been crossed?  The emptiness?  The chasm? 

 

Here we were, unaware and uncaring toward a God who loved us enough to let us choose to be out of relationship with God, even when that was THE thing that God wanted MOST.  So we, as a race, were there.  And God acted to nullify that emptiness between us.  God came across and became one of us, to live and walk and breathe and laugh and sing alongside us.  And God made the bridge for us to be in communion with him through Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit. 

 

So when Paul says ‘boast’, understand the word the way it was intended.  As it says in verse 11:

 

But more than that, we even REJOICE in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.           

 

Let’s pray.  

during the hymn of response, Judson came forward to make public his profession of faith in Jesus Christ as Lord.  He was baptized on my birthday just under a month later.

Reckoned To Us

 

Sunday, June 8^th, 2008

Proper 5/ Ordinary 10 A/ Pentecost +4

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Romans 4:13-25

Theme: Salvation Through Faith

 

 “¹³For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. ¹⁴If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. ¹⁵For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation. ¹⁶For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, ¹⁷as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”) —in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. ¹⁸Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So numerous shall your descendants be.” ¹⁹He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. ²⁰No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, ²¹being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. ²²Therefore his faith “was reckoned to him as righteousness.” ²³Now the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone, ²⁴but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, ²⁵who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.”

 

Back to basics. 

 

The heart of the matter. 

 

The central truth. 

 

The core argument. 

 

They are all ways of saying – and signaling – that what you are beginning to talk about is a fundamental aspect of the issue at hand.  That is what we are touching on this morning.  We are in Paul’s letter to the church at Rome, and he is stressing the equality of the gentile and the Jewish follower of Christ – it is, in fact, one of his major issues to address in the letter – he was dealing with a stratification – a separation – that had crept into the church in the absence of the Jewish believers – those who most probably first established the church – after being evicted from Rome by the emperor Claudius. 

 

The argument, in fact, cuts both ways.  Paul is trying to get across to BOTH the Jews AND the gentile members of the congregation that NEITHER is greater or lesser than the other, but that, by the Grace of God through Faith in Jesus Christ, they are all brothers and sisters. 

 

Elwood made a particularly important point last week in his testimony.  At one point, after he said the he would live on this earth as long as God let him, and then he would go live with God in heaven.  Not because of anything he’d done.  He reviewed the fact that he is a deacon here at Jerusalem, that he has served as a Sunday School teacher, Sunday School Director, served on various committees over the years, but he reiterated the fact that not a single one of those things EARNED him the right to go to heaven.  That the only reason he knows he is going to heaven is because he has put his faith and trust in Jesus Christ who died for him on the cross, and made the way for him to go before the throne of God and have Christ stand in his place and be deemed worthy because Christ was worthy. 

 

That is actually the same argument that Paul is making throughout Romans.  He is underscoring that fact to his Jewish brothers and sisters who may be thinking that there have to be some sort of thresholds met in order to qualify for entry through the golden gates. 

 

It is likewise the argument that he makes to his gentile brothers and sisters who come from any number of pagan religious backgrounds that most likely ALSO taught that there were certain offerings, certain rituals that needed to be followed in order to please the gods – whoever they were – to allow one to prosper or succeed. 

             

The point Paul is making is that in light of the action of God in Christ ALL striving for the purpose of attaining salvation is null and void.  That we can’t beat each other to the finish line when it comes to that particular race because THAT race has already been run and completed and God in Christ won hands down, or rather, hands up and out on the cross. 

 

We’ve read it so often in scripture, in studies, we hear it in sermons – “salvation by grace through faith”.  So … what does that mean, exactly?  What is grace, and what is faith? 

 

Grace in this case is the action of God on God’s own part, not prompted by anything we’ve done or asked for.  For reasons that we can wonder about and only partially understand this side of heaven, God realized what needed to be done in order to remain in relationship with humanity, and that was, to come to earth and live among us.  To be with us and teach us what he meant it to look like when he set out on the adventure that resulted in creation. 

 

Faith is what we bring to the table that God invites us to.  Even then, it is not purely ours.  It is our spirit’s response to the prompting of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives and in our hearts.  It is that part of us that first surrenders to the Lordship of Christ and calls the rest of ‘us’ to follow. 

 

Faith is that part of us that sees what we can’t see with our eyes; that hears what we can’t hear with our ears; that feels that which we can’t feel with our hands; that knows that which we can’t know with our minds, but only with our hearts.  It is what understands when the rest of us is confused, that believes when the rest of us is saying it can’t be so. 

 

Now, here’s the rub.  Faith is a good thing to have.  Period.  We can have faith in a lot of things.  Faith that the floor will hold us up, faith that the light will come on when we flip the switch, faith that we will still be here tomorrow to complete the plans we’ve set for the day or the week … though in truth we do not know that for certain.  But when we speak of faith in the Christian sense, we speak of a very specific type of faith – it is faith in a person, faith in that what that person said was the truth about himself, about God, about what it means to be truly righteous, about what happens to sin that we confess, about what God really wants of us is US – not our deeds, or our works, our efforts.  Those are part of it, of course --- but they come AFTER we have given ourselves to God.  NOT before. 

 

So what does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton on June 8^th, 2008?  It means that we recommit ourselves to giving ourselves to God – hopefully we’ve all done that at some point in our lives – we’ve come to the realization that we can’t do this by ourselves, we don’t WANT to do this by ourselves, and we can ONLY do this – this LIVING IN THE LIGHT OF GOD’S LOVE – with God in us through the presence of the Holy Spirit THROUGH our faith in Jesus Christ.  And that involves a conscious decision.  A moment in which we change, in which we begin to turn control of our lives – ALL of our lives – our thoughts, our actions, our emotions, our bitterness, our resentments, our grudges, our unexposed, darkest corners – over to the light and the love of Christ. 

 

Did you notice I said ‘begin’ to turn control over?  That is because our old selves don’t vanish the moment we surrender to Christ.  That old self has been in control for a very long time, and is used to it, and doesn’t easily want to let go.  Yes, there are instances when it happens quickly – and those are the really mind-boggling testimonies we’d all like to have – where we were hooked on drugs and living on the street and eating out of dumpsters until we found Jesus; and the addiction – the desire to do drugs – vanished from one moment to the next.  We’d all like to be able to tell of such miraculous conversions, but the truth is much more … routine, much more prosaic. 

 

The truth is most of us made our decisions in the quietness of our home, or driving along the road one day, or in a quiet Sunday School room while some other function was going on in another part of the church.  And things went along pretty much as they always did after that.  So it is hard to distinguish the before from the after.  And that makes it harder to recognize the old self when it rears its ugly head and says “no, don’t apologize; they had it coming”, or the old self – that still sounds surprisingly like you yourself, convinces you that harboring that kernel of hate for that one particular person who did that one particular thing – regardless of how long ago it was – is not doing anyone any harm, but is keeping me aware of what they are capable of … that that is somehow acceptable, when Christ has equated hatred with murder … I hope you’re getting the picture here.  Our old self is going to be around for the duration.  Our GOAL is to be able to recognize and dismiss our old self when he or she tries to convince us to do, say or think what is contrary to the Gospel of Christ.                     

 

Let’s pray.  

To Show His Righteousness

 

NOTE:  This message was not preached - today.  Elwood Schools, a member, had asked for an opportunity to share his testimony.  Something he’d been dreaming about – literally – for two solid months.  Elwood was diagnosed with Melanoma 5 years ago – right about the time I came to Jerusalem, and was given a 5-10% chance of survival.  His testimony was the message we needed to hear this morning.

Sunday, June 1^st, 2008

Proper 4

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Romans 3:21-31

Theme: Salvation by Grace

 

 “²¹But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, ²²the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, ²³since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; ²⁴they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, ²⁵whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; ²⁶it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus. ²⁷Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. By what law? By that of works? No, but by the law of faith. ²⁸For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law. ²⁹Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, ³⁰since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. ³¹Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.”

 

It is one of the greater challenges we face as believers if we hold Scripture to be in any way authoritative for the way we live our lives and seek to allow it to help us to understand our faith: that of engaging scripture as part of living out the greatest commandment that Jesus spells out in the Gospel of Mark and something we touched on this past Wednesday night: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind,” which actually substitutes the last word of the Old Testament version of that commandment where the original last word is “strength”.   Beginning long before Martin Luther, but especially SINCE him, the emphasis we as children of the protestant tradition place on the study of scripture demands that we exercise our minds and our intellect as well as our spirits when we encounter God through the written word. 

 

In looking at today’s passage, we would do well to first remind ourselves that Paul was writing to a congregation that, from what we can tell, he had not yet met in its entirety.  From the closing greetings of the letter we see that Paul knew many of the members of the congregation, but we do not know how big that church was, to be able to say whether he knew most or all of them.

 

We know from Acts that Paul’s call was to bring the message of the Gospel to the gentiles – and he is writing to a congregation that IS mostly gentile converts to Christianity.  It was not always the case.  The first converts to Christianity in almost every instance of the early days of the church were Jewish.  It was most likely no different – at least initially – in the Roman church.  But the Roman church was, as its name suggests, in ROME; the capitol of the Empire, home to Caesar and the government.  Roman Caesars were not your average civil servant.  They, in some cases, came to believe themselves to be gods in their own right.  As such, they were answerable to no one.  When you don’t have to answer to anyone for your actions it becomes very easy to lose any sense of perspective and any sense of accountability, since there is none enforced around you.  The emperor Claudius was not far off that model.  Though he did not, apparently, come to believe himself a god, he DID in many ways act as though he did.  In the year 49, for whatever reason, as most likely as not fabricated, he ordered all the Jews expelled from Rome.  The expulsion included the Jewish Christian converts that were part of the church, among them Priscilla and Aquila, good friends and fellow workers as well as fellow missionaries with Paul in his early days, as well as many others.  After Claudius’ death about six years later, his successor, Nero, reverses the edict and allows the Jews to return.  In that return those Jewish Christians came back to what might have been left of their homes and businesses and their congregation. 

 

That reintegration of the congregation after several years of separation set the stage for some dynamics within the fellowship that well might resonate today with us.  Granted, our particular congregation is not one that has been split recently, though that is not an uncommon event in any given group of churches, especially Baptist ones, nor is it too far removed from the collective memory of our faith fellowship – not as having suffered a split, but as having gained a number of members as a result of a sad turn of events in a sister congregation. 

 

There’s a subtle shift that takes place whenever a government sanctioned action takes place. As social beings, as people who define ourselves – to whatever degree – by how we fit into the society in which we live, we hold that society in fairly high esteem – sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously.  However objectively it may be otherwise, because we are integrated into it, we cannot always recognize those aspects of it that need work. 

 

Last Sunday’s offertory, the hymn ‘America the Beautiful’ holds a special place in my heart among what we would commonly refer to as ‘patriotic hymns’ – if you were sitting in the choir, which I was, the song was being hummed and SUNG – maybe not out LOUD, but it was definitely being sung – and it is easy to do.  We learned the words in elementary school, if not earlier.  They spring out of our minds almost immediately when we hear the first notes of the song played.  The reason it is special to me is that it is at its heart a prayer to God, asking for guidance, to confirm our self control, to mend our every flaw, to refine that which is good in our society – the gold in us – and if you think about it, in that process the impurities get burned out.  It is a statement of the fact that we are not there yet, we are imperfect, and that we cannot get there apart from divine guidance.             

 

It is the most fundamental expectation of living in a society – to live in peace.  To be able to get up, go to work in the morning, come home in the evening, and know that for the most part, things are going to remain as they were between those two times.  It is the reason that those times when that DIDN’T happen – the attack on Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the attacks on September 11^th, stand out so strongly for those who lived through them – because they were a radical shift from the normal routine.  When a government can provide that peace we tend to be lulled into a sense of security that is in fact at odds with the reality of millions if not billions of our neighbors on the planet.  But it is a security that we hold onto really, really tightly, because it means so much to us.

 

I imagine that on some level, the gentile members of the church in Rome felt some kind of similar connection to that sense of security when the expulsion order came down from Emperor Claudius for the Jews to be kicked out.  Somewhere in the back of their minds the thought was born that ‘they must have done something to deserve this’.  And so, they became guilty in some vague way in the minds of their former brothers and sisters.  After they left, life went on, in some form or fashion as it had before.  Not in an Unfamiliar way, since the gentile converts were accustomed to things being the way they were in Rome.  And then, after six years of more routine, they open the door to their sanctuary to a knock and there they are, their Jewish friends and brothers and sisters.  And they welcome them back, of course, but there’s that nagging doubt in the back of their heads … what did they do … why did they come back … they may be kicked out again any time now … we can’t let them completely “in”.

 

Can you imagine that happening?  Can you see the divide opening up between the two groups?  Paul was aware of it, and wanted to stop it from blossoming – or devolving – into an outright fight – a disturbance that might lead to another mass deportation. 

 

So he calls on the Gentile Christians to not forget that they were actually in the same boat that their Jewish Christian friends were in not so long before.  He evens them out, so to speak. 

 

You see, the underlying cause and effect principle being subconsciously applied is ‘you did something to deserve this’, whether for good or bad.  The constant fight Paul had with the Judaizers in the early church was to dispel the notion that in order to enter into the grace of the gospel you first needed to meet the physical standards of converting to Judaism. 

 

Now he has to deal with the same thing from the opposite side of the spectrum:  Gentiles assuming that Jewish believers did something to become second class citizens – both in their society and in their church.

 

Paul rejects the notion in the most fundamental way he knows.  He goes to the heart of what unites them all: the question of salvation, and spells it out in no uncertain terms.  It has nothing to do with what ANYONE – Jew OR Gentile – has done.  It is purely because of God’s righteousness that God chose to offer salvation freely.  And it is in that free offering that God ultimately leveled the playing field.  Because God wants to make it plain and simple to anyone who is interested:  God wants everyone to be saved,   everyone.  So everyone should be treated with the same respect, the same tenderness, the same care, the same gentleness with which God treats US.

 

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

 

It means that we are commanded to make no distinctions either.  No From-Here’s or Come Here’s, no well to do or struggling financially, no white or black, no distinctions of any kind.  God’s grace does not distinguish, and neither should we. 

 

And that can be hard, because every other aspect of society, though it may claim otherwise, is modeling for us the need to make those distinctions.  This is a place where the Gospel calls us to do differently.  To NOT follow the role we’ve been shown; to go against the grain. 

 

And depending on how deep into the grain we are, it can be a task that will only come with the transforming of our minds and our spirits through the changing power of the Holy Spirit.                  

                    

Let’s pray.