His Love For Us
Sunday, June 15th, 2008
Proper 6/ Ordinary 11 A/ Pentecost +5
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.
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