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.