With One Voice

I have managed a written version of the sermon again this week! It is for the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity.  This is it with the link below to a recording of the sermon itself.

With One Voice

The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity

Romans 14:1-12

After all that we have been reading so far in St Paul’s letter to the believers in Rome, chapter 14 comes as a bit of a shock.

In chapters 1 to 11, St Paul has been discussing God's plan of salvation. In chapters 12 and 13, he writes about how we should respond to all that God has done for us in Christ and how it should affect our relationships in the world, both with each other and with those in authority. Then, after having warned the Roman believers that the Day of the Lord is at hand at the end of chapter 13, he follows it in chapters 14 and 15 with what seems a relatively trivial subject in comparison: discussing the believer’s diet and whether we can have meat with our vegetables or whether we should stick to just vegetables!

After all that has gone before, it seems a pretty big come down and something of an anti-climax. It would not perhaps be quite so bad if St Paul only spent a few verses on it. In fact, St Paul devotes 30 verses in our Bibles to the subject. This is nearly double what he spends on the Holy Spirit in chapter 8. So why is this issue so important to him?

To understand why it is, we are going to need to understand something of the cultural and historical context.

Firstly, by the time St Paul wrote the letter to the Roman believers, the Church was made up of both Jews and gentiles. In Rome, gentiles were, in fact, in the majority. Coming from such different backgrounds, how Jews and gentiles related to each other and got on with each other on a practical day to day basis was a major issue.

The Jews, after all, were already worshipping the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and had been doing so, albeit imperfectly, for many centuries. They had been expecting the Messiah, and they were familiar with the Scriptures. The gentiles, however, came from a pagan background. Some had some knowledge of God through their attendance as guests at synagogues, but many did not, and all would have been involved in idolatry in some form or another. The pagan gods were everywhere in the first century.

Secondly, those from a Jewish background had a lifestyle grounded in God’s Law. The Law made one day special and gave specific instructions on what could and could not be eaten. Sabbath observance and keeping kosher were not optional extras for the Jews. This is something we don't quite understand today, but for Jews it was central to their identity. Indeed, many Jews in the past had chosen to die rather than work on the Sabbath or eat pork, which was forbidden in God’s Law. Furthermore, much of the meat available in the meat markets of the ancient world had previously been offered in pagan sacrifices or had not been slaughtered in the way that the Law required.

So, for many Jews, it was easier simply not to eat meat and to stick to vegetables. In that way, they could be sure of keeping the Law’s requirements.

Thirdly, worship in the early church centred around a meal, not just a symbolic meal, which is what we have nowadays on a Sunday, but a proper meal (see 1 Corinthians 11:17-34). When Jews became followers of Christ and found themselves mixing with an increasing number of gentiles within the Church, how that meal was prepared and what was in it was for many both a religious and social issue.

How much of an issue it was can be seen in St Paul's letter to the Galatians in which St Paul describes how he and St Peter had a very public argument over it. St Peter, we learn, had routinely eaten with gentile believers in Antioch, but when Jewish believers arrived from Jerusalem, St Peter withdrew from eating with the gentiles in order not to upset the Jewish believers by eating in a way that the Jewish believers would have found contrary to the Law. St Paul was horrified at this and said so, rebuking St Peter publicly (Galatians 2:11-14).

The Roman Church itself seems to have consisted of several small groups of believers. These were predominantly gentile in composition, but by no means exclusively so. It seems that some were made up of Jewish believers and those who sympathized with them. These Jewish groups, in an attempt to be faithful to God’s Law, kept the food laws and ate only vegetables. Many of the groups, however, ate what they liked.

This made fellowship between the groups difficult, which was bad enough, but worse still, those who did not eat meat passed judgement on those who did, and those who ate everything despised those who only ate vegetables.

It is, then, to these different groups and their members that St Paul addresses his comments. It should be said that while this was an issue in Rome, it wasn’t only an issue peculiar to the Church at Rome. We know that it was a problem more generally in the Church. We argue today over sexual issues; they argued over food. Food and sex are always issues that get people worked up!

St Paul is certain that what a believer eats no longer matters and that the food laws in the Law no longer apply. St Paul himself calls those who take this view the ‘strong in faith’. He is also very clear that those who think that the food laws do still apply are ‘weak in faith’.

There were thus two types of believers in the Roman Church: those St Paul calls the ‘weak’ and those he calls the ‘strong’. What we have to remember, however, is that those St Paul thought weak in faith certainly did not think of themselves in this way. As far as they were concerned, they were obediently keeping God's Law, which was why they were so judgemental of those who did not. For their part, those who ate all things believed that those who ate only vegetables were limited in their understanding, which was why they despised them.

The reason that this was such an issue was that their differences were preventing the different groups from coming together to worship God and to have fellowship with each other. Given the problems and challenges the Church was facing from outside, it certainly didn't need to add internal division to them.

The way St Paul tackles this problem is very interesting. We may have expected him to do so by discussing the issue itself and attempting to explain to those who did not eat meat why it was okay for them to do so. In other words, that St Paul would to try to sort out the division by getting the believers in the church to agree on one single position, but he doesn't.

St Paul does not see the question that needs to be answered as being whether they eat meat or not, but whether they accept one another or not, and acceptance of one another means accepting differences of opinion. Consequently, St Paul starts chapter 14 by urging the strong to accept the weak. St Paul writes:

‘Now accept the one who is weak in faith, but not for the purpose of passing judgment on opinions.’ (Romans 14:1)

Now St Paul can take the position he does because he thinks the food laws are a matter of indifference. However, while he is convinced that the food laws no longer apply, he accepts that for some they can be a way of demonstrating their desire to honour God. I am not sure how convinced the weak who kept the food laws would be by what St Paul writes. They ate only vegetables because they thought that this was what the Law demanded. For them, this was not a question of human opinion or something that they had any choice in but about obeying God’s Law. I am sure that St Paul would have realized this, which suggests that what St Paul writes is designed principally as an appeal to the strong. He does seem predominantly to be addressing the strong. Hence, St Paul can write ‘we who are strong’ (Romans 15:1), as if the strong are his principal audience.

St Paul tells them that rather than claiming their right to eat meat or protesting their freedom, the so-called strong are, firstly, not to despise those who eat only vegetables, and, secondly, they are to be willing to give up their right to eat meat in order not to upset their brother or sister in Christ.

All this seems a bit removed from us today. People are vegetarians, of course, but it has nothing to do with keeping the Old Testament food laws! St Paul, however, in the process of discussing this issue gives us some principles, which are very relevant to us and to every age.

Firstly, we need to choose our arguments.

St Paul was not averse to telling people when he thought they had got it wrong. I have already referred to his argument with St Peter at Antioch. The letter to the Galatians itself is strong stuff in which St Paul severely reprimands the Galatians for what he sees as their abandonment of the Gospel. This is the key to understanding St Paul’s approach. It is why he begins chapter 14 by writing that they are to accept the one who is weak in faith but not to pass judgement over ‘opinions’.

St Paul is clear in his own mind that those who ate only vegetables were weak in faith and have not understood the implications of having died to the Law. Equally, he doesn't see any threat to the truth of the Gospel in those who only ate vegetables continuing not to eat meat as long as they, in turn, don't judge those who do. What St Paul thinks is all important is whether someone seeks to live for God and honour him by what they do. If a believer is able to offer what they do to God with thanks, then St Paul thinks they should be left alone to get on with it. Each person has to decide for themselves how they live. St Paul writes that each one should be fully convinced in their own mind (Romans 14:5).

Secondly, we are accountable first and foremost to God.

Now this sounds all very liberal and individual. We each do what we feel is right for us. Except, for St Paul, it is not quite like that. We have to be able to offer what we do as individuals to the Lord with thanks for it. The one who eats should be honoring the Lord by eating and the one who does not eat should be honoring the Lord by not eating. St Paul has already made it clear that there are some behaviours that are never honoring to the Lord and which we cannot thank him for. Drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, and jealousy, for example. Other behaviour, while not necessarily being a logical outcome of the Gospel, is in itself morally neutral, but it can become something good if offered with thanks to God. The person to decide whether a particular behavior is good or not is ultimately, of course, God himself. And decide he will. As St Paul writes:

‘Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? Or you, why do you despise your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God. For it is written, “As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall give praise to God.” So then, each one of us will be held accountable to God.’ (Romans 14:10-12)

If we think that God will not be pleased if we do something or if we are not sure whether we should, then we should not do it ‘for whatever is not of faith is sin’ (Romans 14:23).

Thirdly, just because we can do something, does not mean we must.

Something can be good in itself or even morally neutral and done by us to honour God, and yet there may still be a reason for not doing it. That reason is out of consideration for a brother or sister in the body of Christ. St Paul makes this plain in chapter 15. St Paul writes:

‘Now we who are strong ought to bear the weaknesses of those without strength and not just please ourselves.’ (Romans 15:1)

Even when a brother or sister has failed to understand fully what the Gospel allows us to do, not only do we ourselves not have to do it, there are times when we definitely should not do it. We are to go out of our way not to harm or cause distress to a brother or sister. If we cause our brother or sister grief, we are no longer walking in love (Romans 15:14).

This does not mean that we have to listen to unreasonable or irrational demands from people, but it does mean that getting our own way is not what we should be most concerned about. What we should be concerned about is being able to join together with each other in loving acceptance of each other, so that with one voice we may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 15:6).

We need, then, to pray:

• that God will grant us the wisdom to know when we need to argue for the truth and the courage to do so

• that whatever we do will be honouring to the Lord

• and that in all things we will put the love of others before the love of ourselves

St Paul gives us the governing principle. St Paul writes:

‘For not one of us lives for himself, and not one dies for himself; for if we live, we live for the Lord, or if we die, we die for the Lord; therefore whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.’ (Romans 14:7-8).

Our Lord himself tells us that we are to love the Lord our God with all our being and our neighbours as ourselves. It is not necessarily easy, but nor was it easy for Christ, writes St Paul, to take on the reproaches of us all (Romans 15:3). We are now called to honour him, so that we may indeed with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

May God grant it to be so.

Amen.

Time to Wake Up

The great enemy when it comes to writing sermons is time, or rather the lack of it, especially when you are preaching every week, as I am at the moment. 

Ideally, time would be spent on reading and preparation, then on producing a written version, followed by some thought being given to delivery and the production of the notes needed for the sermon itself. Then, in an ideal world, the sermon would be recorded and posted online together with a transcription of the sermon as preached as well as the written version for those who wanted to take time over it. 

Most weeks, however, it is only possible to complete part of this process or to complete it inadequately. The written version is normally something that doesn't get finished!

This week for the sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, however, I have managed to complete a written version.  So, instead of the transcription, here is the longer written version. The actual preached sermon can be heard at the link below!

Time to Wake Up

The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity

Romans 13:8-14

Last week, we saw how St Paul teaches the need for us to love and for that love to be real. He tells those he writes to not be overcome by evil, but to overcome evil with good (Romans 12:21).

What follows immediately after this in Romans 13, then, is something of a surprise. St Paul writes about the need for believers to obey those in authority and to make sure they pay their taxes. He is quite strong in how he puts this. St Paul writes:

‘Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.’ (Romans 13:1-2)

St Paul goes on to describe those in authority as God’s servants and ministers (Romans 13:4, 6). This is why those he is writing to pay taxes, he tells them.

This is a passage that continues to trouble Christians today. What about when the authorities are not only people we disagree with but are also truly bad people. Surely St. Paul doesn't see them as instituted by God, and surely he doesn't expect us to obey them whatever they tell us to do?

The first thing to be said about this passage is that St Paul was only too well aware that the authorities could be really bad people. After all, he had been on the receiving end of the cruelty of those in power more than once. What is more, he had held them to account when he felt they were in the wrong (see Acts 16:35-40).

This passage in Romans, though, is not our reading today, and as much as I would like to say more about it, I must resist the temptation. What I would say, however, is that the principles that St Paul enunciated in our reading last week apply here as well.

Firstly, we are not to be overcome by evil, but to overcome evil with good, and this applies to our relationship with those in authority as well as to anyone else. Secondly, St Paul hasn’t stopped discussing how our love is to be real at the end of chapter 12. He continues his discussion on how our love is to be real on into chapter 13 and into this passage about the governing authorities. The need for us to love applies to the many issues we face in the world that St Paul has said we must not be conformed to, and it applies in the world of politics and government as much as anywhere else.

It is only because we have such a romanticized and sexualized view of love that we don't see the connection with what Paul writes about love in our reading last week and what he writes here in Romans chapter 13 about the governing authorities.

That St Paul has not left off discussing the theme of love at the end of chapter 12 is to be seen in how he continues after this passage in chapter 13. After telling the believers of the Church in Rome to obey the government and pay their taxes, St Paul writes,

‘Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.’ (Romans 13:8)

St Paul tells them in the passage that follows, and which is our reading today, that all the commandments are summed up in the single command to love your neighbor as yourself.

St Paul was accused by some in the Church of teaching that believers didn't have to worry about how they lived and what they did (Romans 3:8). St Paul himself asks the question of whether God's grace, that is, his unconditional love for us, means we should continue in sin? He answers it with an emphatic, ‘No!’ (Romans 6:1,15). He realizes, however, that his teaching could seem to suggest otherwise. As, indeed, could his teaching about the God’s Law. He tells the Roman believers that we have died to God’s Law (Romans 7:1) and that we don't serve God any more according to the written code, but in the newness of the Spirit (Romans 7:6).

So, does this mean that there are no rules? There were those who thought it meant exactly that. The Corinthians, for example, had a slogan, ‘All things are lawful to me’, and they used it to justify all kinds of behaviour, even going to a prostitute (1 Corinthians 6:12-20).

St Paul definitely doesn’t think it means this. He firmly believes that there is behaviour that is absolutely incompatible with a believer’s life in Christ and that if a believer is led by the Spirit in the new life that Christ gives that there are things that they simply will not do. In Galatians, St Paul describes these things as the ‘works of the flesh’ (Galatians 5:19).

Again, we saw last week that we live between two times, the time of Christ's death for our sins as our Saviour and his return as our Judge. How are we to live in this in-between time? Many then as now lived as if they were asleep, as if they didn’t have to worry too much about how they lived. St Paul calls his readers to wake from sleep. He tells them that the night is far gone and the day is at hand. He urges them to cast off the ‘works of darkness’ and put on the ‘armour of light’ to protect themselves from the darkness.

St Paul gives three examples of the works of darkness that believers are to cast off. The first two are typical behaviours of the night, ‘partying and drinking’ and ‘sexual promiscuity and licence’. The third is different to the other two, ‘quarrelling and jealousy’. The past lifestyle of some of the Gentile members of the Church may well have included partying and drinking and promiscuity and licence in it, as is the case today. Today, however, we may feel that these two types of behaviour are not typical of church members generally! That may be true. But quarreling and jealousy, sadly, have been major problems in the Church from the beginning. It serves as a reminder to us that we should not focus only on certain types of bad behaviour and ignore others.

St Paul closes, firstly, by telling them, using the metaphor of getting dressed, to put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and secondly, to make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires. They are to so copy Christ and how he lived that they look like Christ, and in living as Christ lived, they are not to satisfy their own desires. The life St Paul calls them to live is the precise opposite of one that makes self-fulfilment its goal.

How are we to apply all this today?

Firstly, it wasn't just in St Paul's own day that people thought that love meant the freedom to do whatever they felt was right. In the 1960s, there was a general rebellion against rules and authority. Many truly believed that ‘love is all you need’. Anything to do with law and commandments, rules and regulations, was to be done away with. We may not put it quite so crassly now, but the belief continues that as long as you do something ‘out of love’ that's what matters.

The question is, however, what is love? It means so many different things depending on who is using it. Ideally, we would find a different word than ‘love’ to use. It is clear that St Paul’s idea of what it is and what many today think it is are very different. Given how the word love is used and understood today, using the word love to describe what St Paul and the New Testament tell us to do simply confuses and even enables conduct contrary to love as the Bible understands it.

For St Paul, love isn't contrary to the Law, it's what the Law was all about and what the Law itself was pointing to. As St Paul has previously explained, the problem wasn’t with the Law but with our inability to keep it. Love represents a different way of achieving what the Law itself was seeking to achieve. If we love, we will do what the Law wanted us to do all along.

For many today, however, love rather than enabling us to fulfil the Law is about me finding fulfilment for myself and satisfying my own desires. If it feels right, do it! If challenged about whether what we are doing is right or not, often the response is to ask how something can be wrong when it feels so right?

As we have seen, St Paul closes chapter 13 by telling us to put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires. The fact that something feels right is no guarantee that it is right. Indeed, the very fact that something feels right ought in itself to serve as something of an alarm call to us. It should alert us that it may be our own selfish desire, what St Paul calls the desires of the flesh, that is telling us to do something, rather than something that the Holy Spirit is leading us to do.

St Paul writes that love does no wrong to a neighbour. If something we want to do is primarily about what is good for us rather than what is good for others, it is at the very least worth questioning and reconsidering.

Secondly, as well as an emphasis on ‘love not law’ there has been a general feeling that the Church has been too negative in the past. It was, many claim, too concerned with telling people what they should not do rather than being positive about what they should do. This sounds good in theory, but it has led to people not being sure that there is anything they shouldn’t do. What we should or should not do has now largely become a matter of individual choice with no-one’s choices being either wrong or better than anyone else’s.

St Paul is far more robust and realistic. He tells us we are to cast off the works of darkness. Having surrendered to the prevailing cultural climate, we in the Church have failed to tell people both what these works are and why they need to cast them off. The works of darkness are not only wrong in and of themselves, they hurt and damage both ourselves and others.

Let us take the works of darkness that St Paul gives in our reading this morning by way of example. Firstly, as we all know, alcohol is a real social problem. A lot of crime and violence is caused by drinking and drunkenness. As are broken families and domestic abuse. Secondly, sexual permissiveness has become the norm. But did you know that STIs are at an all-time high? How many people on any one day in the US have an STI? The answer is 1 in 5. That figure is from the Centers for Disease Control. Now you may say that’s the US. AIDS Concern, however, did a survey amongst young people in Hong Kong and discovered of those they surveyed that 17.5% of the girls had had an STI. We are very selective about the diseases we let affect our behaviour, don’t you think? Thirdly, I think we can all agree that envy and jealousy can lead people to do things that harm others, but they also harm the person who is envious and jealous. Envy and jealousy add to stress and anger, which are closely linked to several illnesses. Anger itself is a risk factor for heart disease and long-term stress harms the immune system and has been linked with several forms of cancer.

It may sound to our ears today that St Paul is being negative and opposed to anyone having a good time and enjoying themselves, the reality is that the desires of the flesh lead to destruction, disease, and death.

When St Paul tells us to put on the armour of light, he is not only telling us what we should do instead, he is telling us how we can protect ourselves from the darkness, that, after all, is what armour is for. But if you are going to put the armour on, you first need to take the clothing of darkness off, which is why St Paul closes our passage with the metaphor of putting on the Lord Jesus Christ and making no provision for the flesh.

Our goal as believers is to become Christ-like. Sometimes when people like me talk about love it sounds all very abstract and unreal. For the believer, love is not an abstract concept. Love is a person. If we want to know what love looks like, we look at Jesus and if we want to see the right way to live, we look at Jesus. Our goal in life is to become like him. We are to put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires.

May God grant that each of us puts on the Lord Jesus Christ and becomes more like him.

Amen.

Real Love

The following is a more or less verbatim transcript of the sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity. I have lightly edited it for clarity, but it is not meant as a written version of the sermon.

The sermon itself can be listened to wherever you get your podcasts or at the link below!

Real Love

Real Love

Romans 12:9-21

St Paul begins chapter 12 of his letter to the Romans and a new section of the letter by appealing to his readers on the basis of the mercies of God. In the light of all that he has described about what God has done for us, St Paul now appeals to us on that basis. He tells us and tells his readers that we're not to be conformed to this world, but rather we are to be transformed. The way we are to be transformed is by the renewing of our minds. How we think matters. The first thing our renewed minds will think differently about, St Paul writes, is ourselves.

As we saw last week, St Paul tells us that we are not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought (Romans 12:3). St Paul will repeat this instruction in our reading this week. Well, if we are not to think of ourselves too highly, how are we to think of ourselves? St Paul writes that we are to think of ourselves according to the ‘measure of faith’ God has given us. We are each given gifts to enable us to play our part in the body of Christ. We are all different with different gifts, but we are all part of the same body, and we are to use our gifts to benefit that body.

Which brings us to this week's reading.

St Paul begins, ‘Let love be genuine’, that is, let love be real. Well, that's clear enough. Commentators, however, don't agree on the meaning of what follows. They are at something of a loss to explain the connection between the different parts of the passage that we have just read. Many see it as just a random collection of things that Paul wants us to do. They see what St Paul writes as loosely connected sayings about how we should live.

Closer examination, however, reveals that there's nothing random about what Paul writes. This is a carefully constructed passage. St Paul uses various rhetorical devices, which are clear if you hear the passage read out aloud in Greek, but which, sadly, are lost in translation. I've tried to give you a better idea of the passage or at least part of the passage on the order of service this morning.

As I have said, St Paul begins by stating his theme, let love be real, let love be genuine. And because the word love can mean different things to different people, St Paul tries to banish any sentimentality by explaining what it is that he means. We are to hate what is evil and cling to what is good. Love involves hating what is bad and discovering, discerning, what is good and holding onto it. St Paul goes on to explain that love shows itself in how we relate to one another. We are to love one another, outdo one another in showing respect and be earnest, devoted, in our concern for each other. This will lead, amongst other things, to us contributing to the needs of the saints and to welcoming strangers, being hospitable to outsiders who come to us.

In other words, for Paul, if we are to love, there is a strong emphasis on how we relate to others, both in the church and outside it. He tells us we are to bless those who persecute us, to identify with others in their need, live harmoniously together, and not have a high opinion of ourselves, but instead mix with those from less privileged backgrounds. We are to live peaceably with everyone as much as we can and under no circumstances to seek revenge. We should think about others rather than ourselves and our concern for others should extend outside the community of faith. Should we worry about what other people think of us? As far as St Paul is concerned, the answer is, ‘Yes!’ because what other people think of us is a reflection of how we think about Christ.

Well, all this seems a very tall order, doesn't it? Think about what St. Paul is asking of us. He wants us to share our gifts with each other, love one another, and live peaceably with everyone as much as it is in our power to do so. How are we to do this? It seems an impossible task. If, however, we have been following what Paul has been writing in Romans so far, we will have some understanding of how we are to do it. But St. Paul encloses a little reminder in this passage about how we are to do it.

We are to be ‘passionate in the Spirit and serve the Lord’. Your translation may have ‘be fervent in spirit and serve the Lord’. I think a better translation is ‘be passionate in the Spirit and serve the Lord’. And this will see us rejoicing in hope, persevering in suffering, and persisting in prayer. If you want a simple way to remember it, there are three words beginning with the letter P: praise, perseverance, and prayer. There is so little hope in our world, but we can rejoice in hope because Christ gives us hope. We can persevere in suffering because of the hope that Christ gives us. And the suffering we experience, rather than leading to despair, leads us to pray. To pray for the strength to bear it, but also to pray for the day when Christ will return and all suffering will cease.

In chapter 13, St Paul will discuss our obligation to the governing authorities, and he will then sum up our response to the mercies of God by writing, 'Owe no one anything except to love one another.’ (Romans 13:8). He will then encourage us to see that love, to see our response to the mercies of God, in the light of the coming day of the Lord, and he will conclude by writing, ‘Put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires’ (Romans 13:14).

St Paul locates our life here and now between two events: between the death of Christ and the return of Christ. These provide the basis and the impetus for how we are to live. We live in response to what God has done for us in Christ our Savior and in the light of Christ's return as our Judge.

What can we learn from all this? And what does it teach us about how we are to live? How are we to live in this ‘in-between time’ between these two pivotal events?

Well, firstly, St Paul makes clear that worship is about how we think and live. We understandably see worship as being about what we do on a Sunday: singing hymns, saying prayers, listening to the readings, and trying to listen to the sermon. But worship in the New Testament is so much bigger than this. It includes all this, of course. But worship in the New Testament is about the offering of ourselves to God. St Paul writes:

‘I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.’ (Romans 12:1)

Elsewhere St Paul writes:

‘So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God.’ (1 Corinthians 10:31)

We are to present our bodies, who we are, as a living sacrifice to God. This is our spiritual worship. It calls for a new way of thinking and looking at our world. We are a living sacrifice, and we are to offer all we are, all our thoughts, and all we do to God as a continuous act of worship. You have all been given this morning an order of service, a liturgy, when you came into church this morning. St Paul is telling us that our diaries, our daily schedules, are to be our order of service, our liturgy, because we worship God in the smallest to the greatest act of our day.

But secondly, this offering of ourselves will requires not only a radical rethink of our attitude to God and worship, and but also to ourselves and to others. Jesus tells his disciples in our Gospel reading that they must deny themselves (Matthew 16:24). This is completely alien to us today, isn't it? We are told constantly that we are to put ourselves first, and that we are to do this by believing in ourselves, by being kind to ourselves, and by making time for ourselves.

St Paul challenges this way of thinking. He tells his readers, and tells us, not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think, not to be arrogant, not to claim to be wiser than we are. Our focus is not to be on ourselves and what we want but on God and what he wants.

And so finally, what God wants is for us to take seriously the needs of others. St Paul stresses the importance of our loving one another. As a vicar, I sometimes get asked, ‘Can I live the Christian life on my own?’ No, you can't. ‘Do I have to go to church to be a Christian?’ Yes, you do. ‘Isn’t it enough to read my Bible, say my prayers, and try to live a good life?’ No, it isn't. Because living the Christian life on our own is not how God has designed it.

St Paul tells us we are all given gifts, all are given gifts, but not the same gifts, and we all need all those gifts to live as God wants. To worship God as we should means we need each other, you need the gifts that I have, and I need the gifts that you have, we need to share our gifts in the body of Christ.

The problem is we don't think we need each other, and so going to church has become for many people something of an optional extra. The reason why it was so easy for us to give up going to church over Covid was because we didn't have a serious enough view of the Church before it. We are one body in Christ and individually members of one another, St Paul writes (Romans 12:5). We are a community of faith, and that community needs to come together bodily, physically, to function in the way God intended. I certainly appreciate all the resources that there are online, and I try to avail myself of them. But it's not enough. You need me and I need you.

Responding to the mercies of God, then, really does involve a complete rethink in how we see God and worship, ourselves, and each other. St Paul closes his explanation of love and our passage this morning on the same note with which he began it.

He began by telling his readers to hate what is evil and to cling to what is good. He closes by saying, ‘Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good’.

May we overcome evil with love, love that is real, as we seek to serve the Lord passionately in the Spirit.

Amen.

The Renewed Mind

The following is a more or less verbatim transcript of the sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity. I have lightly edited it for clarity, but it is not meant as a written version of the sermon.

The sermon itself can be listened to wherever you get your podcasts or at the link below!

The Renewed Mind

The Renewed Mind

Romans 12:1-8

Over the summer, we've been reading through St Paul's letter to the Romans, and today we reach Romans chapter 12. In Romans chapter 12, St Paul begins a new section of the letter, and it's very much a practical section in which St Paul talks about how we are to live out our Christian lives. I think many people breathe something of a sigh of relief when they get to Romans chapter 12 because they feel we can leave behind all the theoretical, heavy stuff that we've been looking at in chapters 1 to 11. In the following chapters, from chapter 12 onwards, St Paul really gets down to practicalities. For example, in Romans 13, he will tell people that they have to pay their taxes. Perhaps when we get onto that, we'll wish ourselves back in Romans 1 to 11!

We shouldn't, however, be too quick to leave behind chapters 1 to 11, because St Paul himself links what he is about to say in chapters 12 to 16 with what he has said in chapters 1 to 11. In chapters 1 to 11, he closes by writing of the mercy of God. In the light of all that he has had to say in chapters 1 to 11, St Paul now asks his readers to do certain things and to live out what he has written in a certain way. Given God's mercy shown to us in Christ, this is how we should respond.

But you might say, ‘Oh, but Ross, I've been away on holiday over the summer. I've missed all your amazing sermons on chapters 1 to 11. How do I know what those mercies are?’ The good news, everybody, is that they are available online in the normal places. So go back, listen to them, and then you'll know what we're talking about!

In Romans chapter 12, verse one, St. Paul tells us that we are to present our bodies to God, a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is our spiritual worship. The Jews presented the dead bodies of animals in worship. St Paul tells us we are to present our own living bodies in worship. St Paul means by this that we need to offer God not just individual acts of obedience, but the whole of ourselves, all that we are, in His service. We are to do what God wants us to do. We are to do His will.

But how are we to know what God wants of us? How are we to know what his will for us is? Well, we cannot know while our outlook is conformed to this world and to its way of thinking and doing things. We need a complete change of mindset. St. Paul writes that we need to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, because it's only with renewed minds that we will be able to know, to discern God's will.

These are such important verses. Many people, understandably, want to concentrate on what we do. What we do, however, depends on how we think. In other words, our minds matter. It is only when we understand something of what St Paul has been saying in Romans 1-11, that we will be able to work out what God's will for us is. Our offering of ourselves is a reasoned response to God's mercy as St Paul has described it.

So, we need above all things to get our thinking straight. Those of you who do listen to my sermons will know that I believe that many parts of the church have fallen victim to some strange thinking. It is no wonder, then, that we find it hard to discern God's will for us. St Paul wants us to think differently to the world around us. We are not to take the values and attitudes of this world and baptize them into the Church, but to be transformed, to be renewed in our minds and in our thinking.

The first thing St Paul tells us we will think differently about when our minds are renewed is ourselves. The danger for all of us is to think too highly of ourselves. You've probably heard the phrase, ‘he or she has a very high opinion of themselves’. The first thing our renewed mind needs to do is not to think highly of ourselves but to think with sound judgment. The Bible version that we use in church says with ‘sober judgment’. I think that doesn't quite capture the right nuance somehow. ‘Sound judgment’ is the sense of Paul's word here. In other words, St Paul wants us to see ourselves as created and loved by God but also dependent on God and powerless to do anything without him. St Paul encourages us to appreciate the gifts that God gives us, not with a view to finding fulfillment for ourselves, but to discover how we can find our place in the body of Christ and to know what that place is.

St Paul writes that we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually members of one another. This, I think, is a very important insight. In some political philosophies, the individual counts for nothing or for very little. What matters is not individual freedom, but the greater good of the State. I think this is the basic idea behind communism.

In other systems, however, the emphasis is firmly on the individual. We must all be allowed to pursue our own goals and ambitions, free from external control and constraints, and this, I would suggest, underlies Western capitalism. It is behind what is often described as the ‘American dream’. Everyone can be a winner. The reality is, however, that there have to be losers too.

The Lionesses, England women's football team, were held up as individuals who had followed their dreams. But as the Lionesses have realized, sometimes you have to wake up from your dreams. The Lionesses, at least, will wake up to a big paycheck, certainly a bigger paycheck than I will ever see! Others are not so fortunate. They wake from their dreams battered, bruised, and bereft. And if you want another B, many wake up bankrupt, bankrupt emotionally, financially, and mentally.

State socialism doesn't work, neither does idealistic individualism. So where does the answer lie? St Paul writes in 1 Corinthians chapter 4 verse 7, ‘What have you that you did not receive?’ Seeing that what we have comes from God, gives us purpose and direction, the purpose and direction we need. St Paul writes in our reading that we each have gifts that differ according to the grace we have been given. We are individuals in the body of Christ. We are one body in Christ and individually members of one another.

Our gifts differ. Your gifts are different to mine. I am different to you. But the gifts that we are given are not to benefit ourselves, but to benefit the body of Christ, to enable us to serve in the body of Christ.

The world we are not to be conformed to teaches us to ask, ‘What can I get?’ Jesus teaches us to ask, ‘What can I give?’ The Gospel does not focus on what the benefit is to us, but what use I can be to others. Jesus taught that it is in giving that we receive, and that the measure we give will be the measure we receive back (Luke 6:38).

The service God is calling me to is not the same as the service God is calling you to, but he is calling each one of us, without exception, to service, and what is more, he has given us the grace we need to accomplish the service he has allotted to us. Some people don't have a high opinion of themselves but instead despise themselves and even harm themselves. They think they're useless and have no gifts. St Paul would challenge both those who have a high opinion of themselves and those who have a low opinion of themselves to look away from themselves, and instead look to the love of God; to look at what God thinks of us and what God can do through us.

Well, the relevance of all this today should be clear. We are today commissioning those who will help lead us in worship and in the teaching of our children. With this we come back to what Paul writes about not being conformed to this world. As our children start back at school very soon, it is our children who are actively being taught, everywhere they go, in everything they do, and in everything they see, to conform to this world and to its lies. They are being given the values and attitudes of this world.

Our children need people who are transformed with renewed minds to teach them the love of God and to help them understand God's love for them. We are, then, especially grateful today to those who are willing to undertake this work and commit to it. In a moment, we will formally commission them for it.

This year in Sunday School and Junior Church will be starting an exciting new curriculum. It's not only new to us; it’s only just been released - in June, in fact. This new curriculum is one which focuses fully on the Bible and on God's message to us. Because if our minds are to be renewed and if we are to be transformed, we need to hear God's word to us. And having heard it, we need to obey it. St Paul will write later in chapter 15 of Romans:

‘For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.’ (Romans 15:4)

It is not just our children who need to hear the Word of God. Each and every one of us needs to hear it. The messages we hear in the world around us are often messages of despair and of defeat. It is the instruction of the Scriptures that gives us hope.

So today, as we commit and commission our teachers and those who will lead us in our worship of God, may we also commit ourselves, each one of us, to listening to the Word of God, so that our minds may be renewed and our lives transformed as we offer ourselves wholly and completely to God.

‘I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, on the basis of God’s mercy, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship.’ (Romans 12:1)

May God grant us to present ourselves to him in service and may he do great things through us in the weeks and months ahead.

Amen.

The Mercy of God

The following is a more or less verbatim transcript of the sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity. I have lightly edited it for clarity, but it is not meant as a written version of the sermon.

The sermon itself can be listened to wherever you get your podcasts or at the link below!

The Mercy of God

The Mercy of God

Romans 11.1-2, 29-32

In our Gospel reading this morning (Matthew 15:10-28), Jesus is asked by a Canaanite woman to help her disturbed daughter. Jesus ignores her. The disciples want him to send her away. She's being a nuisance. Jesus explains that he was sent only to the ‘lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (Matthew 15:24). She's a Canaanite; she doesn't belong. But the woman kneels before Jesus saying simply, ‘Lord help me’ (Matthew 15:25).

Jesus's reply to her is shocking, ‘It's not fair to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.’ (Matthew 15:26). Her reply is famous, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table’ (Matthew 15:27). Jesus, impressed by her reply, heals her daughter.

We focus on Jesus's reply and his healing of her daughter. But Jesus’ words when read plainly seem offensive. We've got so used to seeing Jesus as the universal Savior; the One who has come to all and who welcomes all. We don't see him as the One who came just to a select few. His message, we believe, encourages belief in diversity, in equity, and in inclusivity. Indeed, these principles are an expression of the Gospel itself. It shocks and offends us when Jesus doesn't seem to believe in these principles himself.

And in a very real sense, he doesn't. We forget that God chose Israel to be his people. It was to Israel that the Law was given. It was to Israel that the prophets were sent, and the promises were made. Whatever else, reading the Scriptures, it's clear that Israel is at the centre of God's purposes. So, what Jesus says about only coming to the lost sheep of the house of Israel seems obvious.

The Messiah had been promised to Israel. If Jesus was the Messiah, then by definition it was to Israel that he had come. St John puts it plainly, ‘he came unto his own’, he writes (John 1:11). He came only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel! Once we understand this, and most Christians don't, we can begin to understand the problem that St Paul is addressing in our reading from Romans this morning.

If Jesus came unto his own, if he came to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, why didn't Israel accept him? And why did the Gentiles to whom he wasn't sent receive him instead? St Paul addresses the obvious explanation. Maybe the reason why the Jewish people aren't turning to Christ in St Paul's day is because God himself has rejected them. Has God decided to give up on the Jewish people and focus on the Gentiles? This is the question that St Paul is addressing.

Now, although we would not put it quite like this, many Christians think that this is exactly what has happened. Not that God has rejected individual Jews, but rather that the Jewish people as a whole are not special anymore. Very often you will find in the Church that people believe that the Jewish people are now no different and not in any different position to anyone else.

So, has God rejected his people (Romans 11:1)? St Paul dismisses the idea. St Paul points out that he himself is a good Jew, and while the Jews may not be responding now to the Gospel, he writes, this has also been the case in the past. In the time of Elijah, for example, it was just a faithful remnant who refused to bow the knee to Baal. The rest refused to hear what God was saying to them. And so too, St Paul writes, now in his day, there is a faithful remnant and he is part of it.

But why had the majority of Jews failed to respond? The answer, of course, is that they had stumbled over the historical reality of Jesus. St Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that it was the fact of the crucifixion which caused all the problems (1 Corinthians 1:23). A crucified Messiah was a contradiction in terms. The Messiah was meant to be victorious, not defeated, not die on a cross. They could not and would not accept a crucified Messiah. But, St Paul asks, did that mean that the Jewish people had now fallen out of favour? Did it mean they had stumbled to fall? (Romans 11:11). Has God given up on Israel and the Jewish people?

Well, the answer to this question is not quite so straightforward as it seems, because, as I've said, most Christians would say that while God has not given up on individual Jews, Israel as a distinct group, Christians would often argue, has now been superseded by the Church. The Church, many people believe, is the new Israel. The Church continues where Israel, because of her rejection of the Messiah, left off. Jews are welcome to join the church on the same basis as everyone else. But now it's by faith in Christ not birth as a Jew. It's all over for the Jewish people and for Israel as a distinct entity as far as many Christians are concerned.

Now not everyone is happy with this way of thinking. Some evangelicals, in the States especially, see a continuing role for Israel and come up with all sorts of schemes and systems including timetables and calendars to explain what that purpose is.

St Paul absolutely rejects the idea that God will abandon Israel and the Jewish people. He writes that they still figure and have a place in God's plan. In verse 29 of our reading, St Paul writes that the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable. Equally, however, St Paul does not have a system or timetable for what God's plan is for his ancient people. Jesus himself said to his disciples, ‘It is not for you to know the times or seasons’ (Acts 1:7). But what God does want us to know, and what God wants us to be sure of, is that he is faithful and merciful.

The fact that so many of the Jewish people had rejected the Gospel and were persecuting those who accepted it could be seen as God's rejection of Israel. St Paul is anxious to explain that God keeps his promises and that his desire is not to punish or reject, but to have mercy and to forgive. What St Paul is explaining is how the Gospel impacts the Jews, on the one hand, and the Gentiles, on the other. But what he writes is relevant to us as individual believers as well because the fact of Israel's failure to believe raises two important questions, questions about God himself.

The first question is, can God be trusted to stand by his promises to us? And secondly, can we be sure of God's mercy? What happens when we fail to fulfill God's purposes for us and let him down? Will God abandon us to the consequences of our decisions and actions? Are we to live in fear of rejection?

The first thing to say is that actions have consequences. As you sow, so shall you reap, writes St Paul in Galatians. And this is true purely on a human level. What we do has consequences. But it is not a case of God just being passive and allowing us to face the consequences of our actions. St Paul describes how God actively intervenes and punishes wickedness and sin. We cannot presume on the forgiveness and goodness of God, and too much Christian teaching gives the impression that this is exactly what we are doing. Too much Christian teaching implies that God is simply too nice to judge us and will forgive us whatever. That simply is wrong.

Secondly though, God will not cast us off forever. Despite our cuddly view of God, often when we fall or fail we do feel guilt. We do feel guilty when we mess up and do things that are wrong. We're all too conscious very often, aren't we, of the wrong we have done and the mistakes we have made? Often, we find it hard to forgive ourselves, let alone ask God to forgive us. St Paul makes clear that God does judge us and does hold us to account, God does want us to live according to his will, but he also knows that we are flesh, that we're human and mortal, that we're weak, and that we fail. God, St Paul writes, is a God of mercy who forgives all who are sorry, who repent, and who return to him.

This means acknowledging our mistakes, admitting our wrongdoings, and accepting our failure. And this can be difficult. We want to believe in ourselves, don't we? We want to see ourselves as strong and capable, that there's nothing that we cannot do if we want to. Tonight, the Lionesses will be playing Spain in the World Cup final. And all over social media for the past few days there have been posts about what we can learn from the women football players. They are seen as an example of how you can do it if you believe in yourself; you can achieve anything if you know your goal and if you follow your dream. Believe in yourself and you too can be a Lioness!

We don't want to face up to our weakness and to be challenged to see that we can't always achieve what we want to achieve. And seeing ourselves as we truly are is often too painful to bear and certainly too painful to bear on our own. God, however, wants us to face up to our weaknesses. He already knows what we're like. He knows what we have done, where we have failed, and he knows the wrong we're capable of doing. He knows everything there is to know, and yet, St Paul writes, he still loves us and goes on loving us. St Paul asks, at the end of Romans chapter 8, what can separate us from the love of God. And his answer is quite simply, nothing. Knowing that God wants to show us mercy and grant us forgiveness and peace can change everything. It can change us - if we let it.

In Romans chapters 1 to 11, St Paul discusses some really serious and heavy topics. The Gospel and salvation, judgment and sin, righteousness and faith, the Law and the Spirit, Israel and the people of God. There are many ways he could have brought his discussion of this section of the letter to a close, but he does so by focusing on the mercy of God. As we will go on to see next week, it is the mercy of God that gives us the confidence we need to live for God. For if God is not merciful, there's no point in going on, there is no point in trying to serve him, for we will fail, and we will fall short of being the person even we know we should be, let alone be the person God wants us to be. But knowing that despite our weakness, our failure and sin, God still loves us, accepts us, and welcomes us back when we fail, enables us to overcome our shortcomings, leave behind our disappointments, guilt, and regrets, and look with hope to the future.

St Paul concludes chapter 11 with these words:

‘O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

“For who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counselor?
Or who has given a gift to him,
to receive a gift in return?”

For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen.’ 

(Romans 11:33–36)

We will never be able fully to understand God. God remains above us and beyond us, but, in his mercy, he has come to us in Christ, and in Christ he accepts us just as we are. But he doesn't leave us as we are. He encourages and enables us to become the person in Christ that we can be.

May we experience God's mercy and by His mercies may we live for Him.

Amen.

The Wretched Man

The following is a more or less verbatim transcript of the sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity. I have lightly edited it for clarity, but it is not meant as a written version of the sermon.

The sermon itself can be listened to wherever you get your podcasts or at this link:

The Wretched Man

The Fifth Sunday after Trinity

Romans 7:13-25

Consider the following two statements:

1. ‘Human beings are fundamentally good; there is good in everyone.’

You will often hear this said or see it written on inspirational pictures posted online, and we desperately want to believe it. We want to believe that we are all basically good, despite the evil that we see in the world around us. Take Ukraine, for example. Good people, good Christian, church-going people, are committing what are regarded as crimes even in a time of war: torture, murder, rape. Despite their supposed innate goodness, humans like you and me, are still doing evil.

2. ‘I couldn't help myself; I had to do it. I had no choice.’

People often explain their behavior, particularly their bad behavior, by appealing to some inner compulsion or drive over which they have no control. And this explanation of their behavior is often used by people who would otherwise resent being told they had no free will, or that they are unable to do what they want to do! They see no apparent contradiction between claiming that they had no control over something they have done, and at the same time believing that they are free to do what they want to do.

So, which is it? Are we basically good and free to choose how we live? Or are we captive to forces over which we have no control? Well, the reply that is often given is that we are indeed free, but we're free to choose and that includes being free to choose to do evil and that itself includes choosing to give in to both internal and external forces. However, the replier will go on to explain, there is still good in people if you look for it.

Well, St Paul would disagree fundamentally with this explanation. He wouldn't disagree that some people want to do good, but he would disagree with the idea that we have either the freedom or ability to do it.

In our reading from Romans for this week, St Paul, having described a struggle with sin, writes, ‘Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? (Romans 7:24)’. Who is this wretched man? Is St Paul speaking of himself personally or is he speaking more generally, with himself as the representative of a type or of a group? And when did this wretched man's struggle take place? Did it take place before he came to Christ? Or is St Paul describing the experience of everyone including that of every believer?

The wretched man, in Romans chapter 7, wants to do good and to resist sin but finds himself powerless and unable to do so. Instead, he finds himself doing the very sin he hates. While there are many different variations, there are basically only two ways of understanding and interpreting what St Paul says in Romans chapter 7, that is, the pessimistic or the ultra-pessimistic way of interpreting it.

The pessimistic way understands St Paul to be saying that outside of Christ, before someone comes to faith in Christ, they are incapable of doing even the good they want to do. The ultra-pessimistic way of interpreting it understands St Paul to be saying that no-one, not even a believer, can ultimately resist the power of sin. And there are people who argue for either of these interpretations. But what, on either interpretation, has led St Paul to such a depressing view of the human condition?

It used to be said that St Paul was reflecting the experience of someone who was a believer but who wanted to keep the Law. In other words, St Paul is describing his own experience as a Pharisee before he came to faith in Christ. This understanding of the chapter has largely been abandoned by scholars nowadays. This is because elsewhere in his letters, this is not how St Paul remembers his experience before he became a believer. He writes to the Philippian church that when he was a Pharisee keeping the Law, he was blameless when it came to righteousness under the Law (Philippians 3:6). Here in Romans chapter 7, however, St Paul writes of the impossibility of keeping the Law.

Now it's important to see that St Paul is not saying that people never keep the Law or that they never do good. Rather he is saying that we are unable to keep the Law as the Law itself demands. Let me give an example.

Suppose on the way home from church this morning, you're driving down the freeway, and you're stopped by the police for speeding. And the police officer says to you, ‘You were speeding sir (or madam).’ And you reply, ‘Officer I've kept to the speed limit for most of the freeway. It's only just now that I've broken the speed limit.’ You wouldn't get a pat on the back from the police officer for having kept the speed limit for seven eighths of a mile and only sped for the last eighth. You would be given a ticket! You have broken the law.

So, which is it in Romans chapter 7? Is it the pessimistic interpretation or the ultra-pessimistic interpretation that we should go for? Well, I started to write my own interpretation of Romans chapter 7 for the sermon this week, and you would still be here at midday if I was to read it out! Instead, for those of you who are members of the Facebook Group, I'll post it this week. So, if you want to read the logic behind what I'm going to say, it will be there for you to look at. What follows is a summary of it!

I think that Paul is pessimistic about any attempt to do good outside of faith in Christ. However, for someone who has come to faith in Christ, St Paul has the confidence that in Christ that person can defeat sin; that, as a believer, we can be freed from sin's power and control. This, then, explains the identity of the wretched man in Romans chapter 7.

The wretched man is indeed St Paul himself, but St Paul writing as the representative of all who want to do good by keeping God's commandments. But it is St Paul also writing as the representative of those who haven't yet come to faith in Christ but who, nevertheless, still want to do good. St Paul is looking back on his life as a Pharisee perhaps, but looking back from the vantage point of faith, and he is looking back on his life differently. He sees the reality of his former life, and he sees the reality of all those who, like him, are genuine in their effort to keep the Law. He sees, though, that their effort to do good will ultimately come to nothing. And it will come to nothing because they simply do not have the power and the ability to do good. St Paul describes in Romans how we need to die both to sin and die to the Law itself.

In Romans chapter 6, St Paul describes how when we're baptized into Christ, we are baptized into his death; we die to sin. But in Romans chapter 7, at the very beginning of the chapter, he writes something that to any good Jew would seem absolutely incredible, indeed, almost blasphemous. St Paul writes that we have died to God's Law. St Paul writes that we no longer serve God that way. We now serve, St Paul writes, in the new way of the Spirit (Romans 7:6). He will go on to describe that new way of the Spirit in Romans chapter 8.

In Romans chapters 1 to 5, St Paul has spent a lot of time describing the human condition. He describes how it is one of sin, how we are all sinners, and how we all fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). Here in Romans chapter 7, he shows one of the terrible consequences of this. We not only sin; we are under the power of sin, which means not being able to do good. Seeing ourselves like this, as sinners controlled by sin and unable to do good, may lead to despair. St Paul cries out, ‘Who will deliver me from this body of death?’. But St Paul knows the answer. He writes, ‘Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ’. Who will deliver me? St Paul knows the answer. But do we?

We resist this pessimistic assessment of our condition outside of Christ. We insist, don't we, on believing in our own innate goodness and our freedom to choose how we live our lives despite all the evidence to the contrary? We refuse to admit our inability to keep God's Law and to live as even we know we should live. We refuse to see the reality of our condition, and our stubborn refusal to see the reality of our condition is itself part of our wretchedness. Who will deliver us indeed?

Sin not only prevents us from doing good, it has led us to believe that we actually can do good. We need to understand ourselves, our sinfulness, our powerlessness, our hopelessness.

The desire to understand ourselves is itself a common one. Hence people will sign up for psychotherapy sessions, will take psychometric tests, and will submit themselves to psychological assessments. And the desire for self-knowledge is a good one, when it is motivated by a wish to be a better person. Sadly, all too often, it's just part of our ongoing self-obsession. The need for self-knowledge, however, is a common theme in philosophy and in religion in general.

But here's the thing: true self-knowledge can only be found when we come to know God. We can never see ourselves as we are until we see ourselves, as St Catherine of Siena put it, in the mirror of God. It is only when we come to know God in Christ that we gain true self-knowledge, for it is only God who sees us completely and who understands us entirely. But when we see ourselves as God sees us, it can be desperately frightening, because to see ourselves in the light of God is to become aware of the darkness in each one of us. It is to become aware of our weakness, failure, and unworthiness. When St Peter saw himself as Christ saw him, he said to our Lord, ‘Depart from me O Lord for I am a sinful man (Luke 5;8)’. But it is when we see ourselves as God sees us that we also see that God loves us as we are, as wretched, as weak, as failures, as unworthy.

I've told you in the past about how when I was just a schoolboy at secondary school, a teacher challenged me and said to me, ‘Ross, do you know God?’ And that was the beginning of my journey of faith. The same teacher also said to me at the same time, ‘Ross, Jesus didn't come to die so we could be forgiven for our sins. And I was a bit taken aback by this, because that was standard Christian teaching: Jesus died for our sins. But he said that no, God had been forgiving sins throughout history. The Old Testament is full of God forgiving sins. The problem was God forgave sins and people went on sinning afterwards. Forgive sin, sin, forgive sin: it was a cycle. God wanted, this teacher explained, to end the cycle. God wanted not only to forgive us our sins, but to make it possible for us to overcome sin. And that's what Paul is writing about in Romans chapters 6, 7, and 8. God not only wants to forgive us our sins, which, of course, he does, God wants to deal with our sin. He wants to make it possible for us to be freed from sin. He wants to enable us to serve him in the new way of the Spirit.

When we look at ourselves, we all too often compare ourselves with others, and so we think we're not doing too badly. But in the presence of God, all is revealed, and we see our wretchedness. The wretched man of Romans chapter 7 is each one of us outside of Christ. And when we see our wretchedness, we too cry out, who will deliver me? And it's in that cry, it is in that moment of despair that we come to see the power of God to change us and to free us. It is when we see our wretchedness that we also see that deliverance is to be found in Christ. Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Freed from Sin

The following is a more or less verbatim transcript of the sermon for the Third Sunday after Trinity. I have lightly edited it for clarity, but it is not meant as a written version of the sermon.

The sermon itself can be listened to wherever you get your podcasts or at this link:

Freed from Sin

The Third Sunday after Trinity

Romans 6:1-14

Well, over the summer, when I'm preaching, I'm going to be looking at the readings from Romans. So far, we've seen that St Paul has told us that all of us, without exception, are equal in sin and subject to the wrath of God. All need saving and all need saving the same way, writes St Paul. The only way we can be saved, St Paul tells us, is through faith in Christ. We don't deserve to be forgiven and accepted by God, but God out of love for us, and because of what Christ has done for us by dying for us, forgives us freely and accepts us.

Well, there is an obvious question that emerges from all this, and St Paul asks it in verse one of our reading from Romans. If God forgives us no matter what we do and no matter what we have done, is there any need for us to do anything differently? Why can't we just go on living as we have always lived, knowing that God will go on loving us as he has always loved us? St Paul puts it this way, ‘should we continue in sin that grace may abound’ (Romans 6:1)? When we were sinners, grace abounded to us, so why not go on sinning, so that grace may go on abounding?

It's a logical question but it's not just a theoretical question. It seems that there were people who were accusing St Paul of saying just this and claiming that St Paul didn't care whether people sinned or not. There were others who argued that that was precisely what the Gospel meant. St Paul was writing Romans from Corinth, and he had had to deal with people in the church in Corinth who thought that now they were Christians, forgiven and accepted by God, it meant they could do whatever they liked. St Paul is horrified that people can think he thinks like this, and he is horrified that believers could think like this.

Nevertheless, St Paul doesn't respond to the idea that we can go on sinning as believers by simply telling people to stop sinning. He will say that, but first he explains, not only why we should stop sinning, but also why we can stop sinning. St Paul asks, ‘how can we who died to sin go on living in it (Romans 6:2)?’ ‘Do you not know’, he continues to ask, ‘that all who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death’ (Romans 6:3)? St Paul has previously written about Jesus' death and the forgiveness of sins it brings. Now, in Romans 6, he speaks about our death and the freedom from sin it brings.

We will only understand what St Paul is saying in Romans chapter 6 when we understand that Paul is not simply talking about sins, that is, sins in the sense of those wrong things that we do. Not loving God with our whole being, for example, not loving our neighbor as ourself, not keeping the Ten Commandments, and so on. ‘Sin’ for St Paul isn't just the things that we do that are wrong. Sin is both a power that controls us and a state in which we live.

In times past, when a couple were living together outside of marriage, the phrase that was used to describe it was ‘living in sin’. I don't know if you remember that phrase or have heard it. The idea wasn't just that what they were doing behind closed doors was wrong, but that the state of being together outside of marriage was itself a state of sin. Well, that's what St Paul is saying. Every one of us outside of Christ is living in a state of sin. A state in which Sin itself controls us. And the only hope for us, writes St Paul, is for our relationship with Sin to come to an end. And for it to come to an end, there must be death. It can only be ended by death, he writes, and it is us who must die.

And we did die, St Paul tells the Roman believers, when we came to Christ in faith. When we come to Christ, our relationship with Sin as a power ends. St Paul tells us that our old self was crucified (Romans 6:6). ‘Whoever has died is freed from sin’ (Romans 6:7), and it follows that if we have shared in the death of Christ, so too we will share in the resurrection of Christ (Romans 6:5, 8). We have died and been buried with Christ, St Paul writes (Romans 6:3-4). So, we can now share the resurrection life of Christ. We have died with him, so now we can live with him. We can walk in newness of life (Romans 6:4).

St Paul is describing something that has actually happened. Before the Roman believers came to Christ, it was impossible for them not to sin. St Paul describes this state in Romans 7. He calls it being under the ‘law of sin and death’ (Romans 8:1). We're all familiar with the physical laws of the universe, laws that govern us and govern our life in this world. St Paul says there are spiritual laws that govern our life in this world as well, and one of them is the law of sin and death. The law of sin and death tells us that when we want to do good, no matter how much we may want to do it, we can't, and that if we don't do good, we will die. Sin leads to death.

It’s a terrible situation to be in. If I sin, I will die. And yet I cannot help myself, I will sin. St Paul will write in Romans 7, ‘the good that I would I do not, the evil that I would not that I do’ (Romans 7:19). ‘O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death (Romans 7: 24)?’ But, writes St Paul, we have, as believers in Christ, died to sin, and we are freed from it, so that the law of sin and death no longer applies to us.

Now we do have a choice. St Paul urges his readers to make it. We are to understand that we are dead to sin and alive to God and that we need to act accordingly. We now can do the good we want to do, and we can not do the evil we don't want to do. St Paul tells his readers, not to let sin exercise control over them (Romans 6:12).

In other words, he is saying previously you had no choice, you had to do what Sin told you to do; now you don't. Previously you were dead to God and alive to sin; now you are dead to sin and alive to God. St Paul, as he goes on in Romans, will explain what this means in practical terms for how we live, but first he wants the Roman believers and us to understand how real and how radical the change is that Christ has brought about in our lives.

I want to highlight three points for us from all this.

1. Continuing in Sin?

Most of us would not put it so bluntly. We would not say, ‘let us continue in sin that grace may abound’. In any case, this is not the language we use anymore. But isn't this the reality?

To put it another way, how seriously do we take our faith? How much difference does it actually make to how we live? To what extent does our faith influence our choices and decisions? Isn't our attitude all too often, basically, that no matter what we do, there is nothing to worry about, God will forgive us anyway? Yes, we'll try to avoid serious sin, but as to significant lifestyle changes, that's a different matter altogether.

And why worry if God loves us and accepts us, whatever? Why indeed? Jesus in our Gospel reading says to his disciples that those who find their life will lose it and those who lose their life for his sake will find it (Matthew 10:39). What both our Lord and St Paul are saying is that faith in Christ is a life-changing experience. We can't just continue living as if nothing has happened. And if we can live as if nothing has happened, then we may need to ask ourselves whether maybe nothing has happened. If we really have come to Christ, it will result in real and radical change.

So real and so radical, in fact, that only the language of dying and rising again is sufficient to describe it. It may take time for us to appreciate it and to realize how significant it all is, but we must appreciate it. We must appreciate that Christ changes everything.

2. Changed by Christ

The reason why we don't always appreciate the difference coming to Christ makes is because we don't understand quite what life is like outside of Christ.

One of the most misunderstood and misleading ideas that has gained currency in our world and in the Church is the idea of ‘free will’. We in the church are partly to blame for championing it and promoting it. The idea of free will, as it is popularly understood, is that we are all free to make our own choices. Christians will say that God has given us free will so we can choose whether to worship him or not, and we believe it! It would be funny if it were not so tragic.

We have made this idea of human freedom central to how we think. St Paul is far more realistic. He describes our condition outside of Christ as ‘enslaved to sin’ (Romans 6:6). It's not that we have no choice, but that our choices are limited. We are controlled by forces external to us. That seems so obvious, but we so desperately want to believe in our autonomy and our freedom that we just ignore all evidence to the contrary.

St Paul writes that we are slaves to whom we obey, either sin that leads to death or the obedience that leads to righteousness (Romans 6:16). Now we miss what St Paul is actually saying here. He is not simply saying choose whether you serve sin or choose whether you serve righteousness. He wants us to see that we can only serve righteousness once we have been set free from sin, and we can only be set free from sin when we have been changed by Christ. We have to come to Christ first. It is only once we have come to Christ that we are given the freedom to choose to serve Christ.

Many do want their lives to be turned around. Many are conscious of the wrong they have done and of the unhappiness they have brought both to themselves and to others by the way they have lived and by their actions. It is by accepting that we have done wrong, accepting that we are powerless to change our lives, and accepting that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves, that we begin the journey of our lives being turned around. This is because it is when we realise just how powerless and hopeless we are that we can see how Christ is sufficient for our need. We need to trust in Christ and Christ alone, St Paul tells us, and, if we do, Christ will bring about real and lasting change.

3. Controlled by God

Coming to Christ changes everything, but we have to act on that change.

At the moment, it seems as if everybody is emigrating somewhere or other: Australia, Canada, UK, you choose it! They are leaving Hong Kong and life in Hong Kong and moving to another place. They will no longer be subject to the rules and laws governing us in Hong Kong; they will instead become subject to the rules and laws governing them in wherever it is they have moved to. They are changing citizenship, exchanging life in Hong Kong for life in the UK, or wherever.

St Paul tells us that we have changed citizenship. We no longer belong to the kingdom of Sin and are no longer governed by its rules. We belong to the kingdom of God. We have been given the right and power to live as children of God, but we need to start living that way. We are now given the opportunity to live lives free from Sin, no longer controlled by it. As I've said, St Paul will go on to explain what this means in practical terms, but he wants in Romans 6 for us to see how real that change is, and he wants us to live as changed people.

Many people, sadly and tragically, prefer life in the kingdom of Sin to that in the kingdom of God. And we need to be under no illusion here. The demands that Christ makes of us as citizens of the kingdom of God are very real. Jesus in our Gospel reading spells out just how demanding those demands are. But Jesus promises to all those who follow him, who lose their life in the kingdom of Sin and exchange it for life in his kingdom, that they will find life, life that lasts eternally. But more than that, we are promised that we will be given the power to live that life. We'll be given the resources we need to be able to live that life.

It's as if when somebody lands in London, they're welcomed right away as a citizen and told there's a million pound bank balance that has been set up for them. A million pound bank balance that’s there for them to draw on to finance their new lifestyle. Jesus not only transfers us from the kingdom of Sin to the kingdom of God, he gives us the resources we need to live in that kingdom, but we have to want to; we have to decide to do so.

The challenge before us is very real. We have experienced in Christ a real change. We now need to live out that change and walk, as St Paul puts it, in newness of life.

May we find that life and may we walk in it!

Amen.

Saved from the Wrath of God

The following is a more or less verbatim transcript of the sermon for the Second Sunday after Trinity. I have lightly edited it for clarity, but it is not meant as a written version of the sermon.

The sermon itself can be listened to wherever you get your podcasts or at this link:

Saved from the Wrath of God

The Second Sunday after Trinity 2023

Romans 5:1-11

We don't appreciate today what a major issue for the early church the Gentiles believing in Christ was. Jesus came unto his own, that is, to the Jewish people. He came as the Jewish Messiah in fulfilment of the Jewish Scriptures, and what is more, he largely confined his ministry while on earth to the Jews. He says in St Matthew's Gospel, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (Matthew 15:24). In our reading this morning, when Jesus sends his 12 disciples out on mission, he tells them to go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but rather go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matthew 10:5-6).

Now, he did tell his disciples that after his ascension that they were to go beyond Jerusalem and Judea to Samaria and away to the ends of the world (Acts 1:8). But nothing during their time with him had prepared them for what it meant when Gentiles started believing in Jesus. How were they as Jews to welcome Gentiles into the people of God? In Romans chapters one to four, St Paul explains that as all are equal in sin, all must find salvation the same way.

And the way that they will find salvation, he tells the Roman believers, is by the way of faith in Christ. St Paul explains that God forgives and accepts all who come to him through faith in Christ. Having explained this in the first four chapters, St. Paul concludes in our reading this morning, ‘having been justified by faith, we have peace with God, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand’ (Romans 5:1-2). Justification is not the only thing that happens to us when we come to Christ in faith, but it is an important, indeed essential, part of it.

Being justified by faith, however, is not the end but the beginning. St Paul writes of how we boast of our hope of sharing in the glory of God (Romans 5:2). St Paul describes how the suffering we experience now produces in us endurance, and how that endurance produces character, and how character produces hope. Hope that does not disappoint us. Hope! Hope is something that is in short supply in our world. We read and hear of the existential threats facing humanity almost daily. Jesus himself warned his disciples that they would hear of wars and rumours of wars, that there would be natural disasters and plagues (Luke 21:10-11).

We sort of thought war was on the way out, didn't we? With the arrival of nuclear weapons, we didn't think anyone would be mad enough to risk large scale war. And now we see the unthinkable. War again in Europe. Not just a local squirmish, but a war which is even now having global consequences. This week, African leaders visited Kyiv because the war is now impacting on food supplies on a global level. It is a war that carries with it the threat of nuclear destruction. And while this war is going on, there is the threat of another war in another part of the world – in Taiwan.

Natural disasters such as earthquakes and famine continue. But looming over us now are the natural disasters with a human cause. Global warming is producing climate change. We have all heard about it. But despite all the publicity and all the warnings from scientists, we are doing next to nothing about it. It is no wonder that young people who have the most to lose are especially worried, and they are right to be. We have seen the wildfires and the floods, and we've seen how even in New York in the past few days people have had to stay indoors because they could not breathe, the air quality was so bad. Scientists warn that there is worse to come.

And we don't need reminding of plagues, do we? We've just lived through a plague, the like of which most of us thought we would never see. And just as we were congratulating ourselves on having got on top of some of the world's most infectious diseases, COVID came along to remind us of how vulnerable we are. And while COVID has been terrible, it could have been much worse. It could have been a far more fatal virus.

The sense that all is not well with our world goes some way to explain why many people don't want children. The birth rate in Hong Kong, for example, is now at its lowest level since records began. In half of the world's countries, the birth rate is now below the level needed to replenish the population. Before I was ordained, I worked for a short time with Oxfam and two of the things we were most worried about while I was working for Oxfam were starvation and overpopulation. Now we're worried about obesity and underpopulation. It's ironic, to put it mildly.

Not only are young people not wanting to have children, rates of depression and mental illness are on the increase. And this is before we talk about artificial intelligence and the societal scale risks it poses to humanity. You will have read recently how those who invented AI have issued a statement saying, and I quote, ‘mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war’.

Jesus warned his disciples about these things. He told them they would happen, and he told them not to despair or lose hope because the end is not yet (Luke 21:9). These things, Jesus said, must happen. Most of us feel there is not much we can do about them anyway. But it doesn't stop us worrying. What I want to say this morning is that real though these existential threats may be, the real threat to each of us is much nearer home. The real threat is personal and individual. It comes from within us, not from outside. The threat is internal to us, not external. It is a threat that comes from the sin and unrighteousness in each one of us.

St Paul writes, ‘for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth’ (Romans 1:18). While we are still sinners, we are subject to the wrath of God. And so, we can have no hope, no hope, that is, until we find peace with God. The amazing thing, writes St Paul, is that it is God himself who has taken the initiative to make peace with him possible. St Paul writes, ‘but God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Romans 5:8).

This is the Gospel. We can have peace with God, we can be forgiven, but we need to be clear, there is nothing automatic about this, nor is it something that can be earned. St Paul tells us that it is only something we can receive, receive as a gift by faith in Christ. It is by faith that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, St Paul writes. But more than that, St Paul says, ‘we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.’ (Romans 5:11).

We boast in God! But here's the thing: we don't want to boast in God. June is ‘Pride Month’. I don't know if you've noticed, but it used to be called ‘Gay Pride Month’ or ‘LGBT Pride Month. It is interesting how ‘now ‘Pride Month’ has become much more. It is interesting how popular it is regardless of your sexuality.

‘Pride month’ has become popular with all people because of the ideology behind it. An ideology that is now the ideology of society, regardless of your sexuality. It is the dominant ideology, at least amongst us. It's an ideology in which we ourselves are central. And what's not to love about me? What's not to be proud about in me. It's my identity, my needs, my wants, and my desires that matter to me, and they should matter to you too. Pride in who I am is what counts. And in the same way that the letter in the middle of the word defines what sin is, so too the letter in the middle of the word ‘pride’ defines what pride is. It's I, me. The Bible calls it idolatry, and the wrath of God is being poured out on all those who in their idolatry suppress the truth by ungodliness and unrighteousness.

We can boast in ourselves all we like, but all we are doing is boasting ourselves to judgment and destruction. St Paul tells the Roman believers, and through them he tells us, that our hope lies in sharing the glory of God. St Paul writes, ‘much more surely, therefore, since we have now been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God’ (Romans 5:9).

Jesus in warning his disciples not to worry about all the existential threats they saw in the world around them, warned them instead to worry about the false prophets and messiahs who would lead them astray. Don't worry about the wars, don't worry about the earthquakes, don't worry about the plagues, but do worry about false teaching. Because false teaching is much more dangerous than earthquakes and famines, plagues, and wars.

Many are being led astray in our own day and led astray, sadly, by teachers in the church who tell us that we have nothing to worry about, that God's just too nice. He won't judge you. He won't get angry with you. He's too loving for that. But St Paul writes that he is not ashamed of the Gospel because it is the power of God to salvation (Romans 1:16) and the reason why the gospel is the power of God to salvation is because we need saving. Thank God, he has made that salvation possible. Possible to all of us, without exception, but only through faith in Christ.

It is through faith in Christ that we are justified and given hope, and it is through that faith that we will be saved. The hope we have in Christ is a real hope. St Paul writes, ‘and 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’(Romans 5:5).

May we find peace with God today through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, and may we too be able to boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.

Amen.

Introduction to Romans

The following is a more or less verbatim transcript of the sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity. I have lightly edited it for clarity, but it is not meant as a written version of the sermon. The sermon itself can be listened to wherever you get your podcasts (search for: Ross Royden).

The First Sunday after Trinity 2023

Romans 4:13-25

Facebook group members will know that my original intention for the next few weeks was to preach on St Matthew's Gospel. Over the past few years, I've preached sermons going through St Mark's Gospel, St Luke's Gospel, and St John's Gospel. It was my intention to preach this year through St Matthew's Gospel. However, as you will have noticed, our second reading as we enter the season of Trinity is from Romans. And we're going to be reading through Romans for our second reading from now until the middle of September, September 17th, to be precise. So, I have decided instead to preach on Romans!

I am not quite sure why the readings start today at chapter four of Romans, but the fact that they do means that this week I can introduce Romans and then start properly on Romans next week, because Romans chapter five, verse one is a much more natural place to start if you're not going to start at the beginning.

Well, if you do the maths, this means there's about 13 Sundays when we'll be having readings from Romans. And you may think, oh my goodness, that's a lot of sermons on Romans. If you are thinking like that, can I just mention Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, who was the minister of Westminster Chapel during the 20th century? On October 7th, 1955, he began a series of sermons on Romans on a Friday night. They attracted 500 to 600 people. Those were the days! He finished preaching on Romans twelve and a half years later, having preached 372 sermons. They've been edited and transcribed, and they're available to buy in 14 volumes.

So if you think 13 sermons isn't quite enough, you can go and get Martin Lloyd-Jones's sermons. Many of them are available online to listen to as well. If you do think I'm getting off a little bit lightly, I intend to do a series on a few chapters of Romans for Lent 2024. Whether or not we get anything like 500 people to them, I rather doubt.

St Paul's letter to the Romans is 7,114 words. St Paul averages 4,134 words in his letters. Seneca's longest letter is 2,495 words, so quite a bit short of the 7,000 plus words of Romans. St Paul's letter to the Romans, then, is long. But it's not long as we would think long. You can read it in a few minutes. It's shorter than a lot of reports that I'm sure many of us have to read in the course of our work. Although it is not long by our standards, the scholarly literature on Romans is immense, far beyond any one person's ability to get on top of. It's very easy, when seeing all that's been written about Romans, to feel bewildered and overwhelmed Because there are many different and conflicting interpretations of what St Paul meant by what he wrote in his letter to the Romans, scholars will argue at length even over single words.

Well, faced with all this, we need to remember that St Paul originally sent his letter to a church composed of many who were poor, illiterate, and uneducated. But he expected them to understand what he wrote. St Paul wrote Romans from Corinth in the winter at the end of the AD 50s. He spent three months there at Corinth before he went on to Jerusalem. So he had time to think and time to write. As he wrote, he wrote having been active in ministry as an apostle for some 25 years. He had already established churches in Galatia, in Philippi, in Thessalonica, in Corinth, in Ephesus, and these are just the ones we know about. What we have in Romans, then, is the mature reflection of somebody who had been engaged in ministry for a considerable period of time. The question is, of course, why did St Paul send the letter to Rome?

St Paul did not found the church in Rome. It wasn't even an associate of his who had established the church there. Indeed, as he sends the letter to Rome, he has to apologise for not having visited Rome before. So why go to all this trouble to send such an important letter to people many of whom he didn't know and a church which he had never visited? Well, the answer is that St Paul felt he had finished the work God had given him to do in the east of the Roman Empire and that he was now being called by God to go to the west of the Empire and specifically to Spain (Romans 15:24, 28).

St Paul's hope is that Rome will supply him with the material resources he needs for that mission to Spain and will also give him a base to work from. This reminds us, firstly, that St Paul wasn't the real founder of Christianity. Sometimes you hear people say that it was St Paul who founded the Church, or that St Paul was the second founder of Christianity. Well, it's true he was a major apostle. He founded many churches. But there were several churches he didn't establish. He didn't establish the church in Jerusalem, the church in Antioch, the church in Alexandria, the church in Rome, and others besides. St Paul was important, but not perhaps quite so significant as some people think.

Secondly, St Paul wasn't a lone ranger. He wasn't somebody who just went off on his own to do his own thing. He always worked in teams. In Romans 16, he sends greetings to people in the church in Rome whom he did know; people he had worked with in the past. Many of them are women. And this reminds us that St Paul wasn't hard to get on with.

You often hear people say he was a very difficult person to get to know. No, he wasn't. The people that he greets in Romans are people he's been imprisoned with, people he's been close to death with. And it also reminds us that he wasn't a misogynist; he wasn't someone who disliked women. The person who delivers the letter to the Romans to Rome and the person who first reads it out, because they wouldn't have been able to read it for themselves - there would have only been one copy to begin with - the person who reads the letter out to the church in Rome and the person who first teaches on Romans was Phoebe, a woman. We know that tells us in Romans chapter sixteen verse one.

Well, in Romans, St. Paul explains how, as an apostle to the Gentiles, he sees his mission to the Gentiles. He is sharing his understanding of the Gospel with them, so that they will know what it is they're getting into if they support him and get behind him in his mission to Spain. Now it was necessary for him to do this because there was significant disagreement in the Church over the Gentile mission. We forget that Jesus came unto his own, that is, he came to Jews, to the Jewish people. After Jesus' ascension, the church reached out to pagans, to Gentiles. But this raised questions over which there was a lot of argument, because Jesus hadn't left any guidance as to the basis upon which Gentiles were to be admitted to the church.

St Paul and the early church all agreed on the fundamentals of the faith. They agreed that the Scriptures were inspired by God. They agreed that God was the creator of the world and that he had sent his Son into the world. They agreed that Jesus had died, had risen, and had ascended. They agreed that Jesus had died for our sins. They agreed that we should worship around a common meal. They agreed on the sending of the Spirit and that the Spirit was active in their midst. All the things that we today would say in the Creeds, they largely would have agreed on. They might not have agreed on it in the same detail as we now have it, but they would have been united in the basics of their faith.

The problem was, what did this Jewish message about a Jewish Messiah mean for people who weren't Jews? Fundamental to the Church's faith was that Jesus was the Christ. So fundamental was it that the title ‘Christ’ became Jesus' name. Jesus the Christ became Jesus Christ. But what did it mean for a pagan to confess faith in a Jewish Messiah? And what did pagan Gentiles have to do when they did confess faith in this Jewish Messiah? Did they also have to keep God's Law as God had revealed it to his people in the Scriptures? Well, the obvious answer as many people saw it was, yes, of course the Gentiles had to keep God's commandments. Of course they had to keep God's Laws. Others said, well, yes, they do have to keep God's commandments, but there are some things that God asked us Jews to do that they don't have to do. So the answer is yes and no.

St Paul, however, said, no, they don't have to keep God's commandments; they don't have to keep God's laws. And that was controversial. St Paul's position eventually won the day, and we now accept it without question. So we don't keep the Sabbath holy; we do work on it. We do eat pork, at least most of us do. We do wear garments, perhaps are now wearing garments, of more than two fabrics. These are all things that are forbidden in the Old Testament Law. Men who become Christians today don't feel the need to be circumcised. So when Bishop Timothy leads the confirmation service in the Autumn, he won't be asking a doctor to conduct a physical examination of the men to make sure they're circumcised. As parents, we don't feel that as well as getting our children baptized, we also have to circumcise our sons.

But God said to Abraham that any male who wasn't circumcised could not be a member of the people of God (Genesis 17:14). So where did that leave the pagans, the Gentiles who were becoming members of God's people? The point is, St. Paul couldn't take Rome's support for his mission for granted. He had to explain himself, and he had to explain his understanding of what the Gospel meant for pagans. Well, his three months break in Corinth gave him the chance to explain in a careful and systematic way how he saw the Gospel for Gentiles.

He begins by telling the Roman Christians that he's looking forward to his visit to preaching the Gospel in Rome. And he's looking forward, he says, because the Gospel is the power of God to salvation to all who have faith to the Jew first but also to the Greek to the pagan to the Gentile. The reason he says the Gospel is the power of God to salvation is because in the Gospel is revealed the righteousness of God and it is revealed ‘ by faith for faith’(Romans 1:17). And St Paul will spend quite a lot of time in Romans explaining what he means by this.

Now when we hear that the Gospel is by faith, for faith, we probably don't have a problem with that. But for the first Christians who were Jews, the righteousness of God was revealed in the Law for people who kept the Law. Yes, they believed in Jesus the Messiah, but that didn't mean that they didn't also have to keep God's Law to be righteous. And people who didn't keep God's Law, by definition, weren't righteous. But St Paul says, no, the righteousness of God, what God wants, is by faith for faith.

Now, while we today probably don't think that ‘by faith for faith’ is too controversial, we may find the reason that St Paul gives for saying it's by faith for faith somewhat more disturbing. In the first four chapters of Romans, St. Paul explains why we need the righteousness of God by faith, and he explains why we all, without exception, need it.

Firstly, he says we need the righteousness of God because we as as human beings are unrighteousness. He begins his account of his Gospel, not with the love of God, but with the wrath of God. ‘For the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven’, he writes, ‘against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness of human beings who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth’(Romans 1:18-19). I don't know if you're one of those parents who produces portfolios for your children. In them you display, quite rightly, certificates showing their achievements as well as pictures of them doing what they love and what they're good at. And you submit them as a way of showing the school that you're submitting the portfolio to a feeling of what your child is like, what the child looks like as a person. As adults, we do it with a CV when we apply for a job. We list all our achievements, all our skills, and so on and so forth, to show future employers why they would be stupid not to employ us.

St Paul in the first chapters of Romans does that with the human race. Only the portfolio of the human race is one of failure, wickedness, and rebellion against God. St Paul says that human beings are dead in sin, disobedient to God, and as a consequence doomed under the judgment of God. In other words, St Paul concludes that the human situation is a desperate one. There is none who is righteous, no, not one, all have sinned, he writes, and come short of the glory of God (Romans 3:10, 23).

‘Diversity, equality, and inclusiveness’ are the key words of our generation. Companies all want to make their mission statement DEI: diverse, equitable, and inclusive. St Paul begins his account of his Gospel by saying the Gospel meets that criteria. It meets that criteria because no matter who we are, we are all equal in sin, and all alike included under God's judgement. We are equal in sin and facing the wrath of God. All alike; no exceptions.

Now, St Paul doesn't write all this to make the Romans feel bad and he doesn't write it to make us feel bad, although, it has to be said, if we haven't felt bad, then it's unlikely we have ever understood the Gospel. All are sinners, all need saving, all can only be saved the same way. And to be saved we need to be righteous, but no one is. So we need the righteousness of God. We are ourselves are not righteous, we need God's righteousness. St Paul writes that the righteousness of God is revealed in the Gospel through faith for all who have faith, not just the Jew but also the pagan. Which pagans? All pagans! The Gospel is through faith for all who have faith.

Having explained this in chapters one to three, St Paul, in our reading today in chapter 4, gives the example of Abraham. Now this is a key example because the Jewish people saw Abraham as the father of the people of God, and St. Paul agrees that Abraham is the father of the people of God, but says St Paul, the people of God are those who share the faith of Abraham and those who trust in God in the way Abraham trusted in God. And crucially, writes St Paul in our reading, Abraham had faith in God before he was circumcised and before he did anything that could be counted as good. He trusted in God while still ungodly, unrighteous and as a sinner.

And so to be part of the people of God, people who look to Abraham as their father, St Paul writes, we need the same trust in God and in God alone that Abraham had. Now St Paul will go on in Romans, as we will see, to unpack the implications of this and to answer the questions which he knew would arise from it. But he wants to make sure that we all have understood from the word go what it is he's saying.

The Gospel is for all who have faith in Christ, but it is only by faith, not by works, not by good works, not by works of the Law, not by keeping God's commandments, but solely by trusting in God and in what God has done for us in Christ. This, says St Paul, is the Gospel he is going to Spain to preach. This is the gospel he wants the Roman Christians to get behind. All of which is great. But the problem for us with all this is that it's not how we think today.

I don't think many of us worry too much over whether we're righteous or not or whether we keep the Law or not. I doubt that many of us worry about whether or not God is going to punish us or not. Not only is the language that St Paul uses not our language, his concerns are not our concerns. Preachers like me attempt to put what St Paul has written into the language of our day. We try to show why his concerns should be our concerns. But we're hampered by all the arguments there are over what St Paul meant and by the divisions in the church historically over what he meant.

It is no wonder that people say, isn't it all too much trouble? Ross, you'd been better to have stuck with St Matthew! At least there are some good stories in the gospels. But St Paul writes that the Gospel is the power of God to salvation. Well, this makes it something that matters. It also means that the Gospel is not just another creed that we believe in or code that we follow. It is something we can have confidence in, but it is also something we ignore at our peril.

In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus says that he has come not to call the righteous but sinners. And St Paul tells us, that's you and that's me. So hearing the Gospel message to sinners isn't just a nice idea, something to do on a few Sundays in 2023. What we are dealing with is a message that St Paul claims is absolutely relevant to us, to our life, and to our our future. Jesus said he came to call sinners. It is in the Gospel that Jesus calls sinners to him today. And so Paul tells us that the call of Jesus can be answered by having faith and trust in him, by trusting that he will heal us and forgive us our sins in the way the woman with the hemorrhage trusted, that simply touching his cloak would give her healing.

Our faith can make us well too. We are, of course, free to turn away like the Pharisees did. We are free to get on with other things we think more important and find more interesting. But if we like St Paul, believe that the Gospel is the power of God to salvation, we will want more than 13 sermons. 372 sermons won't be enough because we will want to make absolutely sure we have understood it and have responded to it.

St Paul writes, ‘I'm not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God to salvation, to the Jew first, but also to the Greek, for in it the righteousness of God is revealed, by faith, for faith’.

May we be amongst those who have faith and are saved.

Amen.