Kalamazoo Mennonite Fellowship
June 7, 2009
Romans 4,5
Will Fitzgerald
Reports on our prayers for each other?
There is a lot happening in Chapters 4 and 5 of Romans, and we won’t have time to look at it all. But I’m curious … what did you notice of special import? What are some of the themes that are covered?
Let’s start with Adam. No, let’s start with ourselves. No, let’s start with our parents. At some point, we each need to decide not to blame our parents for the ways we get messed up—this is a healthy thing to do, I think. But we can’t deny that a lot of our messes are due to our parents. Even well-meaning parents (like my parents, or, say, me) cause their children grief along with good things at times, of course. Now is not the time to talk about specifics, but I think you know what I mean. Many of our personal, physical, sexual, spiritual, economic, psychological failures are originally our parents fault (we get to place our own particular spin).
And who messed up our parents? Our grandparents, of course, who were messed up by our great-grandparents, who were messed up by our great-great-grandparents, and so on. Plus some bad aunts and uncles, and great aunts, great-great uncles … Eventually, we start running out of different ancestors, and eventually our mess is originally due to our first parents, to the first human.
This, by the way, is a place where people who take the first chapters of Genesis literally and recent scientific research agree. Lying, betrayal, false thinking, sexual misbehavior all seem to be part and parcel of what it (currently) means to be human—or even a close genetic relation such as apes or chimpanzees. But our scripture puts it more simply and more directly: “sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned.” Whatever you want to call this—original sin, “the human stain,” something like a spread disease, it all goes back through our parents, back to our first parents. As a result, says, the Bible, Death is king: “death exercises dominion” over us.
So, what was God’s reaction to all this? God chooses to forgive the sins of humanity in a very particular way: He calls Abraham. Genesis 17:1-4:
When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty;walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.” 3 Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations.
As NT Wright and, I sure, others have noticed, the mention of Abraham in Romans is not just to chose someone at random whom God forgave. Rather, it is through this Abraham that God chose to work: to make a covenant with, and give specific instructions to; that is, the Law or Torah. Abraham is more than just a really good example, he is the first of a multitude that God calls back to God’s self.
Paul, of course, is talking about the place of the Torah in Abraham’s life. Torah provides three things: and inside and an outside, how to behave once you’re inside, and how to get over the barrier. Those inside were the Jews; those outside were the nation (but even in the beginning of the story, God is making provision to expand his people). Circumcision is, for males, the first entry way to the Jewish life. Other law told the Jews how to act as Jews: keeping kosher, a particular kind of priesthood, etc. But furthermore, how to act more morally than “the nations” do: the things mentioned, for example, in the 10 commandments.
Notice that the Law can be divided into at least two types: the moral code and what some call cultural markers. The Jews were commanded to have no other God but God; they were commanded to not lie, and to honor their parents; these commands were different in kind, in general, from those outward signs that distinguished how the Jews dressed and ate. These were a little bit like “gang signs” for the Jews: eating kosher and circumcision are the clearest examples of this. It wasn’t that eating shellfish, for example, is inherently wrong; just that one of the ways to signify being a Jew was—and is, to some extent—by not eating shellfish.
Paul makes a big deal about this. Abraham is declared righteous by God before he was circumcised. God chose Abraham, Abraham believed God’s promise “and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” He crossed the border from being a non-Jew to being a Jew not by being circumcised, but by trusting God’s promise to him. He was circumcised because he was a Jew; not in order to become a Jew.
Furthermore, Abraham’s belief makes him “the ancestor of all who believe.” Something new was happening in the world; God was starting a new nation that, in the fulness of time, would encompass not only those who were physically descended from Abraham, but those who were his spiritual descendants as well. God promised Abraham that he would be the father of many nations. And, physically, he was the first Jew and the father of all Arabs. But more importantly, this was the start of God’s new covenant that would eventually make Abraham the ancestor of all who believe.
In a very similar way that we can blame our parents for a lot of our mess, we also can be grateful for our spiritual parents. I think, for example, of my first Christian teacher, Rev. Larry Nelson, the pastor of the First Church of Wellston back when I was in high school. He helped me understand so much about faith and ‘the faith.’ And Rev. Nelson had his own spiritual parents, who had their own spiritual parents—going all the way back to Abraham, the “ancestor of all who believe.”
And yet, “the free gift is not like the trepass.” It’s not exactly as if there were two great human tendencies: sin and belief which are at war in the human spirit; if we side with “belief” we win, if we choose “sin” we lose. That is, this might be the case, but the truth is that we have to admit that we are, in the end, powerless over our mess (as the first step of the twelve step process states). There’s a war, and we always choose the losing side. We need some kind of bridge from the losing side to the winning side.
But at just the right time, God sent Jesus Christ into the world, and it is Jesus who reconciles us to God; Jesus is the bridge. There are rich images in these chapters about how this happens:
The most important practical effect of this is, of course, that we now can have life, now and eternally, through Jesus Christ. Grace and righteousness are offered to us in Christ Jesus; it is our joy to take God up on this offer. “Since we are justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have accessed to this grace in which we stand, and we boast of sharing the glory of God.”
But we still have a mess to clean up in our own lives, and we have to deal with the mess all around us. I think this is part of what Paul is saying that we “suffer:” we still have the natural consequences of all those bad choices of ours and others, with a few more added in, because we now can be persecuted for following this Jesus.
Rather than get depressed over this situation, we read, “We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 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.”
Rather than get depressed over the situation, we start the long process of obedience: we go from an initial trust to a steadier and more and more consistent enduring faithfulness. We endure, and God’s promise is that our characters will improve. And if our characters improve, we can see this as a proof that our situation is hopeful: we can feel God’s love in us.
Remember that one of the themes of Romans is “the obedience of faith.” The chapters we have looked at this morning spell out quite a bit of the details of what “the obedience of faith” is about. We start with a trust that God’s free gift of salvation is given to us in Jesus Christ, and we continue to trust God for this. We are convinced that God has acted on our behalf, and remain convinced that God is working in us. We are faithful to obey the core commands of God, becoming more and more consistent in our faithfulness.
The next section of Romans—chapters six through eight—describe a bit more of how this happens, and it will be to this that we turn next.