March 3, 2013 | 4:00 p.m. | Third Sunday in Lent

To Keep Us Together

The Third in a Series of Sermons on the Apostle Paul

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Romans 1:16–17
Romans 3:21–31

What would you say if I were to tell you this: Christian faith isn’t all that complicated. God’s message amounts to the idea that the things in life that keep us apart from one another are not God’s intention, and throughout history, God has been working to get us to live together and to love one another, and until such a time as we learn to do that, God will never give up on us.

My hunch is that you would say, “That’s nice, Adam. Great message. But what does it really have to do with me?” In order to answer that, I would probably extend to you some pastoral care; I would ask you some questions. I would try to find out what things in your life are separating you from others or from God. What kinds of things do you wish or hope will be reconciled at some point in this life? Maybe it’s a broken relationship with a parent or sibling or child. Maybe it’s anger over a disease or accident that changed your life. Maybe you are consistently troubled by the disparities between rich and poor or between black and white in our country. Or maybe it is the divisions between Protestants and Catholics or Christians and Muslims throughout the world that really causes you angst. We could have a conversation about any of these divisive elements of human life, and that conversation would get complicated. And because I am a human being, limited in my intellect, at some point my ability to explain and solve your problem would break down. But I would still never cease to believe the starting point: that Christian faith isn’t all that complicated. God’s message amounts to the idea that the things in life that keep us apart from one another are not God’s intention, and throughout history, God has been working to get us to live together and to love one another, and until such a time as we learn to do that, God will never give up on us.

Speaking of things that get complicated, if you are anything like me, you got about a sentence and a half into tonight’s reading before you began to lose your focus because of how complicated it is. What is Paul talking about? “The righteousness of God has been disclosed . . . ,” “in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed . . . ,” “a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law . . .” So many terms you and I don’t usually use, all cobbled together. I want a glossary, to begin with, for “justification, salvation, righteousness”—just to name a few. Then I want one of those earpieces everyone has at the U.N. so that maybe Paul’s message will come through in a language I can understand.

Admittedly, I often avoid preaching on Paul because of the abstractness of these discourses. I much prefer to look in the Old Testament or the Gospels for a story to talk about. You, the congregation, may not be familiar with the story, but at least there’s a plot. Well, there was a plot for Paul as well. There is a back story that helps us understand what Paul is up to when he rambles on about justification and righteousness and the law. I’m going to give you a taste of what that background was, hopefully without complicating things even further, so that we can get back to what Paul really thought faith was about.

As we’ve talked about in previous weeks, Paul went through an important change of heart during his young life. He was trained as a Pharisee, a strong adherent of the Jewish law, and he became a persecutor of others, especially followers of Jesus. At one point he had an amazing experience of Christ’s presence with him, and out of that experience he changed his mind. Though he remained a Jew, he went out talking about Jesus to anyone who would listen.

If you know your Middle Eastern geography, Paul traveled north from Jerusalem through modern-day Syria, stopping in Damascus and Antioch—major Roman cities of the day. He eventually took a boat over to Cyprus and then made his way into central Turkey and an area called Galatia. This part of Turkey is, by all accounts, still one of the most isolated places in the world, with unbelievable mountain passes and rock formations; it would have been utterly impossible to travel during the winter in those ancient days; most people stayed where they were. So Paul went from big cities, where there would have been people from lots of different religions and ethnic backgrounds, to isolated places, where few people would ever have even met a Jew like himself. And in all of these places, he talked to people about Jesus.

In the isolated places, Paul was faced with a difficulty that faces many of us: how do you talk about your faith with people who don’t share your background? Paul was Jewish, and Jesus was Jewish, but the people in these villages were not; many of them had probably never even met a Jew.

These people Paul met didn’t understand any of the laws he was referencing or the stories from the Old Testament he told. For us, it would be like sharing Christianity with people who have never heard any stories in the Bible or had never attended a service in a church. What would you say?

Paul admits that he’s faced struggle as he’s tried to figure out how to express himself; he talks about that in a lot of places—the persecutions he faced. Here he expresses that he won’t let the difficulties of the conversation keep him from talking. He offers what many would call a summary of his thought: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel. It is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” Paul knew that he had a good story to share with people, but lately it had become complicated. He started visiting all these isolated towns where he had to find innovative ways to express his thoughts about God. And eventually he developed an argument that made great sense to him, an argument that was probably helpful to the people in his context and an argument that, if you read very carefully and study the Bible diligently, you and I can come to understand. But on a first look, this explanation Paul gives in Romans 3 is very confusing. That’s why I began the reading tonight where Paul starts: “I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”

Paul was a Jew; he knew this whole story about how, throughout time, God created the world, loved people even when they turned away and made mistakes, and sent Jesus Christ into the world so that not only the Jews, but everyone, would know of God’s good intentions for this world. And when Paul went to these little towns that had never heard that story, he wanted them all to know that it wasn’t too late for them to hear it and that our different backgrounds and the divisions between us need not keep us apart.

Out of Paul’s experience of dealing with all different kinds of people, Paul concludes that the differences we face, the boundaries we must cross to get to one another, are not God’s intention; they are human creations. The Jews might have been first in the Bible, but now Paul says there is an opportunity for others to hear the same promise: that God made us to care for one another and for this world, and that Jesus Christ was sent so that, even after people fell short of following God’s law, there is still a way to salvation for all who seek it.

I told you that I prefer to talk about stories from the Bible in order to illustrate a point. There is a story that Jesus tells in the New Testament that sums up this idea from Paul rather nicely; it’s found in the Gospel according to Matthew. In this story, a man who owns a vineyard goes out early in the morning to hire workers. He agrees to pay them a fair wage for a day’s work. He goes out again at 9:00 a.m. to hire more workers, then again at noon, and again at three, and then at 5:00 p.m. when there is only one hour of work left. At the end of the day, he pays them. And they discover that everyone gets paid the same amount whether they worked all day or just for one hour. The folks who worked all day are obviously furious, and they complain to the owner, who says, “I am doing you no wrong—did you not agree to the daily wage? Am I not allowed to do what I please with what belongs to me?” Obviously the lessons are many, among them that we should not begrudge people who come along late into the life of faith, but also that whenever we find our way into a relationship with God, we should count ourselves blessed and see what a miracle it is that it is never too late for us. In a way so contrary to what the divisiveness of the world seems to suggest, in God’s story, no preference is shown for one group of people over another. God’s gifts are for us all.

What would you say if I were to tell you this: “Christian faith isn’t all that complicated; God’s message amounts to the idea that the things in life that keep us apart from one another were not God’s intention, and throughout history, God has been working to get us to live together and to love one another, and until such a time as we learn to do that, God will never give up on us”?

Amen.