Romans 8:28-34
28 We know that God works all things together for good for the ones who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose. 29 We know this because God knew them in advance, and he decided in advance that they would be conformed to the image of his Son. That way his Son would be the first of many brothers and sisters. 30 Those who God decided in advance would be conformed to his Son, he also called. Those whom he called, he also made righteous. Those whom he made righteous, he also glorified.
31 So what are we going to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? 32 He didn’t spare his own Son but gave him up for us all. Won’t he also freely give us all things with him?
33 Who will bring a charge against God’s elect people? It is God who acquits them. 34 Who is going to convict them? It is Christ Jesus who died, even more, who was raised, and who also is at God’s right side. It is Christ Jesus who also pleads our case for us. (Common English Bible)
“With Sighs too Deep for
Words: Verse-by-Verse Through Romans 8,” Week Four
The
anguish of the man’s words could almost seep through the pages—if I had read
his words on physical pages, rather than digitally, something I am sure he
would’ve thought an incomprehensible innovation back in October of 1553.
That
month, a man denounced for his beliefs by both Protestants and Catholics alike,
Michael Servetus, was executed for heresy—burned at the stake, as was the fate
of many heretics then, so that there would be no remains. Servetus was prosecuted in no small part by
the titanic church reformer John Calvin, and it was Calvin’s role in this whole
sordid affair of putting another man to death for his beliefs that caused
Sebastian Castellio such great anguish and lament.
You
see, Protestants like Castellio and Calvin had spent the past several decades
being persecuted for their belief in the Reformation—they were excommunicated,
exiled, and in some cases, executed themselves, just like Michael
Servetus. And so Castellio could not
bear seeing someone who ought to have known exactly how it felt to be so
forsaken turn around and treat another man thusly.
Castellio’s
lament exists today in the form of a book, De
Haereticis, an sint Persequendi, which roughly translated, means, “Should
Heretics be Persecuted?” In it, he
writes in part:
When Servetus fought with
reason and writings, he should have been repulsed by reason and writings…it is
unchristian to use arms against those who have been expelled from the Church,
and to deny them rights common to all mankind.
Notice
that in making this argument, Castellio is declining to refer to Servetus as a
heretic—he has come to believe that there is no such thing, objectively, as a
heretic, and that a heretic only exists in the mind of another person—that is,
if I disagree with your interpretation of God or the Bible, I must be a
heretic. Not because I am one, but
because you claim I am one.
It
really requires you to change the way you look at people who don’t think the
way you do. And we must in fact change
the way we look at such folk, for as Paul writes in today’s passage, it is God
who acquits His elect. And if His elect
contains people you or I may not deign to call Christian, or lovers of Jesus
Christ, or people of good faith, then I’m afraid that we are in for a massive
shock in heaven.
This
is a new sermon series that will take us all the way to Advent—otherwise known
as the Christmas season (holy cow). Of
course, we’ll be talking about the Christmas story then rather than now, which
is still firmly rooted in the Halloween-and-Thanksgiving season. In that spirit of not only looking at what we
have to be thankful for but also what cause we have to be loving and to experience
such great love, we’ll be taking on a verse-by-verse treatment of the eighth
chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Why this particular chapter?
Well, for one thing, it simply has been a while since we’ve had a series
on Paul or his letters, and much like the USDA’s ubiquitous (when I was a kid,
anyways) food pyramid, I strive to provide a balanced preaching diet for y’all;
I’m like a spiritual lunch lady, doling out the religious Sloppy Joes.
However,
Paul is also a very dense, sometimes esoteric, theologian, especially in
Romans, but when it comes to actually talking about the nature of God’s love,
Paul’s prose genuinely begins to soar, and we’ll be spending this plus the next
four Sundays trying to unlock exactly what the Holy Spirit has placed within
Paul for this extraordinary chapter, beginning three weeks ago with the first
eleven verses, and then last week with the subsequent five, all of which dealt
with the nature of the Spirit and its fostering of selflessness rather than our
prior and inherent selfishness. Last
week, we thematically moved on to the Spirit’s relationship not just with us as
individuals, but with all of creation, with “sighs too deep for words,” as the
New Revised Standard Version translates verse 26, from which this series got
its title, and today, we arrive at the start of Paul’s conclusions to all of
these different things, and he covers a ton of ground in doing so!
In
reading this series of verses, it is quite easy to in fact come away thinking
like Calvin—doesn’t “God knew them in advance…those whom God decided in advance
would be conformed to His Son, He also called” in verses 29 and 30 sound an
awful lot like the Calvinist notion of predestination, which posits that our
ultimate fates are sealed before we are ever even born, and that there is
nothing we can do to change that fate?
It sure sounds like that’s the case.
Except,
lend an ear to what Paul is saying in the verse before all of that, in verse
28, that begins this passage: “We know God works all things together for good
for the ones who love God.” That love is
an active choice we make, we choose to love as we choose to do anything
else. We can elect to be loving or
unloving, faithful or unfaithful, and so we can choose whether to love God as
well.
If
we do, then what Paul says becomes true: God works all things together for
good. And that good, of course, is God’s
grace and the opportunity of salvation, extended to all to accept. But we cannot take credit for choosing to
accept it, which is where we often run into trouble. From Bible scholar Stephen Finlan in his book
The Apostle Paul and the Pauline
Tradition:
“Paul does not want
anyone to take credit for his or her own salvation. The language of being called gives God the
glory. Paul is not denying freedom of
choice. He is constantly exhorting
people to choose rightly…what is highlighted in these verses is not
predestination, but destiny: Paul is not looking back, but looking ahead to the
perfecting and glorifying of those who accept God’s offer.”
We
aren’t supposed to take credit for our own salvation, but what we often do is
precisely that: not necessarily by patting ourselves on the backs for being
saved, but by condemning, ostracizing, and really until rather recently in
Christianity’s history, executing those who we label as “unsaved.”
People
like Michael Servetus. People like the
citizens of Paris this past Friday.
People like the Syrians—refugees fleeing with their lives, and their
now-dead friends and loved ones they have had to leave behind. People like our brothers and sisters in God
across time, across the earth, who have faced untold, unspeakable, unimaginable
pain and anguish at the hands of those who deigned to take upon themselves the
role of God the judge and cast out the other because they weren’t like us.
Who
convicts us, indeed. We convict ourselves
by own actions, there is almost no need for God to convict us further, although
He surely could.
But
God doesn’t. God reaches to save before
to judge God reaches for salvation before condemnation, for reconciliation
before estrangement, and for love before damnation.
Can
we actually do likewise? More to the
point, dare we do likewise? Because we
surely can, we simply choose not to.
And
by so doing, like I said, we convict ourselves.
By convicting others as heretics, we convict ourselves as heretics, as
blaspheming pretenders to the name of God that is not ours to claim.
Which
is precisely why we need, so deeply need, desperately require the Risen Christ
to plead for us, because there are real, genuine crimes against life, against
humanity, taking place right now, not just in Paris but also in Lebanon and in
Kenya where hundreds likewise died in terrorist attacks over the weekend, and
if we are going to instead try to convict a coffee company for plain red holiday
cups, or a school district for asking a coach to pray privately rather than on
the 50-yard line, then we need the Risen Christ to intervene on our behalves,
because we have so lost the plot that the faith of people around us is at
stake.
Don’t
believe me? Look at the massive backlash
against the Christians who decided that those plain red Starbucks cups were
somehow persecution. We knew at the
beginning of the week that there were way more important things than disposable
coffee cups, and what has just happened in Paris, and in Beirut, and at Garissa
University in Kenya, only confirms that immutable reality.
And
if we ignore that reality, in favor of the persecution complexes that we have
built up for ourselves, while people are dying at the hands of religious
fundamentalist violence, and while prejudices and bigotry are being built
against entire peoples as a result of that violence, then it can only be the
grace and love of Christ Himself that can indeed save us, for we have shown
that we simply cannot.
Which
is, in the end, I suppose, why we should be so heartened, so encouraged, so
reassured in God’s grace for each of us.
But
I gotta tell you, after Paris, and Beirut, and Garissa, it’s hard to be. It’s really, really hard.
Because
it is a lot easier to be like John Calvin and want to fight fire with fire.
But
that will only further the laments of the Castellios of the world who have seen
the better versions of ourselves and are desperately calling us towards that
reality.
Let
us try to end that lament here, now, even if it won't change our reality today in the hopes that it will change our children's reality tomorrow. That may be who we end up doing this for--not ourselves, but for our children, and grandchildren, on the far-off idealistic notion that they may one day live in a peaceful world.
So let us try to end that lament now, before another Paris occurs, for it is God
who demands such goodness from us, even when we do not feel we are capable of
it.
But
we are. In some deep, far-off corner of
our souls, we have always been. Because
Christ pleads for us, and to us, every single day.
Thanks
be to God for that. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
November
15, 2015
