Flipping Off the Powers
You can tell how Rome understood the key conviction of Christianity from what Rome required as proof of its renunciation.
Romans 8.31-39
COVID felled me last week, and I was not able to continue our preaching series through Romans 8. I did muster some notes and the skeleton of a sermon before I got sick.
I know everyone prefers the Holy Grail. But have you seen the Monty Python movie, The Life of Brian? Anyone? It's set in first century Judea where the Jewish opposition to the Romans is hopelessly split into factions. And there's a scene in the movie where one of the splinter groups has a secret meeting where a vigilante soldier asks, “What have the Romans ever done for us?”
And one by one, his fellow freedom fighters grudgingly admit a host of benefits the Romans have brought the Jews. But Reggie, their leader, remains unconvinced. Reggie finally demands, “All right, all right, but apart from sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order— besides all of that, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
To which the reply comes, “Brought peace.”
And Reggie has no answer.
“What have the Romans ever done for us?”
“Brought peace.”
Not only did the Romans bring the world sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order and peace by the sword, Rome also brought to the world a clear understanding of what it means to be a Christian.
Caesar not only knew how to dig a sewer, pitch an aqueduct (and make a killer salad), Caesar knew— better than most Christians today— the fundamental claim of Christianity.
Around the year 112, a Roman civil servant named Pliny, who was governor of Bithynia in what is modern Turkey, wrote a letter to the Caesar of his day, the Roman emperor Trajan. In the letter, Pliny sought to offer explanation to Caesar for how he decided to deal with these strangers and dissidents he'd encountered, these people called Christians.
Some of these Christians Pliny punished.
Some he tortured and executed.
Still others, those who were Roman citizens like Paul, he transferred back to Rome.
But not every Christian kept the faith. Not a few offered to go cold turkey and give up the faith in the face of persecution. What about them? What did Pliny do with them? What did Rome require of them?
You can tell how Rome understood the key conviction of Christianity from what Rome required as proof of its renunciation.
To prove to Caesar that you forsook your Christian faith, the emperor required that you offer a sacrifice of meat and wine and incense. In other words, a sacrifice of worship— a kind of anti-baptism. Offer a sacrifice of worship before a statue of the emperor. And while you did so, before the image of the emperor, you needed to confess, to profess that Caesar is Lord.
And notice Pliny didn't invite renunciants to confess Caesar is Lord in private. Pliny didn't ask them to make a personal profession. Pliny didn't invite them to close their eyes and bow their heads and raise their hands if they accepted the lordship of Caesar in their hearts.
No, Pliny required a public display of loyalty.
Pliny insisted upon a public pledge.
What Rome required of Christians to renounce their faith points out exactly what Christians affirmed when they converted to the faith.
Pliny saw with cold clarity what many Christians today miss: that loyalty and obedience to Jesus as sovereign Lord is not only the climax of what God has done in cross and resurrection, confessing Jesus Christ is Lord is also the fundamental claim of Christianity.
Just so it's not just roads and sewers and salads Rome has brought us.
It's also a clear-eyed understanding that the core of being a Christian is pledging allegiance to Jesus as Lord.
What Rome required for Christians to exit their faith is exactly what St. Paul says is required for Christians to enter it. Two chapters after this passage, Paul writes that if you confess with your lips that Jesus Christ is Lord, then you will be saved. And the word Paul uses for confess is homologio. It means literally a public declaration of allegiance.
And notice—
Paul doesn't say that if you confess that Jesus fulfills the promise to Abraham, then you'll be saved. Paul doesn't write that if you confess that Jesus is God in the flesh, then you'll be saved. Paul doesn't even say that in order to be saved, you must confess that Jesus died for your sins.
No, he doesn't say you need to confess Jesus as your substitute.
He doesn't say you need to confess Jesus Christ as a sacrifice.
As a savior.
As a son of man or a son of God.
Paul gives an altogether different kind of altar call.
When it comes to salvation, Paul focuses squarely on a single specific confession, the lordship of Jesus Christ.
Because...
Because that's the chapter in the salvation story we all now occupy. That's the point in the Apostles Creed where we all live. The Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and our Reconciliation to God— those are all past perfect events.
But right now...present tense…
Jesus sits at the right hand of God and to him the Father has given dominion over all of the earth. He is now Lord. If you confess, if you publicly pledge your allegiance to Jesus Christ as Lord, then you will be saved, says.
Rome helps us see that Christianity is about choosing.
Choosing between the rival claims upon us.
If Pliny understood that to swear Caesar is Lord was to forswear Jesus as Lord, then the logic follows: to repent and confess that Jesus is Lord is to reject and condemn other Lords.
And Pliny points out— you cannot offer allegiance in a vacuum.
To be allegiant is always and at once to be against.
It's what we rehearse in baptism.
Affirmation is always a simultaneous renunciation.
That is the first question we ask at the font.
And the very act of pledging allegiance presumes other powers contending and vying for your loyalty. The word allegiance is unintelligible without an enemy. “If God is for us, who is against us?” Paul asks. “Who will bring any charge against us? Who will condemn? Who will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus?”
No matter how you're accustomed to hearing that crescendo in Romans chapter 8, Paul's not asking rhetorical questions.
It's more like a fill in the blank.
The apostle Paul has already supplied you with the answers.
“If God is for us, who is against us?”
Come on. That's not even a Tuesday crossword kind of question.
“If God is for us, who is against us?”
The power of sin. That's who.
Sin with a capital S. An alien enslaving power whose power Paul has already told us we are all under and from whom not one of us is able to free ourselves.
“Who will bring any charge against us? Who is to condemn us?”
Again, it's not a rhetorical question.
The answer is obvious to anyone who's been listening to Paul. The law will bring charges against us. Or, if it's easier for you to understand, instead of law, call it scripture or religion.
Scripture will condemn us. Religion, the law which Paul has already told us the power of sin, has hijacked and now wields like a weapon against us so that now the very gift God gave to make us righteous only indicts us. All of us. All fall short. Only indicts us as unrighteous. Indicts us even as ungodly.
“Who will separate us from the love of God and Christ Jesus?”
The answer, obvious to anyone who's been following Paul's argument thus far, the answer is Death.
Death will separate us from the love of God and Christ Jesus. Death with a capital D, a power, Paul says, that from Adam onward advanced through all the world like an invading army.
Death with a capital D, a power that Paul makes synonymous with the power of sin, both of which Paul reveals at the end of this letter refer to the power of Satan, whom Paul calls at the end of his summary of the gospel message, he calls it the Last Enemy. He writes, “For Christ our Lord must reign until he's put all his enemies under his feet. The Last Enemy to be destroyed is death.”
“Who is against us? Who will condemn us? Who will separate us?”
They're not rhetorical questions. In fact, the very reason Paul testifies that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus is because there are powers in the world at work against us to do just that.
The Power of Sin.
The Power of Death.
The Power of the Law.
Call it what you will.
All of whom— pay attention now— all of whom Paul has personified in his letter as reigning monarchs, as exercising dominion, as lords.
Kurios.
The same word Paul uses when he says, if you publicly pledge your allegiance to Jesus Christ as kurios, then you'll be saved.
See—
Pliny understood that to pledge allegiance to Jesus Christ as Lord was to be against another Lord. That to accept Jesus Christ's Lordship was to reject another's Lordship. But Pliny didn't understand what Paul saw. Caesar, Rome, they're just manifestations of a bigger, more cosmic enemy contending against God and all of creation to separate us from God.
Here at the end of chapter eight, after Paul has been speaking about life and the Spirit and the freedom we have in Christ, after Paul has led you to believe that all his talk about Sin and Death and Satan is behind you, here at the end of Romans chapter eight, Paul just doubles back again. But this time he spins it out onto a wider horizon, naming the circumstances where the lords of Sin and Death manifest themselves in the world.
Hardship.
Injustice.
Persecution.
Famine.
Nakedness.
War.
Paul asks, “Can these separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus?”
Because hardship and persecution and injustice and famine and nakedness and war, they don't just happen, Paul says.
They are the ways that the rival lords of Sin and Death work to do just that.
Separate us.
Divide us, by doubt and despair, from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
Because it's easy.
It's easy to look at hardship and persecution and injustice and famine and nakedness and war.
It's easy to look and become disillusioned.
It’s easy to look at the world and wonder, “What has God ever done for us?”
Hardship and persecution and injustice and famine and nakedness and war— they are the statues before whom a power who is not God would have us bow in allegiance.
Hardship and persecution and injustice and famine and nakedness and war, they don't just happen.
Instead, they are the ways that the rival lords of Sin and Death tempt us to break faith, break allegiance, and to become loyal to them.
“What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? Who will bring any charge against us? It is God who makes right. Who is to condemn? Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or war? No. In all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
If you just stick these verses from Romans chapter 8 onto a Hallmark card, if you simply gild it with sentimentality at a memorial service, you completely miss Paul's point.
As New Testament professor Dr. Beverly Gaventa points out, these verses in Romans chapter 8, it's trash-talk.
It's Paul trash-talking the powers.
It's Paul talking smack against the Power of Sin.
It's trash-talk.
Paul widens the horizon to encompass all of creation. And there Paul sees all the tragic circumstances in which we live. And he sees behind them the work of enemies. Not enemies like Caesar or Trajan or Pliny, but the Enemy. And against the Enemy, the Power of Sin and Death, Paul musters up as much confidence as he can for his church at Rome. And he declares defiantly that God will have the last word.
It's Paul encouraging allegiance to Christ in the face of rival lords who would lure your loyalty away.
Because— let's face it— it seems like they're in charge.
It's trash-talk.
It's Paul shaking his fist at the Power of Sin and Death.
It's Paul talking smack at persecution and injustice and famine and nakedness and war.
It's Paul staring them down, thumbing his nose, and giving them all the finger.
It's trash-talk.
“None of you— not death, not famine, not racism, not war, not poverty, not addiction…none of you,” Paul says, “has the power to separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”
“No power has the power like Christ's power,” Paul says literally in the Greek.
Or as we might say today, “you're going down.”
If hardship and persecution and injustice and famine and nakedness and war and all the rest, if they are the ways that Sin and Death seek to lure your loyalty away from Jesus the Lord, then that means to give in to despair or disillusionment, to lose heart— it is to give your allegiance to rival lords who have been working against you for that very conclusion.
You pledge allegiance to Jesus Christ, therefore, not with your head looking up, but with your eyes fixed straight ahead at the world as it really is.
And you pledge allegiance to Jesus Christ, not with your hand over your heart, but with your fist shaking at the sky and your middle finger sticking straight out, flipping off the powers and trash talking all the other lords who would pull you away from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
My prayers, too, for your healing. Thanks for the strong and enlightening insights on this text.
Powerful words! Hope you are on the mend. Get your Covid shot!