Romans 15.1-13
Ten years ago this winter, I took twelve months of medical leave for stage-serious cancer. In the interim, not wanting to be a distraction in my own congregation, I tried to worship with other congregations near and far from our home. I was not prepared— not at all— for how difficult it was to find a church where either the preacher or the people appeared to expect God to speak. In every case, they treated the Bible like an artifact instead of the living Word of God.
Eventually, I gave up my search and stayed home on Sundays.
Because, why would I not?
Paul himself says that if the Word is not alive, then we are all wasting our time.
In the Gospel of Matthew, after the Pharisees attempt to entrap Jesus with a question about paying taxes to Caesar, the Sadducees sidle up to him with an equally loaded question. Citing the scriptures, they posit a woman who has been widowed seven times. “You tell us, Jesus. In the resurrection, whose wife will she be? Which of those guys will be her husband?”
Impatient with their unserious question, the Lord replies, “Is not this the reason you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God?”
Neither the scriptures nor the power of God.
The link between the two is the key.
The power of God is manifest in his word.
To reiterate this very point, Jesus directs them back to the Bible. “Have you not read what was said to you by God in the scripture?” Jesus asks them— and note the change in tense, “There the Lord says, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.””
The Bible is not an artifact.
The scriptures are not simply the record of what God said.
The scriptures are the means by which God says.
William Stringfellow was a lawyer and social activist in the middle of the last century. After graduating from Harvard law school, Stringfellow moved into Harlem and began a career representing victimized tenants. Stringfellow believed it was his baptismal vocation to advocate against the principalities and powers. An Episcopalian, Stringfellow was a brilliant lay theologian who fit into neither the liberal nor the conservative wings of the church precisely because he challenged the status quo not on progressive political grounds but according to the Word of God. Stringfellow’s Civil Rights advocacy, for example, put him at odds with conservative believers, but his high view of scripture often discomfited his fellow activists, who preferred to regard the Bible as an curio.
In his book Count It All Joy, Stringfellow recalls one such instance of his esteem for the scriptures embarrassing his fellow believers.
He writes:
“A few years ago, serving on a commission of the Episcopal Church charged with articulating the scope of the total ministry of the Church in modern society. The commission included a few laity and the rest were professional theologians, ecclesiastical authorities and clergy.
Toward the end of the first meeting, some of those present proposed that it might be an edifying discipline for the group, in its future sessions, to undertake some concentrated study of the Bible. It was suggested that constant recourse to the Bible is as characteristic and significant a practice in the Christian life as the regular celebration of the Eucharist, which was a daily observance of this commission.
Perhaps, it was suggested, Bible study would enlighten the deliberations of the commission. The proposal was rejected on the grounds, as one Bishop put it, that “most of us have been to seminary and know what the Bible says; the problem now is to apply it to today’s world.”
The bishop’s view was seconded (with undue enthusiasm, I thought at the time) by the Dean of one of the Episcopal seminaries as well as by the clergy from national headquarters who had, they explained, a program to design and administer.
The point in mentioning the incident is that the notion implied in the decision not to engage in Bible study is that the Gospel, in its Biblical embodiment, is a static body of knowledge which, once systematically organized, taught, and learned, is thereafter used only ceremonially, sentimentally, and nostalgically.”
A static body of knowledge.
You know neither the scriptures nor the power of God…there the Lord says.
It was his encounter with these final chapters of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans that converted the pagan Augustine of Hippo to the faith of his Christian mother, Monica. In the year 386 AD, Augustine was teaching rhetoric in Milan. In a garden, Augustine heard a voice— the voice of a child, maybe the voice of God, summoning him, “Take and read. Take. And read.”
The voice resisted dismissal. Finally, Augustine located a Bible. He picked it up. He opened it at random to Romans. And he read the first passage he saw. As Augustine recounts in his Confessions:
“I read in silence the first paragraph that my eyes fell upon from the Apostle’s letter to the Romans…Immediately, the light of freedom poured into my heart and all the shadows of doubt were scattered.”
For Augustine—
The scriptures were not an artifact.
The scriptures were the power of God.
They made Augustine Saint Augustine.
Paul concludes his long discussion of the partisan dispute which divides the church at Rome by returning to the initial command with which he began. “Now we who are strong,” Paul writes in verse one, “ought to bear the infirmities of the weak and not to please ourselves.” Notice, Paul himself has a position in the debate which divides the Body. Paul identifies with the strong who believe they are free in Christ and therefore do not believe any ought or should should be added to the gospel. Though Paul has summoned both sides in the partisan fight to welcome the other, to walk with them in love, and to bear their burdens, this does not mean Paul regards both parties as correct.
There is a right side in the conflict.
Nevertheless!
Paul subordinates his position to his conviction that believers must treat one another in a manner that makes the gospel intelligible to the wider world. Just so, Paul reinforces his command to “build up the neighbor” by appealing to Christ as our paradigm. But in lifting up Jesus as our exemplar, Paul does not turn to the Gospels. He instead turns to the Old Testament. “For Christ did not please himself,” Paul writes, "but, as it is written, “The reproaches of those who reproached you have fallen upon me.””
The citation is from Psalm 69.
It is a psalm of lament.
It is a psalm of David.
Or so God’s people believed.
Just as the risen Jesus tells the disciples on the road to Emmaus that all the Bible is about him, Paul understands the speaker of Israel’s psalms to be none other than Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim.
Paul’s claim is as colossal as it is subtle.
Christ is not simply the subject of the scriptures.
Christ is the one who speaks from them.
No, Paul’s claim goes even further. Christ speaks from the scriptures to us.
Christ speaks from the scriptures to us for us.
“For our instruction,” Paul writes in verse four. In other words, according to the apostle Paul not only is Jesus the speaker in the Old Testament, his addressees are you and me. As my teacher Beverly Gaventa comments on this passage:
“Paul’s remark recalls Romans 4.23-24, which asserts that the words of Genesis 15.6 apply both in the case of Abraham and in our own. Unlike Romans 4.23-24, however, Romans 15.4 makes no reference to an earlier addressee, and at least one possible implication of this statement is that Scripture only now has its proper addressees.”
Us.
The Bible is not an artifact.
The scriptures are not simply the record of what God said.
The scriptures are the means by which Christ says.
To us.
For us.
William Stringfellow’s preacher once put the theologian in charge of a Sunday School class for teenage boys. Finding the assigned curriculum shallow and moralistic, Stringfellow did something strange for that congregation. He asked every teenager in the class to secure a Bible. Most of the students ignored him. Nonetheless, Stringfellow opened his own Bible at random to Paul’s Letter to the Romans and just started to read aloud to the teens. During his first class as a Sunday School teacher, all Stringfellow did was to read the epistle in its entirety. He allowed no questions or interruptions.
At the next class on the following Sunday, a boy hoped to foment a rebellion against their new teacher by bringing a case of beer with him to church. But Stringfellow patiently persisted.
Stringfellow writes:
“The essential event each week remained the same— all of us simply heard a reading of the entire Letter to the Romans. It was only after the group had suffered this exercise a dozen or more times, week after week, that the tactic was changed and I proposed that the Letter be then read sentence by sentence, in its given sequence, and that after reading each sentence aloud, we all pause and ask one question: What does this say?
Not, what do I think?
Not, do I agree?
Not, is this relevant to my life and circumstances?
But, straightforwardly, first of all, What is this word?
So we persevered. It was a laborious enterprise. But we did continue, meeting each Sunday, and, as it were, reading and listening to each sentence of Romans, in turn, and asking, What is Christ saying to us?
It was around Christmastime that the change came. The same boy who had brought the case of beer to "class" turned up one afternoon at my tenement in East Harlem. He thought, he said, that I must have plenty of other things to do and would not bother to take time for this "class" or persist in reading the Letter in "class" unless I was convinced there was something important in the Letter. His curiosity was engaged and he had procured a New Testament, stolen he admitted, in order to read the Letter on his own in his privacy.
For the remainder of the afternoon he and I tried to talk with one another about our respective experiences of hearing the Word of God. This tough, brash kid from the streets turned out, in that encounter, to be a most sophisticated exegete, although I am pretty sure that if I ever called him such to his face his impulse would be to hit me for cussing him. Somehow it had lingered in his conscience that the original, indispensable and characteristic question to ask, in reading the Bible, is the very question that seems so seldom to be asked in church or seminary or layman's conferences. Namely, what does this say?”
One Sunday over a decade ago, a worshipper came up to me after worship. She looked angry and utterly discombobulated. The United States was then only a few years into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and recently the newspapers had broken stories about CIA black sites and the practice of state-sponsored torture. This parishioner’s husband sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and was a stalwart defender of the administration’s policy of enhanced interrogation. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was only a few weeks away from her husband tearing me a new one.
“Reverend Jason,” she said in a flustered voice:
“Can I just tell you? I was sitting in my pew, same as any Sunday, and you know what? Some rude, impertinent woman, whom we’ve never spoken to in our lives, came up to us after the service and said to my husband, “I was listening to the scripture today, and the Lord spoke to me.” She said the Lord spoke to her, can you believe the ego on her?! She said, “The Lord spoke to me and the Lord told me to tell you to confess and repent and change your ways.” Can you believe the chutzpah of that woman? Can you even imagine how embarrassing that was— I mean of all the places for that to happen to us, at our church?!”
Bless your heart, I thought.
But I nodded my headed and agreed, “I’m sure it was incredibly embarrassing.”
“Well, what are you going to do about it?!” she insisted.
“Do about it? I’m not going to do anything about it.”
“What do you mean you’re not going to do anything about it?”
“There’s a reason we call them passages of scripture,” I said, “Jesus has this stubborn habit of passing through them and speaking a word. If you don’t like the word that woman heard— well— take it up with the Lord.”
She stormed off.
In due time, neither she nor her husband would speak to me.
That is, until they were spoken to.
Throughout the empire but especially in the heart of it, there was no reliable way for believers to know with certainty that the meat they found in the market had not previously been offered upon Caesar’s pagan altars. “How can we proclaim that Jesus is Lord if we eat meat sacrificed to idols?” the so-called weak in faith anguished. “Will not our manner of living contradict our message? Thus, a segment of Christians in Rome opted for vegetarianism as an aspect of their obedience to Christ. While the argument could have been over any of God’s commandments and their applicability to a believer justified by grace alone, meat was the particular question which vexed the church at Rome.
The apostle Paul devotes over a chapter of his epistle to this dispute, but, notably— surprisingly perhaps— Paul makes no attempt whatsoever to urge the partisans to settle their disagreement. Paul never implores them to find consensus over the issue in question. In wrapping up his discussion of the debate, Paul— though he’s stipulated to his own conviction in the matter— still has not directly instructed the Roman Christians in how to resolve their conflict. Other than laying down the law that believers are to welcome other believers no matter how much they might disagree, Paul has offered no solution for how they might resolve their conflict.
He recommends no concrete measures.
He proffers no wisdom or counsel.
He gives no practical advice.
Yet this is not avoidance!
And it is more than sheer pragmatism!
About the Bible-stealing boy who had shown up at his front door to discuss Paul’s letter, William Stringfellow recalls:
“Somehow, he had come— reluctantly, against his will, with his customary hostility and suspicion— to confront the Word of God in the Bible in a way very similar to that which he would face any other person. Or rather, the way any other person would face him. And the repeated encounter with the Word of God changed that kid indelibly.”
Quite simply and straightforwardly—
Paul believes the Lord Jesus speaks through the scriptures.
Paul submits to the Christians in Rome no practical advice, no concrete guidance because Paul believes it is none other than Lord Jesus who speaks through the scriptures.
On Christ speaking through the scriptures, the theologian Robert Jenson writes:
“God speaks throughout the life of Israel and in her scriptures, and when he speaks this utterance is not another than that same Word who is named Jesus. In the language of the earliest trinitarianism, in persona Verbi: it is the second person of the Trinity, Jesus of Nazareth, who is the persona within the story of Israel.”
The Word is not another utterance than the Word named Jesus.
As the Book of Hebrews says— astonishingly:
“Moses considered abuse suffered for Christ to be greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt.”
Moses suffered for Mary’s boy. A thousand years before Christmas, Moses suffered for Christ. This utterance of the scriptures is not another than that same Word who is named Jesus.
Therefore, Paul believes—
If they but search the scriptures, Christ will change their hearts.
If they but search the scriptures, Christ will conform them to his own mind.
If they but search the scriptures, Christ will shepherd them to a solution.
In fact!
Paul's absence of application is him practicing what he has preached.
Why would Paul, or any other preacher, bother with advice or wisdom of their own when the scriptures are “the Word of God for the people of God?!”
Paul does not give the Romans a To Do List.
He does not do so because he truly believes what he has written to them, that their minds are being renewed and their souls are being shrouded in Christ.
How could they not be undergoing change when the scriptures are how Christ says?
In the opening pages of his Confessions, Saint Augustine poses the riddle of how an infinite God could be contained in any place. If God is the one who contains all things, then how could the infinite be located within any finite creature? The question becomes more pertinent when Augustine considers the fact that God loves the human heart and wants to dwell there.
But there's a problem.
As Augustine imagines it, God arrives, suitcase in hand, and knocks on the door of our heart. And he can hardly fit inside. The place is too small. And it's a mess. The roof leaks. Mold is growing on the walls. The front door is hanging off its hinges. There are strange smells in the hallway. Weeds are growing up through the floorboards. Yet God is not deterred. God wants to live here. The place has a lot of promise; and besides, God likes the neighborhood.
So there's only one solution:
God rolls up his sleeves and gets to work, expanding and demolishing and renovating, tearing out the kitchen and knocking down walls. Jesus is moving into your heart not because these surroundings are fit for him, but because he enjoys the challenge of fixing up old places like this— a broken-down dump of a house.
As Augustine puts it:
”The house of my heart is too small for you to enter: make it more spacious by your coming. The house of my heart lies in ruins: rebuild it.”
What Augustine is describing is what you call the rest of your life.
Your whole life is nothing but the story of God’s renovation.
And the rest of your life begins not with any instructions.
The rest of your life begins with an invitation.
Listen for the Word of God.
The senator’s wife stormed off and refused to speak to me for a season. So I was surprised when I was on medical leave and she called me up, offering to drive me to one of my chemotherapy sessions and sit with me. Though I was not working at the time, I knew it was stewardship season; therefore, I was afraid to say no to her.
Chit-chat got us through the time in the car.
Finally, with the drip from the bag about halfway finished, I asked her, “What made you reach out? I mean, you were hardly my biggest fan.”
She thought about it for a moment, and then she cracked a knowing smile like Paul Newman at the end of the Verdict.
“I’ve been spending a lot more time in the Bible,” she said.
I nodded, thinking her answer must be a deflection, but she continued.
“Before, I spent a lot of time in small groups and circles where we talked. I was in a lot of Sunday School classes where we read books about the Bible. And I’ve attended too many political functions where we assumed the Bible. This is the first time I’ve spent any time in the Bible, and it’s left a mark. I’m not who I was.”
“We call them passages for a reason,” I said.
Your heart is too small.
It is.
Wine and bread may not be able to fill your bellies.
But the word that attaches to them can do more than fill your hearts.
So, come to the table.
In Persona Verbi