Created in Love,
Loving the Creator[1]
Romans 1:16-2:11
First Presbyterian
Church, Clarksville
Harmony Presbyterian
Church
June 17, 2012
Ordinary 11
The Reverend Dr.
Robert Wm Lowry
“I am not ashamed of the gospel,” says Paul.
Unrelenting in his opinions and unyielding in his conviction, Paul, come hell or high water, is going to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ and not be ashamed. I don’t know about you, but I wish more Christians would honestly live like that; living and speaking and believing in the gospel of Christ without ceasing. Not so much that we are obnoxious or prideful, but so that we are bold and unashamed. I wish more of us were willing to openly and honestly and bravely speak about our faith.
I am not ashamed.
I don’t know about you, but I wish I could honestly live like that. I wish I could go out there, and be willing to be labeled as a Christian and never be ashamed.
Unfortunately, there are some reasons to be ashamed. Not ashamed of the gospel but of some of the things that have been done in the name of the gospel. By manipulating the gospel to meet our own ends, we Christians have been responsible for unjust wars, for justifying slavery as God’s natural order, for persecuting un-favored groups and peoples by making hate and bigotry morally acceptable. God help us, we have some skeletons in our closet and they are pretty damn shameful.
We have a history, and not all of it is worthy of the God whom we serve and worship or the gospel we are called to proclaim.
Unfortunately in our contemporary culture, bad news sells and those lapses in our treatment of the gospel and the world are the things of which most people who don’t go to church are most aware. Our silence and unwillingness to be openly Christian, to speak up and correct the record in both our words and our actions, feeds into that perception.
“I am not ashamed of the gospel,” Paul says.
How do we get there? How do we start to overcome our missteps and start to show the world the gospel and do it with boldness?
Maybe the answer is taking seriously that portion of our text today where Paul writes about not judging others. If anything is at the heart of our tendency to stumble over the gospel and make a mess of things, it is the temptation to judge; to measure the world against our own private morality measuring stick. If we will let go of our judging, maybe we could begin to change the perceptions about all Christians, and could live into the reality of not being ashamed.
Paul, in that way he has, gets to the heart of judgment and what really motivates us to stand in judgment of others and the world. He points out that when we judge we are not merely assessing others’ lives. In reality, Paul says, we are trying to limit the grace of God. Whenever we judge, we take yet another bite of the serpent’s tempting fruit and seek to replace our judgment for God’s grace. Not only is that not in our power, it is never in our best interest.
More than ever before, we need to live in the world that is completely and thoroughly covered in God’s grace; every corner of our world, each and every nook and cranny and corner, whelmed by the love and grace of God. We need to live in the world where God’s grace is inescapable.
Well I’ve got good news for you. We do live in exactly that world, for God’s grace has saturated the world; it is inescapable; it is the whelming flood that sweeps through creation.
And when we can stop substituting our own idea of what is worthy with God’s declaration that all that is created by the hand of God is good, we may just find ourselves living unashamed of the gospel. Perhaps the answer is as simple as an act of the will to refrain from judgment.
That makes for a tidy theological package wrapped up all nice and neat. But good ole Paul won’t leave it there. Simply saying “judge not” will not do it. So Paul does what Paul so often does, he pushes things a little more. He demands that we look beyond simple answers to some more difficult truths.
This section beginning in verse 18, and intensifying in 24 is so intriguing. Paul has just written in verse 16 that he is not ashamed, and is moving toward not judging and the all-encompassing grace of God, but here he pauses to do something that at first glance seems like a good amount of judging, or a good amount of stuff he should be ashamed about.
In verses 24, 26 and 28, Paul repeats a form of the Greek word “paradoken”. From the root “paradidomi,” it literally means “to give over.” It is a compound word, para meaning beside or with and didomi means to give or present. There is no single English word that is the equivalent, but in context it means handing something, or someone, over like a hostage. We are handed over as hostages to our sinfulness.
Like so much of scripture, this text isn’t about what many people have tried to make it about. This is not a passage that shows how a man must not lie with a man nor a woman to have unnatural intercourse. I know that’s what the words read, and if you take them out of context it can sure make a tidy moralistic argument. But this is not an aside from Paul outlining a particular sin. In this passage, Paul is writing not about homosexuality, but about healthy sexuality, and in this case unhealthy sexuality in order to make a larger point. Paul uses sex and sexuality to make his point, but it is hardly the main thing on his mind. Still, making this text merely about moral assessments and judgments on sex is an easy trap to fall into. When it comes to sex and sexuality, our cultural sensibilities press us to avoid talking about talking about it because all of that is dirty or somehow bad and wrong. Like an embarrassed teenager, we too often skip over these sorts of texts, dismissing them with easy moralistic platitudes because it is an uncomfortable topic. In truth that is one of the huge mistakes in the church’s theological history. The damage this persistent misunderstanding and misuse of the text has done is only matched by the wrongness of the theology behind it.
The real issue for the apostle is stated plainly in verse 25. They worshipped the creature instead of the creator.
It is God, after all, who creates our bodies, and calls us very good. It is God, after all, who creates us to be in relationship with one other, and calls us very good. It is God, after all, who creates us as physical creatures and calls us very good. All of it, God creates every part of our human-ness, every part of our physical nature, and calls us very good. Paul recognizes this and in order to show that what he is saying is for all humanity and not just a select group, he turns to one of the most base and universal parts of being human.
So the issue for Paul is not sex per se but our misuse of the gifts of God. The trouble comes when we objectify and abuse the gifts God has given us. It’s when we worship that which is very good instead of the one who makes us and declares us so that we run into problems.
That’s Paul’s real issue here. The trouble is that we abuse God’s good creation and our objectification of created goodness distracts us from the good creator. We become captives to our tendency toward objectification. Or, to use Paul’s language, we are handed over to be hostages to our own sin.
In many ways, we live in the same world as the one Paul wrote about. A world where people are taught by the culture to worship their bodies and search only for the pleasures the world can provide; a world in which intimacy is treated as recreation rather than a sacramental expression of love.
So when Paul goes on about natural and unnatural sexual expression, he wasn’t trying to define this person or that person or a particular sort of human intimacy as inherently sinful. What Paul was trying to communicate was the sinfulness in worshipping the creation instead of the creator; of objectifying God’s gifts and making those idols of our desire and devotion. Even the most wholesome and loving act bears the stain of sin if it is the result of objectifying or, worse, worshiping the object, of serving the creation instead of worshipping and serving the creator.
That, I believe, is why Paul is so harsh here and on through chapter 2. It is as though he is saying don’t you dare judge others for whatever they are doing with their bodies, because you are worshipping the creation instead of the creator in your own way. The issue for Paul was not a woman giving up natural intercourse for unnatural, or a man lying with a man. Paul has much bigger fish to fry. He seeks to warn the Romans, and us, of the dangers inherent in allowing our devotion to turn from God and toward the things of this world.
Here the issue is worshipping God alone, and having no other Gods- nothing in heaven or on earth- before God. That is the axis around which this particular theological argument turns. And it is hardly the first time this has come up with the people of God. We recall from Exodus, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; 3you shall have no other gods before me.”[2]
From the day God first spoke in the garden to when God gave the law to Moses to when Paul wrote to the people in Rome to this very day, God has known our tendency to allow the object of our devotion to shift from our creator to our own favored parts of creation.
Consider nearly every episode in the history of the church that may lead us to be ashamed of our misuse of the gospel.
Slavery; rather than worshiping the God who created us all, the gospel was used as a means to devalue some of God’s children and hold up as sacred one race over another.
Sexism; rather than recognizing that all humanity is created in the image of God, the gospel was used as an excuse to degrade and discriminate against women.
Unjust war in the Crusades, the wars of the Reformation, and modern wars like Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and elsewhere; rather than heed Jesus’ call to love all, the gospel was used as an excuse to wage war in the name of what the powerful declared to be true faith.
Each and every time the gospel of Jesus Christ is misused and we are given cause to be ashamed of our misuse of the gospel, the object of our worship is the creation of our own making rather than the creator who made us.
Not being ashamed of the gospel means living lives that remain focused on the true object of our worship, our love, our devotion and our lives.
When Narcissus of legend peered into a pool of water and saw his own handsome reflection, he fell so deeply entranced with the beauty of his own reflection that he was unable to pull himself away so he wasted away and died.
Not being ashamed of the gospel means tearing our eyes away from the pleasing sight of our own desires and fulfillment and turning them toward the God of history; the maker and lover of all things good.
But it is so easy to keep looking at our own reflection in the will of God. It is so easy for us to substitute our own vision for God’s world for the vision God gives us in Jesus Christ. It is easy to find ourselves drawn toward the reflection in the water never realizing that as long as we are captive to it, our eyes will not be on the true object of our affection. But, what if we did manage to tear our eyes away?
What if we did return our eyes, our hearts, our spirits to God?
What if, like Paul, we weren’t ashamed?
What if we created and lived into lives and a gospel community of which
we need never be ashamed?
What if we worshipped God alone?
Not ourselves, not our pleasures or desires, not substituting what we believe God should want or should desire, not casting our own reflection on God, but God, our Maker, our Redeemer and our Sustainer alone.
I’ll tell you what. I think we might just get a glimpse of heaven on earth. You and I might just become the creatures we were meant to be; living the way God intended; loving the true object of our greatest affection- our loving and gracious God by whose hands we are lovingly made.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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