"In the Name" June 10, 2012 Romans 1:1-17

In the Name

Romans 1:1-17

First Presbyterian Church of Clarksville

Harmony Presbyterian Church

June 10, 2012

Ordinary 10

The Reverend Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

            This morning we begin a journey through Paul’s letter to the Romans.

            Few biblical texts have had as much influence on the church and even the world as this deeply theological letter written nearly 2000 years ago.

            Paul, having spent the previous decade preaching, teaching and founding Christian communities all around the Aegean Sea, decides to take his theological show on the road to Spain. On his way to the Iberian Peninsula, Paul would make a stop in Rome, the Eternal City. Rome was the seat of power not only in the empire but in the world. He knew that if his theology would take root there, it would spread like wildfire to every corner of the known world.

            Unlike many of the places Paul worked, Rome’s church was not founded by the apostle. In Rome the story of Jesus and his ministry had made it into the fabric of the Jewish community long before Paul ever decided to visit. This presented a particular problem for him. In most of Paul’s letters, he writes to the community to correct them on some error in theology or practice; some way they had strayed away from the theology he left with them.

            The Romans were different.

            They did not know Paul’s particular brand of Jesus theology. They were likely unfamiliar with much of what he had taught in other places and the way of living he prescribed for followers of Jesus of Nazareth. So before he arrived, Paul thought it wise to write ahead and let the Romans know a) that he would be dropping by for a visit and b) his theology of the faith so they would know what to expect from his teaching.

            That letter is our roadmap for the next few weeks as we journey with Paul through the height, depth, width and breadth of the apostles’ vision of the nature and character of God and the life in Christ.

            When I was a student at Pulaski Heights Junior High School, my English teacher Ms. Bell worked to teach a bunch of attention challenged teenagers how to write a basic research paper. She would tell us that the whole thing rises or falls on the thesis sentence. The thesis, she said, is what sums up your paper for the reader and sets the tone for the whole thing. If your thesis is a dud, the rest hardly matters.

            30+ years later, I hear Ms. Bell whenever I sit down to write a paper, article or even sermon. Reading Romans, I think Paul must have had the same sort of teacher because in his first sentence, he sums up the whole of Romans and gives us a picture of where the letter is going.

Now to be sure the first sentence of Romans is a long and convoluted sentence that would be a bear to diagram and is worthy of James Joyce or William Faulkner in its complexity, but at its heart it has a pretty simple thesis. It says,“God is as good as God’s word and God’s word is fully and wholly reliable.” And that is the heart of Paul’s letter. It is a letter about the righteousness and goodness of God.

            In the broader context of the first century, Rome was a cosmopolitan city. It defied easy classification in one particular cultural category. It was a true world city; a crossroads of the peoples and cultures. Of all the cities Paul visited and taught in, Rome posed a unique set of challenges.

            Not only had Paul not founded the faith community in Rome, the city itself was hardly cohesive even within the Jewish or Jewish- Christian community.

            It was a place where many ideas and systems of belief and models for virtuous living competed for the attention and adherence of the population. Corinth, Thessalonica, Ephesus…these were fish in a barrel for a theologian and teacher of Paul’s caliber. Rome was in a league of its own.

In some ways, Rome in Paul’s day was much like the whole of western culture in our own. It was a challenging mission field for the gospel of Jesus Christ. While western culture until the mid-20^th century was culturally Christian and, in many ways, culturally Protestant, that is no longer the case. Like the Rome of Paul’s time, the whole of western culture has become a crossroads of cultures and religions.

It was into this place that Paul, the disciple of the Lord, goes bearing the truth of God’s promise; the truth of the righteousness of God.

To say that ours is a time of great change in the church would be more than an understatement. It would not be an hyperbole to say that we live in the midst of one of the greatest shifts in church life, church culture and religious life in general since the years of the Protestant Reformation.

Any number of books written in the last decade or so purport to explain the shifts in church culture from the institutional/congregational model familiar to so many of us to new and often unusual expressions of Christian community such as house churches, pub churches and even cowboy or biker churches. Theologians, anthropologists and sociologists are all seeking to explain why familiar more traditional modes of church life are losing traction while new and nontraditional communities are attracting more and more new people.

Some blame the music.

Some blame the theology.

Some say the church needs to make it easier to join.

Some say the church makes it far too easy.

Some give advice on how to better advertise.

Some give you the chance to franchise a proven model.

Book after book, seminar after seminar, program after program each offers quick fixes and easy solutions to the challenges of the modern church; how to meet the challenges of our modern day Rome.

Of all the books I have read on the topic, and I believe me I have read my share, one stands out. It is by Kenda Creasy Dean who is professor of Youth and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. Her most recent book, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church, Kenda delves deep into the data collected in the National Study of Youth and Religion.

Like Paul, Kenda gives you a bold up front statement of what she wants to tell. The first sentence of the book reads:

            Here is the gist of what you are about to read: American young people are, theoretically,    fine with religious faith- but it does not concern them very much, and it is not durable   enough to survive long after they graduate from high school.

            And, she adds, “One more thing: we’re responsible.”

            Kenda goes on to assess the state of the church today and argues that we have lapsed into a lazy and all too often self-indulgent faith. A faith that is concerned more with not offending or being off-putting than it is with truth-telling and virtuous living. She refers to this contemporary sort of theology as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

            That is hard medicine to swallow, but if we are to make a frank assessment of the church in the world today, we have to accept that the reasons that the church is in decline are not laid at the feet of the culture but at ours. Teenagers are the canary in the coal mine in the church. Their rejection of our institutional structures and ways of belief are a lesson for understanding the past and the future of the church. And at the heart of what they are telling us is a simple message.

            Practice what you preach.

            More often than not the reason that teenagers and young adults give for leaving the church is a feeling that institutionally, we say one thing on Sunday mornings and live another during the week. In other words, they are left with the impression that we keep our theology on the one hand and our lives on the other.

            It is a harsh indictment, but it is hardly a new one. In fact this habit of separating belief from life- theology from living- was already enough of a problem in Rome that Paul addresses it in his letter.

Paul reminded the Romans of the same thing that teenagers remind the church today; belief in God is not about the words. Well, not justabout words. It is about living into the words we say, the things we believe.

When Paul tells the Romans, in these first few words of his letter, that the God of history is as good as the word that has been promised; God’s word is the very righteousness of God. And if we are to live in faith in that word, we must be as good as that word as well. In other words, if we are to proclaimour belief in this God whose promise is Jesus Christ we must fully live into that promise.

Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasaar refers to this as our participation in the truth of God. And that is what it is. When we live into the faith we profess to believe; when we let that faith saturate our very lives the way a hard summer rain drenches the earth, we will not be able to keep from becoming full participants in the truth of God; the righteousness of God.

In the 2000 British Film Billy Elliot, Billy’s father takes him to the community recreation center to take boxing lessons. Billy does not like boxing but happens upon a ballet class. At first, Billy is not all that good. He is clumsy and trips over his own feet. But his teacher, Mrs. Wilkinson, sees talent in the boy. And believing in him, she tells Billy to forget his feet and just dance.

Forget your feet.

Stop worrying if you are doing it right.

Stop worrying if your feet or your posture or your form are perfect.

Stop worrying, forget your feet and dance.

Mrs. Wilkinson must have read Romans!

Paul, our teacher, seeing beyond our anxieties and fears-beyond the clumsiness of our sins and our faults- tells us to forget our feet and dance in the promise of God. Because it is in that promise that we are called to live and to grow and to lose ourselves and let our souls dance in celebration of God’s goodness and promise.

When we let our souls dance in the fullness of God, we participate in the righteousness and promise of God. In fact the very word that is used to describe the participation of the three persons of the Trinity with one another is Perichoresis which literally means dance around! The persons of the Trinity dance around one another! That is how they participate in the fullness of the triune God.

And so should we!

So let our sojourn through Paul’s letter begin. Over the next few weeks we will delve ever deeper with the Apostle into the hope and joy that is found in God. It all commences here, with these words recounting promises made and promises kept. There is no surer place to start any journey than on the name and promise of the righteousness of God.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.