“You, Me and the Gospel” (Romans 1:7-17)

This is the first sermon I preached at Messiah Episcopal Church, on 26 September 2004…

 

Preaching on an occasion such as this is a daunting experience. This is really kind of a test run—like Wilbur and Orville Wright standing on the grassy fields of Kitty Hawk a century ago and looking at their newly-constructed flying machine. They had spent months designing and building wings, fuselage, engine, propellers and all that they thought it would take to accomplish the first powered flight, not to mention years of dreaming, studying and consulting from their bicycle shop in Ohio.

In your case you have a search committee that fasted and prayed, studied, met and traveled for more than a year and a half. And I know for a fact that their dedication was mirrored many, many times over by others in this congregation, who have prayed fervently, trusted hopefully and waited patiently as events gradually unfolded.

So here we stand on the runway, and we nervously ask ourselves, like Orville and Wilbur, is it going to fly? On their fourth attempt on 17 December 1903, Wilbur managed fifty-nine seconds of flight, reaching an altitude of 852 feet, and the brothers knew that they had entered the era of human flight. Perhaps some of you are thinking already that a fifty-nine second sermon would be a good way to introduce my incumbency at Messiah. If so, I am sorry to have to disappoint you. Yet my hope for this morning is that we may begin to have some sense that we are at the beginning of a fruitful partnership, and that together by God’s grace we may have the joy of seeing this church truly soar on eagle’s wings. So would you turn with me in your Bibles to the first chapter of St Paul’s letter to the Romans as we embark on our first adventure in exploring God’s word together.

My reason for choosing this passage is that Paul’s circumstances as he wrote were very similar to mine as I stand in this pulpit this morning. This is Paul’s attempt to introduce himself to a Christian community that he soon hoped to encounter face to face. Although he had no doubt met a number of its members as he and they traveled through the Roman Empire, he had not yet had the privilege of meeting them as a congregation. So he spends some time at the beginning of this long letter reflecting on who they are, who he is, and the nature of the ministry in which they share—which is what I want us to do now in the moments that remain to us.

You

The first thing that Paul affirms about his fellow Christians in Rome (in verse 7) is that they are loved by God. I don’t know if you have ever paused to consider what an amazing statement this is. What Paul is speaking about here is not some generalized kind of love. There are no doubt some of you who could say that you love Canadians. And I do not for a moment doubt the genuineness of your affection. But that is not the same as saying that you love me or that you love my wife (which many of you have already shown you do even without really knowing us). In the same way the love of God, of which Paul speaks here, is a very personal, individual love. It is not merely that God loves people (which he does) or that he loves Romans (which he does) or that he loves the Christians at Rome (which again he does). It is that he loves Priscilla and Aquila, Andronicus and Junias, Ampliatus and Urbanus, Apelles, Herodion, Tryphena and Tryphosa, Rufus, and each of the rest individually and personally.

This morning I want to affirm each of you in that divine love. I hope that there is no one who will leave this place this morning without a deep sense that God loves you personally, as an individual. Perhaps you have heard the story of Karl Barth, the greatest theologian of the twentieth century, who was once asked after a lecture at Union Theological seminary what was the most profound theological statement ever made. His answer: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” You may not feel that way—I can’t say that I do all the time. You may not be able to make sense of it—and I would ask who among us does. Yet that does not alter the fact that God loves you more deeply, more constantly, than you can ever imagine.

The second thing Paul says is that they are “called to be saints”, or, as he says in verse 6, “called to belong to Jesus Christ”. You may be here for any number of reasons—perhaps curiosity to see the new rector, perhaps to test the waters, perhaps because you would never be anywhere else on a Sunday morning. Yet in a fundamental sense, whether you acknowledge it or not, you are here because, no less than the fishermen who stood repairing their nets by the Sea of Galilee, you have been called by Jesus Christ—called to follow him, called to serve him, called to become like him.

Paul’s word for it is that you have been called to be saints. It may seem a rather daunting title for us mere mortals. The word in Greek is the same as “holy”. What Paul is saying here is that when Jesus Christ calls a person, he never leaves them the same. Yes, he fully accepts us as we are. But when we are drawn to him, we are drawn into a process of transformation that continues until the day we die and will not leave any part of our lives untouched.

To spend time in the company of Jesus is to find ourselves being changed. And that is exactly what happened to these Romans. In Paul’s words their faith was being reported all over the world. Perhaps Paul was exaggerating a little when he spoke as he did. Yet the fact remained that their lives were being changed to the point that people were talking about it.

When Jesus Christ begins to make a difference in our lives, we in turn begin to make a difference in the lives of others and in our world. We become the salt and light that Jesus spoke about in the Sermon on the Mount. And I know that you are a congregation that is making a difference in many ways in the world around you—ways that do not make newspaper headlines, but I know that there are many whose lives have been touched and continue to be touched through what Jesus is doing in and among you here at Messiah. Long may that continue!

Me

Having said a little bit about his readers in Rome, Paul goes on to reveal a few things about himself. When I met with the search committee, I told them that I saw the role of the rector in a parish as helping people to look outward and upward—outward beyond our comfort zones into the world around us, because it is so easy for us to be so absorbed by our internal life that we become a “holy huddle”; and upward in prayer, because it is always a temptation to do things on a merely human level and to forget to involve the Lord and to look to his guidance.

It seems to me that Paul saw himself doing much the same kind of thing. Twice—in verse 9 and verse 15—he shares his eagerness to proclaim the good news about Jesus. Let me tell you that I share that same eagerness. I can’t claim that every sermon I preach is a “royal George”, but nothing will give me more delight than to explore the Scriptures with you. My goal will not be to help you become some kind of walking Bible encyclopedia. Rather it is, in Paul’s words elsewhere in the New Testament, that you may be “thoroughly equipped for every good work”, that together we begin to catch a glimpse of God’s perspective on life in this increasingly complex world and make a difference in it as a result.

Paul also speaks about his prayers “at all times” on behalf of the Romans. For my part I have not ceased to pray for you since the day I accepted the call to become your rector. And I know full well that you were praying for me long before that. I count myself deeply privileged to enter a community that takes its prayer life seriously. I am humbled by your dedication.

As a result I am not sure that there is much I can teach you about prayer. Yet I trust that we can explore it together. So it is that with Paul, I recognize that we are in a partnership. I pray with him that our relationship may be one of mutual encouragement, that our exposure to one another may make us only want to grow in faith, to go deeper into the love of Christ.

There are some people I love to be around because they bring out the best in me. In their presence I can never be catty or sarcastic, for somehow they help me to become more of the person that I ought to be in Christ. Perhaps you know people like that as well. It is my hope that we can be that kind of person for one another as we seek to serve Christ here at Messiah.

The Gospel

Paul has said something about his readers and something about himself. Yet all of this is really just a preamble to his real subject, one that will take up the remaining fifteen chapters of his letter. That subject is the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ—and I would be remiss if I did not follow in his footsteps and speak about it. Three things:

Paul says that he is not ashamed of the gospel. There are many things he might have been ashamed about: his past as a persecutor of Christians, the mysterious thorn in his flesh that caused him such weakness, his delays in fulfilling his promise to make it to Rome. But one thing he was not ashamed of and that was the good news of Jesus Christ. I don’t know about you, but there are many things I would rather talk about than Jesus—the weather, sports, gardening, my health, to name just a few. To be truthful, the gospel comes rather low on my list. I wonder if the same isn’t true of some of you as well. Not that we need to be buttonholing people and shoving the gospel down their throats, but we do need to learn not to be ashamed of it, even more, to be confident in it. And Paul gives us two reasons why:

First, the gospel is the power of God. Perhaps you already know that the word Paul uses here is dunamis. It is the word from which we derive our English word “dynamite”. And so the gospel is dynamite. Those of you who are involved in Alpha know that. You have seen people’s hearts being set aflame by the gospel as you share it week by week. Over the past couple of days I have been able to spend some time leafing through this marvellous book some of you have written about yourselves. As I read it I find myself deeply moved as I see lives that have been transformed by the gospel. And that has been the experience of my own ministry again and again that, as people are exposed to the gospel faithfully and consistently, it inevitably has an impact on their lives.

Secondly Paul tells us that in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed. Volumes have been written on that word righteousness, but essentially and put very simply it has to do with right relationships. It is through the gospel that we learn how we come into a right relationship with God. And that, says Paul, is through faith from start to finish. But what I want you to note here is that Paul uses the present tense. He does not say, “In the gospel a righteousness from God has been revealed,” but, “In the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed.” That is, the good news of Jesus is self-authenticating. It is not merely a quaint story from the past. So often to the surprise of those who hear it (and sometimes to the surprise of those who proclaim it) the gospel speaks to us in the present and makes Jesus a reality for us today.

My hope and prayer for you and me at Messiah is that we may grow as a community that has no doubt about the power of the gospel—that as we proclaim it and live it we may know daily the wonderful life-giving presence of Jesus in our midst and never be the same as a result.

Father, I thank you
that in your grace you have brought us together in your service.
I pray that in your mighty power you may move among us
to make us a gospel proclaiming, gospel living community
where your love is known,
where Jesus is reverenced and served
and where your Holy Spirit leaves no life untouched—
for the glory of your great and ineffable name.

Sermon – “Good News, Bad News” (Romans 1:16-25)

We’ve all heard the “good news, bad news jokes”. A tomato and a carrot were out for a walk one evening. They were crossing the street when a car tore by and seriously injured the carrot. The carrot was carried off in an ambulance while the tomato rushed to the hospital after him. Outside the emergency room he met with the doctor. “How is my friend doing?” he asked breathlessly. “Is he going to live?” The doctor looked at him sternly and replied, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that your friend is still alive. The bad news is that he’s going to end up being a vegetable for the rest of his life.”

If you listened carefully to this morning’s reading from the New Testament, you will have noticed that it contains both good news and bad news. Paul starts with the good news, which is the gospel—and he gives us two good reasons why this is so. First of all, it is the power of God. The word in Greek is dunamis, from which we derive our English words “dynamic” and “dynamite”. And so we believe that, unlike other stories, the gospel has a power of its own, to bring those who hear it into a relationship with God.

I may have told you before of the story of Ernest Gordon, a Scottish military officer who was captured by the Japanese in World War 2 and taken to a prisoner of war camp in Burma, to work on the infamous “railway of death”. He and a group of his fellow prisoners began to read the New Testament together and it was not long before they were realizing that this Jesus of whom they were reading was not just a figure of history but one who was present in their very midst. Soon their lives were being transformed. Where there had been despair there was hope. The near-animal behavior that they had been reduced to by their captors was replaced by courageous acts of self-giving. They would never be the same again. That story has been duplicated again and again wherever men and women come into contact with the gospel.

The Gospel [wrote Karl Barth] is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question mark against all truths. The Gospel is not the door but the hinge… By the Gospel the whole concrete world is dissolved and established. 

The gospel is good news because of its power. But that power derives from its content. “For in it,” Paul tells us, “the righteousness of God is revealed…” Now you could just as easily translate those words, “In it the justice of God is revealed.” Whichever way you do it, it will become clear to us as we venture through Romans that God’s righteousness and God’s justice are not the same as human righteousness and human justice. According to human justice, the punishment must fit the crime. One of the earliest things a child learns to say is, “But that’s not fair!” What we will find is that God’s justice simply does not fit neatly into any of our human categories. It will always baffle us, always confound us—and that is why Paul says it is revealed “from faith to faith”, or as the New Living Translation puts it, “from start to finish by faith”.

The Act: They suppressed the truth

However, this amazing good news, which Paul proclaims and which is the subject of this letter, is set against the backdrop of bad news. Just as the gospel reveals the righteousness of God, so by contrast it inevitably reveals the wrath of God as well. Now speaking about God’s anger makes many people profoundly uneasy. It conjures up images of hellfire-and-brimstone preachers of past generations who appeared to think it was more effective to frighten their parishioners into Christian faith than to woo them. Yet when you take a moment to think about it, are there not things in this world that God ought to be angry about—the carnage of war, the horror of slavery and human trafficking, the evils of racism; or on a closer to home level, domestic abuse, bullying that drives children to suicide, a drunk driver who plows into a family of five? What kind of God would he be if he were not angry about things such as these?

Paul will have more to say about specific evils in the final verses of the chapter. However, for the moment he calls upon us to look at the root cause of so much of what is out of kilter both in his world and (I want to say) in our world today. It all revolves around two verbs. The first is in verse 18. Paul speaks of those “who by their wickedness suppress the truth”. The term quite literally means “hold down”. So you have a picture of a group of brigands taking someone captive and holding them to the floor. It happened to the prophet Jeremiah in the Old Testament. Jeremiah was warning that the city of Jerusalem was going to fall to the armies of Chaldea and that they ought to surrender. The city officials didn’t like what he was saying because they were afraid it would undermine the morale of their troops. (Never mind that Jeremiah was right and that surrendering from the start would spare a great many lives and even the city itself.) So they took him captive and shut him up in a muddy cistern.

So it is that not only individuals but whole societies can become profoundly uncomfortable with the truth, to the point where they will go to almost any length to suppress it—and this is where Paul’s second verb comes in, in verses 23 and 25: “exchange”. Once the truth has been rejected, there needs to be an alternative “truth” to take its place. In verse 23 Paul writes, “They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.” He was expanding on a verse from the Psalms, where the psalmist looked back to the construction of the golden calf on Mount Sinai and wailed, “They exchanged the glory of God for the image of an ox that eats grass” (106:20).

Lest we think the church is immune from this, the lessons of history teach us otherwise. At the time of the Reformation the church had exchanged the free grace of God for a system of rituals and indulgences. In Nazi Germany the church exchanged God’s love for people of all nations for the myth of the German Volk. Today I fear that we have exchanged God’s holiness and the call to repentance for a “gospel” of inclusivity.

Late in the seventh century BC the prophet Jeremiah lamented,

Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for something that does not profit. Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water. (Jeremiah 2:11-13)

The Consequence: Their hearts were darkened

You cannot drink for long from a cracked cistern. There will be consequences, and the first consequence that Paul identifies is that “their senseless minds were darkened”. In actual fact the word that Paul uses in verse 21 is not “mind” but “heart”. And at its root the word translated “senseless” means something like lacking comprehension, insight or understanding. What we are seeing here is a dreadful process: that our actions and our thoughts, what we do with our bodies, what we entertain in our minds, will invariably penetrate deeper into what makes up the very core of our being.

The lesson is brought home in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The ring that lies at the center of the story wields great powers in the hands of its possessor. Yet it becomes clear that the ring exerts a power not only on the external world but also in the heart of the one wearing it—and that that power is not for the good. The case in point is the evil Gollum, a slimy character who dwells in darkness at the bottom of a cave, surviving on a diet of raw fish and the occasional straying goblin. Gollum had begun his life as a hobbit, but the power of the ring had gradually corrupted his heart to the point where he was wholly given over to the purposes of evil.

We think of our heart affecting our minds and actions. The book of Proverbs teaches us, “Keep your heart with all vigilance, 
for from it flow the springs of life.” Yet it recognizes that the flow goes in both directions. How do we keep our hearts?

Put away from you crooked speech,
and put devious talk far from you. 

Let your eyes look directly forward, 

and your gaze be straight before you. 

Keep straight the path of your feet… 

Do not swerve to the right or to the left; 

turn your foot away from evil. (Proverbs 4:23-27)

As Jesus’ disciples we are challenged to maintain a difficult balance. Our place is in the world, but how important it is not to allow the world’s values to take hold of our minds and penetrate our hearts. For then we cease to be the salt and light that Jesus calls us to be. And if the salt has lost its saltiness, what is it good for?

The Outcome: God gave them up

And so we have the truth being suppressed and exchanged for a lie. We have hearts darkened. But the bad news does not end there. There is still one more dreadful and frightening detail that Paul has to add. “Therefore,” he says in verse 24, “God gave them up…”

What haunting words! What a dreadful sentence! Can you imagine anything more devastating? To be given up by God. For God to leave us alone, entirely to our own devices. To call out and all we hear is an echo. To have nothing and no one in any ultimate sense to whom to turn. This is the final outcome of suppressing the truth and exchanging it for a lie. This is what happens when we allow our hearts to be darkened. It is a terrible fate.

“God gave them up…” Yet already, in the prospect of that devastating silence, there is a faint whisper of hope. The darkness has descended upon us; yet as we look to the eastern horizon we see the first glimmer of the first ray of dawn—and it is found in those very words of desolation: “God gave them up…”

The hope is in the fact that this is not the last time in his letter to the Romans that Paul will use those words. Underneath the fearful scene that Paul paints for us in chapter 1 is the abiding conviction of chapter 8—that the God of his gospel, the God whom he proclaims and in whom we put our faith today, is the God “who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for us all” (Romans 8:32). In the words of Stuart Townend’s hymn,

How deep the Father’s love for us,
How vast beyond all measure,
That he should give his only Son
To make a wretch his treasure.

How great the pain of searing loss,
The Father turns his face away,
As wounds which mar the Chosen One
Bring many sons to glory.

When Jesus cried aloud, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he was taking God’s absence, the final outcome of our exchanging the truth for a lie, upon himself. “So remember,” Paul writes elsewhere, “that at one time you were without God in the world. But now you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:11-13).

Out of the bad news our wondrous God brings good news. May we find our minds made new and our hearts set free by its transforming power.

Sermon – “Good News People” (Romans 1:1-10)

Over the course of the summer we will be reading through much of the sixteen chapters of St Paul’s letter to the Romans. John Calvin, the great Swiss reformer, stated of it, “If we have gained a true understanding of this epistle, we have an open door to all the most profound treasures of Scripture.” More recently the great English evangelist, preacher and teacher John Stott claimed, “It is the fullest, plainest and grandest statement of the gospel in the New Testament.”[1]

Nevertheless, I think that many of us would see studying Romans as a daunting task. Although it takes the form of a letter, it is much more than that. It is really a thesis, Paul’s clearest and most complete statement of his theology, of his understanding of Christ and the church, of the human condition and the gospel. If you find Romans difficult at times to follow, you are in good company. Even the apostle Peter confessed, “Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand…”

Author and hymn writer James Weldon Johnson told the story of a preacher who stood up before his congregation one Sunday morning and declared, “Brothers and sisters, this morning I intend to explain the unexplainable, to find out the indefinable, to ponder over the imponderable, and to unscrew the inscrutable.” I don’t lay claim to any such powers as those as we make our way through the letter to the Romans, but I do believe that as we look to the Holy Spirit and allow the Scriptures to speak to us—as the Bible says, to let deep call to deep—we will find ourselves being transformed in the process.

From the very outset Paul makes it clear that his subject and his overarching theme, indeed his passion, is the gospel. He describes himself simply as “a servant of Jesus Christ”—and if you check out the footnote, you will see that the word literally means “slave”. And Paul’s whole task as a slave, his assignment so to speak, is the gospel.

Now “gospel” simply means “good news”, and that is the way that a number of our contemporary English versions of the Bible translate it. Originally it was used of a messenger announcing a military victory, but it has a considerably wider application than that. The passage from Isaiah that Jesus read in the synagogue at Capernaum spoke about good news: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners” (Isaiah 61:1). Elsewhere Isaiah wrote, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns’ ” (Isaiah 52:7). And Paul had come as just such a messenger.

The good news foretold

The first thing that Paul sought to make clear was that the gospel was not his invention. It was a message that he had received and was now passing on. In the ancient world the Romans had a way of conveying messages called the cursus publicus. It was a state-operated relay system, with rest houses placed every eight miles or so. Here messengers would swap out their tired horses for fresh ones, guaranteeing that messages were delivered swiftly and efficiently. The system continued into the fifth century and there was nothing to compare with it again until the development of the modern post office.

That was how Paul saw himself, not as an originator of a message, but as a messenger faithfully passing on the message with which he had been entrusted. “I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received,” he wrote to the congregation in Corinth (1 Corinthians 15:1). Now in this letter to the Romans he traces that message all the way back to patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament.

Of this the great theologian Karl Barth reflected,

The gospel is no intrusion of today. As the seed of eternity it is the fruit of time, the meaning and maturity of history—the fulfillment of prophecy… The words of the prophets, long fastened under lock and key, are now set free. Now it is possible to hear what Jeremiah and Job and the preacher Solomon had proclaimed long ago. Now we can see and understand what is written.[2]

Thus as Christians we want to affirm the value of the Old Testament. We believe that in it, every bit as much as in the New, are to be found all the treasures of the gospel.

Perhaps you have heard, as I have, people who reject the Old Testament because the God they find there is a God of vengeance and judgment, and not the God of love and forgiveness that we find in the New. Early in the second century there was a famous heretic named Marcion. The core of Marcion’s heresy was very similar. He taught that there were two Gods revealed in the Bible: the God of the Old Testament, who is a God of law and justice, and the God and Father of Jesus Christ, who is a God of mercy and salvation. As a result he taught his followers to reject the Old Testament in its entirety. But that is the opposite of what we hear from Paul in these opening verses of Romans, and it contradicts the unanimous teaching of the New Testament, not least Jesus himself. The good news we proclaim issues out of the Old Testament like a flower growing from a seed. As the old Sunday school rhyme puts it, “The New is in the Old concealed; the Old is in the New revealed.”

As we read on in Romans, then, we will find Paul quoting from no fewer than fifty passages found in thirteen books of the Old Testament. The largest proportion of them is from the Psalms, and I would like to pause there for just a moment. One devotional exercise that I have found helpful is, as I have been reading through the Psalms, to seek to recognize Christ in them—not just in the obvious psalms like Psalm 22, but to see, for example, that Jesus is the man in Psalm 1 “who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers”; that Jesus is the man in Psalm 25 “against whom the Lord counts no iniquity and in whose spirit there is no deceit”; or in Psalm 40, “who makes the Lord his trust, who does not turn to the proud or to those who go astray after a lie”. As I have done this I have found the Psalms speaking to me with I richness I might never have otherwise imagined.

The good news focused

The second thing that Paul tells us about the gospel in this passage is that it centers in God’s Son. Twice he describes it in that way: in verse 4 and in verse 9. The good news that we proclaim is not a philosophy. It is not an experience. It is not a code of behavior. Rather, it is all about a person, Jesus Christ.

I have to say that Paul is a little like a pit bull in that regard. And you have to be. It is so easy to be distracted, to be derailed, to find that we are focusing on something other than Jesus. It may be the beauty of the liturgy, or the growth of the church, or the benefits of meditation, or the plight of the poor, or any of a thousand other things. I do not question that all of them are good and worthy, but they are not the gospel. They are not good news unless they emanate from Jesus and direct us to him.

I remember years ago watching John Stott being interviewed on a Christian television program. His interviewer (himself a Pentecostal pastor) kept talking about Christianity. It finally got to the point where, several minutes into the show, John interrupted him and said, “It’s not Christianity we’re here to talk about: it’s Christ.”

There is no power in Christianity. Christianity is a system. The power of the gospel is in a person, Jesus Christ. It is he, Paul tells us elsewhere, and he alone, who is the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24). “Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone … so that we may present everyone mature in Christ” (Colossians 1:28).

The good news fulfilled

A third thing we learn about the gospel in this morning’s reading is that it is for all people. Already in Paul’s day, scarcely a generation after the events of Jesus’ cross and resurrection, the message had reached all the way to Rome. Now Paul had plans to take it to Spain as well. Already it had cut across distinctions of race and ethnicity, social class and gender. Already it was being embraced by people from the lowliest slaves to members of the household of Caesar.

All of that is wonderful in itself, and it is the fulfillment of Jesus’ command in this morning’s Gospel reading, to go and make disciples of all nations. Yet it seems to me that the clincher comes in two little words. You will find them at the beginning of verse 6: “including yourselves”. The gospel isn’t just for “them”. It’s for you. It’s for me.

I remember many years ago as a teenager sitting in the office of a local pastor. I’m not exactly sure how we got to this point in the conversation, but he asked me to elaborate what I believed as a Christian. My answer was basically the Apostles’ Creed: that Jesus was God’s Son, that he had died on the cross for the sins of the world… Then he stopped me. “John, you say that Jesus died for the sins of the world, but do you believe that he died for your sins?” At that point I had been attending church for some time, a couple of years or more. I had been teaching in the Sunday school. But I was unable to give a positive answer to his question. What that question did, though, was to set me on a quest that not long after led me into a relationship with Jesus that was truly personal—and I am forever grateful for his willingness to ask it.

It is an easy assumption to make that because someone is in a church—they may even be in the choir or serving on the vestry or teaching in the Sunday school as I was—that they have responded to the personal challenge of the gospel. Erica Sabiti was the first African Archbishop of Uganda. As a young lad he had been a pupil in a church mission school where he had no doubt been exposed to the gospel. He later trained as a teacher in one of those mission schools and then as a catechist in the church. That in turn led him to theological college and ordination, first as a deacon and then as a priest. Yet all that time he would have described himself as being one foot away from the kingdom of God—the distance between his head and his heart. It was only when he went out one day to pray and accepted Jesus into his heart that the gospel that he had heard from his youth became a life-giving reality for him.

Again, as Karl Barth has put it, “What [the gospel] demands of [us] is more than notice, or understanding, or sympathy. It demands participation, comprehension, co-operation.”[3] The gospel is not fulfilled until I appropriate it personally, until I recognize that its message is for me—until I bow before Jesus, its source and center and subject, and allow him become a reality for me today.

---

[1]     Romans: God’s Good News for the World, 19

[2]     The Epistle to the Romans, 28

[3]     The Epistle to the Romans, 28

Sermon – “If you love me” (John 14:15-27)

For the past five weeks (since Easter) we have been reading from the First Letter of Peter in our Sunday morning services. Peter writes to Christian believers who are suffering for the sake of the gospel. He is writing from Rome, more or less mid-way through the reign of the Emperor Nero. While the first great persecution following the fire of Rome has not broken out yet, pockets of persecution against Christians are breaking out in parts of the empire, particularly on its fringes.

Peter writes to give those scattered believers encouragement in the face of suffering. “Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that, although they malign you as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify God…” “If you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God’s approval … because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you and example.” And in this morning’s passage: “Even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord.”

One of the most painful and awkward scenes to my mind in all of Scripture is the exchange between Jesus and Peter that takes place at the very end of John’s gospel. Many of you know the scene. It was some time after Jesus’ resurrection. Peter and six others of Jesus’ followers had headed back up north from Jerusalem to their home territory of Galilee. They had spent all night out on the water fishing but entirely without success. The sun was just peeking over the horizon when they heard a voice calling to them from the shore. “Fellows, you don’t have anything to eat, do you?” “No,” they shouted back. “Try letting down your net on the right side of your boat and you’ll catch some.” To their surprise they had scarcely dropped their net into the water before it was bursting with fish.

John was the first to realize what was happening. “It’s the Lord!” he exclaimed. Within an instant Peter was pulling on some clothes and diving into the water. It was after they had broiled some of the fish and had eaten them that the hard conversation began. Jesus turned to Peter and said, “Simon, son of John…” Jesus was addressing Peter by his formal name—the name he had before he had become one of Jesus’ followers—not by the name Jesus had given him: Peter, the Rock. “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” “Yes, Lord,” Peter replied, “you know that I love you.” Then Jesus asked a second time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” “Yes, Lord,” Peter replied once again, “you know that I love you.” “Simon, Son of John, do you love me?” This time the question really stung, because all that Peter could think of was his cowardice of only a few days before—how three times he had denied even knowing Jesus. “Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you.”

To me the scene is a foreshadowing of that day when I will stand before Jesus and he will ask me, “John, do you love me?” And I ask myself, how many times have I denied Jesus? How many times have I shrunk back from living out my faith? How many times have I allowed the fear or selfishness or rebellion or the thousand-and-one other lesser motivations that battle inside me to stand ahead of my love for Jesus? “John, do you love me?” “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Yet within my heart I know that my love is often weak and cold.

Keeping the commands of Jesus

Weeks before Peter’s painful encounter on the shores of Galilee, he had been with Jesus and the other disciples in the upper room. There he had heard Jesus say the words that opened our Gospel reading this morning: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” And so loving Jesus is more than having nice thoughts or warm feelings about Jesus, more than loving the idea of Jesus. Fundamentally, our love for Jesus is going to be measured by our actions.

The Greek of the New Testament has two words for “obey”. One of them (peitho) has to do with an enforced obedience. James uses it when he writes about putting bits into the mouths of horses to force them to obey us. The other (hupakouo) is a more responsive, willing obedience. Thus by faith Abraham obeyed God’s call to go to a land he had never known. Children are encouraged to obey their parents, not because they will be punished, but because “this is right”. The wind and the sea obeyed Jesus because in him they recognized their creator.

However, neither of those is the word that we find in this passage. When Jesus speaks to his followers, he tells them not that they are to obey his commandments, but that they are to “keep” them. The difference may seem subtle at first, but it is an important one. And perhaps to drive the point home, Jesus repeats what he says twice more over the course of the next few verses: “They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me” (verse 21). And, “Those who love me will keep my word” (verse 23). We find the same word in Jesus’ final words to his disciples at the end of Matthew’s gospel in the Great Commission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to keep everything that I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19,20).

What, then, does the Bible mean when it uses the word “keep”? Literally it means to guard, to protect, to preserve. When Jesus turned water into wine at the wedding celebration in Cana, the steward expressed his surprise because, he said, “you have kept the good wine until now” (John 2:10). And so we keep things because we recognize their value. This is what underlies the wisdom offered to young people in the Book of Proverbs:

My child, if you accept my words

and treasure up my commandments within you,

making your ear attentive to wisdom

and inclining your heart to understanding; 

if you indeed cry out for insight, 

and raise your voice for understanding; 

if you seek it like silver,

and search for it as for hidden treasures—
then you will understand the fear of the Lord

and find the knowledge of God. (Proverbs 2:1-5)

In the Psalms we read of the surpassing value of God’s word:

The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul;
the decrees of the Lord are sure, making wise the simple;
the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the Lord is clear, enlightening the eyes…;
the ordinances of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb. (Psalm 19:7-10)

So it was that from their earliest days as a nation the people of Israel were reminded,

Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:6-9)

“With my whole heart I seek you;” sang the psalmist, “do not let me stray from your commandments. I treasure your word in my heart, so that I may not sin against you” (Psalm 119:10,11).

Empowered by the Spirit of Jesus

Loving Jesus, then, means having his word etched into our very hearts, finding in it our delight, our very life. Yet for how many of us is this true? Archbishop William Temple was a man of profound faith. At the same time he confessed, “Our love is cold. It is there, but it is feeble. It does not carry us to real obedience. Is there anything that I can do?” he asks. And here is his answer: “No; there never is, except to hold myself in his presence… But the Lord, who knows both the reality and the poverty of our love, will supply our need.”[1]

Jesus knows better than we do that, as much as we might want to, as hard as we might try, we cannot live the life of discipleship in our own power. And so he promises his disciples “another Advocate”, one who will be with them forever. Now if you look at that word “Advocate” in verse 16, you will see that it is accompanied by a footnote, which suggests that the word may also be translated “Helper”. And if you look at other versions of the Bible you will find that the same word is rendered “Counselor” or “Friend”. Indeed there are some translators who have simply thrown up their hands and used the word “Paraclete”, which is nothing more than an Anglicization of the original Greek word in the New Testament. My own preference is for “Helper”, as the word literally means someone who comes alongside you, to support and assist, to encourage and to guide.

So it is the Holy Spirit who takes Jesus’ words and makes them live for us. It is the Holy Spirit who gives us the will and the power to keep them on a daily basis. It is the Holy Spirit who makes the life of discipleship a possibility—and more than that, a joy and an adventure to which nothing else can compare.

Trusting in the love of Jesus

I have spoken about what it means to love Jesus: to keep his word, to be indwelt by the Holy Spirit. As we love Jesus in this way, we find ourselves being led more deeply into the mystery and the wonder of his love for us. “Those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them … and we will come to them and make our home with them.”

Karl Barth is regarded by many as the greatest theologian of the twentieth century. Perhaps you are familiar with the story of when he was at Rockefeller Chapel on the campus of the University of Chicago during his lecture tour of the U.S. in 1962. After his lecture, during the Q & A time, a student asked Barth if he could summarize his whole life’s work in theology in a sentence. Here is what Barth said: “Yes, I can: ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.’ ”

As important as our love for Jesus may be, we need to put it into its far greater context—and that is the love of both the Father and the Son for you and for me. And that love is not limited. Nor is it conditional. It does not depend on our love for him. There will be times when we fail—even spectacularly—to keep Jesus’ words. There will be occasions when we grieve the Holy Spirit. Yet there will never be a time when God’s heart does not burn with love for us. As he was there for Peter on the shore of Lake Galilee, Jesus will be there with us; and, as he said to Peter, he says to you and to me once again, “Follow me.”

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[1]     Readings in St John’s Gospel, 238,239