Today's Sermon

 

"Signing Off: You’re Better Thank You Think – The Gifts of Paul 10"

 

Romans 15:14-15
14 I myself feel confident about you, my brothers and sisters, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, and able to instruct one another. ¹⁵Nevertheless, on some points I have written to you rather boldly by way of reminder, because of the grace given me by God

Romans 16:1-16
16 I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae, ²so that you may welcome her in the Lord as is fitting for the saints, and help her in whatever she may require from you, for she has been a benefactor of many and of myself as well.

3 Greet Prisca and Aquila, who work with me in Christ Jesus, ⁴and who risked their necks for my life, to whom not only I give thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles. ⁵Greet also the church in their house. Greet my beloved Epaenetus, who was the first convert in Asia for Christ. ⁶Greet Mary, who has worked very hard among you. ⁷Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was. ⁸Greet Ampliatus, my beloved in the Lord. ⁹Greet Urbanus, our co-worker in Christ, and my beloved Stachys. ¹⁰Greet Apelles, who is approved in Christ. Greet those who belong to the family of Aristobulus. ¹¹Greet my relative Herodion. Greet those in the Lord who belong to the family of Narcissus. ¹²Greet those workers in the Lord, Tryphaena and Tryphosa. Greet the beloved Persis, who has worked hard in the Lord. ¹³Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord; and greet his mother—a mother to me also. ¹⁴Greet Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, and the brothers and sisters who are with them. ¹⁵Greet Philologus, Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas, and all the saints who are with them. ¹⁶Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the churches of Christ greet you.

“Signing Off, You’re Better at This Than You Think: The Gifts of Paul 10”

            It was June 2nd that we began this journey with the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans.  I choose this path because Paul is a definitive figure in early Christianity. Romans is the most complete accounting of his theology and what many believe to be his final surviving writing. We embarked on this journey to unpack some of the baggage many have acquired about Paul – that he was judgmental, that he was anti-women, that his vision for life was harsh and unforgiving. It is important to try and understand Paul, even if only to know when to depart from him.  For some, this series has been an introduction to Paul, having had little exposure to him.  We haven’t covered every word (though it may have felt that way), but hopefully enough to map out his path.  I promised we would find hidden treasures along the way.  We met not just the expert in the law Paul, but the mystic Paul, one moved by spiritual experience. 

            On that first Sunday I asked you to imagine being a child unleashed in a field on a grand Easter egg hunt with treasures waiting to be found.  I held up an egg, symbolizing not only the little gifts we would find along the way, but also the cracks we needed to make in the misleading shell that’s been formed around Paul’s image. 

            Now, it is time for Paul to sign off, from his writing and from his life.  How does Paul do that, this self-aggrandizing, harsh, judgmental one – you can detect my facetiousness?  “I, myself, feel confident about you…that you…are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, and able to instruct one another” (Romans 15:14).  Imprisoned and awaiting what tradition tells us was his execution, Paul says:  I feel confident about you.  You’re better at this than you think.  You are full of goodness.  You are full of knowledge, or what I might suggest, wisdom, knowing what to do with that knowledge.  You know enough to instruct one another.  Yes, I have challenged you, he says, writing boldly, all because of the grace given and entrusted to me by God.

            The “you” in Paul’s farewell carries meaning in and of itself.  As is almost always the case in the scriptures, the “you” is plural.  That’s one of the many limitations of the English language; it doesn’t distinguish between “you” singular and “you” plural, unless, of course, you are in the South. Yes, most of the time when the Bible says “you” it means “y’all.”  In our individualistic culture we default to you-singular, but Paul, Jesus, the prophets, they lived in the land of y’all.  Why belabor the point?  First, Paul pushes the edges of our orientation, challenging us to think beyond ourselves to consider the other, to consider most of all the community.  It’s not that he envisioned 21^stcentury American life, but his writings, by the power of the Holy Spirit, certainly have something to say to it.  Two, on the more comforting side, he leaves us with the lesson that while it may not be all about you, it’s also not up to you alone.  You, we, are in this together. 

            Do you know how many times people come to me and lament their own failures or shortcomings in the faith?  Often it’s because they’ve been taught a you-singular mentality:  You, individually, have to have it all together.  No, not only does Paul say our wholeness comes through our weakness, he says it comes through our coming together.  It’s together that we are able to find someone who is strong in belief, another in getting things done, another in teaching, another in advocating, another in caring, another in thinking, another in feeling, and so on and so on.  Your deficiency is met by someone else’s strengths, and theirs yours.  Together we are the body.

            Paul believes the collective “you” to be so important he devotes precious pen strokes to listing just some of the individual “yous” as he signs off.  I feel as though today’s second reading was payback for all the times I have given difficult readings to the lector, with names of ancient cities or genealogies of unfamiliar names.  There is such an economy of words in the Bible – the Gospel of Mark is less than 40 pages.  Some of Paul’s letters as short as a single page.  The names matter.  They tell a story.  Notice the first commendation Paul offers is to Phoebe, a deacon of the church, a benefactor, so much for Paul being anti-woman.  The historical evidence is clear women occupied prominent places of leadership within Paul’s inner circle.  Yes, there are some passages that go against our appreciation of equality between the sexes, but some of those may be a misunderstanding of context. Others appear in books not written by Paul, instead written in his name much later as the church pivoted to accommodating itself to the wider norms of the Roman Empire.  As we discussed last week, whether we approve of it or not, this was a survival technique of the budding and fragile church.

            Phoebe isn’t the only woman Paul names, there are plenty of others, remarkable given the undeniable patriarchal character of both the times and Paul’s own tradition. There are those with familiar names, such as Mary, and some less familiar, such as Junia.  Let’s talk about her for a moment, Junia found in verse 7. She embodies a hidden treasure as well as well as an unfortunate turn in our tradition’s walk.  Your Bibles thankfully say, Junia, but there was a time when many Bibles read something else.  Do you know what they said instead?  Not Junia but Junias.  A simple copying error you might say, those poor guys writing by candlelight.  What’s a letter or two?  Quite a lot, it turns out.  The Latin scholars in the room already know where I’m going.  Junia bears the feminine ending, while Junias the masculine one.  Somewhere along the way, the name got changed, not because the first Christians couldn’t stomach a woman leader, but because later Christians couldn’t.  Count the women in your passage.  Paul is handing over of the movement he loves to the leaders he trusts, many of whom are women.

            Don’t hear the list of names as mere niceties of an awards acceptance speech.  Paul is teaching us right up to the end.  What makes the movement whole is also what makes it sustainable; it’s shared. 

            There’s an analog with Jesus.  When New Testament Scholar John Dominic Crossan talks about what distinguishes the Jesus movement from that around John the Baptist, he points to this same characteristic, that of shared ownership.  That’s an angle I had never heard considered.  It's well-established that there was a rivalry or sorts maybe not between John the Baptist and Jesus directly, but between their respective followings.  You see remnants of this in the scriptures.  The Gospel of John tells the story from the winner’s perspective.  Written around the end of the first century, it goes to lengths to establish from the opening pages the primacy of Jesus and the subjugation of John the Baptist as the one who comes to prepare the way for him.  Crossan, a fine scholar, makes the case that it wasn’t that John’s followers seamlessly became Jesus’ followers, but rather one movement faded away and the other endured for a particular reason.  Set aside convictions about Jesus’ identity, Crossan argues Jesus’ movement endured because it was, well, for and by the people.  It wasn’t, ironically, all about him.  It was about them, a democratization of the good news. 

            Elsewhere, Crossan draws the distinction this way.  He calls John “an apocalyptic eschatologist,” eschatology dealing with the final destiny of humanity.  John believed the world was so bad that it required, and would receive, a divine “clean up” in the form of God coming down to wipe things clean and start afresh.  Jesus, on the other hand, believed in “ethical eschatology,” in which people’s collective behavior would bring about the divine clean up.  As Crossan puts, “In an apocalypse [John]…we are waiting for God…in ethical eschatology [Jesus], God is waiting for us.”[1]  It’s up to us.

            Back to Paul who seemed both to be waiting for a divine clean up and advocating for people to tidy up themselves.  At least at times in his life, Paul clearly anticipated the coming of God in the return of Christ, though what this meant and when it would come seemed to evolve throughout his life, as you’d expect from anyone who grows in their faith.  Maybe Jesus was coming back as he came the first time.  Maybe the return of Christ was in the form of what Paul called the body of Christ, those who have taken up the spirit, the movement, and the commitment to forming community characterized by the grace and love Paul himself experienced in his mystical encounter.  Maybe the divine clean up exists outside the image of our current imagination.  The implication, however, is the same, that all the lessons we have learned throughout this journey remain as we both wait and usher in the Christ:

• Week 1 – God is accessible, available, universally so, bound by no tradition.
• Week 2 – What matters most is not our faithfulness to Christ, but Christ’s faithfulness.
• Week 3 – God’s love and grace is given freely, not to be earned, but to be cherished.
• Week 4 – Spirituality is not about disconnecting, but finding holy and righteous connection.
• Week 5 – Paul’s great promise to us of a love that overcomes even the grave is to be an undeterrable source of hope in the face of whatever threatens us.
• Week 6 – Our love is to be measured not in how it feels, but the amount of tension it can withstand, its commitment.
• Week 7 – We find God through finding each other.
• Week 8 – We must engage our minds, find wisdom through examination and deliberation, as we make use of the tradition, including the Bible, to navigate life.
• Week 9 – The flames we carry within us—and we do carry them, divine ones—are fragile, and we are responsible for not only our own, but each other’s.
• Week 10 – We are in this together. No one has to hold all of this alone.

            One more thing you must know about Paul.  For him, everything is grounded in the resurrection, which he writes about explicitly elsewhere (1 Corinthians 15).  We could do another series…I think you’ve had enough for now.  For him, resurrection is what God does in Christ, and to be people of Christ is to be people of resurrection, living a resurrection reality right now.  Living the resurrection now is what it looks like when we embody those hidden gifts that Paul gives us, when we embody the teachings of the Christ who transformed him. Through them, we live the resurrection in our lives, in our families, our communities, our nation, the world. Every time, large or small, when we bring life out of death, when we show that death does not have the last word, we live the resurrection.  The hidden gifts we’ve discovered along the way are what help us do that.  We began by talking about finding treasures on a great search.  Along the way, we pointed out and leaned into the hope that some of the negative impressions of Paul might be cracked by our exploration.  How fitting it is that both are symbolized by the egg, which has come to be a symbol of…the resurrection.  Resurrection is what God does, and thanks to Paul, it can be what we do together.

            Signing off, Amen.

[1]https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/portrait/john.html