BIBLE READINGS: Deuteronomy
26:1-11 Romans 10:8-13 Luke 4:1-13
SERMON
Today I would
like to reflect some more on what it means to be a Christian and how it might
contrast with what many of us have been taught to think and believe in the
past. We will follow in the footsteps of the Apostle Paul, doing the same thing
in the passage we heard read before.
One of the great temptations for the Christian Church has always been to try to
turn the gospel into a neat and simple system so that everything is clear and
everyone knows what’s required and who’s in and who’s out. And for those of us
who were raised in churches where everything was very neat and certain and the
boundary lines were very clear, the passage we heard from Paul’s letter to the
Romans was often a favourite. “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord
and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the
mouth and so is saved.” Quite simple and clear-cut, we were told. One
compulsory belief to assent to, and one compulsory allegiance to verbally
declare, and there you go, you are saved. And usually the opposite was
proclaimed with equal fervour. Those who don’t believe in the resurrection of
Jesus from the dead and who don’t declare that Jesus is Lord are unsaved. In
fact they are damned and headed straight to hell. Or so we were often told.
And often we were taught
that this was an expression of the great protestant doctrine of justification
by faith alone, and this was in contrast to the Roman Catholics who, so we were
often told, believed that you were saved by doing certain works such as attendance
at mass and confession and rosaries and charitable works. Faith alone, we
asserted. Believe and declare, and that’s it. But there was some problems with
that approach. Firstly, it often didn’t end up feeling nearly as liberating as
“faith alone” was supposed to be. It often ended up sounding as though “believe
this one thing” and “declare this one thing” were just as much “works” as
attendance at mass or praying a rosary. In fact, sometimes they were worse
because they seemed so much less certain. If you had to pray the rosary, at
least you knew whether or not you had done it successfully. You’ve either done
it or you haven’t. But “believe in your heart”? It’s easy enough to know
whether I’ve said with my mouth, “Jesus is Lord”, but how do I judge whether I
really believe something in my heart? How firmly do I have to believe it? How
do I know whether I have believed it firmly enough? And actually, even if I can
know that I’ve said “Jesus is Lord” with my mouth, didn’t Jesus himself say
that some of those who come to him saying “Lord Lord”
are people of whom he will say, “I never knew you.” So maybe that’s not so
comforting either.
Another major problem with this approach is that it actually seems to
contradict the whole thrust of what the Apostle is trying to say in this part
of his letter to the Romans. In fact, to put it in terms that come from our
gospel reading, it seems to fall into a major temptation that often faces the
church: the temptation to take a gracious relationship with the risen Christ,
and turn it into a system of exclusion and control. Let me show you what I mean
about the alternative that Paul is offering here.
The passage we heard began with Paul quoting from the book of Deuteronomy: “The
word is near you, on your lips and in your heart”, and it is on the basis of
that quotation that he then says “because if you confess with your lips that
Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you
will be saved.” So Paul is clear that what he is saying about confessing with
your lips and believing in your heart is to be understood in relation to the
quote from Deuteronomy and particularly in relation to the ways that it was
commonly being interpreted in his day. You see, this part of Deuteronomy was
very important to the Jewish people of Paul’s day. It comes after a section
that has been talking about how if the people follow God’s law they will gain
many blessings, and if they don’t they will fall victim to all manner of
curses. But then in chapter 30, something different happens. God speaks about a
day when something new will occur, and instead of having to strive to know the
word of God and obey it by strenuous and conscientious effort, we will instead
find that God has graciously put the word in our hearts and in our mouths and
it will simply flow naturally from who we are. Now in Paul’s day, there was
great interest in how and when this would come about, and various different
groups within Israel were pushing different interpretations of it, and pointing
to different ideas of how you could recognise those into whose hearts and
mouths God had put the word of life. And many of those interpretations amounted
to systems of obedience and belief, and so conformity to those things would be
the sign of God’s chosen saved ones.
So it is against the
backdrop of this speculation about how the promise from Deuteronomy would be
fulfilled that Paul comes out and says that the promise is fulfilled in Jesus
the Messiah, and that God’s salvation is now graciously offered to everyone,
not just the Jews, and that the sign of salvation is what overflows from our
hearts and our mouths.
So this is quite different from how it has often been preached. Rather than
being a formula or prescription — if you say this and believe this then God
will save you — it is a description of those who are already being saved. God
is already saving all these people and you can tell that by the faith in their
hearts and the gracious words of their mouths. The faith and the words are the
evidence of what is already happening, not the prerequisite which they must
achieve before God will act.
And where this becomes so important is in what Paul says next, which is again
in contrast to what was being assumed by many good Jews of his day. “‘No one
who believes in him will be put to shame.’ For there is no distinction between
Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on
him. For, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’” He’s
got two more biblical quotes in there, from Isaiah 28:16 and Joel 2:32, and the
thrust of it is “everyone”, “no distinction”. Now Paul specifically says “no
distinction between Jew and Greek”, but not because that was the only
distinction eliminated, but because that was the distinction being argued over
at the time. It was widely assumed by religious Jews that God was saving the
Jews, and the gentiles could go to hell, and even in the New Testament church,
this was still be wrestled with. If a gentile put their faith in Jesus, did that
mean they had to convert to Judaism in order to be among those who God was
saving? For us now, it is almost impossible to imagine that anyone could
believe that God’s salvation might be ethnically limited, although there are
still sects like the Ku Klux Klan who articulate exactly that. But Paul’s “no
distinction” argument goes a lot further. Elsewhere he points to there being
“no distinction” between male and female, slave and free. Again categories that
had particular relevance to his day, although it took the church many centuries
more to come to terms with them, and some parts of the church are still trying
to sort out what “no distinction” between male and female might be supposed to
look like.
But however enlightened we might like to think we are, the big temptation, and
certainly a temptation that the evil one loves to get us sucked into, is to
keep trying to turn the gospel back into a system that allows us to reimpose
distinctions and define who is in and who is out and draw nice neat clear lines
between us, the saved, and them, the damned. Just like in our gospel story, the
evil one is always saying “if, if, if” and trying to get us to think we have to
try harder or do more or be something else. “If you are really the church that
God wants you to be, banish those people who don’t measure up to this standard
or that standard.” And so it is all too common still to find churches which,
instead of looking for signs of faith in people’s hearts and words, look for
conformity to various norms of orthodox belief or lifestyle. And usually those
churches are most readily recognisable by the clarity and passion with which
they oppose and condemn those who fall outside their nice clear boundaries.
Rather than look for and celebrate any reason to welcome and include, they look
for and jump on any reason to exclude. They could not imagine for a moment that
the Apostle might say there is no distinction between Christian and Muslim, no
distinction between liberal and fundamentalist, no distinction between homosexual
and heterosexual. But Paul doesn’t say “there are fewer distinctions.” He says
“there is no distinction; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all
who call on him.”
So maybe if God could ask the entire Church to come up with just one thing to
give up for Lent, and then forever after, it would be to give up trying to turn
the gospel back into a system of categorising insiders and outsiders, and to
instead just welcome and celebrate every sign of faith and hope as evidence of
God’s gracious welcome of more and more people into the community that is
marked out and known by just one thing, the generous, welcoming, transformative
and recklessly inclusive love of Jesus. And any Lenten discipline that doesn’t
lead us towards that would be a good thing to give up!
Acknowledgement: Nathan
Nettleton