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Romans 8:
31-39
May 23, 2010 ST. PAUL: A PENTECOST SCRAPBOOK We’ve been working on a series of sermons on St. Paul and with today being Pentecost Sunday – traditionally known as the birthday of the church – it seems fitting that we pay tribute to this man who was most responsible for the establishment of the church. It may come as something of a surprise, but the church was the brainchild of St. Paul and not Jesus, and so it is St. Paul that should be given the credit and I suppose also the blame for the establishment of the church. We know that he had at least 3 long missionary journeys in which he circumnavigated an area stretching from Rome in the West all the way to a group of churches in Asia Minor, Macedonia and Greece. In trying to establish these small, struggling churches, he was shipwrecked and imprisoned, and yet, showing amazing tenacity and determination, he continued on with his ministry. Ultimately, he was executed by the Roman authorities, but suffice it to say, the church of today, for all of its faults and failures, wouldn’t exist at all without the spirit and the vision of this man by the name of St. Paul. This morning I thought we might honor the memory of this man by putting together what I have called “A Pentecost Scrapbook”, highlighting some of the churches St. Paul helped to create. Like all scrapbooks, there’s room for only a few of the churches, and even then, only a snapshot or two of each of those churches with which he worked, but I hope it will give us a sense of the enormity of his efforts and also something of the flavor of his theology and an inventory of some of the major themes in his letters. Each of the churches with which he worked was somewhat different, and so, understandably, the letters that he wrote to these churches were different both in substance and in style. Some read like love letters while others read more like what a schoolmarm would write to a disobedient and delinquent student. So, let’s pretend that St. Paul lived to a ripe old age, and it’s now Pentecost Sunday, and so he’s taken out his scrapbook to share with his grandchildren. His letter to the Romans was by far the longest of his letters, and indeed this is how they are organized in what we call the New Testament – from the longest to the shortest, and in his letter to the Romans, we find some of his most complicated theology, in which he talks about such abstract concepts as “justification” and “sanctification.” I remember as a young minister being embarrassed not being able to answer someone’s question about which came first, “sanctification” or “justification.” I confess I still don’t know the answer to that question, but being older and more calloused, rather than be embarrassed, I might be inclined to say, “What difference does it make?” Sometimes, we, in all of our churches, can waste a lot of time in theological minutia, concentrating too much on things that make very little difference. Nevertheless, one of the critical and central issues that you find in the theology of St. Paul and expressed time and time again in his letter to the Romans is that we are saved by grace and not by works. This of course would be a major theme in the Protestant Reformation but it really began with the writings of St. Paul, and it really began not so much as a theological tenet but rather as an autobiographical experience, namely the experience that St. Paul or Saul had on the Road to Damascus, an experience that would radically transform his life. He hadn’t earned it; he certainly didn’t deserve it, but all of a sudden he found himself surrounded and overwhelmed by God’s Love, and he found that Love to be absolutely unshakeable, and what amazed St. Paul was that previously he had thought that God’s Love was something that one had to earn, by being perfectly obedient to all the thousands and thousands of laws and observances that you’ll find in the Book of Leviticus and elsewhere, but now he has come to see that God’s love cannot be earned but is more like a mother’s love for her child, completely unconditional and without qualification. So, for all those who labor under the illusion that they’re just not good enough for God’s love, for all those who think that they have failed themselves time and time again, for all those who struggle from feelings of unworthiness and inadequacy, for all those who felt that they were spiritual weaklings in the face of injustices and evil, St. Paul had a most important message to proclaim, and he circumnavigated the world with this message, creating church after church that would teach and preach that God’s Love is absolutely unconditional and universal. And so in our scrapbook, under his letter to the Romans, I think I would put a photograph of the Coliseum in Rome, the place in which so many Christians were tortured and devoured by lions, and underneath that photograph I would put these words of St. Paul, words that expressed the unshakeable, undefeatable, indefatigable, indomitable faith of those Christians: In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. A defiant, outrageous statement, to be sure. The knowledge of God’s love makes one greater than all the great conquerors of all the great empires, stronger than Julius Caesar, more powerful than Alexander, that even Genghis Khan in all his ferocity cannot defeat those who live with the unshakeable knowledge of God’s Love. And so, in my imagination, I see St. Paul sharing this page from his scrapbook with his grandchildren and saying to them, “Please remember this. We are more than conquerors through him who loves us.” The next page in his “Pentecost Scrapbook” is devoted to the Church at Corinth, situated on the Peloponnesus of Greece, not too far from Agamemnon’s grave in Mycenae. Now, being that there are two long letters that he wrote to this church, we have to be rather choosey. So, I think I would put in the scrap book drawings or photographs of some of the great church buildings and cathedrals – Salisbury Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, The Basilica in Rome, the National Cathedral in Washington DC, a Greek Orthodox Church in Athens complete with magnificent icons and also – please forgive me for being presumptuous -- a beautiful Meetinghouse in Old Lyme, Connecticut. I see old St. Paul sitting down with his grandchild and with a crayon, and rather curiously he draws a line through each of these structures, and then just below, he writes these words: Do you not know that you are God’s Temple and the God’s spirit dwells in you? More than anyone, St. Paul understood the importance of church buildings. He knew that building cathedrals and meetinghouses would preserve the life and teachings of Jesus for future generations, but he also knew that all these glorious buildings would be in vain, unless we remember that we are, each one of us, the most glorious temple that there can be, that we are, each one of us, a vessel of God’s love, and while architecture is a wonderful gift that can inspire us, the spirit of God can be seen best of all in biography and autobiography, and so we need to be ever so careful with these temples that we are. On yet another page under the
Church at Corinth, I think St. Paul would have written the creeds that humanity
has composed – the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed and also the Statement of
Faith of the United Church of Christ, and also in large letters, he would have
written the word “sermon”, and then underneath, he would have written the 20th
verse from the 4th chapter of his first letter to the Church at
Corinth, where he said, Moving on now to the next page in our “Pentecost Scrapbook”, we come to St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, who lived in a region that would now be in the central part of Turkey. As I said earlier, St. Paul’s letters could sometimes seem like love letters, but at other times he could scold like no other schoolmarm, and as I said last week, it was to the Galatians that he dispensed with his usual salutations and pleasantries and cut straight to the chase, saying to them, “You stupid Galatians.” The reason for this is that the church leaders there were teaching and preaching that Gentiles or non-Jews would first of all have to become Jewish before they could become Christian, and without going into all the gory details, they were even requiring that adult men be circumcised before they could be baptized. So, no wonder and for good reason he said, “you stupid Galatians”, and these words certainly deserve a page unto themselves as a reminder for how the church universal, churches of all denominations, sometimes do some incredibly stupid things. I wonder how many, many children of God, yearning for love, have been frozen out of churches because of our ill-conceived rules and regulations. Instead of boldly waving the banner of grace, the church historically has set itself up as a gate keeper on God’s love. So, we may not like it, but we all sometimes need that admonition: “You stupid Galatians!” “You stupid Congregationalists!” His letter to the Galatians is sometimes called, “The Magna Charta” of Christian Liberty, for it’s in this letter the he writes these words which should be repeated and remembered by all of our churches: For freedom Christ has set
us free; stand fast The next page in his scrapbook would be the Letter to the Church at Ephesus, which is situated on the beautiful Mediterranean coast of Turkey. Tradition has it that this was the home of Mary, the mother of Jesus, after the crucifixion of her son. While there are many verses that I would want to include, for this page, I think I would draw an eye, an “all seeing eye” and I would include the place where St. Paul said that we should have “the eyes of the heart enlightened.” As we know, there are those with 20/20 vision who can see nothing at all. They read the newspaper; they watch television, but they do not see how the children of God are languishing from poverty and injustice. They do not see the terrible inequities that so divide the human family. They do not see anything from anyone else’s perspective, or as Jesus said, “they have eyes but they do not see.” With these eyes, our human eyes, we inevitably divide the world “subject and object”, but with the “eyes of the heart” we see things not as things but rather as emanations from God. In my imagination, I like to think that this way of seeing was something that St. Paul may have learned in Ephesus while visiting Mary, the mother of Jesus –maybe having tea with her one afternoon -- for surely Mary had that remarkable ability to see with the eyes of the heart, for she was able to come to see her own child as the emanation from God that he was, and so helped him to become what he was destined to be. If the church in Galatia was the recipient of St. Paul’s harshest words, the Church in Philippi, led by a woman by the name of Lydia, was a straight “A” student by comparison. Situated way up in Macedonia, it responded with great generosity to a plea by St. Paul to help the struggling church in Jerusalem. When St. Paul wrote this letter he was probably in prison, probably in either Ephesus or Rome, and yet, his words seem unusually sublime, and while there might be several verses that we would want to include in our “Pentecost Scrapbook”, I think I would go with some words that seem to suggest a form of prayer, a different form of prayer, more of a form of contemplation that all of us could use for those times in which we feel if not imprisoned, at least trapped or hemmed in by circumstances beyond our control. He says to his beloved Philippians: …whatsoever is true,
whatsoever is honorable, whatsoever is just, whatsoever is pure, whatsoever is
lovely, whatsoever is This was wisdom borne out of experience, and I can see old St. Paul saying to his grandchild, “look, from time to time you will find yourself in a tough situation, and like a prison, it will seem as if there is no way out, but the mind is a remarkable gift from God, and if you think about these things, you will come to know a remarkable freedom of spirit and you will know what it means when we speak of the peace that passes all understanding.” While our scrapbook would be incomplete without some reference to the Church in Thessalonica, up in the northern part of Greece, the letters to this church being perhaps that oldest of all the letters that he wrote, I think for now I would like to conclude our Pentecost Scrapbook with a little piece of what I would call “theological holography.” As I understand it, in ordinary photography, if you were to cut a negative in half, you have only half of the image. But in holography, even just a piece or a fragment reveals the whole image. And so it is with certain passages from the bible. There are some verses that seem to say everything all at once, as if all the wonder and mystery of the universe could be contained in just a few words. To write such words is the elusive dream of a poet and a philosopher, but if I were to lose everything else in the New Testament, I could learn to be content with just a few words in St. Paul’s letter to the church at Colossae, a small, seemingly insignificant town not too far away from Ephesus. On this page, I would draw people, many different kinds of people, but also I would draw pomegranate trees and maple trees, orangutans, and pelicans; I would draw rivers and oceans, mountain villages and urban communities. It would be a collage of many different images, and then in bold letters, superimposed on all these images, would be these wonderful words of St. Paul: CHRIST IS ALL AND IS IN ALL Even if I were to lose all the rest of the bible, that, for me, would be enough. Amen.
David W. Good Old Lyme, Connecticut
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