Romans 12:9-18
The world is weird, pretty much every day. One recent example… Last Sunday, after our discussion of the 8th Phoenix Affirmation, a guest asked me about a line from Paul’s letter to the Romans, one you’ve all heard: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”
And of course, that passage would turn out to be in this week’s scheduled lectionary reading, one I selected months ago. You didn’t hear it today because I cut those last verses of the reading. So let’s talk about why, why Paul falls into the category of a necessary problem, why assumptions he made, and to some extent Jesus also made, have skewed Christianity, and where Paul gets it right and is worthy of study.
We can reasonably claim that Christianity would not exist as a world religion without Paul. What we think of as ancient Judaism, the religion of John the Baptizer and of Jesus, really begins to take a shape we recognize after the Babylonian Captivity in the 6th Century Before the Common Era, six centuries removed from Moses and four centuries after David and Solomon. Some even place the formation of a familiar Judaism as late as the Maccabean revolt in the 2nd century BCE, not much further removed from the time of Jesus than we are from the formation of this church.
The Judaism of the 1st century of the Common Era was diverse, with many competing movements, some led by charismatic leaders like John with his ministry of baptism, and Jesus with his ministry of healing and teaching.
The Sadducees and Pharisees are mostly accepted as the major players in the Jewish Council that served as a civilian administration under Roman control, and were closely connected with the Temple authorities. But there were also Essenes and Sicarii, social banditry and just plain old banditry.
It was chaos, and pretty much every sect was mad at every other sect, because it was easier to be mad at one another than to be mad at the Romans, who were the real problem but also very dangerous, kind of like the way America’s minorities and impoverished stay mad at one another rather than at the corporations and billionaires who are destroying our democracy and our planet.
The followers of Jesus were one weird little sect among many weird little sects, because much of the Roman world found the Judaism of that age weird, the idea of one God, the dietary restrictions, and especially circumcision.
Paul tell us he was a Pharisee. We have no reason to doubt this. And not just a Pharisee, but a bit of an extremist. He is the one holding the cloaks as the crowd stones Stephen. But then he has this episode on the road to Damascus, when post-Ascension Jesus appears to him, and he converts.
Skeptical? Me too.
There is no way to test claims of direct revelation, claims that often turn out to be mutually exclusive, filled with contradiction, the claims of a Paul or a Joseph Smith or any number of other self-proclaimed seers and prophets, each offering the one true and final word from God.
But on the other side of his vision or psychotic break, whichever you think it is, Paul ends up being the bridge between the insular world of Judean Judaism, the broader world of Diaspora Judaism, the many Jews who already lived in places like Babylon and Alexandria, and the Roman and Hellenistic non-Jewish world. For despite being deeply involved in religious sectarianism, Paul is also a merchant, at the very least bilingual, speaking Aramaic and Greek, and a citizen of Rome. We can assume that he is well traveled.
Paul knows people who knew Jesus, at the very least Peter and James, the brother of Jesus, but Paul never heard Jesus teach and was not part of the inner circle. He had no contact with Jesus or his followers before the crucifixion, as far as we know. Yet, Paul is the earliest authentic source we have. None of the gospels and none of the letters were written by actual disciples. Paul’s letter to the church at Thessaloniki, written around 52 CE, is the earliest surviving Christian text.
The seven authentic letters of Paul contain some beautiful stuff, but they lack some of the gritty populism of the gospels, which is sort of amazing, because Paul was already the most influential figure in the movement before the gospels were written.
So influential is Paul that we cannot surgically remove him despite the fervent desire of so many. We can guess about Jesus in his historic context, but we cannot be sure Paul hasn’t influenced our view.
Paul believes the world, as he experiences it, is about to end, so there is no need to change it. In that first letter to the Thessalonians he offers reassurance to the church that the faithful who have already died will join those still alive at the Second Coming of Christ.
The gospels can be ambiguous about the Day of the Lord, with competing messages offering an apocalyptic re-ordering of the world or an in-breaking kingdom in which the holy co-exists with current creation. We can and still do debate apocalypse. Though personally, I’m pretty sure that the four riders of the apocalypse are misnamed. One must surely be named Social Media, and another Incorporation.
For Paul, it is all cataclysm or bust, maybe next week. Hopefully next week. So there is no need to get married or divorced, things he literally says in his letters. Just stay where you are, enslaved, married to a violent pagan, whatever…
The other problem is that Paul has complete faith in Roman rule. The empire is benevolent, sometimes experienced in Roman law enforcement saving him from violent mobs, never mind that it was Roman rule that tortured and executed Jesus.
Paul’s opponents are not benevolent, Athenians or adherents of other Jewish sects. When he is arrested for creating a public disturbance for the last time, he uses his citizenship to appeal to Rome, and is taken to the capitol. Adventures ensue, including a shipwreck on Malta.
Everything after that is unverified legend not in scripture, but it seems likely that his trust in the empire was misguided. Sometimes people put faith in the stability of institutions and they turn out to be no more stable than the madman who claws his way to the top, as we well know, people like Caligula and Nero, the latter scapegoating Christians after the Great Fire of Rome in 64 CE. Legend has Paul executed in Rome, possibly, along with Peter, during the Neronian Persecution, though Peter’s presence in Rome is questionable.
Now, news flash, the Second Coming of Christ did not happen in Paul’s lifetime and the Roman Empire was neither as egalitarian nor as stable as advertised. And Jesus, even through the lens of Paul’s influence, never tells people to wait around. Jesus is all action verbs: follow me, get up and walk, go out into the world. The short time that remains is all the more reason, in the teachings of Jesus, for urgency. He’s not waiting around.
I am not interested in sitting around waiting for the world to end. And if there is a heaven, entry is not going to be based on what I believed. It is going to be based on what I did. Matthew 25 does not say “what you have convinced yourself to believe.” It says “what you have done.”
For all Paul gets wrong, for all he has been misread to create an artificial separation between faith and works, he gets it right in the first part of today’s passage from his introductory letter to the churches in Rome. He calls those who would follow Jesus to pray, to embrace humility, generosity, service, to choose peaceful co-existence if it is possible.
If it is possible.
He calls those who would follow Jesus to lean into love, to offer one another grace, which resonates with the teaching of Jesus, “judge not lest ye be judged,” “love your enemy. “
It matters how you live. It matters how you treat others. And nothing, I mean nothing, made Jesus angrier that showy and self-righteous religiosity.
We pray because we are not the center of the universe, only the center of our own universe, and we did not call ourselves into being.
It is hard to meet the arrogance and idolatry of American Evangelicals and Fundamentalists with love.
I get it.
They seek to impose a narrow and hateful theocracy on the United States no different than the ayatollahs of Iran or the mullahs of the Taliban. But we cannot become them. We can, and must, become so much more.
Paul, a tentmaker from Tarsus straddling two worlds, translated the good news of a loving God for an age that was hungry for good news. Our age is hungry for good news. And God still loves.
Amen.