This Sermon Sucks

Note: I wrote this sermon on Romans 5:1-8 and I didn't have anything to say and I didn't much want to either. So I waited for the last possible moment and made something up. My sermons can only get better from here, and after I have revised this (for homework) I will post the revision.

Everything I post is my own opinion unless otherwise stated, except this sermon, because I won't lay claim to it either.

heather



The thing about Paul is that he never met a dangling participle he didn't like. I can only hope that in the original Greek Paul sounds as passionate and clear as I hope to be in interpreting his words. In order to unpack this, however, there is one word that need some interpretation. We come into this space from our stay in the secular world and we often listen with our secular ears. Unfortunately, sometimes the secular world has taken words and twisted them to a new meaning so that the original intent is hiding within them.

I want to spend a moment looking at the word righteous. Whole books have been written on the word righteous and what it means to be righteous, but I will have you know that most if not all of those books will put you to sleep at night and you still won't know what the technical theological word righteous means. One of my favorite ways to understand the meaning of a word is to look it up in a thesaurus and see what the similar words are. Webster gives three distinct categories of righteous similes. The religious one is Holy and it includes words like devout, pious, reverent and fervent. Another definition is Self- Conscience and includes self-righteous and egotistic. The last is virtuous and it has words like noble and clear-conscience and reliable.

If you didn't know what righteous meant but that it was a religious word and you looked it up in the dictionary, would you connect it with reliable or goodhearted, or would you connect it with self-righteous and rigid?

If someone told you, “No one would die for a righteous person, but they might for a good person” wouldn't you agree? Given that in a religious context the dictionary says that a righteous person thinks they are right even to the point of hypocrisy. We can easily concede that many died following Ghandi to freedom because he was a good person, but I can't think of a single person who died bravely for the sake of Pat Robertson.

You might be thinking that the dictionary isn't written by religious people or for religious people and you would be right. All the dictionary tells us is how people use terms. And people don't use the term righteous in a good way when speaking of religion. Why? That is certainly a topic worthy of one of those long dry books I was telling you about.

The bible is not the dictionary. It is the story of a religious people creating a common record to share their religious experience. As such, we do use words with technical meanings and we then have a responsibility to keep the bible as accessible as possible. We cannot hand people a bible when they ask about God and tell them it contains everything they need for salvation. That is the experience that many people have of the bible but the bible does not come with a secret decoder ring. Not only are we required to actually know what we mean when we use words like righteous, we need to make ourselves available to explain and clarify those terms when we encounter them in our secular lives.

Let's look at that sentence again with some of our similes. Lets see if replacing righteous and even good, which is a pretty vague and technical term, can make this sentence any easier to understand.

Rarely will anyone die for a reliable person-though perhaps for a reliable person someone might actually dare to die.

It looks like the simile method of bible study breaks down here. I thought it did too, until I suddenly remembered my favorite chapter of the bible. First Corinthians Chapter One . Verse 21 says “God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.” So, the technical term for our simile sentence is a tautology, which means the beginning of the sentence says exactly what the ending of the sentence says, or 'its true because it's true.”

So who would die for a tautology? This is church after all, you know the answer. Christ died for a righteous person or a good person, and most importantly, he died for a reliable person. Verse 8 says “But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” which sounds prettier than the more easily understood verse 6, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.”

Before we can accept the absurdity of Christs death, we have to accept the truth of our own reliability. We have to accept that we can be relied on- to fail God and to fail each other. We aren't actually reliable at all – but God loves us anyway. God made a way for us to move beyond that unreliability. God made a way for us to reach beyond our humanness and experience something of his love and to share that love with each other. What Paul is trying to tell the Romans, and what he has to say to us even today, is that we do not have to become worthy to be worthwhile people. Martin Luther, in 1517, says “we do not become righteous by doing righteous deeds, but having been made righteous, we do righteous deeds.” We do not have to be worthy of God's love, but we must simply accept God's love, and in doing so, we will share the love of God.
What you should do about it? Paul has an answer for that too. Boast he says. Tell everyone you know and everyone you meet that Jesus died so you don't have to. And whether they look at you funny, or they walk away, or they put you in jail, you will still have God's love, for no other reason than you believe in it. Paul is speaking from a place that few Americans have to experience, that of being REALLY persecuted for being a Christian, and so when he talks about the process we go through to reach a secure foundation of hope, well, my hope is that there are no lions.
Boasting, for Paul leads to suffering, and suffering requires endurance, and endurance leads to the personality traits we call character. I must admit, I have no idea how character leads to hope, but I do like the progression from boasting to hope. And hope that “does not disappoint” is certainly something to boast about.

Let us go forth and boast of God, but let us do so with a sensitivity to the ways in which the world will distort our message, through deliberate misunderstanding and genuine confusion. Let us go forth and boast of God, but let us keep the absurdity of undeserving grace for us ever present in our hearts as we interact with others. Let us go for and boast of God, and let us hold fast to our hope for we will neither suffer nor endure anything without the Holy Spirit which is the source of that hope. Let us go forth. Amen.