We were all born into a world that is in love with differences. The love language that we have all learned is that of enmity towards those who are different. By the time I was a teenager I had been to Sunday School long enough to learn that all other churches except for those from my tradition were suspect. Their doctrine was wrong. Their view of the Bible was wrong. The church I went to emphasized, almost every Sunday, that our community did things in the manner of the early church. That made us special. Because our doctrine and practices were better, my church was in some sense superior to say a Baptist church or a Methodist church. We knew who the real Christians were. In fact my church community could give you the book, chapter and verse, from the Bible, as to why we were better.
The central question of faith for me as a kid was who is in and who is out. Faith was a debate and faithfulness was about being both right and self-righteous about being right. This kind of posturing towards others traps you into adopting divisions and self-righteousness as signs of godliness. My guess is that I am not alone. Many of us who have grown up going to church have learned to live in acrimony rather than in harmony. This is true if you grew up going to church or not. Take a quick listen to the daily news or scan your social media feed for just a few moments. Not a lot of harmony in our culture.
The Apostle Paul battled against peoples love for differences his entire ministry. Nowhere is this issue more apparent than in the book of Romans. The book of Romans is packed with a lot of theology. Christians have been debating the theology of Romans since the 18th century. In fact New Testament scholar NT Wright has suggested much of Christianity today is attempting to answer 21st century questions with 18th century answers.
All of the theological debates that revolve around the book often lead to forgetting that Romans is all about relationships. If you have been going to church for a long time you might find that a bit shocking. Reducing the book of Romans to theological issues such as justification is an adventure in missing the point. It is a distraction from Paul’s real world work with real people facing their own theological conundrums.
Towards the end of Paul’s ministry we find him on the move. Up till now he has been based mostly in Antioch. Paul now finds himself looking to go to other areas. Paul's desire to go to other areas may not be because he is sensing some urging by God. Paul could be wanting to go to other areas because the church in Antioch has become partisan and divided along religious and racial lines. Paul talks about this in Galatians 2:10-14 which says:
10 All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I had been eager to do all along. 11 When Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. 12 For before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. 13 The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray. 14 When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in front of them all, “You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?
Paul is getting out of town because the Christians in Antioch lack the get-along gene and perhaps Paul is worried that his brothers and sisters in Rome might be facing similar issues.
There is a detail to the context of the book of Romans that is often not considered yet this detail has major implications. Around A.D. 49 the Roman Emperor Claudius expelled Jews from Rome. That meant that not only Jews left Rome but so did Jewish Christians. That left a lot of Gentile Christians to define what it meant to follow Jesus without any Jewish Christians present. The Gentiles who remained would have begun meeting together without Jewish leadership and input, and those they reached with the good news of Christ would have been Gentiles. When Jewish Christians began returning five years later, they would have encountered house churches composed of more Gentiles than Jews. In AD 54 Claudius is dead and Nero takes over. Nero doesn’t much care about anything other than Nero. The Jewish exile from Rome is over.
Before the edict, the ruling Romans would have viewed Christians as a subset of Judaism—the churches, after all, were socialized like Jewish groups. But after the edict and the changing socialization of the groups into Gentile-ish communities, the process of viewing Jews and Christians as separate groups would have sped up. Note that by A.D. 64—only seven or so years after Paul’s letter arrived, this process would have been complete. Christians were successfully identified as a group separate from the Jews as Nero’s soldiers carried out their brutal persecution of Christians in Rome. Paul’s letter arrived while this process of changing self-identification was taking place. Jewish Christians coming back to Rome had to struggle with the question of whether they were primarily Jewish or whether they were primarily Christian (which would have felt increasingly like a Gentile thing to them)1. Gentile and Jewish Christians will have to figure out how to live with one another. How will these Christians (Gentile and Jewish) handle their diversity?
In all the theological discussions around the book of Romans what is often missed is that Paul writes Romans to demonstrate how to get along with people who aren’t like us. For centuries Jews had been told that they were God’s people. That meant that God was particular. God was partisan. God was for them and against everyone else. God was going to bring about His Kingdom through the Jews and for the Jews which is good news if you’re a Jew. From Abraham to the Exodus, from settling the Promised Land to being driven into exile, from the Maccabean revolt to Roman rule, all of this time they have been waiting for God to send the Messiah that will set the world right. If Jesus is the King of the Jews then who cares about the Gentiles. They have never belonged and never will. Yet now some people are coming from the church in Jerusalem calling themselves apostles and are teaching that Gentiles, those filthy dogs who haven’t kept the law, are now justified before God just like Jews. That is an unsettling thought, if you are Jewish.
Paul launches Romans with a scandalous claim in Romans 1:13-16:
13 I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that I planned many times to come to you (but have been prevented from doing so until now) in order that I might have a harvest among you, just as I have had among the other Gentiles. 14 I am obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish. 15 That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are in Rome. 16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.
Paul, in the book of Romans, casts the church as a large community. The church is based on belief not boundaries. It is a community of loving embrace and hospitality. A graceful community of people who trust in Jesus alone. God is not contained in Judaism nor in the narrow experience of Israel. Paul tells his Jewish brothers and sisters that God is at work among the Gentiles. Like it or not. And if God is at work outside of your boundary lines then maybe your lines are artificial.
Richard Nixon’s southern strategy concept fed Americans a steady diet of complaints about the liberal media and how liberals support lawlessness. It was a strategy built around capitalizing on the racial fears of white southerners. Goldwater used it in 1964 and Nixon perfected it by 1972. Ronald Reagan tapped into it in the 1980s by portraying minorities as “takers” that disadvantaged whites. In more recent times the concepts of the southern strategy have produced the thought that former president Barack Obama is an African born, secret Muslim socialist and all Democrats are out to ruin the country. President Trump used the southern strategy to his advantage to gain the support of white conservative Christian voters in 2016. Which is odd considering that only 38 percent of white evangelicals living in the South identified Trump as a Christian, but 84 percent voted for him.
Let’s be honest with each other for a moment. Being a conservative is not what makes you reject people. The rejection comes from turning conservatism into a quasi, watered down version of Christianity in which artificial lines get drawn between who is in and who is out. The same is true for those who adhere to liberalism. They view conservatives as being hate-filled, anti-intellectual, homophobic, war mongering xenophobes. Liberalism will critique, mock, and marginalize opponents to the point of political annihilation (same for conservatism). For them if you’re not with us then you are a backward, simple-minded, red-neck whose views don’t need to be expressed in society. Conservatives have expressed similar ideas about liberals.
Into this mixture of animosity you can add a generous amount of antagonism from media sources like CNN, Fox News, OAN, Tucker Carlson, Rachel Maddow and all of their ilk. They are not bent on integrity nor interested in facts or truth. They are all built around selling ideas and products for cultural domination and ratings.
Christians perhaps, like never before, suffer under what Paul calls the demonic powers and principalities whose essential work is to stir up and exploit disunity. It is the same powers that have given us the convenient scapegoats of immigrants, the 1 percent, muslims, liberals, conservatives, mexicans . . . basically anyone and anything that can serve as a distraction from the evil powers working the gears.
In August 2009 Alicia Sanchez sat down next to her dog and leaned up against her Jeep Cherokee. She began to prepare herself for the inevitable, she was going to die. Her son Carlos, age six, had just died in a remote part of Death Valley national park. After running out of gas and water Alicia and her son walked more than 10 miles in search of help. Eventually, Alicia was found severely dehydrated and spent a few days in the hospital to recover. Once at the hospital she explained that she and her son had become lost in Death Valley. She made a wrong turn. She explained that she was merely following her GPS.
Over a 15 year period at least a dozen people died in Death Valley due to what many have come to call “death by GPS.” Charlie Callahan is a Death Valley wilderness coordinator explains the phenomenon this way, “People are renting vehicles with GPS and they have no idea how it works and they are willing to trust the GPS to lead them into the middle of nowhere.”
Christians aren’t brainwashed. Yet it seems that so many of us have become dutifully committed to trusting partisan and divisive voices that they have been led out into the middle of nowhere. They have replaced the Christian story with something else. The Jews of Paul’s day had forgotten their story too. They have become victims of a Jewish interior world that envisioned God’s salvation. not for a large family, but a smaller family that was only for the Jews.
When Paul says he is not ashamed of the Gospel he is not envisioning Christians wearing t-shirts with statements of faith on them. Paul is not suggesting that you use your social media accounts to make public statements of faith that call out others on their lack of faith. Paul isn’t asking you to be bold for your faith or stand up for Jesus by “telling it like it is.” What Paul does say is that he is not ashamed that Gentiles are coming to Christ. Paul is telling his Jewish brothers and sisters that every time they look down on their Gentile brothers and sisters they are actually ashamed of the Gospel. Being ashamed of the Gospel happens everytime you and I place ourselves in a position of superiority over and against others. We are ashamed of the Gospel every time we believe that the Gospel is for a small group of people not a large family. We are ashamed of the Gospel everytime we nurture our own self-righteousness and use that to create artificial boundary lines between us and them.
When we believe we are keeping the faith genuine and undiluted it is more likely that we have become ashamed of the Gospel. We have reduced the Gospel to something that is for people who are more like me.
Paul writes in Romans 8:28-29 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. 29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.
This passage has often twisted Christians into all kinds of theological knots. Yet Paul’s point is that all things, which is Jews and Gentiles both becoming Christ followers, is working for the good. It is working for the good because those who love God (Jew and Gentile Christ followers) and are seeking to participate in God’s mission here on earth together. Let us do the same.
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