Romans 4:1-16; Romans 12:1-18; Romans 8:12-25; Galatians 3:614, 23-29

Several years ago, now, a former professor at my seminary, J. Daniel Kirk, wrote a book entitled Jesus Have I Loved, But Paul? In this provocative book, Dr. Kirk argues that maybe, just maybe, you and I have gotten the Apostle Paul wrong. You see, if you would ask several people, namely women, Gentiles, slaves, and other groups what their opinion of the Apostle Paul is, I don’t think he would rate highly. And from my personal experience as a pastor, I have heard people complain more about the writings of Paul than any other writer in the Bible. Paul, according to many, is misguided, is a lot angry, is a misogynist, sometimes even characterized as a racist, is homophobic, is proud, boastful, and rude.

Yet, if this is the case, then the problem for Christians is compounded more so because the writings of the Apostle Paul make up a significant portion of the New Testament. The New Testament has several sections. The first, and perhaps the most famous, are the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These are the records of the life and ministry, passion, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And then there’s the Book of Acts. The Book of Acts recounts the expansion of the Church. The first ten chapters of Acts deal with the Apostle Peter and center on his activities in working with the Church that was founded in Jerusalem. Then the rest of the book, from chapter 9, overlapping a bit with Peter, the entire way to the end in chapter 28, is about Paul, this mysterious miscreant according to some, primary theologian according to others.

Because of the tension that surrounds the Apostle Paul, which has only gotten greater since the year 1517 when Martin Luther so skillfully used the writings of the Apostle to launch the Protestant Reformation, Paul is  considered a character best handled with kid gloves and best left to the professional theologians and pastors to tell us what he is saying. Again, when folks are honest with me as a pastor, they will tell me of their preferences for reading the scriptures. And I can name three areas that come in for special mention. The first is the Gospels, the story, life, and teachings of Jesus. The second is the Psalms, the Psalms that give hope and wisdom and say things we are afraid to say ourselves about God, about other people, about ourselves and the world. And then Proverbs, those little nuggets of wisdom that are so easy to pop out of context and apply to our lives. Sometimes, in a willy-nilly fashion, other times in keeping with the author’s intent. But I digress. Many times, we want to come to the scriptures to find something that’s useful right now in our moment, in our hour of need. And for most people, the Apostle Paul and his writings do not top the list of places they turn when they are in spiritual trouble.

Today, as we continue examining the story of the Bible, we need to ask ourselves a few questions. First, who was the Apostle Paul, really? What was his origins? How did he come to know Jesus Christ? And what was his mission? Second, we need to ask ourselves why God has seen fit to include so many writings attributed to Paul in the New Testament. The New Testament has 27 books, and the Apostle Paul writes of those 27, 11 or attributed to him, and 1, the book of Acts, describes much of his biographical and missionary activity. 12 out of 27.

Jesus only gets 4. This has led some to call Paul the real founder of Christianity, who just used the Jesus story to establish his own religion. And perhaps from the size of his influence in the New Testament, there might be a case for that, with the exception that Paul shows in his writings that it is the other way around. That Paul’s mission is to make Jesus famous, and not just among his fellow Jews, but among those Gentiles, those other people. Finally, we need to ask ourselves, can we read and appropriate Paul today in a time that differs from that in which the Apostle lived? Is his writing still relevant? And what about those passages that make our skin crawl, those about women, slaves, homosexuals, Gentiles? What about serving the emperor and all of those other phrases that are often bandied about to support one cause or another, left, right, or center, and often quoted back and forth at each other as the party’s vie for dominance?

Let’s start with the origins of the apostle Paul. As I’m sure some of you may know, Paul was not the name of the character of whom we are speaking. People in his native Tarsus, a small-ish city in what is now Turkey, knew him as Saul. He was born a Jew. He grew up and he joined the Pharisee party, a group who believed that by building a fence around the Law of Moses, protecting it, and ensuring everyone followed it as if they were a priest in Jerusalem themselves, God would hasten the day when He would act to save the Jewish people. While we do not know precisely whether Paul had any students of his own while he was a Jew, we know he studied under main rabbis, including Gamaliel, one of the chief rabbis of Judaism. These are impressive scholarly credentials. It would be like studying at the Jewish equivalent of Harvard, Yale, or another Ivy League school. Paul received the best education possible, and as he talks about in one of his letters, he went further than many of his colleagues and contemporaries. He was zealous for the law. Like a man possessed by one mission and one mission alone to protect the law and the God that it represented, Paul would do anything to keep his people faithful and to protect their identity. Thus, when a new sect of Judaism threatened to destabilize the landscape, these upstart Christians, Paul saw it as his personal mission to intervene, to drive these people away, and to persecute them so that they would know that they were not in God’s will, that their story was false, and that the real keepers of the law were those that honored the Torah, that built a hedge around it, that worshiped God by obeying the law.

One day, as Paul was pursuing this mission with single-minded devotion, he encounters a vision, a flashing blinding light on the way to Damascus, a city in the Roman province of Syria. And from this blinding vision, a voice cries out, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? Of course, we come to know that this is the voice of the risen Lord Jesus Christ. And how is he persecuting Jesus? By persecuting his followers. Jesus and his followers have such a close identity that it can be said that what is done to a follower of Jesus is done to Jesus himself.

Paul quickly realizes the error of his ways. It helps when the God of the universe intervenes in a powerful and dramatic way like that, doesn’t it? But more than that, Paul needed to have his eyes checked for more than one reason. First, this encounter caused Paul to lose his sight, and believers took him to their house. He was there to be healed and to be schooled. Many people assume that immediately after Paul’s conversion, that he jumped at the chance to preach this new faith. But if you look at the itinerary in the book of Acts, and you follow the breadcrumbs that Paul leaves in his letters, you actually find something astonishing. Paul did not immediately start preaching. At least not sustainably. Paul had much to do. Paul had much to learn. Paul had much to process. And so through the spirit and in the providence of God, Paul goes away for several years into a place the Bible calls Arabia, which today would be in the country of Jordan, right near the city of Petra. How long is he away? Scholars estimate up to 14 years. That’s right, 14 years. That’s enough to go through pre-K, kindergarten, and all the grades 1 through 12. Paul was getting an education.

Before we look at what Paul was taught while he was away in Arabia, we need to look at the reaction that Paul prompted among the believers. Was Paul a sincere convert? Or was Paul a devious, crafty soul that was trying to infiltrate the Christians to better persecute them? These were live questions in the ancient church. It would be as if we were inviting a terrorist into our congregation, not knowing whether their conversion was sincere or whether it was merely a ploy to come and destroy us more efficiently. Amazingly, the Spirit works as the Spirit wills, and even in this persecutor of the church, the gifts of the Spirit testify, in a way that only they can, that Paul’s conversion was genuine and his heartfelt change of mind sincere.

After Paul returned from his educational trip, he does not immediately go out preaching either. First, he returns to the gathered assembly, and they instruct him to go to the house of Israel. But he must explain himself why he feels so called to go to those who are nonJewish. After all, didn’t Jesus himself say that he was sent to the house of Israel? But then we have this whole incident with Peter and Cornelius, right? That salvation is applied equally to Jew and Gentile. And from that as we read in Acts, we think in very linear fashion, that from that moment on Gentiles were merely accepted into the church with no problem. But that is not the case. In fact, it was a lively debate in the early church, if and then how the Gentiles were to be accepted into the faith. Did they really have to become Jewish? How were they made right with God? Were they somehow second class to the Jews? These questions and more haunted much of the discussions that happened while the Apostle Paul was actively ministering.

Finally, at the first church council meeting ever, they decided to fully accept the Gentiles as equal members of the church. And this was in no small measure to the work, theology, blood, sweat, and tears that the Apostle Paul and his companions, namely Barnabas among others, put into reaching out beyond the walls that Judaism had built for itself, around those hedges of protection, out into the world that found itself in darkness, worshipping the elemental spirits of the world, those things that are not God but have power, like the sea, the sky, the air, those people in short that we would call pagans. The decision of the Jerusalem Council that Gentiles were to be included as Gentiles without the need to convert, with no need of circumcision or obeying the dietary laws, was revolutionary. It was this that opened the door for most of us to become Christians, to become saved, and to become followers of the God of the universe through Christ.

This week, as I was looking at Paul’s letters and the book of Acts, I struggled to figure out what scriptures to cite, to use as examples of the Apostle Paul’s teaching. There are so many and so varied are the contours of Paul’s writings that I could spend an entire career preaching verse by verse through them and still not finish, even with forty years covering the depths of his writing. So today I had to pick selectively to highlight those key emphases that the Apostle has laid out for us, and I must do so briefly, although next week we’ll come back and focus on one theme that cements the entire course of the New Testament with the broader story of the Bible. So, I won’t cover that one today. That’ll get an entire message of its own.

In the time remaining, I want to highlight some of the broad strokes of Paul’s theology to whet your appetite for when you approach these daunting scriptures that are so often misunderstood. It is necessary that I be very brief. Many authors have written entire books on each of these points, and much more could be said. But I think after today, you might approach the writings on your own using this message as a bit of a roadmap, if you will.

The first, and one of the key points I wish to mention this morning, is that God only has one family. We often sing in the church, “I’m so glad I’m a part of the family of God.” And that is fine. But do we ever ask ourselves and consider how we have become part of the family of God? To many, God has one family the people of Israel. So how is it you and I, the Gentiles, have made it in? Well, this argument is misguided.

We need to look at the story of the scriptures, and we see God starts out with the creation of all humanity, and it is only after the repeated failure and descent into sin that God singles out one people group, the people of Israel. But God intended that people group to not be His treasured possession solely for their own sake. God’s people Israel always had a mission to be a kingdom of priests mediating between God and the people, and to be a light to the nations, to show the Gentiles what it meant to live as people of righteousness and integrity. Today, that mission devolves onto a new family, a new family that is a recreation of that old family, the humanity 1.0 that existed at the first. In Jesus Christ, we have become part of Humanity 2.0, the recreated family of Jew and Gentile, united around the person and work of Jesus Christ.

This relates to the second key part of Paul’s theology. We become part of this new family of God, this one family of God, only by grace, only by faith. We do not earn our status with God through our obedience to a law, through our ethnic identity, through our intrinsic worth even, although we have that. Instead, we are justified or made right with God merely by God’s gift to us. That is what we call grace, and it is grace all the way through. From the first moment we recognize we have a need for God and for salvation to the time that God takes us home and perfects us in the New Jerusalem, it is all by grace and it is all by faith. And faith, what is that? Is it a collection of beliefs and doctrines? Is it a list of dos and do not’s? No. My friends, faith is simply trusting that the God who makes promises in the Scriptures will keep them, believing in the truth of those promises, and trusting that God will make a way where there seems to be no way. For with humans, as Jesus says, many things are not possible, but with God all things are possible.

Next in our list of emphases that Paul highlights in his teaching is the role of Abraham in the story of God. Have you ever looked at Genesis and wondered why Abraham gets so many pages? He’s so far back in history. He only has one child, but yet he receives nearly 20-some-odd chapters in the Bible. Yes, his story is interesting, but why so much text? Why so much press? In a nutshell, it is the concept of covenant. Now, a covenant is an agreement made between God and human beings. And with Abraham, God made a covenant upon which God himself swore by his own identity and essence that he would uphold, and that is to create this one new family of Jew and Gentile together. Scripture calls it proclaiming the gospel beforehand, before the events themselves happened. Abraham was given a window into the fact that through him salvation would come as his great great great greatgreat-grandson, Jesus Christ, enters the scene, takes upon himself the sin of the world, and more important even than the sin, he takes upon himself something else, the curse of the law.

You see, attached to the law of Moses were two sections, sort of like the positive and negative consequences of a contract. Positively, if Israel kept the law, they would have God in their midst. God agreed to dwell among them, and God promised to bring blessings, not only spiritual blessings, but material blessings as well. God blessed Israel by giving them sun and rain, springtime, harvest, abundance. But if Israel turned to the left or to the right, and did not keep on the straight and narrow path as dictated by the law, there would come a curse, and that curse was exile, expulsion, dwelling away from God’s presence. That should sound very familiar, right? Adam and Eve experience being kicked out of Eden, being exiled, and being sent away from the presence of God. Cain is banished by God from His presence and made to wander the earth. Humanity is scattered at the tower of Babel and meant to go away, to spread out, to scatter from one another. Abraham is called to go from his people and is exiled to the promised land. Israel, when she cannot uphold her end of the bargain, is vomited out of the land, carried off to exile, ten tribes to never be heard from again, Judah and Benjamin to wait seventy long years to return to a dwindled, diminished temple in Jerusalem.

Thus, it was found that only through Abraham’s ultimate descendant, the one upon which all things hinge, could salvation come. And here’s how it worked. Think of it as a funnel. At the cross, in the moment of Jesus’ death, he took upon himself not only our sin, our guilt, our shame, but for the people of Israel and us, he bore the curse of the law. A righteous man was killed by the powers that be unjustly. And the Bible says in Deuteronomy 23, “Cursed is one who hangs on a pole.” As Jesus hangs on that cross at Calvary, the full weight of the Deuteronomy’s curses come upon him. He is exiled. He is tortured. He is killed. But on the third day, he was raised from the dead because God would not see the innocent fail to be vindicated in God’s economy of justice. Justice will always prevail in the end, even if it takes a circuitous route to get there.

It was never anticipated that God would take action amid history to speed up the end. Many Jews believed in a final resurrection when God would restore humanity and the world, but no one expected what happened in Jesus. History, right in the middle of it, bringing forward the end of time, collapsing the timeline so that the end times begin at the resurrection, not someday future. And in the meantime, you and I are living in the overlap of the ages. The end has come, and yet the end is still to come. Part of understanding Paul is living in that tension. At one moment, Paul can talk about the end as if it has already happened. And then in the next passage, he will talk about the end times as something still distant in the future or right around the corner. Some people say that Paul is confused or that Paul believed the end would occur any moment in his lifetime, but that interpretation oversimplifies Paul’s perspective. If we keep in mind this idea that the end is overlapping with the beginning of the end, then we can read Paul right.

And this leads us to our last point for today. The “so what,” if you will, of the message. Have we misread Paul? Have we seen him as racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobic, arrogant, prideful, and boastful? If so, perhaps we need to look below the surface a bit, to look at the broader picture, to see that for Paul, there is only one thing that identifies us, and that is not our race, our ethnicity, our class, our gender, our status, our sexuality, or any other thing that we humans use to divide ourselves amongst each other. For Paul, the main thing is this. Are you in a relationship with Jesus Christ? If so, then you are part of the new humanity. That’s it. That’s all that matters. We keep the particularities of where we find ourselves, but those identities are transcended and united because we all serve Jesus Christ. Just as the first human family was diverse, filled with male and female, people of different languages and ethnicities, so in the new Jerusalem, we will come in as we are. The translation to heaven and the resurrection body will not change those things that marked us out as distinct here on earth, but instead they will be transcended as we find our primary identity as children of God and co-heirs with Jesus Christ.

So now my friends, considering what we’ve heard today, perhaps we can read Paul a little differently and understand that Paul was reacting to very particular circumstances in his letters. When Paul said things that sound to our ears as determinative and preventing any argument, perhaps we need to look at the situation first to which Paul was writing. Because, as Paul says in Galatians, in Christ Jesus we are one, and our identities become that of Jesus Christ. We share in the identity of Jesus as a child of God. That becomes the primary identifier. When we emphasize and highlight those secondary identities, and cannot mention that first overarching and uniting one, then, like Paul before his conversion, we will do our best to play a game of one-upmanship, to hunt down those that look different, and make sure that they remain weak so that we will be strong. But when we find our identity in Jesus Christ, there is no room for that kind of gameplay. There is no room to make others less than so that we might be more than. Instead, as Paul says, we will humbly strive to outdo one another in honoring those who differ from us, so that in all these things, in the diversity of the kingdom, there may be one family, with one Lord, in the hands of one God, in one universe. Therefore, indeed, there is no need to even think about such things, because we are not under law, but under grace. But miraculously, we are so in the line and descended from Father Abraham. Dear God help us to be Abraham’s greats. Abraham’s great-great-great-great-great-great-etc. grandchildren. Let us live as such. Let us stop looking around for what distinguishes us from one another and look to that which unites. The grace, the love, the example of Jesus Christ. Amen.