Romans 1:1-17 "Speaking the Faith" Scott Hoezee

A few weeks ago I had the rich opportunity to spend some time at a Greek Orthodox church here in Grand Rapids. Among the more obvious features that distinguish the Eastern Orthodox tradition from the rest of the Christian Church is its strong attachment to icons, visual images. If you walk into an Orthodox church sanctuary, the first thing you will notice is that in stark contrast to a church like our own, Orthodox sanctuaries are loaded with paintings. Nearly every square inch of walls and ceilings is filled with color as panel after panel of sacred images proclaim visually the events in the life of Christ and of the saints. The Orthodox are quick to point out that their tradition is the oldest continuous tradition in the worldwide Christian church. And because of its roots in the earliest centuries of Christianity, there is much we can learn from our Orthodox brothers and sisters.

Lately there has been a surge of interest in Orthodoxy, with many former Catholics and Protestants becoming Orthodox. There are a variety of reasons for that, of course, but there is some indication that it is precisely the role of visual images that has an attraction for postmodern people. As it is, there are scholars like Mitchell Stephens who are convinced that the visual, the increasing prevalence of images in our society, will one day soon eclipse writing, speaking, and other verbal modes of communication. In his book The Rise of the Image, The Fall of the Word Stephens claims that it is merely obvious that our video-driven culture has gained the upper hand over oral and written forms of communication.

Hence it is not surprising to discover that churches are now using PowerPoint presentations, slide shows, and video clips in the context of the Sunday sermon. A pastor from out West recently emailed me to inquire about a movie to which I made reference in one of my books. He said he wanted to track down the precise scene I mentioned because he would then be showing that portion of the movie as part of an upcoming sermon.

There is no doubting the power of images. But listen: before there was ever a single religious icon in the world, centuries before there was such a thing as photography, motion pictures, and video, there was the Word of the gospel alone. Before the Church was a church, before Christians had any building they could call their own, long before anyone debated how to decorate and outfit a Christian church sanctuary, there was the Word of the gospel as that gospel was proclaimed by the mouths of the blessed apostles.

The Letter to the Romans is a theological masterpiece from the pen of Paul. A lot of what you read in Romans has become central in defining what Christian belief is. Most commentators believe that in this opening chapter Paul swiftly summarizes everything that is to come in the remaining fifteen chapters. In verses 16-17 Paul mentions the key words of gospel, righteousness, faith: it is difficult to imagine words more loaded and freighted with meaning than these. Let's see what Paul does with these vital matters and then ponder what this should mean for the church yet today.

In the first fifteen verses of Romans 1, Paul says over and over how eager he is to visit Rome so that he can preach the gospel there. Proclaiming the gospel, preaching the good news, is obviously Paul's passion. So before he goes much further, Paul uses verses 16 and 17 to explain why this is his passion. But if I had to guess, I would imagine that few of us think we need an explanation. If you meet a business person who says that he is passionate about turning a profit, you likely won't inquire why. It's obvious: all those involved with commerce are eager to realize a profit because that's what it's all about. If you meet up with the manager of a baseball team, you won't be startled to hear him say he is passionate about having a winning season. Winning is what the game is about.

And so also if you were to meet up with an apostle, you'd not be taken aback to hear that preaching is his passion. In the first century, however, when Paul wrote this letter, it was not immediately obvious to people why preaching would be much of a passion for anybody. What's more, once they heard the content of what Paul proclaimed, they would have even more questions. Back then, any number of people would ask Paul, "Why do you preach and furthermore, why do you preach that crazy message about Jesus?"

An explanation was in order, and so Paul gives one. He begins by pointing out that he is not ashamed of the gospel. Most of the time when someone takes pains to tell you how he is not ashamed about something, the reason is because a person could be ashamed of it. When country singer Loretta Lynn sang, "Well I'm proud to be a coal miner's daughter," she needed to make her pride clear because there are lots of people in the world who are ashamed to own up to their common roots in poverty and ignorance. So also when Paul says he is, as a matter of fact, not ashamed of the gospel, he has to make it clear because there were reasons a person could be ashamed. What were those reasons?

Conceivably there are several. Some think that it was possibly embarrassing for Paul to declare salvation as a free gift of grace because that made it look like God's earlier methods of giving the Law to the Jews had flopped. Had God goofed or run into a dead end? Others think that another possible reason a person could be ashamed of the gospel is its apparent foolishness and weakness. The Jesus whose death supposedly cinched matters had been no more than a carpenter's son, a peasant, a redneck nobody from the backwaters of the world. Everybody knew he ended up getting crossed-out by the Roman authorities (and if that doesn't sound like a failed life, it's hard to know what would!).

But now those who proclaimed the gospel told the unlikely tale that this very man had all along been God's Son in disguise, that his crucifixion was not the dead end it appeared to be but a part of what had been God's plan all along, and the real capper was that this quirky rabbi had not stayed dead but had risen and was now alive on the throne of heaven as the cosmic Lord of lords and King of kings. It's not too difficult to find some features to such a tale that would raise a lot of eyebrows.

But Paul was convinced that despite how different the gospel of grace sounded from all that had happened earlier in history with the Jews, it still hung together and the gospel would one day catch up also the Jews. What's more, Paul was convinced that even though the gospel is in its own way a wild story, many times truth is stranger than fiction. No one in his or her right mind would ever make up a tale like that. It seems an unlikely story, but Paul believed it was God's story and that was enough for him.

But then as now, in polite company, in sophisticated company, intelligent people did not admit to buying into such a thing. Have you ever told someone you are a Christian only to see a look of complete incredulity come across his or her face? There are any number of places in society where telling someone you are a follower of Jesus will cause people to smirk, to regard you like a juvenile and naive person who is scarcely distinguishable from some bumpkin who still thinks the earth is flat! I don't know about you, but I don't like it very much when I sense that people are snickering behind my back. But I know that so long as I proclaim the gospel, there will always be those who deem me naive, innocent, a fundamentalist obscurantist with blinders on.

Paul knew how others regarded him. He'd been laughed at before. When the gospel wasn't making people hopping mad, it was making them giggle and snicker. For every occasion when Paul's preaching made people clench their teeth, there was a time when it made folks roll their eyes. "But I'm not ashamed to say it and to keep saying it," Paul writes. And the reason he could make so firm a declaration was because he knew that for all its modest, weak, even foolish outer trappings, hidden inside the quirky proclamation of the gospel was nothing short of the power of God. Paul knew that when the gospel message was believed, when the Spirit of God worked the miracle of faith in a person's heart and mind, that person was changed forever.

But Paul has more to say yet in verse 17. The gospel contains a revelation, the unveiling of something marvelous: the righteousness of God. Actually, the Greek on this point is a little confusing. The NIV opted to call this "a righteousness from God." The original Greek more straightforwardly says this is "a righteousness of God," making it sound like a characteristic of God himself. So is righteousness here something that God distributes or is it a description of what God is like? Or is it both?

Probably it's both. What makes the good news good is not just that God is righteous (because we already knew that) but rather that God shares this righteousness with everyone who believes. By way of analogy, if everyone in the world already knows that George is a multi-billionaire, then a document that details "the wealthiness of George" is not very tantalizing. But if I can let you know that "the wealthiness of George" includes how wealthy he is in terms of having a generous spirit (such that George in intent on giving away his wealth so as to make lots of people wealthy), well then "the wealthiness of George" becomes interesting to you in a personal way because it just might affect you personally!

So also here: all by itself hearing about "the righteousness of God" sounds like just a description until you realize that what makes the good news good is that God is giving away his righteousness so that we can all share it! We can have what God has because the gospel reveals God to be very hard at work to spread his goodness around. God has worked himself literally to death to give away his grace and goodness.

In the NIV of verse 17 this is a righteousness that is "by faith from first to last." That is this translation's attempt to make sense out of another difficult Greek phrase. As the footnote on that page admits, the original Greek says that the righteousness of God that the gospel reveals is "from faith unto faith." It's a double prepositional phrase that has perplexed scholars for centuries: "from faith to faith; by faith, toward faith."

At first glance it sounds about as odd as if I were to say to you, "I'm going to stop by to see you on my way from the mall and on my way to the mall." Well, which is it? When you see me, will I have just finished my business at the mall or will I be on my way to the mall? Or is it both? Am I in between malls? It all sounds rather circular. But maybe that circularity is the point. The whole thing is about faith from start to finish and at every point in between. Faith is the gift you get from God that helps you to perceive in the gospel something other than the unlikely, foolish story it at first seems to be.

If God doesn't give you faith up front, you'll never get past the parts of this story that seem wildly unbelievable. But once God gives you faith, you understand, you believe. That faith-inspired clarity then brings you right back to the God who gave you the faith in the first place. The whole thing is about having faith. Lifting up a somewhat obscure line from the prophecy of Habakkuk, Paul concludes by saying that faith is so precious a gift from God, that if we have it, it becomes our very life. "The righteous will live by faith."

The gospel contains nothing short of God's power. Nestled into the very core of the gospel is enough truth, enough spiritual energy to save a person forever. The gospel contains the difference between life and death, between purposeful living and aimlessness, between hope and despair. Because the gospel unveils a God who is so loving as to make the best thing in life free indeed through what he accomplished in Jesus the Christ.

That's why Paul simply had to talk about it, preach it, proclaim it. But to bring things full circle this morning, another one of the gospel's more amazing features is that it accomplishes all these wonderful things just through preaching! The proclamation of the Word--that simple matter of one person's speaking and another person's hearing--can and does make the difference.

Over the course of church history we have developed all kinds of new things. The Orthodox developed their fine tradition of iconography. Skilled composers have set the gospel truths to music in chants, oratorios, hymns. Artists have painted untold numbers of masterpieces depicting biblical scenes, and manuscripts of the Bible have long been adorned in a variety of visual ways. In more recent times filmmakers have dramatized biblical stories, and for ages now preachers have pulled in lots of cultural illustrations to help make the Word of the gospel more vivid for people's lives.

But in a day when some people believe the spoken and written word is just generally a dying breed, in a day when some churches seem to think that glitzy technology and entertainment formats borrowed from television are absolute necessities if people are going to be reached, in a day when even many preachers shun the trappings of traditional proclamation so that they can instead sit on a barstool and just casually "chat" and "share" with folks who would be put off if they really thought they were being preached at--in a time of flux and change like this, we need to savor and return to the one thing Paul believed about as strongly as he believed anything: namely, it is the telling of the gospel's truth that is God's power at work to generate faith in people's hearts.

Maybe we've begun to lose faith in the power of words. Maybe the true Word gets drowned out today in the cacophony of words that cascade over us day after day. Advertisers are constantly blitzing us with flurries of words--words that mean nothing. The talking heads on 24-hour cable news channels never shut up yet seldom strive for thoughtfulness, contenting themselves with idle chatter. In some ways all of life now looks like one of those ridiculous Jerry Springer or Jenny Jones exploitation shows in which the whole audience is constantly shouting, the show's host is shouting to be heard above the din, the guests are talking over each other and cutting each other off and swearing so much that the soundtrack sounds like just a long series of the censor's bleeps.

No one on those shows really thinks their words will change anything. That's why some years ago when one man murdered another man as a result of what was said on Jenny Jones, everyone was just shocked. All those gushing words weren't actually supposed to lead to anything. Words seldom do.

But this morning, based on Romans 1, I will be so bold as to say that if you do not believe in the power of at least one Word, then you are missing something fundamental to the faith. We need to believe that the Word of the gospel--all by itself, unadorned, without video accompaniment--has the power to change lives. We need to believe that passionately because only by so believing will we be motivated to keep on speaking that Word ourselves. You don't need a pulpit to tell people what you believe. You don't need PowerPoint. You can be as plainspoken as they come. You may stutter, you will likely bump into questions you can't answer. Probably at some point you'll run into those who think you're pretty simpleminded still to be believing in those old gospel "myths."

That's OK. If you believe that the gospel contains the power of God, revealing the righteousness God is giving away for free, then you'll keep telling the old, old story. If you do, then somewhere along the line, whether you ever find out about it or not, the very power of God is going to burst forth in someone's heart. This Word can do that! Don't be ashamed. Tell the gospel, and watch what God does next! Amen.