Ashamed of the Gospel?
Preached Canberra Baptist Church 13th April 2008
Romans 1.1-17

Many years ago a Preacher was preaching through the Book of Romans when he came to chapters 6 – 8 one Sunday when a visitor happened to be present in the service.  After the service, one of the women of the church engaged this young man in conversation. After learning a little about him, the woman asked, “How long have you been a Christian?” The young man looked down at his watch and said, “About fifteen minutes.”
Such is the power of the book which we are opening at the moment.  It has had a profound effect on many Christian lives and on whole human cultures. St Augustine of Hippo, John Wesley, Martin Luther and Karl Barth all found their lives turned around by engaging with the book of Romans and they went on to become some of the great giants of the Christian Church.  Two weeks ago Thorwald Lorenzen preached powerfully about the reading of Romans that touched them and has liberated and empowered generations of Christians – and it can touch and empower us!
Why does it have this power?  Romans contains one of the longest sustained theological arguments by Paul in any of his letters comprising of chapters 1 through to 8.   These chapters deal with the great themes of the Gospel:  justification by grace through faith, reconciliation, the fact that God is for us and the utter reliability and sustaining power of God’s love in Jesus Christ.
Christians are deeply familiar with the triumphant conclusion of those first eight chapters: Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? …. No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
You can’t be in churches very long without hearing the firm and sober opening of Chapter 12: I appeal to you therefore brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship…. I
And yet between those two passages there is a shadowy section of the book of Romans: three chapters 9, 10 and 11 rarely preached upon in the church, almost as if these three chapters in between have quietly dropped out of Scripture. Three chapters in which Paul grapples theologically with the place of the Jews within God’s saving action.
Romans embraces two important themes: the absolute centrality of Grace and Jesus Christ to God’s saving action AND God’s continuing concern for, and honouring of, his promise to the Jews as His covenant partner. The church has delighted in the first of these themes and celebrated but we have been less keen to engage and celebrate the other.
So as we turn to the book of Romans we have to ask what was it that Paul was seeking to address.  What were the issues affecting the Roman Church?  In nearly all of Paul's letters he seems to have engaged with the pressing issues and the difficult theological questions that his readers faced. With tendency Romans is a little different almost as if it is an exposition of his faith. Were there issues that the Roman Church was troubled by that Paul was actually seeking to address and engage?  As we read Romans it will be with these questions in the back of our minds trying to hear what Paul was actually trying to say to the church. 
When the opening introductions and thanksgivings and explanations had been completed Paul launched into the substance of his letter.  He opens with a very strong and powerful statement.   For I am not ashamed of the Gospel; it is the power of God’s salvation to everyone who has faith, for the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous through faith will live”.
In his sermon a fortnight ago Thorwald Lorenzen explored the second part of this statement - the liberating message of righteousness by faith, the gift that comes through it of human dignity, of receiving and being rather than doing as the hallmark of a true life with God.  I want to attend to Paul's opening line “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel”.
I want to suggest two alternative renderings of this statement each with implications for how we read the whole of the letter.
The first way of reading this statement is what I think is our common intonation. We tend to read it through Western eyes as an opening rhetorical flourish of a confident preacher who is about to present a Gospel about which there is no doubt: this way we read it for I am not ashamed of the Gospel – with the emphasis at the end of the sentence. It is this reading that is most commonly  attested in our hymns and in our preaching. Isaac Watts wrote a hymn:
I’m not ashamed to own my Lord
or to defend his cause;
maintain the honour of his word,
the glory of his cross.

It’s number 343 in the hymn book – sung to an upbeat and confident tune. It is a very personal hymn, the hymn of personal commitment to publicly witnessing to one's faith in Jesus Christ. Another hymn in the Sankey tradition picks up the same kind of speech:
Jesus! And shall it ever be
a mortal man ashamed of Thee?
Ashamed of Thee, who angels praise,
whose glories shine through endless days!    (Sankey’s Sacred Hymns and Solos, No. 905)

In this tradition it is unthinkable that we would ever be ashamed of Jesus and his gospel. The victory of Jesus, his worth and glory are so evident that any shame or embarrassment can only be the expression of a very personal failure or fear: for the church the triumph of Jesus is clear and is expressed with that rhetorical flourish: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek”.
But it may have had a different intonation in the Roman church to which Paul writes. It can also be spoken this way: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel” with the emphasis at the beginning of the sentence and the implied supplement “even if some of you are”. Were there in the Roman church some at least who were actually ashamed of the gospel? Some for whom it presented moral and intellectual issues that they could not get over?  Was there a significant embarrassment or question over the gospel in that community?
It may be unthinkable to the hymn writers I quoted. It may be difficult to grasp for those of us who live in a Western society where the gospel is deeply embedded in our laws and our culture and where our faith has been dominant for centuries. But this was not so in Paul’s time. Christian faith was struggling and new, it was reviled in many quarters and strange to the ‘common sense’ of that day.
If it’s possible that shame did attach to the gospel among Paul’s readers, what was the source of that shame? I want to point to two possible sources of such shame.
The opening chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians gives us the clue to the first: For the message about the Cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God … For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles… (1 Cor 1.18, 22-23). Here the source of offence, of shame, is the Cross itself. What is shameful is that in setting out to redeem and restore humanity God has done this through the death of Jesus on the Cross – the reviled death of an outcast and criminal. To those who are good and in the social mainstream it is offensive that this was God’s way.  Yes, God wants to save us from the power of sin and restore us to fulfilled life, but did he really have to choose this path? From ancient documents we know that this was a source of accusation of the ancient Christians and their proclamation. The church in its proclamation had to deal with the shamefulness of the Cross.
In 1 Corinthians it was the Cross which was the object of shame – and Paul is quite clear in naming it. But in Romans there is not a hint of this. The Cross and crucifixion is not referred to directly at all.  There is plenty about the death of Christ but the Cross is not mentioned other than a reference in Chapter 6.6 that ‘our old self was crucified with him’. The Cross is not problematic for the Romans. If there is a sense of shame in the proclamation about Jesus it has to lie elsewhere.
The second possible source of shame is that it lies within the very gospel itself, within the loving and gracious intention of God towards us that is found in Jesus. The scandal to which Paul refers is not the scandal of the Cross  but the scandal of Grace Itself.  In other words,it is not the means of God’s saving act that is regarded with suspicion, but the very character of God’s loving intention towards humanity.
At its heart the gospel presents the teaching and life, the death and Resurrection of Jesus: the kingdom of God is breaking in to human affairs, God loves everyone passionately, God forgives our sins and welcomes us into fellowship.  The only rules left are the rules of love, of loving God and loving one another and that is what we should do.  What the Cross declares is that there is no limit to what God in Christ will do to reach out to us, to forgive us, and invite us into the great adventure of the kingdom! That is what this table spread before us is all about – and all are welcome here because God’s love in it’s radical and unconstrained freedom reaches out to all people, no matter how broken, no matter how stained!
That’s good news! At least it is to those of us who are sinners. But to the moral and the good, to those who have worked hard to build an ethical life and disciplined systems, the sorts of people (like the Pharisees) who take the law and the Hebrew Scriptures seriously it is not good news at all. It is actually quite morally offensive. If you believe that God has chosen the people of Israel and demonstrated his love and loyalty to them over a millennium of documented history then this gospel of grace of God’s free love embracing people is not only offensive, it can even be blasphemous. If God has welcomed the Gentiles simply through faith in Jesus Christ then he has abandoned the covenant with Israel and he is perverse, He is unjust! Having instituted the law and called the people of Israel, how can God be just if he is gracious and welcoming of the Gentiles in Jesus?
This is one of the great questions that members of the Roman church faced.  On the other hand there were those who believed that the church was now the New Israel, the inheritors of the Covenant – that the old Israel had been passed over and the Gentile church now filled that favoured place. As you read the New Testament you find that right through it runs this tension between Jewish and Gentile Christians and it appears to have been a very significant issue for the Christians in Rome.
Dodging the issues never seems to have been Paul’s style. Faced with a community where for some theological conservatives the very justice of God may have been compromised by the message of Grace, and where others had embraced this radical new preaching of righteousness through faith, Paul opens with a clarion call:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel (no hint of coyness or a backward step there!)
it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. (He includes both sides of that critical divide that ran through from the Empire and the church of his day)
 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed (the justice of God is not compromised or impugned by this gospel of grace – it is revealed by it, declared by it)
 through faith for faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous through faith will live”. (Here we have the great theme of the gospel – that life comes by grace simply through faith, through the trusting receiving of God’s gift)
You don’t need to belong in a church congregation or any local community to learn that people see things differently.  For those of you who read a little about post modernism will know that Difference, or difference between people and variety, is one of the great themes of postmodern thinking. The world falls apart into dualisms differences
Men/women, Hindus/Buddhists, rich/poor, European/African, Muslim/Infidel….
We stand in a tradition in which the gospel of Grace has infused the Western world – it is the source of our sense of dignity, freedom of our society and our concept of rights.  All of these things come out of the gospel of grace.  In the church we are so used to it that grace has almost become our possession, the marker of our distinctiveness, the badge of our belonging to God.
Yet Paul says that God’s grace is also what is offered in the Jewish tradition, that God’s grace is not just our own possession but that it embraces those who are different and alien.  That God’s grace holds those on both sides of an argument or an issue.  That God’s grace enfolds all humanity.
And here in these two verses of Roman’s 1.16-17 Paul says God’s power, God’s grace and God’s justice all cohere: they are not opposed.  They are bound up in this message of the Gospel.
As any of us know who live in love, or have children and are parenting, or have to work with a ‘bristly’ colleague, the tone of voice, the intonation, is everything.  I like those hymns and I too am ‘not ashamed of the gospel’ in the sense that I want to talk about it with people and share its meaning.  But I also hear the other tone of voice in this text too, one that hints that the liberating freedom in Jesus that gives me confidence to share is deeper and wider than I ever dreamed.  That it may hold others as well who live beyond the household of faith as I know it.  That God’s grace reaches out and embraces people in staggering and surprising ways.
As we try to live true to Jesus in a divided world, a world of difference, do we dare to believe that God’s grace is of such a character?  That it reaches out and embraces people of different religious and philosophical traditions.  That in Jesus there is something which all people have a stake in and are invited to acknowledge.  As we move deeper into this book in weeks ahead may we discover such a faith and be filled again with excitement and joy at this wonderful message of grace which has seized even us.