Hilton Head Island, SC – February 5, 2012
The Chapel Without Walls
Romans 2:1-11; Romans 2:12-16
A Sermon by John M. Miller
The Great Texts Series - Text – Do you not know that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? – Romans 2:4b (RSV)
Most people have a favorite for everything: main course, dessert, ice cream, actor, singer, instrumental musician, athlete, athletic team, professional golfer, president, historic figure, whatever. These are the people or things that we most like, and they have had an influence on our lives to one degree or another.
For New Testament scholars, and clergy, and maybe laity as well, Paul’s letter to the Romans is, if not the favorite New Testament book, it is as least the most influential. Romans has done more to shape the nature of Christian thinking, especially what we know as Christology, than any other New Testament book. My favorite, and my most influential book, is the Gospel of Luke. But then, I am, in most things, a contrarian, so that should not be surprising to anyone.
However, I give this buildup to Romans because it is going to be the basis for three sermons in a row. There were going to be four, until I discovered that Lent starts a week sooner than I thought it did, so I had to drop the fourth Romans sermon in favor of beginning a Lenten series of sermons on the Beatitudes. I will come back to that fourth sermon, Jews Can’t Lose, at a later time.
Anyway, Romans is the magnum opus of the apostle Paul. In this letter Paul lays out his system of belief in the broadest and most complete outline. For fifteen chapters he addresses one very heavy topic after another, doing whatever he can to make the exquisitely intricate somehow comprehensible to ordinary folks such as you and me. Central to his theme is the notion that without Jesus Christ and his sacrificial death and glorious resurrection, none of us would have any hope of salvation at all.
The first chapter begins with greetings to the Christians of Rome, few of whom he had met yet, since he had not yet been to Rome. They were presumably the leading church in the whole world at the time, and he wanted to explain to them what he considered the essence of the Christian Gospel. After commending them for their faith, about which he apparently had heard much, Paul then attacked what he considered the moral bad guys of the first century. If you want to learn more, read Romans 1. In fact, read all of Romans; it will be good for your soul. Probably. If not, read it anyway.
Paul opens Chapter 2 by saying, “Therefore you have no excuse, O man, whoever you are, when you judge another; for in passing judgment upon him you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things” (2:1). Paul has just castigated slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, foolish, faithless, heartless, and ruthless people (among other kinds, whom he also attacks), and now Paul tells us we too do some of the same things. And we do them, says he, mistakenly supposing that we somehow shall escape God’s judgment. These other bad hombres won’t, but we think we will, says Paul. Then he asks, with biting sarcasm, “Or do you presume upon the riches of (God’s) kindness and forbearance and patience?” Then comes another question, which is really a statement, and is our text for today, “Do you not know that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?”
Paul was raised as an observant Jew. In early adulthood he became as Pharisee. As a Pharisee, he strongly opposed both Jesus Christ and Christianity, because he considered that each was a deadly enemy of a proper Jewish understanding of God’s law. Sin, said Paul, was a breaking of the Torah. And sin was an insurmountable impediment to everyone. How could it be forgiven? Traditionally, the Hebrew Bible taught there was but one way: only through the sacrifice of an animal by a priest in the temple in Jerusalem. “Without the shedding of blood,” said the letter to the Hebrews, “there is no forgiveness of sins” (9:22). Paul didn’t write Hebrews, but until his conversion to Christianity he probably believed that statement. In other words, no one could work out his own forgiveness. Only a sacrifice, and not one which we ourselves made, could result in our forgiveness.
But there is more to it than just that, said the converted Saul of Tarsus, who became the apostle Paul. In order to be forgiven, we must repent. To repent means to acknowledge our sins and to be genuinely sorry for having committed them. But, asks Paul in Romans 2, what actually triggers our repentance? What is the factor which causes us to want to confess our sins?
Elsewhere in Romans, Paul gives different answers to that question than the one he gives in Romans 2:4. But I am convinced in that verse he hit the nail directly on the head. Why are we moved to change our direction (which is what the Greek word metanoia: repentance) means? “Do you not know that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?”
Christian people, countless millions of Christians down through the centuries have never responded positively to the amazing truth of that straight-forward question! And they haven’t done it because countless clergy down through the ages have preached the opposite of what it implies! Far too often we have been told that we must get with God’s program in order to be forgiven. But the truth is, according to Paul, at least in Romans 2, that we realize we are forgiven and therefore we get with God’s program. Our decision to do the right is not really a decision of ours at all. It comes about because we realize God has already forgiven us, and therefore in gratitude we need always to try to do God’s will in all our actions.
But that is not what we have been led to believe by traditional Christian teaching. Again and again we were told that in order to be forgiven by God, it was necessary that first we needed to repent of our sins. Until we did that, we were told, God would not and could not forgive us. Forgiveness requires repentance, we were told. We can’t be forgiven until we repent, we were told.
Yet that isn’t what Paul says in Romans 2. There he clearly suggests that when we repent, we do so because we realize that God has already forgiven us. And how do we know that? “While we were yet sinners,” Paul says later in Romans 5, verse 8, “Christ died for us.” Our forgiveness is illustrated for us by Jesus’ willingness to go to the cross. In so doing, Jesus showed us that God would even die on our behalf if it were possible for God to die. Because that isn’t possible, Jesus voluntarily went to the cross to show us the depth and the cost of God’s love.
“Do you not know that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” Have we ever truly grasped that? Have we? Or are we imprisoned in the old trope of bad theology, the one which insists that we first must feel sorry for our sins in order to be forgiven for them? To imagine that we must do this is to believe that we, and we alone, have it in our power to bring about God’s forgiveness. If we don’t repent, He won’t forgive us. If we do, He will. That’s what we have always been told, haven’t we?
In one of the supreme ironies of human history, it was the death of Jesus Christ which initially caused the Church to come into existence. Had Jesus simply taught what he taught and lived a long life and died as an old man in northern Judea, we probably never would have heard of him. It was his crucifixion and resurrection which electrified his earliest disciples.
John Stroyan is the Anglican Suffragan Bishop of Warwick in England. In an article he wrote for The Times of London, he was talking about those words of Jesus which tell us that in order for us to save our lives, we need first to lose them. Bishop Stroyan wrote, “The paradox at the heart of the Gospel is the relationship between self-sacrifice and self-realization, the call to lose our lives to find them. Outside one of the monasteries I visited on Mount Athos [in Greece] were the words ‘Unless you die before you die, you will die when you die.’”
What profoundly powerful words those are! Unless we die before we die, we will die when we die. What does that mean? Surely one of the things it means is this: We must die to sin (through repentance) in order to live to righteousness (through self-sacrifice.) Or, to quote from C.S. Lewis as John Stroyan did when he ended his piece, “You won’t really start living until you’ve got something to die for.” Or, as Paul said in Romans, we must die to sin in order to live to righteousness. We must repent (turn away from) the wrong things we do and start to do the right things. And so our old sinful self dies and our resurrected, new self is given birth. But why does it happen? It happens because we believe we have already been forgiven by God. And how we do we know that? Because of the cross. The cross proclaims that God loves us like that.
Karl Marlantes was a lieutenant in the US Marine Corps during the War in Viet Nam. As a result of his experiences, years later he wrote a novel called Matterhorn. Maybe he needed to get a sizeable span of time between himself and what he did as a warrior before he was psychologically able to write about it. Years after that he recently wrote a non-fiction book called What It Is Like to Go to War. Marlantes describes the unique kind of bond between male warriors after they are thoroughly trained to engage in combat. He said a singular kind of friendship is engendered when men engage in deadly combat with an enemy. Each soldier knows his life depends on others fighting, if necessary, to the death, just as they depend on him also to fight to the death if necessary. Marlantes told of being in a fierce firefight as his platoon of Marines went up a mountain toward the enemy troops above them. Men were being hit by bullets and shrapnel all around him, but the fight continued. He wrote, “The attack went on, not because of any conscious decision, but because of friendship.”
That is absolutely amazing! Marines were willing to keep going into withering fire, not for love of country, not for military or political reasons, not even because that is what they were trained to do, but because the men being gunned down and killed were their friends! Yet it was more than just that, said Karl Marlantes. He stated that “there is a deep savage joy in destruction, a joy beyond ego enhancement…. There’s a part of me that just loves maiming, killing, and torturing.”
And that, Christian believers, is a terrible truth! Have you ever wondered why most men who have been in close combat refuse to talk about it? It is because it is so horrendously painful! It hurts too much! The wounds, physical or psychological, are so deep, that the soldier knows he cannot, perhaps he must not, re-live it. The real problem is that the Marines or the Army can effectively instruct people in how to kill, but they are incapable of preparing them for how to deal with the killing. I’m not blaming the military; I am simply acknowledging that is beyond their purview to address that, and they would not be able to alleviate spiritual suffering if they tried to do so.
Then how can the weight of our sins, especially those sins we know are the most grievous, be lifted? It happens when we realize anew that God is a God of grace, of kindness, and that His kindness is meant to lead us to repentance. People cannot keep on sinning just as those who kill others, even in combat, cannot keep on killing without its taking an indefinable toll on them. Therefore, when we believe that God has already forgiven us even before we ever committed any sins, in gratitude we will be motivated to turn away from sins we have committed and resolve not sin again to whatever degree that is possible.
Here is a summary of what I understand Paul to be saying in Romans 2, and indeed, throughout his letter to the Romans. God does not love us because we realize we must repent. We repent because we realize that God loves us. We don’t decide to follow God’s law and therefore God accepts us; God accepts us and therefore we decide to follow His law. That is the message the cross is intended to illustrate. It isn’t the cross that saves us or Jesus’ death that saves us; it is God who saves us, but that is supremely illustrated by means of the cross.
Let us hear the same concept in different words. Grace leads to repentance; repentance doesn’t lead to grace. In other words, God’s acceptance leads us to repent; repentance doesn’t lead to God’s acceptance. Or in still other words, Repentance is not essentially an act of contrition; it is essentially an act of gratitude toward God.
Don’t delude yourself that you can win God’s favor by repenting for your sins. But also, don’t delude yourself that you have no sins for which you need to repent.
Whoever said Christian faith is really simple didn’t really understand Christian faith.