The Church in Rome
We are not entirely sure how the Christian church in Rome came into being. Scholars tend to agree that teaching about Jesus as the Messiah probably emerged in the Roman synagogues and gave rise to an internal dialogue within the large Jewish community in Rome. From this it would seem that a small group of those who believed in the revolutionary new ideas coming out of Jerusalem may have banded together as a Christian community.
Paul mentions two names in particular who may have held leadership positions among the Roman Christians: Andronicus and Junia (who may have been his wife, or the name might be Junias in which case we're talking about a close male companion). We do know from a Roman historian that the Emperor Claudius was expelling Jews from Rome in 49AD "because of Chrestus" - which presumably means 'because of Christ' or the emergence of Christian teaching.
So we can estimate that within 10 - 20 years of the death of Jesus a small Christian community was emerging at the very heart of the Roman Empire and was being added to by Christians who were migrating into the capital city from other regions of the Empire. We know that both Paul and Peter, in their later journeys, had direct contact with the Roman Church; however, by then, a core community was already in existence, and long before he visited it, Paul sent them a rather special letter.
Paul's Letters
Looking back to the events of that first century of the Christian faith, it is easy to forget that Paul's letters to those Christian communities which were starting the take shape, are the earliest statements we have of the gospel of Jesus. These complex, highly structured essays - some short, some very long - pre-date the gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and will have been the first formal statements of faith which the earliest churches could take hold of and get to grips with.
For this reason, they were too valuable to serve only one purpose, or to be sent to only the one community to which they were addressed. These letters, and their contents, were intended to be shared, copied, passed on to other nearby communities, read publicly, debated, re-read, studied and acted upon.
We know that Paul used a secretary who would take dictation from Paul and produce the final copy. In the letter to the Roman church chapter 16, verse 22 we find a greeting: "I, Tertius, who am writing this letter, greet you in the Lord".
We also know that, when the secretary had written the main body of the letter, Paul would himself frequently take up the pen and add some personal greetings in his own hand to particular friends at the church to which the letter was to be sent. An interesting point about the letter to the Roman Christians is that Paul adds his usual personal greetings - but he had never been to Rome at this point, and would not have known any of the Roman Christians personally. And when we look at the names of the people he greets, it's clear that another copy of this letter was intended to be sent to the Christian community in Ephesus, because Paul's personal greetings relate to people who we know were his close companions during the three years he spent in Ephesus.
So, we need to recognise that Paul's letters almost always have less to do with where they're being sent to, and much more to do with what they each say about the faith of the Christian, and how that faith is to be lived out in the society in which the Christian will live, serve and give witness to the faith.
This letter
As well as writing to the various Christian communities, which were emerging at that time and making some contact with the Jerusalem church, Paul saw part of his mission to visit them and to teach, guide, correct and inspire them in person.
He was in Corinth in central Greece when he dictated the text of his letter to the Romans to Tertius his secretary. We think the date was the latter end of 57 AD or early 58. And in the letter he says that he's planning a follow-up visit to Rome as part of a longer journey to Spain.
He doesn't seem to know any of the Roman Christians personally in any depth; he hasn't heard reports of any particular problems they're facing, or any errors of faith which they are falling into; so he sends them a tremendously long letter - the longest of those that have come down to us - which sets out his perception of the Christian faith, and then tells them that they must transform themselves into a community which lives by that faith.
There is a school of thought which says that the main content of this letter was already in existence somewhere in Paul's filing system; that he had sat down at some previous time and prepared almost a general 'manifesto' of his beliefs and his reasoning, so that he would have a core document ready for any emerging church to use as the basis for its development.
However, whenever the material was actually compiled, the letter which went from Corinth to Rome around 58 AD (with copies to Ephesus and possibly elsewhere) was clearly intended to be a foundation document for a Christian community seeking to make sense of a strange new faith which sprang from the actions and teachings of a prophetic Jew who had been betrayed by his own people, and executed by the Roman authorities in Palestine some 25 years previously.
In this letter is every mission statement, expression of core values, statement of faith, and set of Bylaws which an emerging church might need. Paul was at the height of his powers when writing this; it is his expression of the Christian faith at his most mature. It is densely packed with theological arguments and explanations which, down the centuries, have thrown light time and again on the core principles of the Christian faith. But at chapter 12 - where today's reading comes from - it changes its focus slightly.
In the first eleven chapters, Paul explains and unpacks his beliefs about God, Jesus and humanity. These sections are his treatise on the meaning of life in Christ. Then at chapter 12 he turns to his fellow Christians and says 'and this is how you should live your lives as a reflection of that life in Christ'. The first bit was the context - the 'why', now here's the method - the 'how'. He says to them:
* Take your everyday life and place it before God as an offering.
* Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.
* Fix your attention on God, recognise what God wants from you, quickly respond to it, and you'll be changed from the inside out.
* The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is, and by what God does for us, not by what we are and by what we do for God.
* We are like the parts of a human body - each part gets its meaning from the body as a whole, not the other way round. So, as parts of Christ's body, let's just be what we were made to be, without comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren't.
* Love from the centre of who you are.
* Don't burn yourselves out: stay fuelled and aflame as alert servants, and pray all the harder.
* Bless your enemies and don't curse them under your breath. Get along with each other.
* Don't hit back; discover beauty in everyone. Don't insist on getting even: God will do the judging.
* Don't let evil get the best of you; get the best of evil by doing good.
Paul's message for us today
That's quite a list! It's possible to trace many of those elements back either to sayings of Jesus or to themes which Paul addresses in other ways in other letters. But when he puts them all together in this one chapter, it looks daunting.
An easy temptation for us is to say 'I can't do all that. I'm just not that good. If that's what's expected of me, I will always fall short of the standard.' But perhaps one item in the list is the key to achieving the others:
Fix your attention on God, recognise what God wants from you, quickly respond to it, and you'll be changed from the inside out.
Another translation of that passage says:
... let the renewing of your minds transform you, so that you may discern for yourselves what is the will of God ...
It is by being transformed - by being changed from the inside out - that we make progress towards the goals God has set for our lives as disciples. God achieves this in us, from the inside out. And this transformation will come about if we maintain our focus on what God wants from each one of us.
There is a choice for us here - as there always is. Shall we focus our relationship with God on the list of things we can't yet do, on our failures, on our shortcomings, or - even worse - on other peoples' shortcomings? Shall we do what we always did, and stay as we always were, and get the results we always got? Shall we cling on to the baggage of our old lives?
Or shall we embrace the transformation which God offers to those who focus their lives on God, those who follow Jesus, who use their gifts to build up the body of Christ, and who share their blessings with others?
One choice empowers and enables us to reach God's expectation of us. The other choice does nothing to move us forward.
In this church we believe that God calls each of us to be a transformed disciple - changed from the inside out. We say this in our mission statement; and we're beginning to see that a willingness to be transformed by God into a better disciple of Jesus is one of the things God has raised up this church to bring about. It is part of our identity - it is one of our core beliefs - it is the only way to turn Paul's list of Christian attributes into our personal goal.
In his own way, Paul was saying much the same thing to his fledgling community of Christians in Rome - and elsewhere - around 2000 years ago.
I am profoundly reassured by that. I hope you are too.
Amen.
(Philip Jones)
This
sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester.
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