Let’s talk about the early church.

I mean, the really early church.

What did this community that we are a part of today, look like in the years immediately following the death of it’s founder? What was the source of all the strife among Jews and Gentiles? Why is it such a big deal that Paul was founding churches in Asia Minor, Greece and Europe?

And why do we care?

Let’s answer that last question first.

We care because the story of God is the story of barriers breaking down.

It is a story of God breaking the barrier between heaven and earth by coming into personal relationship with God’s people. It is a story of the definition of “God’s people” expanding exponentially. It is a story of God standing in solidarity with creation in the suffering all mortal beings life with everyday. It is a story of all the barriers that prevented that experience of God from spreading far and wide being obliterated.

And nobody break down barriers in the early church better than Paul.

So, Jesus just died.

His disciples are scattered.

His movement is seemingly dead, just as the Jewish temple authorities and the Roman governing power were hoping for.

And then (as I explained earlier), Peter came along. I know I’ve been over this all ready, but please bear with me, because this idea about Peter is one of the ideas that excites me most of all thinking about the early church.

I strongly believe that what pulled Jesus’ community back together, the act that we now term Resurrection, was the force of personality of a reinvigorated, convicted Peter. Out of the shattered remains of a community crushed by the death of it’s leader, Peter was able to pull together a new church.

This really one of the most amazing examples of community organizing in human history.

Now, I say “church,” but church doesn’t really describe what was happening accurately. It would be better to say, “Jewish sect.” Because that’s really how the early church (there’s that word again) saw itself. They thought of themselves as reforming the Jewish faith, as moving it forward into a new era behind a new liberator and king. Jesus, in their eyes, was the latest incarnation of Abraham, of Moses, of David; a leader and nation builder for the Jewish people.

And yet, he was so different, too.

He wasn’t a great military leader like David.

He wasn’t a law giver like Moses.

He wasn’t their father, like Abraham.

He was so much more.

He was ushering in God’s Kingdom,

one personified in the example of

love and

humility and

compassion and

grace he lived with.

So, those early leaders made a choice. They decided that this message was one intended for God’s chosen people only, just as all the others had been. They made a conscious choice to spread their new take on Judaism by way of local synagogues, and avoid the gentiles loving among them and all around them.

But then, something funny happened.

This message of love and humility and compassion and grace: it started resonating with gentiles, too. In fact, in some places, it started resonating more with gentiles than with Jews, who were fairly resistant to this idea of reforming the faith of their fathers in the example of some peasant upstart who had been crucified by the Romans.

Not exactly a convincing leader to rally around.

And then came along Saul of Tarsus.

He had been a Pharisee, one of the most zealous, who had made a career and a name out of persecuting these guys who were disturbing the Temple faith in the name of some “Jesus” guy. Then he has a vision and disappears for a while, and  comes back a Christian. And not just a regular Jewish Christian, but a guy who is famous among Jews, a guy who is a Roman citizen as well and can travel wherever he wants in the empire!

Peter and James and the guys must have thought, what a PR coup is this! Who better to work among the Jews than Jewish rockstar Saul of Tarsus? And, he can visit the diaspora communities across Asia Minor, Egypt and Greece!

And then Paul (that’s what he’s calling himself now, post-vision) drops a bomb: he’s not interested in converting Jews. He feels called to Gentile ministry.

This is the origin of the first major division in the Christian church. Paul, this upstart guy who just recently was killing Christians, now comes striding into the room and wants to change the whole direction of the movement! He wants to subvert the authority of super-leader Peter and James, who is only the blood brother of Jesus. He wants to be more than a Jewish sect; he has a whole eschatological view of Jesus that requires the establishment of a new faith tradition, in opposition and over the Jewish one. He wants to do away with Jewish law and custom and culture in general, and start over.

This isn’t what Peter had in mind.

But, Paul is persuasive and convincing, and Peter is willing to show the grace he is teaching as part of the Good News. Most importantly, Peter is smart, and he realizes Jewish outreach is not exactly going gangbusters, and gentiles are actually genuinely interested in learning more about Jesus.

So they commission Paul to go out into the gentile world and start planting Christian communities. And he does, and then there is the whole clash we saw explained back in Galatians, and eventually, Paul fully wins out, the result of both his own force of personality, and the strong push back of Jewish temple leaders that eventually quashes an inter-Jewish Christian sect. This Christianity thing is going to be it’s own standalone thing.

So let’s wrap this back to our passage from Romans today.

Paul has spent a good portion of Romans grounding the ministry of Jesus firmly in the Jewish tradition, via Adam and Abraham. He then touched on the special place of Israel in God’s creation in chapter 9. But then, in chapter 10, he recounts the rejection of Jesus and the church by Israel and the Temple leaders. Remember, all this is written to a church that is half gentile, half Jew, and he is trying to appeal them all.

So he makes a linear argument here in chapters 10, 11 and 12, one that is easier to understand now that you understand early church history a little better. Here is that argument in short:

This is what I’ve found over the course of this study that is so cool about Paul. He was definitely the progressive, universally-minded guy in the room. Peter may have been the big type-A leader, and James may have been the fire and brimstone preacher who who could make you feel this faith, but Paul was the one telling them to think bigger, to think outside of the Jewish box they were in. Paul saw that God’s freely-given grace was for all people everyone in all times. Paul was truly the first universalist. Paul was the guy breaking down barriers whenever and wherever he found them.

We should be like Paul. Walls, border, boundaries, barriers: none of them belong in God’s kingdom. We are one people, following one God, in the example of one man.

Paul ends chapter 12 with a wonderful meditation on what it looks like to be a Christian. He never once mentions restrictions on this community; he doesn’t recount what a Christian doesn’t look like; he isn’t interested in setting up barriers to entry. He only cares about what it does look like when you are living a life in true imitation of Jesus. It’s beautiful, and it’s what this whole big thing is all about. Take these words to heart.

For so long, Christianity has been a religion of condemnation for human beings.

Since the earliest days of the church, Christianity has been rooted in a mindset of judgment and condemnation. Read any history of Christianity (I suggest Diarmaid MacCulloch’s masterful and lengthy tome) and you will read a history of people coming into conflict over how they each think the other is failing to live correctly. It’s a history of rules and laws and do’s and don’ts.

We see this so much today. Christianity in it’s modern context is one is which clobber verses are all the rage. We love to point out what others are doing wrong; we love condemning those we think are straying from the path or committing what we view as egregious sin.

This faith, this Christianity, is a religion of rules.

And we wonder why the church is sinking.

This religion of condemnation is not the Way of Life shown by Jesus. Christianity was not founded as a legal code.

Christianity in it’s purest form is, simply, love.

Paul hits that point perfectly in this passage. After spending the second half of chapter 7 ruminating on humans’ inability to live according to the rules and laws we are supposed to live by, it seems like he is speeding headlong towards more exhortation to live in purity.

And then BANG.

He clobbers us with 8:1.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

No condemnation.

None. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

He goes on: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.”

This is big, radical stuff. This is, like, totally what that Jesus guy was saying.

In the Kingdom of God, there is no place for judgment, for condemnation, for pointing fingers.

We are enveloped in God’s everlasting love and mercy and grace. We cannot escape from it. Paul describes this so beautifully in 8:38,

Yes! Isn’t that great rhetoric from Paul? Such a wonderful piece of work; and it’s all true! Nothing can ever separate us from God and God’s love!

We are forever and always guaranteed to be in God, and for God to be in us, and around us, and loving us. No amount of messing up, breaking rules, violating the Law can ever keep us from that relationship. We are forever liberated from the fear of death found in the law, embodied in sin. We are free.

Christianity is not a religion of condemnation. Christianity is not a legal code.

Christianity is a relationship of eternal life, built on love, sustained by faith, and guaranteed by grace. Forever. No exceptions.

Amen.

I used to think of God as a fairly passive presence in the universe.

I had a “clockmaker”, slightly Deist view of God. God cranked this whole thing into motion, and then sat back and observed, not interfering in the world.

I still have some leanings this way.

I’m definitely not a believer in miracles, or in God playing a role in personal or natural disasters and outcomes. I think the universe is an orderly, rational place that God did in fact set into motion, but that he allows to run by the laws of science for our sake, that we might understand and navigate the way things work.

But I’ve evolved in my thinking. I have a more open mind towards how God interacts with creation. I wrote a blog post on the subject around this time last year, saying:

I was created and born with certain gifts and abilities. As I grow and learn and realize who I am, I awaken to those gifts and abilities and recognize my proper place in the world. And that has lead me to ministry.

To say that God played no active part in this guidance is to deny the existence of God.

God may not have reached into people’s bank account and moved money. He didn’t whisper in my ear saying “You should go into ministry.” But God’s mark is all over my journey. And that is the true essence of a “Great Clockmaker.” Even in things that seems completely disassociated from any mention of God, God’s touch is still present in the very existence of those things.

I think that these three chapters from Paul’s letter to the Romans really affirm that. Paul is still making an argument for justification by faith and why it is necessary that God provided salvation in that way. He ties it back to Jewish tradition by expounding on Abraham and Adam and how God acted in their stories.

And that’s really the key here: God was, and is, and always will be, acting.

Justification by faith, the idea that we are reconciled to God by God’s act of grace, is the ultimate proof of God’s agency in the universe.

As Paul explains, Abraham didn’t receive God’s blessing because of his preexisting righteousness and good deeds; he was blessed because of his faith in God. He trusted that God would act, that God would make good on God’s promise to give him a son in his old age. Paul uses Abraham as the quintessential example of faith.

Paul moves on to Adam, and compares him to Jesus, as the two men standing athwart history in a sense, one succumbing to death, the other overcoming it. Again, God acts through the example of Jesus, affirming that those who have faith even to point of suffering and death are not doomed, a la Adam, but instead are resurrected through reconciliation.

God is not a passive deity, sitting high above us, watching us scurry about. But neither is God reaching a cosmic finger into our world, pushing cars out of the way or misdirecting bullets. God has acted in the most perfect and necessary way, and has in consequence left us free to act and make choices on our own. Paul summarizes his thought process in the beautiful opening to chapter 5:

“The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God. We are dealing with somebody we made up. And if we made him up, then we are in control. And so in passage after passage, we find God reminding people that he is beyond and bigger and more.”

Paul wants us to understand that this is all about God, not us. God is reconciling us, and we are acting in response to God. God is in charge, even if God doesn’t feel the need to flaunt it.

And we should emulate the example of Godliness we see in Jesus, in order to bring the Kingdom here, every day, in a little way.