Sermons

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

            It’s good to be back!

            I’ve been to two big Baptist meetings while I was away and visited three different countries. I hiked to the top of Pulpit Rock in Norway, went swimming in a lake in Sweden, and flew through the streets of Copenhagen on a bicycle. I came home sunburned, blistered, and bug bit, which for me only means that I’ve had a great vacation. But it’s good to be back and especially good to be back with you. I’ve said it before, but there is no place I would rather be on a Sunday morning than right here at Richmond’s First Baptist Church.

It’s good to see you.

I’m grateful to Steve Blanchard and Allison Collier for filling the pulpit so capably while I was away. Steve preached from the Old Testament and Allison preached from the Gospel, but I’m going to continue this series called, “When in Romans,” based on the epistle of the same name. We’ve already worked our way through the first few chapters, looking at how Paul understands the human condition: despairing over the depravity of the pagan world in chapter 1, but recognizing in chapter 2 that those who claim to be religious are not much better. “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” he writes in chapter 3, and for Paul, sin is a problem. In fact, it may be the problem. He uses the word 59 times in the Book of Romans and when he does he makes it clear that sin is what separates us from God. It’s what makes it impossible for us to have a relationship with him that is both life-giving and life-changing. “What we need is to be justified,” Paul says, that is, made right with God, and in chapter 4 he explains that we do that through faith. In the same way Abraham trusted God and God reckoned it to him as righteousness, we can trust Jesus to do whatever it takes to make us right with God. And Jesus has. Now, Paul writes in chapter 5, “since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” And as I said, that may have been what Paul had been looking for his entire life. 

            “What then,” he asks, at the beginning of chapter 6: “should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? Absolutely not! The old you was buried in the waters of baptism. What came up was a whole new you, ready to live a whole new life. Sin shouldn’t have any part of that life. You should be done with sin forever!”

            Should be.

But the way Paul talks about sin in chapter 7 makes me think that even he wasn’t completely done with it. “I want to do what is right,” he says, “but I can’t.  There seems to be some lower nature in me, at war with my better self, that makes me want to do the things I know I shouldn’t do. When I want to do what is right I end up doing wrong, and when I try to stay away from what is wrong I still can’t seem to do what is right. What’s the matter with me? Who will deliver me from this body of death?” And then he answers his own question. “Thanks be to God,” he says, “through Jesus Christ our Lord.” And that leads him to a whole new line of reasoning.

            At the beginning of chapter 8 he says, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” and when I read those words this time around I remembered a Time magazine cover from 2011 that asked the question, “What if there’s no hell?” It was a reference to a book called Love Wins, by Rob Bell, in which he argued that it isn’t God’s will that anyone should perish.^[i] When I read that article in 2011 I thought, “Well, that’s true; it isn’t God’s will that anyone should perish.” But I also wondered: “Does that mean there isn’t a hell, and if that’s true, then what becomes of Christianity?”     New Testament scholar Marcus Borg once observed that for many Christians, “the afterlife is central.” He said that in the Lutheran church of his boyhood the promise of heaven and the specter of hell loomed large. “Indeed,” he wrote, “if you had been able to convince me at age twelve that there was no afterlife, I would have had no idea why I should be a Christian.”^[ii] So if there’s no hell Christianity crumbles, right? Or wrong?

            When I read that verse at the beginning of Romans 8, and remembered that Time magazine article from 2011, it struck me that Paul would answer the question of whether or not there is a hell by saying there isn’t. Not for those who are in Christ Jesus. They might be judged but they won’t be condemned. Christ has already taken their condemnation for them. He has literally gone to hell for them. So they can stop worrying about that, and for some people that would be a tremendous relief.

Because there are still churches where the afterlife is central, where the promise of heaven and the specter of hell loom large. When I started preaching nearly forty years ago there were a few members of that rural Kentucky church who seemed disappointed that I wasn’t more of a fire and brimstone preacher. “That’s what brings them down the aisle!” they would say, suggesting that it was my job to scare the hell out of people. Some preachers still try to do that. But according to the latest surveys sixty percent of Americans don’t even believe in hell anymore. Another thirty percent would say that when it comes to religion they don’t believe much of anything at all. And I suspect there is a relationship between those two numbers: that if you don’t believe in hell then, like 12-year-old Marcus Borg, you may wonder why you should be a Christian at all.

            But please notice that Paul didn’t say there is no hell. He only said that, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” He might say that hell is as real as it’s ever been but those who are in Christ Jesus don’t have to worry about it anymore, they don’t have to be afraid. They are free at last to live the life God has given them. So I’m wondering: what does that even mean? What does it mean to be in Christ Jesus? I’ve been thinking about it for weeks and I think I’ve come up with an analogy that even Paul would approve.

Have you ever taken a sponge that is dry and hard and dropped it into a sink full of warm, soapy water? Something happens to that sponge: it begins to soak up that warm, soapy water until it is completely saturated, soft, and pliable. You can pick it up, squeeze it, and warm, soapy water will trickle down your forearm. I think Paul might say that’s what happens to us in baptism. We are baptized into Christ Jesus, he says, like a dry, hard sponge dipped into a sink full of liquid divinity. We soak up the nature of Christ, the spirit of Christ, until it is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us. But here’s the problem: if you put that soaking wet sponge on a windowsill in the sunshine and leave it there for a few days, it will get dry and hard again. And what about us? In the hours after our baptism we were radiant. We had been baptized into Christ Jesus and it showed. Our faces shone like the sun. But then weeks went by, months, and that holy glow began to dim. And if your baptism was it—if that was your first and last experience of the divine—then your soul may have eventually become as dry and hard as that sponge on the windowsill.

            So, what’s the remedy? Do you get baptized again, and again, and again? Do you come down the aisle every time you begin to feel a little dry, spiritually, and ask the preacher to put you under the water one more time? No, I don’t think so. I think you immerse yourself in worship, in fellowship, in Bible study and in prayer. I think that whatever else you might say about these ancient spiritual practices they are meant to keep the sponge of your soul saturated with the divine. They are how you remain “in Christ Jesus.” And it may sound too simple, but all of these things are available to you simply by going to church.

            As I was working on this sermon I tried to remember a time when I didn’t go to church, and there has only been one. It was when I went off to prep school at the age of fifteen. I started as a sophomore, having tried and failed to get into that school the first two times. The first Sunday I was there the force of habit got me out of bed and carried me to the church closest to my dormitory: a Baptist church. I’d like to say that I went back the next week, and the week after that, but I didn’t. When my parents asked I said I’d found a good church close by, but I didn’t tell them I’d stopped going. It wasn’t that I meant to; it was almost like I had to. That school was hard, and for someone who had never had to study much before it was a big adjustment. We had classes on Saturday up until noon, and then everyone took the rest of the day off to play, and play hard. Check in on Saturday wasn’t until midnight, and when Sunday morning rolled around everybody slept in, and then went to the dining hall for brunch before settling in to do homework the rest of the day. There was so much homework! It felt almost necessary to fall into the same pattern as everyone else, just to take the break I needed so desperately on Saturday afternoon, and then to get my work done before Monday morning. 

            For two years that’s what I did, but when my mother suggested I apply to college early, I did, and when I got in (to everyone’s surprise, including mine), I went. I was glad to get away from the never-ending workload and the cutthroat competition of prep school. Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad I went. I learned a lot at that school. I gained a sense of confidence that I might not have found elsewhere. I came away with this feeling that if I could make it there, I could make it anywhere.

But I barely made it.

I had this cheap electric alarm clock that would click before it buzzed in the morning—the tiniest click, and then a half-second delay, and then that buzzer telling me it was time to get up and get going again, from 6:30 in the morning until 10:30 at night. I hated that buzzer so much that I developed a new reflex. When I heard that click in the morning, before the buzzer could sound, my hand would shoot out from under the covers and turn off that alarm. 95 percent of the time my hand got to it before the buzzer sounded. 

            That’s how tired of that school I was. And although I made some good friends there and had some good times, my mother knew me well enough to know I wasn’t thriving. That’s why she suggested I apply to college a year early—to a tiny college in a southern state where my uncle was on the faculty. I did, and as I said, I got in and went. And I did well there. I thrived. But it wasn’t until I was working on this sermon last week that I realized the only time in my life I didn’t go to church was when I was in prep school. That changed when I went to college. My older brother, Ed, transferred to my new school and went with me. He was a good role model. He got me up early on Sunday mornings to go to church with him. On Monday nights we went to an on-campus Bible study. As I said, I thrived there, but was it because of that? Was it because I got myself grounded again in the things of God? Did it help me realize that it wasn’t all up to me, that I was part of something bigger than myself? At prep school I was lonelier than I’d ever been before. I suffered from a kind of stress I’d never known. A good psychologist may have said I was clinically depressed. Was some of it, or all of it, because I’d given up going to church? 

            I don’t know, and I don’t really know if that’s what Paul is talking about in this passage, but in verse 5 he tells his readers to set their minds not on the things of the flesh, but on the things of the Spirit, and going to church is a good way to do that. I mean, look at you this morning, both you who are in the room and you who are watching from home. Instead of dreaming up new ways to indulge the flesh you are listening to a sermon. Good for you! I tell people sometimes that to sit in church for an hour on Sunday morning and listen for a word from outside yourself, a word from the Lord, is a wonderful, weekly discipline. It’s a way to unplug from the world around you and re-boot your life.

I wish someone had told me that while I was in prep school. Can you imagine, if I’d gone back to that Baptist church the following Sunday, and the one after that, and the one after that? Can you imagine how that congregation might have looked at that fifteen-year-old boy sitting all by himself on a church pew and taken some pity on him? How they might have loved him, and encouraged him, and occasionally taken him home for Sunday dinner? I mean, it’s what you would do, right? If that had happened for me I think I might be telling you a different story today. I think I might be telling you the story of how, even in that stressful situation, I was able to remain in Christ Jesus by keeping the sponge of my soul soaked in the Spirit of God, and how even then, even there, I was able to find life and peace.

—Jim Somerville © 2023

[i] Jon Meacham, “Pastor Rob Bell: What if Hell Doesn’t Exist?” Time, April 14, 2011 (https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2065289,00.html).

[ii] Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity.(Kindle edition, location 266-270).

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?

            I ended up preaching a different sermon last week than the one I had planned to preach. I had planned to preach the second sermon in this series called “When in Romans.” I was going to tell you that Romans 5 begins with the word therefore in the same way some resolutions end with that word. Have you heard them? “Whereas John has been employed by our firm for forty years, and whereas he always showed up for work, and whereas he is now retiring, therefore be it resolved that he is a jolly good fellow”? The first four chapters of Romans read sort of like that—like the whereases in one of those resolutions. Paul might say, “Whereas we are a bunch of miserable sinners who deserve nothing better than death, and whereas we needed someone to die for us in order to make us right with God, and whereas Jesus was willing to do that for us and save us from our sins, therefore (and this is what it actually says in Romans 5:1), “since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

            In the sermon I didn’t preach last week I said this is what Paul may have been working toward his entire life—peace with God—and the good news is that he finally found a way to get there: by being justified by grace through faith. I said, “This was Paul’s gospel, and he preached it wherever he went, but please notice that it’s Paul’s Gospel, and not Matthew’s, Mark’s, or Luke’s” And that reminded me of a sermon I shared with a group of Baptist pastors shortly after I came to Richmond. It was called, “Which Gospel Shall I Preach?” and it started like this:

            ———————–

            In my study at church there is a framed certificate dated August 5^th, 1984.  It’s a license to preach the Gospel, and I remember how excited I was when I got it.  I could just picture myself standing to preach on street corners, in shopping malls, even on the front steps of public schools, daring anybody to stop me. If they did I was going to hold up that certificate and say, “You can’t stop me. I’ve got a license!” All these years later they still haven’t stopped me, but in those years I’ve done some thinking about what it means to preach “the gospel” and lately I’ve been asking myself which gospel I should preach. 

According to the late Tim Keller, evangelicals agreed on “the simple gospel” a generation ago, and this was it: 1) God made you and wants to have a relationship with you, but 2) your sin separates you from God. 3) Jesus took the punishment your sins deserved, so that 4) if you repent from your sins and trust in him for your salvation, you will be forgiven, justified, and accepted freely by grace, and indwelt with his Spirit until you die and go to heaven.  I would guess that, in one form or another, that’s the gospel you received and the gospel you believed.  But Keller, who was the pastor of the largest Protestant church in Manhattan, had at least two criticisms of this simple formulation.  One was that it is too individualistic, “that Christ’s salvation is not so much to bring individual happiness as to bring peace, justice, and a new creation.”  The second was that “there is no one ‘simple gospel’ because ‘everything is contextual’ and the Bible itself contains many gospel presentations.”^[i]

It’s that second thing I want to talk about (I said), the idea that “the Bible itself contains many gospel presentations.” 

Even before someone pointed me toward that article by Tim Keller called “The Gospel in All Its Forms” I had been thinking about how the good news that John preaches seems fundamentally different from the good news that Matthew, Mark, and Luke preach.  In John’s Gospel there is a lot of talk about believing in Jesus.  The miracles he does are called “signs” and they are meant to point people toward faith.  We call John 3:16 the “gospel in a nutshell” and this is what it says: that “God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (KJV).  Right at the end of the Gospel John tells us that “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples which are not written in this book, but these things are written so that you might come to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that through believing you might have life in his name” (John 20:30-31, NRSV).

It’s good news, isn’t it?

But if you turn back a few pages to the Gospel of Mark you find a different emphasis.  Mark’s Jesus, after he has been baptized and tempted in the wilderness, makes his way to Galilee where he begins to say, “The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe the gospel!”  He uses that word in its generic sense.  The gospel is “good news,” and the good news he wants to share is that God’s Kingdom has come near.  But in this Gospel (and also in Matthew and Luke) it becomes clear that for Jesus the Kingdom is not meant to be “pie in the sky, by and by, but something sound, on the ground, while we’re still around.”[ii]  When he teaches his disciples to pray he teaches them to pray that God’s Kingdom will come, and God’s will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  It is the focus of his mission. I think that’s why you have all those healing stories in these gospels, and those scenes where people who were formerly deaf, dumb, blind and lame are now hearing, talking, seeing, walking. This is how it will be when the Kingdom comes on earth. And the message of the coming Kingdom is the “good news” of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which are sometimes called the “Synoptic Gospels”—syn as in synonym and optic as in optical—because they can be “seen together,” because their message is so much the same.

But turn forward a few pages to Paul’s letter to the Romans and you will find a different gospel altogether. Paul seldom refers to the Kingdom of God. He rarely mentions heaven or everlasting life. The good news for him is about being set free from the Law, about being saved by grace through our faith in Jesus Christ. It was good news for Martin Luther, who became a monk as a way of trying to earn his salvation before learning that salvation comes by grace alone through faith alone. It was good news for John Wesley, who after years of wondering if he was really a Christian found his heart “strangely warmed” when he heard someone preach God’s grace from the book of Romans. It’s good news for any of us who have tried to be good enough to get into heaven because that just won’t work. We can never be good enough. But thanks be to God, Paul would say, that “while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” That’s good news, isn’t it? It’s Paul’s version of the good news.

——————–

But as I asked those Baptist pastors fifteen years ago, when I step up to the pulpit on Sunday morning which of these three Gospels shall I preach?  The Johannine Gospel, which is all about believing in Jesus so that you might have everlasting life?  The Synoptic Gospel, which is all about the good news of God’s coming Kingdom?  Or the Pauline Gospel, which is all about being saved by grace through faith, and not by keeping the law? These are three very different messages, with three very different audiences, but sometimes—just sometimes—they overlap.

For example: let’s imagine that you’ve been trying to find peace with God your entire life. You hear Paul’s message of justification by grace through faith. You believe it, you come down the aisle to profess your faith and present yourself as a candidate for baptism and on a Sunday morning a few weeks later, in front of God and everybody, you go down under the water in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and come up clean, with your sins forgiven. For the rest of that day you enjoy a kind of peace you have never felt before. But that night, when you’re home alone, the old temptations return, and before you know it you’ve done it again, you’ve sinned! And now what? If you’re like some people you enter into a lifelong struggle with sin, that often leaves you feeling like a miserable failure, but if you’re like some of the people Paul was writing to you believe that God’s grace is greater than all your sin, and begin to sin with abandon.

In Romans 6, Paul writes to both kinds of people, beginning with that second group. “What then,” he says, “should we continue in sin that grace may abound?” And then he uses a Greek expression that means, almost literally, “Hell, no! How can we who died to sin go on living in it?” But then, picking up on that same line of reasoning, he turns to the second group and says, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” And Paul is just getting started. Ten times in this passage he uses the word Thanatos, meaning “death.” Two more times he uses the word nekros, meaning “dead.” He wants us to understand that our old sin-loving self was drowned in the waters of baptism and therefore no longer has any power over us. If he could sum it up he might say, “The secret of life—this new life in Christ—is death!”

And this is where the Pauline gospel begins to overlap with the Synoptic gospel, this is where Paul begins to sound like Jesus, which almost never happens. Paul and Jesus come from two different places, they have two different agendas, but right at the end of today’s Gospel lesson Jesus says, “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” It almost sounds as if he’s saying, “The secret of life…is death.” But before you start tweeting that out to your friends or posting it on Facebook let me give you some backstory. Jesus was walking with his disciples on the road near Caesarea Philippi, way up on the slopes of Mount Hermon. He asked them, “Who do people say that I am?” and they told him, “John the Baptist, or Elijah, or one of the other prophets.” “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say that I am?” And Peter said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!” And from that moment Jesus began to tell them that he was going to suffer and die. Peter couldn’t believe it. He said, “God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you!” But Jesus said, “Get behind me, Satan, for you are not thinking the things of God, but of men.”

I was talking with a trauma nurse last week who told me that in her experience anxiety about death is one of the biggest problems we humans face. She put me onto a book called Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death, by a psychotherapist named Irvin Yalom. He begins by writing, “Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.” Yalom appeals to Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher, who practiced “medical philosophy” and insisted that just as the doctor treats the body, the philosopher must treat the soul. “In his view there was only one proper goal of philosophy,” Yalom writes: “to alleviate human misery. And the root cause of misery? Epicurus believed it to be our omnipresent fear of death.”[iii]

Which is why what Jesus says to his disciples is so brilliant. Up there on the road near Caesarea Philippi, with all its statues and shrines to the Greek gods, he said, “If any of you want to come after me you need to deny the self, take up the cross, and follow me.” In other words, you need to volunteer to die, because once you do that, once you confront your fear of death head on—once you accept it and even embrace it—death will no longer have any power over you, the fear of death will no longer make you miserable. You can stop thinking the things of men, as Peter was, and start thinking the things of God.

In his own way that’s what Paul says. He’s not talking about the fear of death so much as the love of sin but in both cases something needs to be confronted, something needs to be denied. Jesus told his disciples to deny the self, Paul might tell us to deny our sin-loving selves, but each of them would agree that there is something in us—some trembling, anxious, greedy, needy thing—that has to die. I remember talking to Buddy Hamilton years ago, Buddy, who even then had lived more years than I ever will. He said, “Don’t you think our biggest problem is inordinate self-concern?” Yes. Yes I do, Buddy. And I think Jesus, and Paul, and Epicurus would agree with you. We walk around carrying our fragile egos as if they were soap bubbles, afraid that someone might pop them. “Well,” Jesus might say. “Why don’t you do that? Why don’t you pop that silly soap bubble so you can stop worrying about it?” “Yes,” Paul might say, “why don’t you come down the aisle of the church and ask the preacher to baptize you. Why don’t you drown that sinful self once and for all?” “Yes,” Epicurus might say, “why don’t you confront your fear of death head on? Why don’t you learn to accept it and embrace it?”

There are at least three different presentations of the gospel in the New Testament. They are each very different, with different messages. But on this day Paul and Jesus and maybe even Epicurus would agree that the way to find your life is to lose it.

The sooner the better.

—Jim Somerville © 2023

[i] Tim Keller, “The Gospel in All Its Forms,” Leadership (Spring 2008).

[ii] I’ve heard this in an African American worship service, and it seemed to be something everyone had heard before, and often.

[iii] From chapter 1 of the Kindle edition of Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death, by Irvin D. Yalom (Jossey-Bass, 2008, 2009).

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

            For most of last week I was working on an answer to the question of how we can have peace with God. That’s what Paul seems to want to talk about in today’s Epistle lesson, and that’s what I was planning to preach about this morning. I was going to say that we have peace with God when we realize that we will never be justified by being good enough, but only by trusting the grace of God through our faith in Jesus Christ. But toward the end of last week people began to ask me a different question. Through text messages, emails, and phone calls they were asking not how do we have peace with God, but is this church a Southern Baptist church? And I think you know the reason for that.

            At last week’s annual meeting the Southern Baptist Convention reaffirmed its position that no woman can be the pastor of a Southern Baptist Church. But then it went beyond that and voted to amend its constitution so that no church that had a female pastor of any kind, even if she were a pastor to children, could be part of the Southern Baptist Convention. “The title of pastor is reserved for men alone,” they said. Which is why people were asking the question. They know Richmond’s First Baptist Church has female pastors, and has for years. So far we haven’t had a female senior pastor, but we have a female senior associate pastor, and we have a female associate pastor, and we have a number of other women who serve as ministers and deacons in our church. The people who have been asking this question are wondering if, when the SBC ratifies the amendment to its constitution next year, this church will be kicked out. They want to know: “Is this an SBC church?” Let me see if I can answer that question.

            What I usually say is that Richmond’s First Baptist Church was founded in 1780—65 years before the Southern Baptist Convention even came into existence. But I also say that through the years we have partnered with whatever denominational entity or agency could help us fulfill our mission, and for many years the SBC was a good partner. When I became a Baptist in 1981 I joined a Southern Baptist church. I learned about the emphasis on missions and evangelism that has defined the denomination from the beginning. I learned the names Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong, two famous (female) Southern Baptist missionaries. I learned about the Cooperative Program, the unified giving plan that made it possible for me to go to seminary free of charge—a gift I’m still grateful for. But I also learned that being Baptist means freedom.

When I talk about this in our newcomers’ class I often refer to Walter Shurden’s little book, Four Fragile Freedoms, and then I talk about our individual freedom, sometimes referred to as soul competency. I say, “In some churches they baptize infants, but we Baptists like to wait until you are old enough to make up your own mind about Jesus. In a Baptist church nobody carries you down the aisle, and nobody pushes you down the aisle. You make up your own mind.” Next I talk about Bible freedom. I say, “Some churches don’t think the people in the pews should be reading the Bible; they think that should be left up to the priests. But we believe that with the help of the Holy Spirit every Baptist can read and interpret the Bible with understanding. We encourage it, and don’t think anyone should stand between a Baptist and her Bible.” Next I talk about church freedom, often referred to as local church autonomy. I tell them, “Other churches have bishops and popes, but we don’t. We have a congregational form of government. We get to decide for ourselves what our mission and ministry will be, and we are free to ordain whomever we perceive to be gifted for ministry, male or female.” Finally I talk about religious freedom, based on the principle of a free church in a free state. “This is how Baptists got their start,” I say. “They didn’t like the Church of England telling them what to do. So they came to this country seeking religious liberty and found it. They built a wall of separation between church and state. We are at our Baptist best when we don’t tell the government what to do, and don’t let it tell us what to do.” James Dunn, who for years served as the Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, put it another way. He said, “Ain’t nobody but Jesus gonna tell me what to do!” That spirit is deeply ingrained in Baptists, so when the Southern Baptist Convention tells us we can’t have female pastors we feel our spines stiffen. We wonder, “Who are you to tell us what to do?” And people who don’t even know us begin to ask, “Is your church a Southern Baptist church?”

Let me tell you a story. Back in the mid-1980’s the Southern Baptist Convention was coming apart at the seams. The denomination was embroiled in a controversy some called a “conservative resurgence” and others called a “fundamentalist takeover.” At stake, some said, was the Bible itself, which led them to brand an otherwise ugly denominational disagreement as a “battle for the Bible.” But not everybody wanted a fight. Some were praying for peace. And in the middle of that controversy a so-called Peace Committee was formed with representation by some of the most prominent personalities on either side. Dr. Jim Flamming, Pastor of Richmond’s First Baptist Church, was appointed to the Peace Committee and he did his very best to be a peacemaker, but as Lynn Turner remembers he came home from one of those meetings and told the church that those people had no interest in peace. He said, “This is a fight going on among preachers and we don’t need to have any part of it. Instead of saying that we are a liberal church or a fundamentalist church or a moderate church or a conservative church, let’s just say that we are the church of Jesus Christ,” which may be another way of saying, “Ain’t nobody but Jesus gonna tell us what to do!” And when the Southern Baptist Convention literally split apart in 1991, with thousands of former members founding the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Dr. Flamming begged the church not to choose, not to split this church down the middle, but to remain the church of Jesus Christ and let those who wanted to support the SBC send their mission dollars there, and those who wanted to support the CBF send their mission dollars there, and for all those years since then—more than thirty years now—that’s the way we’ve done it.

So, are we a Southern Baptist church? When I came to First Baptist fifteen years ago I was told, “No. We do not formally affiliate with either the Southern Baptist Convention or the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Instead we support missionaries, and church members are free (there’s that word again) to support SBC missionaries, CBF missionaries, or both.” That may explain why our church didn’t show up on a blog post by Mike Law, an SBC pastor in Northern Virginia who started searching through the websites of every church affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, looking to see if they had any women on their staff, and checking to see if any of those women had the title “Pastor.” I looked through the entire post to see if our church was listed, and it wasn’t, but I saw the faces of women I admire and respect, pastors and associate pastors who have done great good in their churches, posted on this blog as if it were the 17^th century and this were a witch hunt. It made me mad. Mike Law believes these women are a threat to the Southern Baptist Convention. He believes they pollute the denomination’s doctrinal purity. He believes the role of pastor can only be filled by a man.

I disagree.

I disagree on biblical grounds. I remember back in 1984 the Southern Baptist Convention said that women could not be pastors because Eve was the first to sin. I had just started seminary, but I knew that Eve at least protested when the serpent invited her to eat the forbidden fruit. Adam didn’t. Eve handed it to him and he bit right in. The convention quoted the writings of Paul at some length, which is why many women still don’t get along with him, but remember that Paul was writing in the first century, when women were considered second-class citizens and the property of their husbands and fathers. When Paul (or someone writing in his name) said, “I forbid a woman to teach a man” (1 Tim. 2:12)[i] it was because women were not allowed to study in those days, and you wouldn’t want an uneducated woman trying to teach. That’s not true in the twenty-first century. Women can study right along with the men, in fact, many seminaries have more female than male students, and many professors will tell you that their female students are their best and brightest. And when Paul said, “Women should keep silence in church” (1 Cor. 14:34), I believe it’s because women had always been relegated to the balcony or the back of the room in the synagogue, where they may have whispered and swapped recipes and passed babies back and forth. “But keep silence in church,” Paul said, and he may have meant, “because this is for you, too.” Isn’t he the one who said, “For there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28)?

In Romans 16 Paul sends his regards to Phoebe, who was a female deacon. He had great respect for Priscilla, who was a powerful preacher. He mentions with gratitude those women who were his partners in the gospel. He advised women to keep their heads covered when they “prophesied” (a New Testament word for preaching). You may remember from the Book of Acts that Philip had four daughters who prophesied, or from the Day of Pentecost that God poured out his spirit on all flesh, both men and women, or from the Gospels that the women who followed Jesus were the last at the cross and the first at the tomb, or from the Easter story that if it hadn’t been for Mary Magdalene we might never have known that Christ had risen. You don’t need me to tell you these things. Take women out of the Bible and there’s not much left. Take women out of the church and the roof would collapse.

And that’s my other argument. I disagree with those who say the role of pastor can only be filled by a man on biblical grounds, but I also disagree on the grounds of experience. I posted Lynn Turner’s picture on Facebook on Friday and said something like, “Has this woman ever been a pastor to you?” The testimonies came flooding in, in fact they are still flooding in, from people who have known and loved Lynn for years and who have been blessed by her ministry. Yesterday I posted a picture of Allison Collier and said, “Allison will offer the pastoral prayer in worship on Sunday morning. Do you know why? Because she’s a pastor.” And once again the testimonies came flooding in. Meredith Stone, Executive Director of Baptist Women in Ministry, said that if the SBC constitution is amended some churches may decide to change the titles of their female pastors just so they can stay in the Convention. Well, here’s what I say: you can change Lynn Turner’s title. You can call her whatever you like (and some people have). But she is now, and will always be, a pastor. That goes for the other women on our staff and for all those women I have worked with through the years who were gifted and called by God.

Why is the Southern Baptist Convention doing this? Why do they feel the need to put women in their place, once again? I have my opinions, but at this point that’s all they are. What I really want you to hear is this: that because of the cherished Baptist principle of local church autonomy, even if we were a Southern Baptist church, the Convention could not tell us what to do. They could kick us out, but they could not shut us up, and they could not keep us from being who we are. As the Apostle Paul might say, “Since we are justified by grace through faith, we have peace with God.” And he said that as someone who had been kicked out of better places than the Southern Baptist Convention. Paul had peace. In an earlier draft of this sermon I pictured him standing waist-deep in the waters of baptism, like Jesus, looking up toward heaven as a dove fluttered down and a voice said, “This is my beloved child.” If you’ve had that experience, if you know you are God’s beloved, then there’s not much that can touch you. I pray that for all those Baptist women in ministry out there—and in here—that they would know they are God’s beloved, and that they would not let the actions of a group of mostly old, white men get them down.

Standing waist-deep in the grace of God Paul wrote: “We boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” “Hope does not disappoint us,” Paul said. We have the hope of sharing the glory of God. And even if we have to go through hell to get there,

We will.

—Jim Somerville © 2023

[i] The Letter of First Timothy is not considered one of the undisputed Pauline letters, meaning it may not have been Paul who said this at all.

For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham.

            You may not be aware of this this, but when I am planning my preaching for the year I try to think about how to provide you with a balanced biblical diet. I want to make sure that you get generous helpings from the Gospels, but also some tasty side dishes from the Old Testament, the Epistles, and the Psalms. We’ve just finished up a series from the Gospels; before that was a series from the Old Testament; every Sunday we hear from the Psalms; so maybe it’s time for the Epistles, and some of you might say it’s past time. You love Paul almost as much as you love Jesus. Well, get ready, because today we begin a summer sermon series called “When in Romans,” and we will be in Romans from now until September 17.

            But I don’t want to bore you with expository preaching: that is, I don’t want to simply go through the letter verse-by-verse. I want to see if we can get a glimpse of the big picture this summer, as if we were visiting first-century Rome and trying to understand its language, customs, and culture. And I want us to get to know Paul in ways we never have before. I want us to think about what could possibly persuade a Jewish rabbi to preach the Christian gospel in a pagan culture.

            Maybe that’s where we should begin.

            You know some of Paul’s story. In Philippians 3 he writes that he was, “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Phil. 3:5-6). That line about being a persecutor of the church takes us to the end of Acts, chapter 7, where we learn that while Stephen was being stoned “the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul” (Paul’s Hebrew name). Luke tells us that a severe persecution against the church broke out that same day, and in the next chapter he tells us that Saul was “ravaging the church by entering house after house; dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison” (Acts 8:1-3).

            But something happened, right? In Acts 9 we read about Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, where he intended to round up any followers of Jesus and bring them bound to Jerusalem, when suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him and he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” It was the voice of the risen Jesus, who told him to get up and go into the city where he would be told what to do. And then Jesus told a disciple named Ananias, who lived in Damascus, to go to Saul, to lay hands on him that he might regain his sight, to baptize him so that he might receive the Holy Spirit, and then to tell him that he had been chosen as an apostle to the Gentiles.

            Let’s pause there for a moment to appreciate what a life-altering experience this was. Paul, as he tells us in Philippians 3, was a Pharisee; he had voluntarily separated himself from anything that was not kosher; he was as Jewish as a Jew could be. He had trained to be a rabbi at the feet of the famous Gamaliel. As to “righteousness under the law” he considered himself blameless, meaning that to the best of his knowledge he had kept all the commandments. He was a Jew among Jews, and according to the Law he was to have nothing to do with Gentiles. They were the uncircumcised, sometimes called “dogs,” who were not counted among God’s chosen people. And yet here was Saul, blinded by his encounter with the risen Christ, sitting in the home of a man named Judas, eating and drinking nothing for three days, while waiting for someone to come to him with a message. And when Ananias came the message was this: “Yes, Jesus is Lord, and the Lord wants you to preach the gospel to the Gentiles.”

            There are two words for repentance in the Bible: one means to turn around and the other means to change your mind. Saul had to do both. First, he had to change his mind about Jesus. He had thought that he was just a troublemaker: a poor carpenter from Galilee claiming to be somebody, maybe even the Messiah. Saul thought he was doing God a favor by keeping people from following this pretender. But then he received a visit from Jesus himself and it changed his life. The scales fell from his eyes. He saw the risen Lord and began to proclaim him in the synagogues saying, “He is the Son of God!” Saul repented in that way: he changed his mind about Jesus. But he also repented in the other way: he turned himself around. I don’t know that there has ever been such a complete turnaround, from persecuting the church of Jesus Christ to proclaiming him as Lord and Savior, and not only to his fellow Jews, but also to the Gentiles.

            I want you to think about that for a minute. Suppose you were the rabbi of a local synagogue and you became convinced that God wanted you to let the Gentiles in. What would you do? What would you say? And not only what would you say to them—to the Gentiles—but what would you say to your fellow Jews, especially the members of your governing board? How would you answer their protests that the Gentiles were not among God’s chosen people? See, I believe there is a way to read the Bible that excludes, and if you are looking for a reason to exclude the Gentiles you can find it, but I also believe there is a way to read the Bible that includes, and if you are looking for a reason to include the Gentiles you can find it. I think that’s what Saul spent the next few years of his life doing: poring over the pages of Scripture to see if he could find any way that Jesus could be the Messiah, and then searching through the pages of Scripture to see if he could find any reason for including the Gentiles. He had to have some answers, not only for his opponents, but for himself.

            I believe he found them, and then I believe he spent some time thinking about how to make his arguments compelling and how to make his preaching persuasive. In the Book of Acts Luke suggests that whenever Paul came to a new town on his missionary journeys he would go first to the synagogue and try to convince the Jews that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah they had been waiting for. But after they kicked him out he would go to the Gentiles with a different message. Because the Gentiles weren’t waiting for the Messiah. They couldn’t care less about that. Paul had to come to them with something they would care about and so he came to them with a message of salvation. I can almost see him out there on the street in front of the synagogue, still brushing the dirt from his clothes, asking the Gentiles passing by, “Do you want to be saved?” “From what?” they might ask. “From this!” Paul would say, meaning the entire pagan world.

            Because I’ve been reading up on the Roman Empire in the first century, and although there is a lot to be said for it in terms of civilization, there is also a lot to be said for it in terms of moral depravity. The Emperor Caligula comes to mind. He took the throne when he was only 23 years old, and is said have considered himself a god, who sometimes reminded others that he had the right to do “anything to anybody.” And he did. He turned murder into a sport, attacking people at random.[i] He slept with other men’s wives, including the wife of a senator. He spent enormous amounts of the people’s money on his personal building projects. Beyond that he had an insatiable sexual appetite for both men and women and is said to have turned the palace into a “brothel” where drunken orgies went on night after night.

Caligula was no longer emperor when Paul wrote Romans, but his decadence had become the stuff of legend. I think it may have been Caligula and his court that Paul had in mind when he wrote, in Romans 1: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the desires of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves…. Their females exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural,and in the same way also the males, giving up natural intercourse with females, were consumed with their passionate desires for one another…and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.” Paul may have been thinking of Caligula himself, who was assassinated four short years after he began to reign.

I can almost picture Paul inside the synagogue, pointing out the depravity of the Gentile world just outside the doors, whipping those faithful Jews into a frenzy of self-righteousness before saying, “But you are without excuse, whoever you are, for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things” (Romans 2:1). A little further down in chapter 2 he writes: “If you call yourself a Jew and rely on the law and boast of your relation to God and know his will and determine what really matters because you are instructed in the law, and if you are sure that you are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of children, having in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth, you, then, who teach others, will you not teach yourself? You who preach against stealing, do you steal? You who forbid adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in the law, do you dishonor God by your transgression of the law? For, as it is written, ‘The name of God is blasphemed among the gentiles because of you’” (Rom. 2:17-24).

What Paul is doing here, rhetorically, is genius. He’s getting the righteous people all lathered up about the unrighteous before telling them that they are just as bad as they are. On the one hand here are the Gentiles, frolicking in an ocean of filth, but on the other hand here are the Jews, trying to swim across that same ocean by keeping the law. What Paul is saying is that neither group is going to make it. Some of the Jews might swim farther than others; Paul might have swum farther than any of them; but the ocean is big, and not even the most righteous Jew can make it across. Along with the Gentiles they are “sinking deep in sin, far from the peaceful shore, very deeply stained within, sinking to rise no more.” When along comes Jesus, in a boat, to pluck them out of the water—Jew and Gentile alike! That’s Paul’s message. It’s not complicated. But he has as much trouble getting the Jews to accept it as the Gentiles. So, in today’s passage he appeals to Abraham, the patriarch of the Jews, and if you thought his reasoning was genius before, just wait.

He begins: “For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith.” And that needs a little more explanation. For Paul the word righteousness was one of the most important words in the dictionary. It’s the Greek word dikaiosune, and for him it means something like “the right-making power of God.” When Paul talks about the “righteousness of faith,” he is talking about the righteousness that is ours not because we keep the law, but because we believe God has the power to make us right. And he uses Abraham as an example. Think about it: Abraham lived centuries before Moses, before the covenant at Mount Sinai, before the Law. He couldn’t have been justified by keeping the Law; it hadn’t been given yet. And get this: Abraham wasn’t even a Jew. He hadn’t been circumcised. That command hadn’t been given. So, here’s this person who isn’t a Jew, isn’t a Christian, hasn’t been circumcised, hasn’t been baptized. He has no claim on salvation, and yet God tells this wandering Aramean, who is nearly a hundred years old, that he’s going to be the father of a great nation, that his descendants are going to be like the stars in the sky, like the sands of the sea, and Abraham believes him. When he does God says, “That’s the kind of faith I’m looking for! That’s the kind of faith I can build my Kingdom on!” And in that moment God reckoned him righteous: a word from the marketplace that meant something like “paid in full.”

“So,” Paul concludes, “our righteousness doesn’t depend on keeping the Law, as much as we Jews like to think it does. But that’s probably a good thing. If it did, none of us could be saved. No, our righteousness depends on faith, the kind of faith that Abraham had. If God could save him, then God can save us, God can save anyone. Unlike Caligula, God really can do “anything he wants to anybody he wants,” and what he wants to do, apparently, is save us from a corrupt world, bring us into his household, make us members of his family, call us his beloved children. What is our role in all this? Simply to believe, as Abraham did, that God can do it.

—Jim Somerville © 2023

[i] https://www.thecollector.com/caligula/