A sermon on Romans 10:8b-13 & Luke 4:1-13 by Nathan Nettleton

In the home group that meets at my place on alternate Wednesday nights, we have been doing a series of studies on the wonderful book The Jesus Driven Life using the accompanying DVDs, and there is a funny thing that keeps happening. We often get caught up in a conversation about how much some of the teachings of Jesus contradict things we were taught to believe as essential in the conservative evangelical churches we were brought up in as youngsters, and then at some point, we realise that Rita and, when she’s there, Acacia are sitting there with no idea what we are talking about because they weren’t brought up in those kind of churches. Pretty much all their education and formation in Christian discipleship has happened here in this church, and so they have little or no reference point for thinking of it in comparison to other versions or approaches. So it is with apologies to them and to any others whose experience is similar that I need to frame some of tonight’s sermon around a contrast with what many of us have been taught to think and believe in the past. And my only excuse is that in a way, the Apostle Paul is doing the same thing in the passage we heard read before.

One of the great temptations for the Christian Church has always been to try to turn the gospel into a neat and simple system so that everything is clear and everyone knows what’s required and who’s in and who’s out. And for those of us who were raised in churches where everything was very neat and certain and the boundary lines were very clear, the passage we heard tonight from Paul’s letter to the Romans was often a favourite. “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.” Quite simple and clear-cut, we were told. One compulsory belief to assent to, and one compulsory allegiance to verbally declare, and there you go, you are saved. And usually the opposite was proclaimed with equal fervour. Those who don’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and who don’t declare that Jesus is Lord are unsaved. In fact they are damned and headed straight to hell. Or so we were often told.

And often we were taught that this was an expression of the great protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone, and this was in contrast to the Roman Catholics who, so we were often told, believed that you were saved by doing certain works such as attendance at mass and confession and rosaries and charitable works. Faith alone, we asserted. Believe and declare, and that’s it. But there was some problems with that approach. Firstly, it often didn’t end up feeling nearly as liberating as “faith alone” was supposed to be. It often ended up sounding as though “believe this one thing” and “declare this one thing” were just as much “works” as attendance at mass or praying a rosary. In fact, sometimes they were worse because they seemed so much less certain. If you had to pray the rosary, at least you knew whether or not you had done it successfully. You’ve either done it or you haven’t. But “believe in your heart”? It’s easy enough to know whether I’ve said with my mouth, “Jesus is Lord”, but how do I judge whether I really believe something in my heart? How firmly do I have to believe it? How do I know whether I have believed it firmly enough? And actually, even if I can know that I’ve said “Jesus is Lord” with my mouth, didn’t Jesus himself say that some of those who come to him saying “Lord Lord” are people of whom he will say, “I never knew you.” So maybe that’s not so comforting either.

Another major problem with this approach is that it actually seems to contradict the whole thrust of what the Apostle is trying to say in this part of his letter to the Romans. In fact, to put it in terms that come from our gospel reading, it seems to fall into a major temptation that often faces the church: the temptation to take a gracious relationship with the risen Christ, and turn it into a system of exclusion and control. Let me show you what I mean about the alternative that Paul is offering here.

The passage we heard began with Paul quoting from the book of Deuteronomy: “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart”, and it is on the basis of that quotation that he then says “because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” So Paul is clear that what he is saying about confessing with your lips and believing in your heart is to be understood in relation to the quote from Deuteronomy and particularly in relation to the ways that it was commonly being interpreted in his day. You see, this part of Deuteronomy was very important to the the Jewish people of Paul’s day. The quote comes from chapter 30 (verse 14) and it comes after a section that has been talking about how if the people follow God’s law they will gain many blessings, and if they don’t they will fall victim to all manner of curses. But then in chapter 30, something different happens. God speaks about a day when something new will occur, and instead of having to strive to know the word of God and obey it by strenuous and conscientious effort, we will instead find that God has graciously put the word in our hearts and in our mouths and it will simply flow naturally from who we are. Now in Paul’s day, there was great interest in how and when this would come about, and various different groups within Israel were pushing different interpretations of it, and pointing to different ideas of how you could recognise those into whose hearts and mouths God had put the word of life. And many of those interpretations amounted to systems of obedience and belief, and so conformity to those things would be the sign of God’s chosen saved ones. So it is agains the backdrop of this speculation about how the promise from Deuteronomy would be fulfilled that Paul comes out and says that the promise is fulfilled in Jesus the Messiah, and that God’s salvation is now graciously offered to everyone, not just the Jews, and that the sign of salvation is what overflows from our hearts and our mouths.

So this is quite different from how it has often been preached. Rather than being a formula or prescription — if you say this and believe this then God will save you — it is a description of those who are already being saved. God is already saving all these people and you can tell that by the faith in their hearts and the gracious words of their mouths. The faith and the words are the evidence of what is already happening, not the prerequisite which they must achieve before God will act.

And where this becomes so important is in what Paul says next, which is again in contrast to what was being assumed by many good Jews of his day. “‘No one who believes in him will be put to shame.’ For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. For, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’” He’s got two more biblical quotes in there, from Isaiah 28:16 and Joel 2:32, and the thrust of it is “everyone”, “no distinction”. Now Paul specifically says “no distinction between Jew and Greek”, but not because that was the only distinction eliminated, but because that was the distinction being argued over at the time. It was widely assumed by religious Jews that God was saving the Jews, and the gentiles could go to hell, and even in the New Testament church, this was still be wrestled with. If a gentile put their faith in Jesus, did that mean they had to convert to Judaism in order to be among those who God was saving? For us now, it is almost impossible to imagine that anyone could believe that God’s salvation might be ethnically limited, although there are still sects like the Ku Klux Klan who articulate exactly that. But Paul’s “no distinction” argument goes a lot further. Elsewhere he points to there being “no distinction” between male and female, slave and free. Again categories that had particular relevance to his day, although it took the church many centuries more to come to terms with them, and some parts of the church are still trying to sort out what “no distinction” between male and female might be supposed to look like.

But however enlightened we might like to think we are, the big temptation, and certainly a temptation that the satan loves to get us sucked into, is to keep trying to turn the gospel back into a system that allows us to reimpose distinctions and define who is in and who is out and draw nice neat clear lines between us, the saved, and them, the damned. Just like in our gospel story, the satan is always saying “if, if, if” and trying to get us to think we have to try harder or do more or be something else. “If you are really the church that God wants you to be, banish those people who don’t measure up to this standard or that standard.” And so it is all too common still to find churches which, instead of looking for signs of faith in people’s hearts and words, look for conformity to various norms of orthodox belief or lifestyle. And usually those churches are most readily recognisable by the clarity and passion with which they oppose and condemn those who fall outside their nice clear boundaries. Rather than look for and celebrate any reason to welcome and include, they look for and jump on any reason to exclude. They could not imagine for a moment that the Apostle might say there is no distinction between Christian and Muslim, no distinction between liberal and fundamentalist, no distinction between homosexual and heterosexual. But Paul doesn’t say “there are fewer distinctions.” He says “there is no distinction; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him.”

So I reckon that if God could ask the entire Church to come up with just one thing to give up for Lent, and then forever after, it would be to give up trying to turn the gospel back into a system of categorising insiders and outsiders, and to instead just welcome and celebrate every sign of faith and hope as evidence of God’s gracious welcome of more and more people into the community that is marked out and known by just one thing, the generous, welcoming, transformative and recklessly inclusive love of Jesus. And any Lenten discipline that doesn’t lead us towards that would be a good thing to give up!