The Rev. Neale L. Miller

Sermon for June 21, 2009

Texts: Psalm/Romans 12:12

Title: “Rejoice”

          The Gospel of John closes with the following words, “But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” John, the Apostle Paul, and the many others who lent their hand to communicating through the written word what Jesus had done by word and act, faced an enormous challenge.  Even their best and most comprehensive efforts fell short when mining the great deposit that Jesus left behind when he ascended to be with the Father. Though humbled by the subject matter about whom they preached, taught, and wrote, the composers of the gospels, the Apostle Paul and the other Christians of the early centuries were compulsion driven to tell what they knew.

              What we have in the gospels of John, Mark, Mathew, and Luke, the various letters or epistles, of Paul and others, are an accumulation of documents recording sayings and events that the reporters personally knew about first hand, or were introduced to by persons who could share that first hand perspective. While those authors have passed on to us an historical record, it is an historical record of a particular sort; it is history as seen through the eyes of faith, written for the purpose of eliciting faith in others.

               The authors of the gospel, and Paul, made no pretense of neutrality, Paul introducing himself to the church at Rome as follows, “Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God…”

            Paul, but also the gospel writers, and the first and second generation Christians whose writings appear in our New Testament, believed themselves to be “set apart for the gospel of God.” I would add that they believed themselves to be set apart not simply to preserve the gospel, as important as that ambition might be, no Paul and John, Luke, and the others were not merely historians, they were evangelists. They wrote as ambassadors, “servants of Jesus Christ…set apart for the gospel of God.”

              Now when these ambassadors were writing they wrote, as any writer today might write, with a specific audience in mind. Matthew, for instance, wrote with a largely Jewish Christian audience in mind, while Luke wrote for a largely gentile population whose faith was stirred by Jesus. Paul, likewise, addresses specific audiences in the churches to whom he wrote, targeting his message to Jews in one instance, to gentiles in another.

              Furthermore Paul, the gospel writers, and the other Christian scribes of the first generations of the church, were always mindful of the context in which the early believers lived.  They understood the particular issues a community to whom they were writing might be dealing with, yet even so, Paul and the others had a more ambitious aim then imparting a word of counsel, admonition, or hope to a specific targeted group, they were very conscious of the fact that the Gospel of Jesus transcended the times. No, they may not have imagined that an audience like us in 2009 would be pouring over their writings, but as to the timelessness of what they were writing to any group or circumstance, no doubts would have troubled them.

              Paul opens his letter to the Romans declaring he “was called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God.” As a servant of Jesus Christ and the gospel Paul was writing to a community he knew less well than the other communities, Corinth and Philippi, for instance, Christian communities he had either personally founded or visited. Paul, as I mentioned last week, had never been to Rome. Yet he knew from the Christians living there, or from the reports of others that had reached him, that they were engaged by particular challenges.

              His letter to the Romans in its entirety cuts a wide swath, but as I noted when I opened this sermons series two weeks ago, we are covering a very specific section of the letter, a section the editors of the Bible entitle, “Marks of the True Christian.” In this section, Chapter 12, verses 9-21, Paul lays out his convictions concerning what a life modeled after Christ might look like.

            In the first installment of the series I concentrated on Paul’s admonition to the Romans, “let love be genuine.” I suggested that Paul lays out his definition of genuine love in chapter 13 of I Corinthians, if you have attended a wedding or two, you have a good idea of the content of the particular chapter I am talking about; “love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful.”  There is more, but the essence of what Paul wants to communicate is that genuine love is the love that Christ modeled, the love upon which the church is founded.

            In the second installment of the sermon series I focused on verse 11 of chapter 12, “Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord.” Paul believed that a Christian vocation required a priority commitment of zeal and ardor, a commitment no other aspect of life could justly demand.

             As we look at verse 12 of chapter I want to begin by observing that Paul’s admonition to “let love be genuine,” is, of course, foundational to any community that seeks to live out gospel values. Genuine love is the connective tissue in the body of Christ.  If it does not exist anything the particular Christian community does amounts to no more than pose and pretense. Likewise if zeal and ardor for the Lord and his work cannot be generated, there will be very little the body can do to command a hearing from those with whom it interacts.

             Genuine love, and zeal and ardor to express that love, are indispensable features of any community aspiring to serve neighbor and world after the example of Jesus Christ. In verse 12 of this 12th chapter of Romans, Paul issues a call to the Romans to do three things.  They are called to “rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, and persevere in prayer.”

             I want to suggest that unlike the two verses we have treated the past two weeks, the exhortation to love genuinely, and to love and live the Christian life with zeal and ardor, the verse we are looking at this morning is more specifically to addresses particular challenges being faced by the Roman Christians.

           “Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.” Paul’s words are certainly applicable to the broad audience who have read them over the centuries; however, I would like us to consider that the circumstances in which the Romans lived and practiced their faith was quite different to the circumstances in which we live today.

               There is a German expression that generations of seminary students and other students of the Bible have learned that applies here.  Sitz im laben. Translated the expression essentially means setting in life, the environment in which life is lived. 

                Though Romans is timeless in its treatment of some of the essential doctrines of the church, doctrines such as grace, justification, and election, Paul was writing to a church that inhabited a specific Sitz im laben, or setting in life.

               The Roman Christians were very much a marginalized community in a culture featuring an eclectic mix of cults whose worship centered on a long list of major and minor gods. Quite obviously claiming affiliation with Jesus, whom the man’s disciples claimed had come back from the dead, would not have won those disciples favor with the people who had executed him for crimes against the state.

                “Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, and persevere in prayer.” Paul’s counsel to the Roman Christian had been battle tested; Paul had been through the wars. It was time to share his strategy for survival with other Christians caught in the crosshairs of a community’s suspicion and outright hatred.

               There is nothing quite like adversity to clarify values and beliefs. The Roman Christian lived under the specter of death for claiming allegiance to Jesus. “Rejoice in hope,” Paul declared.  You best believe that the Christian in Rome who heard or read those words invested a lot of time and energy in identifying precisely where his or her hope was rooted. Again, their very lives were at stake.

               The Jews of Europe, facing extermination by the Nazis in the late thirties and forties, lived in circumstances with which Paul and the first Christians would have been familiar.  While the half dozen years in which the Nazis carried out their genocide produced unimaginable pain and suffering, it also produced some of the most amazing and compelling testimonies to hope. Think of the Diary of Ann Frank, for instance.

                One week ago our choir sang a piece entitled “Inscription of Hope.”  The composer of the piece used as his text some words “inscribed on the walls of a cellar in Cologne, Germany, where Jews were hiding from the Nazis during World War II.” Resilient hope, hope to rejoice in, was discovered, as it so often has been over the course of history, in an experience where the human soul is left with no defender except a core conviction about life and its meaning.

                The words discovered on the cellar wall were as follows, “I believe in the sun even when it is not shining, and I believe in love even where there’s no one there.  And I believe in God even when he is silent, I believe through any trial there is always a way.  But sometime in this suffering and hopeless despair, my heart cries for shelter to know someone’s there. But a voice rises within me saying hold on my child, I’ll give you hope, just stay a little while.” Words written by people who in any moment could be arrested, and most certainly would die, at the hands of their pursuers.   

                 The Sitz im leben, the setting in life, we occupy is not the one from which Paul’s letter to the Romans emerged, or the setting from which the words I just quoted emerged. No, in this first decade of the twenty-first century we are Christians whose faith, by and large, has only really been tested intermittently when personal tragedy or loss has descended upon us. 

                A hope big enough to rejoice in is what Paul hoped to carry to the Christians in Rome.  A hope big enough to rejoice in is the very thing that motivated the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke and John to record the life and teachings of Jesus.  A hope big enough to rejoice in helped the Christians of the early centuries hold out against persecution, torture, and death. A hope big enough to rejoice in motivated missionaries to carry the gospel to the four corners of the earth.  A hope big enough to rejoice in helped the Jews who gathered in that Cologne cellar to stave off despair.

                 Where you find a hope big enough to rejoice is where you will find a vital community of faith.  Unfortunately such communities are more the exception than the rule today. To be sure, faith communities are populated by hopeful people, but hope tends to be modest, hope, for instance, that the stock market turns around, or that the weather will be pleasant for the anticipated vacation, or that their child will be admitted to a good school. 

              Hope of any sort is good, particularly when the alternative is considered, yet the hope that Paul and the church talks about, is a hope to rejoice in, a hope that the life we are currently living is too big to hold. The hope to rejoice in carries beyond the grave to a life where sin and death are no longer factors. The hope to rejoice is the kind that inspired Paul and the martyrs of the church to sacrifice their lives in the name of Jesus. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.

               The world, for all its opportunities, delights and wonders, can offer us nothing of permanence to rejoice in.  In fact, the irony is that the people who have been most deprived of opportunity, whose access to the delights and wonders of the world have been most restricted, have taught us the most about rejoicing in hope. But perhaps there is no irony there at all, perhaps the very fact that world gives them so little reason to hope, is the very reason God has chosen to fill them with a hope worthy of full, all out rejoicing. 

               There is, friends, but one source of hope that will never disappoint us, it is the source of hope that animated Paul and the evangelists to record his teaching and mighty deeds. Yes, hope bears a name, and that name is Jesus Christ. Draw closer to Jesus, and draw closer to a hope to rejoice in. Don’t wait. Make time for prayer and Bible study. Let us pray.  Lord, open our lives to a fuller encounter with you, and transform our lives through that encounter.  In your name we pray. 

PRAYER

              O God, the evangelist John once wrote, “But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if everyone of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” O God, you have filled this world with great wonders, but none so profound as the wonder of Jesus, our Savior, flesh of your flesh, who came to us, and keeps coming to us, that we might have life in abundance. May we, through the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, O God, learn to live as Christ lived, the quality of life we live commending you to our neighbor and the world. May zeal and ardor to serve grow across the church, a rebirth of the Spirit that will offer hope and change to our needy world.

            “Rejoice in hope,” the Apostle Paul declared. May your Church, O Christ, continually strive to find new ways to bring hope before the world, in big, bold, extravagant, rejoicing ways. “Rejoice in hope,” so you declared to the beggar, O Lord.  “Rejoice in hope,” you declared to the man born blind. “Rejoice in hope,” you declared as you broke the loaves and distributed them to the five thousands.  “Rejoice in hope,” you declared to Mary when she met you at the tomb on the morning of your resurrection. “Rejoice in hope,” you declare to us as you beckon us to embrace new opportunities.

               “Rejoice in hope.” Established on the rock of steadfast faith, O God, women and men have maintained hope in all circumstances of adversity.  In your mercy, O God, strengthen us in faith that we may also rejoice in hope. Through the inspiration of your Spirit you continue to work in our lives, grant us wisdom that we may more fully open ourselves to your Spirit by establishing disciplines of prayer and Bible study. Teach us perseverance to move through those dry periods of life when enthusiasm for living cannot be aroused, and boredom makes us impatient and cynical.

Lord, abide with those who live in danger in this hour, we lift up the protesters in Iran who face the recriminations of their government as they wage their campaign for justice. We pray for the sons and daughters of this nation who are posted in Iraq and Afghanistan who live in constant peril.  Even as we lift up the defenders of freedom, we celebrate the work of those whose hearts are set on reconciling adversaries.  Bless the peacemakers of the world, O God, that their work may bear fruit in abundance.

As we anticipate the beginning of vacation Bible school, we give thanks for
              Alicia, and all those whose many efforts have been committed to making the Bible school experience a resounding success. We pray for the children who will participate, that the lessons taught and other experiences planned may enrich their lives and encourage their continuing participation in the life of the church. We give thanks for those who have volunteered to help with vacation Bible school, praying that they may derive special blessings from their involvement.

             We pause, O God, to give thanks for our fathers, celebrating the impact they have had, or are having, on our lives. Mentors, counselors, friends, and also disciplinarians, we give thanks for all we have learned, or are learning, through our fathers.  Challenged by an unfamiliar role and responsibilities, abide most especially with young fathers for whom the challenges of parenting are new. 

             We continue to ask your blessing on this faith community, O God, that you will continue to shine light on our path and challenge us to rise to our fullest potential. Abide, O God, with our elders and this pastor that the lives we live may bear the mark of Christ.

             As the body of Christ we recognize friends within this congregation or friends of members of our congregation who have special needs.