Romans 1:1-17
“Faith to Faith”
March 13, 2011 - First Sunday in Lent

         It’s about 140 miles from Chicago O’Hare airport to Madison, Wisconsin. I looked it up on Google maps because I may make that drive in two weeks. For a couple years I’ve been exchanging e-mail with a fellow who teaches at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He helped edit a book in which a paper of mine was published.

         The thing is that Dave is a philosopher, a fly-fisherman, and a fan of Johnny Cash—just the sort of person I’d like to meet face to face and not just via e-mail. It would be good sit down together, share some barbecue, and talk about the Forms and fish and “Folsom Prison Blues.” So I’m going to be writing Dave an e-mail letter soon proposing that we meet on a free evening I’ll have when I fly to Chicago overnight at the end of the month.

         Paul the apostle wrote the letter we are beginning this morning in something like that spirit of wanting to visit people he already knew a lot about, people he seems to think he would like if he could only meet them. As Paul writes, he addresses a church established for some time. But even after preaching the Gospel around the Mediterranean world for over twenty years, he’s never been able to go to Rome.

         In Romans Paul clearly states what his own life and faith is about. Unlike several other Pauline epistles, we see in verse 1 that Paul is the only sender of this letter. He identifies himself as a servant of Jesus Christ “set apart for the gospel.”

         Then in the next three verses he summarizes that Gospel in a beautiful little nutshell: What was promised in the prophets has come to pass. God sent his Son into the world as a human being, born as a descendant of the Jewish king David. Then Jesus was proven to be God’s Son by His death and resuurection. That’s the Gospel. That’s what Paul is all about.

         Verse 5 Paul directly connects Paul’s mission and life with Christ, saying that it is through Jesus that he received “grace and apostleship.” He was sent through Jesus and for the Gospel of Jesus. And the purpose is “to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name.”

         As we will see in a bit, verse 17 is sometimes said to be the theme verse for the whole letter, but that phrase from verse 5, “the obedience of faith,” is a close runner-up. It shows up here and it shows up again at the very end of the letter in the next to the last verse as Paul says again that what was prophesied before is now completely revealed in order “to bring about the obedience of faith.” The “obedience of faith” bookends Romans. It’s what Paul wants in the lives of people to whom he preaches and writes. It’s what God wants in us.

         Faith is not just about believing certain facts, even the crucial facts Paul recited about Jesus being both human and God’s Son and about His dying and rising from the dead. Those beliefs are key ingredients to Christian faith, but there is more. We often say that additional ingredient to faith is trust. We don’t just believe things about Jesus, we believe in Jesus. We trust Him. We put our hope in Him. We stake our lives on Him. But real faith in Jesus Christ goes beyond even belief and trust. It includes obedience. That phrase “the obedience of faith” means that when we believe in Jesus Christ, it will affect what we do. We will live differently, in obedience to Him and to the faith we have in Him.

         That’s why Paul says in verse 6 that those he is writing to are “called to belong to Jesus Christ” and then in verse 7 that they are “called to be saints.” To have faith in Jesus is to be something different than what we would be without that faith. It’s to have an obedience. As he’ll say further on, it’s to have a righteousness. That obedience and righteousness is part and parcel of faith and can’t be separated from it.

         Christian faith is about believing certain truths about Jesus, but it’s also about becoming new people because we believe those truths. To be new persons means living in a new and different way, the obedience of faith.

         At a Thursday luncheon, the Red Cross honored Paul Yost as one of its “Everyday Heroes.” Yost and his wife were driving behind a car on Beltline Drive last November when the other car suddenly went off the road and submerged completely underwater in a pond. Yost stopped and ran to help, wading into the water and pulling the driver out through a window.

         Yost accounted for his actions by saying, “Who would I be if I didn’t stop? …I was just glad that in the heat of the moment, I followed who I would like to be instead of just not doing anything.” Righteousness is not just making choices to do the right thing. It’s wanting to be a certain kind of person, to be righteous.

         The obedience of faith is following not just who we would like to be, but who we are called to be in Jesus Christ. It’s letting our actions flow out of who we are becoming through faith in Jesus. And Paul is pleased and thankful that he sees it happening among the Roman Christians.

         In verse 8 he tells them that their “faith is proclaimed throughout the world.” Here’s a church, a community of believers, where possibly no apostle has ever visited. Yet they are displaying a lively and active faith that is being talked about all around the world.

         Paul calls God as his witness in verse 9 to attest that he is constantly, without ceasing, praying for the Romans and praying, says verse 10, that he might come to them. This is where we began. He wants face-time with the Christians who live in the empire’s capital.

         There are a couple aims in Paul’s mind for his visit to Rome. First, as he says here in verse 11, he wants to be a blessing to this fledgling church. He would like to offer them spiritual gifts perhaps in the form of teaching or encouragement. But Paul also believes that the Romans will be a blessing to him. Verse 12 pictures both he and the church at Rome being “mutually encouraged by each other’s faith.”

         Part of that mutual encouragement is the fact that, for Paul, Rome is a stop on the way to Spain. As we learn over in chapter 15 of Romans, Paul’s vision was to take the Gospel all the way to the western edge of the Mediterranean world by a missionary journey to Spain. The church in Rome would be his base for that journey like the church in Antioch had been the base for his other travels.

         So the mutual encouragement by faith which Paul describes in verse 12 is the encouragement of an active, obedient faith, a faith placed into each other’s service—Paul preaches among and encourages the Romans and they encourage him by supporting his mission to Spain.

         Verse 13 voices Paul’s disappointment that his trip to Rome has not come sooner. He was hoping to “reap some harvest among you.” In other words, Paul believed he could help the Roman church grow by preaching in that city. He could use his particular gift of sharing the Gospel with non-Jewish people and build up the Christian community in Rome.

         That’s why in verse 14 Paul describes his own sense of necessity and obligation, his “debt” to all the different Gentile peoples. There are the cultured Greek-speaking peoples of the Roman world and there are “barbarians,” people like those in Spain and to the north who are not part of Graeco-Roman culture. Paul feels obligated to bring the Gospel to them all, to travel wherever people haven’t yet heard of Jesus. He also believes his mission is “both to the wise and to the foolish,” to the educated members of society and to the simple working and slave classes.

         Paul has a universal Gospel, a message of faith and hope for everyone. That’s why Rome is the perfect place to go. It’s the crossroads of the world. It’s a huge cosmopolitan city filled with both “Greeks” and “barbarians,” with the “wise” and the “foolish.” He wants to go and spread the good news about Jesus the Son of God who died and rose again to every sort of person, whether high or low in life’s ranking.

         That’s why the faith that grew up after Paul finally got to Rome came to be called the “Catholic” faith. “Catholic” just means “universal,” “for everyone.” Paul taught the church there that what they believed was a message that belonged to every sort of person in the world. Verse 16 goes on, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”

         This letter to Rome was written to prepare the ground and sow the seeds for a deep and lasting understanding that faith in Jesus Christ was not a little, local phenomenon. Believers in Jesus were meant to know that their faith was not just for them, but for the whole world. It started in the small peculiar ethnic circle of the people known as Jews, but it was to branch out in every direction to all kinds of people.

         With verse 17 we get a phrase that is very difficult to translate and understand, “For in it,” in the Gospel, “the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith.” Literally that last bit is “from faith to faith.” I believe that Paul is talking about this handing on, this transmitting of belief in Jesus from one person to the next, from one group of people to another. He’s already said it came first from the Jews, then to the Greeks. Jesus first fulfills the faith of the Old Covenant for God’s chosen people, then He is shared by faith with all the people of the New Covenant including Greeks, Gentiles, barbarians, wise and foolish.

         That’s been the great movement of the Gospel of Jesus Christ down through history, “from faith to faith.” From one base of believing people to new places and populations where faith in Jesus takes hold and grows.

         Today we’ve chosen to remember a story that happened about 300 years after Paul and his letter to Rome. By then Rome was thoroughly Christian and the Gospel had moved west as Paul had dreamed. Roman Christians lived in that big island we know as England. There a bunch of barbarian raiders came and took captive a sixteen year-old Roman boy named Patricius. They hauled him off as a slave to work in a smaller island we call Ireland. He was put to work tending sheep. He never before paid much attention to his faith, but as a slave he began to pray. After six years he heard God speaking, tell­ing him to run. He escaped and boarded a ship which took him back to Ro­man territory.

         At home Patricius began to study. He learned all he could about what it meant to be a Christian and follow Jesus Christ. He became a priest, then a bishop. Then he heard God speaking to him again, telling him to go back to Ireland. So the man we know as St. Patrick, sailed back again to preach the Gospel to the barbarians who enslaved him.

         From faith to faith. God blessed Patrick’s preaching and his simple illustrations like a three-leaf clover to teach that God is a Trinity. Patrick not only taught the Irish to love God, he taught them to love God’s Word and love learning. They formed monasteries, built libraries and began to study Scripture.

         Meanwhile Roman civilization was crumbling. Barbarians from other places invaded and Rome pulled its troops back to defend itself. Roman garri­sons in Europe and England were deserted. England lost its Christian faith and fell back into pagan religion.

         Then when the time was ripe faith went to faith again. God had sent Patrick to Ireland with the faith. Now Irish monks became missionaries. Two hundred years after the faith was brought to them, they brought it back to England and to other parts of Europe. Rome itself was blessed and encouraged in its faith by the work of Irish Christian preachers and scholars. From faith to faith.

         From faith to faith is still how the Gospel of Jesus Christ is passed along. From each little base of faith like the church in Rome or the church in Ireland or Valley Covenant Church in Eugene, the faith is lived and shared and passed on into the faith of those who haven’t yet heard. And they will become the ones to pass it along in faith still to come.

         Much more than Madison, Wisconsin, I would love to go to Rome, to stand in those places where Paul and perhaps Peter stood and where hundreds of martyrs died in faith in order to pass on their faith. I don’t know if I’ll ever go. But a few years ago we sat and watched as our daughter Susan show us pictures she took during her visit to Rome.

         Susan’s pictures were almost as good as going there ourselves. Part of the pleasure was the clear and very real knowledge that God had blessed us to pass our faith on to our daughter. She saw those sights with Christian eyes, with a sense of the history of her faith that lay in and around those monuments and stonework and inscriptions in her photos. Faith to faith in our own family.

         That’s what we want to be about in this church, especially this Lent as we move toward Easter. We want to be people whose faith passes on into the faith of others, as Paul passed his faith to the Greeks and with the Romans passed it on to Europe; as Patrick brought it to Ireland and Ireland brought it back to England. Faith to faith. That’s what we’re about.

         This part of the letter ends in verse 17 with the phrase I alluded to earlier which many believe is the theme of the epistle to the Romans. It’s a loose quote from Habakkuk 2:4 that Paul repeats from his earlier letter to the Galatians chapter 3 verse 11, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.”

         There’s lot’s more to say about what it means that the “righteous will live by faith.” In months to come we’ll talk about becoming righteous by faith rather than by our own efforts. We’ll talk about being included in the community of righteousness through Jesus Christ rather than by our own self-identification as good people. We’ll try to figure out how a righteousness that’s given through faith goes together with our own attempts to behave like God’s people. But here at the outset you get the picture: “the obedience of faith,” “mutually encouraged by each other’s faith,” “from faith to faith,” “live by faith.” Faith is at the center of Romans. It’s at the center of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s at the center of every righteous life.

         For right now, we will say this: those who have faith in Jesus Christ will live, will truly live, will live good, significant and blessed lives in this world and will go on living in Jesus when life in this world ends. That’s the faith that moved Paul. That’s the faith that kept and encouraged St. Patrick. And it’s the faith that keeps and encourages us.

         So we’re going to end today by reciting words attributed to Patrick expressing his reliance on his faith, the Christian faith by which he was saved and by which he lived. As we say them, may you grow deeper in that same faith and be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith. And from our faith may the righteousness of God go out to bring new faith into the lives of those we love and serve for Jesus Christ our Lord.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2011 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj