Romans 16:17-23
“Gracious King”
November 20, 2011 - Christ the King

         You’re at your high school reunion. It’s been twenty years since you went to one of these. Moving around the old gymnasium with a glass of sweet red punch in your hand, you greet one person after another. You recognize some of them right away and exchange smiles and warm hugs. Other faces are a puzzle until one of you volunteers a name. Then that mental click of memory takes place. It’s mostly fun, comparing how you’ve all aged, whose hair is gray, whose figure hasn’t changed, whose clothing and jewelry indicates prosperity or something less.

         Then across the room you spy one more face you had forgotten until this moment. The memory is not at all fun. It might be the girl who humiliated you in front of your tenth grade friends by scornfully and publicly turning down a date. It might be the sarcastic bully who made fun of your weight or your athletic performance in your freshman year. Or it might be that person who you thought was a friend, until she made your deepest secrets the subject of gossip around the junior class.

         That switch in gears, from people remembered fondly to people remembered with pain, is what happened for Paul in the transition from where we ended last week in verse 16 to where he takes up now in verse 17. Paul has just finished greeting all the little church assemblies he knew in Rome, naming their leaders, many of whom were personal friends or relatives. He sends them his blessing. But in the process of naming those names, Paul remembered other people there in Rome, people who did not cause him joy, but sorrow, people who were working against everything he hoped for that church.

         So verse 17 is a jarring break from the greetings we heard last week, not at all the final warm words we would expect after that personal touch. Instead we hear Paul warning his readers about the spirit and activity of certain divisive and dangerous elements in the Roman church.

         All through his letter, Paul had been aiming at the vision symbolized by all those names we heard in the first part of this chapter. Jewish and Greek names. Names of the well-to-do and names that belonged to the poor and to slaves. Names of people well-known either in the Church or in Roman society and names of people lost now in total obscurity. Those names were the church in Rome, an assembly of diverse people brought together in peaceful unity through only one thing, their common faith in Jesus the Messiah, who died and rose again to bring them together in Himself, in His Father’s kingdom.

         Now Paul is warning against others that he chooses not to name here, others who by what they teach and how they live are working against his vision of a unified and faithful church. The NRSV translation, “keep an eye on,” is not quite right. It’s more like, “look out for,” these people. It’s more like the warning I gave my friends this spring as we hiked along rocky trails together in Arizona, “Keep an eye out for rattlesnakes.” The idea is to see them and avoid them, as Paul says at the end of the verse.

         These dangerous people were those who “cause divisions and offenses.” There are various ways to identify these people. In light of the conflict between the “weak” and the “strong” in chapters 14 and 15, these may have been people unwilling to heed Paul’s admonition to accept one another and live together in peace. Yet they had another mark: their divisions and offenses were “in opposition to the teaching that you have learned.”

         Paul isn’t worried here about folks who don’t agree with him. It’s not his teaching he wants to protect. He hasn’t taught the Romans. They heard the Gospel from someone else, whether it was the apostle Peter or some other Christian missionary. That’s the teaching Paul doesn’t want to be subverted. He wants to guard against divisions caused by false doctrine, by teaching which is something different from the truth about Jesus Christ.

         There are other things which divide our Lord’s Church. Despite all we read here in Romans and the other epistles, we often let race and social class and education and politics come between us and split us up. But the worst divisions, the truly offensive splits are those where a teacher begins to get it wrong about Jesus and what He did for us.

         I’m going to brag on the Covenant Church again. The key thing which has kept us together for 135 years is our commitment to the truth of the Gospel as found in the Scriptures. All kinds of things could have split us. We had infant baptists and believer baptists. We had folks fully expecting Jesus to come back in their lifetimes and folks who thought there was no way to know such things. At one point we had people who spoke Swedish as the language of God and younger people who desperately wanted to worship in English. All through it, we kept going back to the truth of the Gospel. When we got into arguments we asked each other “Where is it written?” And when we were worried about someone falling away from God, we asked, “How is it with you and Jesus?”

         The way to unity is to keep going back to the center, to “the teaching you have learned,” as Paul puts it. That’s how Christianity itself survived over two thousand years. Early on, the Church understood that its heart and soul was the person and truth of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who died and rose again. We are not just in fellowship and unity with other Covenant people. We are together with all true Christians. At Communion we say together the Apostles’ Creed. Every Sunday in our early service we say the Nicene Creed. Those creeds express that “teaching you have learned,” down through the centuries, not in addition to the Bible, but in summary of what the Bible teaches.

         Jesus Christ is at the center. Jesus Christ is King, as the liturgical calendar reminds us today. To stray from that center, to let any other person or idea reign over us, is to risk the whole thing, says Paul. That’s why he tells the Romans and tells us to avoid people who are doing and teaching something else.

         In verse 18, Paul has strong words for the false teachers in Rome. Contrary to our profession of Christ as King and our desire to serve Him, the false teachers do not serve Jesus, “but their own bellies,” is the literal translation. That reference to “bellies” may have had something to do with the disputes about food, but it makes it clear that for those people, their center was in themselves, not in Christ.

         Paul offers further warning that “by smooth talk and flattery they deceive the hearts of the simple-minded.” There have always been people with golden tongues who can bend the truth to their own interests. In our time smooth talk and flattery is raised to an art form in what we call advertising. Appeal to a person’s vanity, their desire to be beautiful, their confidence in their own ability, and you can sell them anything, including false doctrine.

         As I sat on the Board of Ministry last week, I heard that one of the problems our Covenant pastors often face is the abundance of smooth talk on the Internet. A good pastor is doing her job, studying the Scriptures, and preaching the truth as best she knows how. But then one of her parishioners goes on-line and finds some web site that contradicts last Sunday’s sermon or warns that an author the pastor quoted is a heretic. That simple-minded web-surfer starts a passionate e-mail campaign in the congregation and suddenly a church is split, a ministerial career is ruined, and Christ is no longer King of that church. It’s exactly what Paul warns us against.

         With verse 19, Paul acknowledges what he’s been saying all along. Despite the problems and divisions there in Rome, it’s a good church. He tells them “your obedience is known to all.” They’ve been serving Christ. His warnings to them are not because they’ve completely lost their way. He warned them so they would not slip, warned them, “I want you to be wise in what is good and innocent in what is evil.”

         Paul was paraphrasing what Jesus told His disciples in Matthew 10:16, “be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” Christian faith is not supposed to be simple-minded. It’s to be real wisdom, wisdom that can tell the difference between good and evil, thoroughly versed in the one while remaining innocent of the other.

         One of the silly things my non-Christian father said to me early in my pastoral ministry was that I couldn’t really teach people about good and evil if I hadn’t had more experience of sin myself. He thought I should get drunk a time or two, try some gambling, maybe something worse, so that I would be able to better counsel people who struggle with that kind of thing.

         My dad, I’m afraid, is a smooth talking flatterer. He was absolutely wrong. You don’t gain a better understanding of the hazard of high voltage by standing in the bathtub and dropping your hair dryer in with you. You don’t grow wiser about the dangers of poison by eating arsenic or dosing yourself with cyanide. And you don’t really learn any more about evil by engaging in it. The person who really and truly grasps the nature and power of sin is the person struggling to avoid it, not the person giving in to it.

         Verse 20 is a promise and a benediction. When we struggle against evil and sin, it can seem long and hopeless. Whether it’s a personal battle against addiction, or a public fight against evils like racism or human trafficking, we get truly weary. The more wise we get about the good we are trying to do, the more discouraged we may become about the evil we are fighting.

         So Paul gave the Romans the promise that “The God of peace will shortly crush Satan under your feet.” It’s a promise with two parts. First, the assurance was that the smooth talkers who were causing dissension and divisions in Rome would not win in the end. God’s peace would rule in His Church. But second, it’s a promise that clearly alludes to what God said to Satan back in the Garden of Eden. The offspring of the woman would crush his head. The greatest offspring ever to come from a woman was Jesus Christ. This is the promise we celebrate today. Christ is King. Christ will reign. Christ will put down all the powers of evil.

         Paul gave the Romans a benediction that made the promise possible. He sends them back to the power on which they rely, the power of God’s grace given to us in the death and resurrection of Jesus. It is Christ who will crush the forces of evil. So it is on Jesus Christ that we rely, not on our own strength. The conquering of evil happens not by effort, but by grace. So he says, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you.”

         We help one another remember the grace of Jesus Christ and the promise of His victory over evil by greeting and blessing each other with that benediction. That’s why Paul’s next few lines beginning in verse 21 are greetings in the other direction, greetings from those with Paul to those in Rome. There’s Timothy, who became one of Paul’s closest companions. There are Paul’s relatives or fellow Jews, Lucius and Jason and Sosipater. Lucius just might be Luke who wrote the Gospel and Acts.

         After offering those greetings, in verse 22, Paul nodded to his secretary who was taking dictation, and Tertius wrote down his own personal greeting. He was not just a hired scribe, but a fellow Christian, who could “greet you in the Lord.”

         Then Paul returns again with greetings from one of the few people he baptized in Corinth, Gaius. Then there was a public official who accepted Christ, Erastus. Then finally a person we know nothing else about, “our brother Quartus,” reminding us again as we heard last week: in Christ’s Kingdom everyone is named and loved and blessed.

         I invite you to hear those ancient greetings from Christians long gone from this world as greetings to you today. Let them encourage and remind you that whatever struggle you have with evil, with Satan, it is not hopeless. Jesus Christ was King for them and He is and will be King for you. He will crush Satan under His feet and raise you up in His grace. That’s the hope and greeting those Christians and all the brothers and sisters in Christ through the ages passed down to you.

         Some of you with Bibles open may notice in many versions there is no verse 24, except maybe in a footnote. That’s because it doesn’t show up in the oldest and best manuscripts we have for Romans. It’s mostly a repeat of the end of verse 20. It’s a scribal error, so good Bible translations leave it out. But, you know, it’s a truly forgivable error.

         Imagine some lonely, tired scribe laboring away at the new copy of Paul’s letters assigned to him. He came to the end of Romans and was weary. His eyes hurt from working by candlelight. He felt the temptation to lay down his quill and go drink a lot of beer. Or other temptations danced in his mind and heart. He and a fellow monk were at odds with each other. He was trying to overcome bitterness, even hatred. Then he penned those words about the God of peace crushing Satan by the blessing of the grace of Jesus Christ. It encouraged him enough to dip the quill again and carefully copy a few more difficult names in greeting.

         Then I picture that weary young man sitting back and feeling like Timothy and Luke and Tertius and Gaius and all the others were looking at him across the centuries, greeting him with the same grace of Jesus Christ by which they lived. And so he wrote it down, that sense that their greetings of grace belonged to him. They didn’t just greet the Romans, but all Christians, everyone who reads this letter. All people who put their faith in Jesus have a gracious King who will come and crush the evil in ourselves and in our world.

         It wasn’t part of what Paul actually wrote, but as our struggling scribe understood, it was part of what he meant. It’s not just as in verse 20, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you.” It’s as that extra verse 24 says, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with all of you.” The grace Paul sent to the Romans came to him. It comes to everyone who believes. It comes to you. It’s a fitting benediction and ending for now of our study of Romans. “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with all of you.”

         Amen.

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