Last week, on two flights traveling back home to North Carolina, depending on your perspective I was gifted or cursed with two talkative seatmates.
I had just left the grizzly country of Montana – and was not prepared at 5:45am for my seatmate to greet me with a bearpaw of a handshake before launching into conversation.
“What do you do?” he asked. When I told him that I was a pastor, conversation ran dry.
So I asked him back what he did, and I was regaled with tales of running a concrete pumping business. Eventually, I put my headphones on and he laid his head on the seat in front of him to sleep.
The next flight, I was seated next to an older gentleman, who again asked me the same question, “What do you do?” “I’m a pastor,” I said.
He was curious about what it meant to be a Mennonite Christian, so I shared. He then talked with light in his eyes about how meaningful it had been with his wife to host many foster children over the decades. But she had died last year and so for the first time after 63 years it was not her but instead a stranger seated next to him on the airplane. He was traveling to North Carolina for a big family gathering. Even though I eventually put on my headphones, he would occasionally tap me because something else came to mind he wanted to tell me, before he proceeded to fall asleep against the window.
The letters of the apostle Paul to early churches are travel conversations.
These letters were dictated and written to be carried across Mediterranean seas and Roman roads, to be read out loud across diverse cultures and communities, to share the good news of Jesus. Paul’s writings are particular – written to particular communities with particular quandaries, yet they brim with the hope of a universal gospel of salvation for all people.
And Paul’s letter to the church in Rome is likely the last of Paul’s writing we have in the New Testament – his theology is mature and densely layered, peppered with quotations and references drawn from the Hebrew Bible. So if you’re left confused after hearing our passage once or reading Paul’s words many times – you’re in good company.
This Sunday’s text comes to us from the midst of Paul’s grappling as a Jewish man with how to square his belief and experience that Jesus is indeed the Messiah – with the strange reality that most Jews did not recognize the Messiah’s coming. Paul is wrestling with why it is that the gospel of Jesus has not connected with many of his fellow Jews.
Our passage begins with Paul describing Christ as the goal, the culmination, the telos – of the Jewish Law… “which leads to righteousness for all who have faith in God.”
Paul sits with a tension here, by upholding God’s ongoing covenantal promise to the people of Israel and the goodness and gift of the Torah, the Law, while also preaching an expansive gospel, that the good news of Jesus’ life and resurrection is available to all people – Jew and Gentile alike.
The righteousness that comes through faith in Christ is Paul’s message – and he is relentless that this righteousness is available to all, to everyone. That word “all” resounds again and again in our passage:
”all who have faith in him won’t be put to shame…”
“There is no distinction between Jew and Greek, because the same Lord is Lord of all, who gives richly to all who call on him.
“All who call on the Lord’s name will be saved.”
And Paul models this expansiveness of Christ’s saving goodness to all people in his life – not only by preaching to Jews and Gentiles, but also in his co-ministry with women. For example there’s the businesswoman Phoebe, who lived in a Cenchcrae, a Greek port city near Corinth, and was a deacon in her church. It would be Phoebe who would transport Paul’s letter eight hundred miles west by ship to Rome, where she likely was the first person to read it out loud to the house churches there, and the first person to answer questions about what Paul might have meant.
“All who call on the Lord’s name will be saved,” Paul tells us, using words from the prophet Joel. We see this same cry for salvation, modeled in our gospel story, where Peter, sinking in stormy waters, cries out to Jesus, “Lord, rescue me, save me!”
Which of us doesn’t want to be saved from something bad like death or drowning? Which of us doesn’t want to be saved from despair or injustice or apathy or addiction or cruelty or sin? We all want to experience salvation.
In my preparations this past week on this text I learned that Romans 10:9, has been used in some more conservative evangelical contexts as a litmus test, taught and memorized as road map of sorts to salvation. And it is a great, pithy line:
“If you confess with your mouth “Jesus is Lord” and in your heart you have faith that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
When we take this verse not as a formula – but put it back in a letter that Paul dictated, and the scribe Teritus wrote down, that was carried by Phoebe across sea and land to be read in scattered house churches in an ancient imperial city, with the hope that good news of Jesus would flourish, encouraging Jew and Gentile alike …
What we have here might not be something clear-cut that draws lines around salvation – but rather is an invitation to a way of life that trusts in the radical, politically-seditious Lordship of Christ, and that walks day-by-day in the power of his Spirit to overcome death.
We are saved by what God has done and continues to do through Jesus – reaching out to us, offering us life, breathing the Spirit into us, extending forgiveness and reconciliation and peace into our midst.
Christ’s saving words to Peter are also for us – “Take courage! I am who I am! It’s me! Don’t be afraid!”
Being saved, being made right with God is not something we have to grasp at from the heights, or to excavate from below. But Christ’s word of salvation, of righteousness, of grace – is a transforming word as near to us as reaching out our hand, confessing our need for help.
And so when that inescapable question comes to us from strangers on the airplane or anytime we meet someone new – “What do you do?”
Paul gives us plenty in the life of faith to do – we can listen, we believe, we trust, we proclaim, we are sent to embody God’s goodness healing, hope and love to all people.
Yet beneath that focus on “Whatever it is that we are doing or should do?” as it regards our salvation – is our abiding faith that ultimately what matters is what Christ has done and will do for us and for the world.
It’s not what we do, but who Jesus is and what he does that brings salvation to all. It’s Christ word of grace that calms our fears, Christ’s hand that pulls us out of peril, Christ who embodies the fullness of the Law, and Christ who has broken the chains of death. We live in gratitude of God’s salvation! Amen.