Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
20 August 2017
Romans
11:1-2, 28-32
Psalm
67.1-7
I don’t
know if you’ve noticed this too,
but in the last couple of years
the incredible
scientific feat of decoding the human genome
has passed from the world of
esoteric science,
into the world of the
mundane.
These days,
for less than the price of two theatre tickets,
you can, and I quote,
‘Bring your ancestry to life through
your DNA’.
The
market-leading company, 23andMe,
will apparently use their worldwide
database of genetic sequencing
to give you personalized information
on your ancestry composition,
any DNA relatives you
may have lurking undiscovered in your family tree,
and even your
Neanderthal percentage.
And it
occurs to me that whilst it may do one no harm
to discover that you’re a few
percent Neanderthal (after all, so is everyone else),
or that you’re only 25%
European,
alongside
sub-Saharan African or East Asian ancestry;
discovering that you have a direct
match on their database
for a sister living in
Australia that you previously knew nothing about
may be rather more problematic.
Of course,
there may be some health benefits in terms of inherited genetic diseases,
but quite what one is supposed to do
with the information
that you have a slightly
increased chance of developing Alzheimer’s Disease
is a bit of a mystery to
me at the moment…
And anyway,
the health reporting isn’t what’s driving this new industry
in personalized DNA sequencing.
People are,
it seems to me, buying into this
because they are curious to
understand more about their identity.
‘Who am I?’
is one of the defining questions of our time.
Am I a European, an African, or an
Asian;
a
mongrel or a Neanderthal?
Who should I identify with?
Which tribe do I belong
to?
In a
globalized world of instant communication,
and social networks that transcend
all geographical barriers,
it seems that we are living through
a ‘crisis of belonging’.
It’s the
same question that drives the huge interest in family tree research:
‘Who am I?’ Or, to quote the BBC,
‘Who do you think you are?’
– the title of course of
the ever-popular TV show
in which
celebrities discover, and I quote,
‘secrets and
surprises from their past.’
Except it’s
not from their past at all
– much of what is discovered, and
the stories that are told,
are from many generations before
anyone alive now was even born.
Logically,
of course, it’s all nonsense:
you don’t have to go back very many
generations
before you have more
ancestors
than there were people
living in the entire world!
The time of
the Norman Conquest in the 11th Century
achieves this by a fact of three or
more.
Which means
that, basically, we’re all massively in-bred.
There is no ‘pure line’ in any of
us.
My Nana
used to say, with some considerable pride,
that her ancestors came over with
the Normans.
Well, so did all of ours, if we’re
white British!
In fact,
did you know that if you’re a white European,
you are, statistically speaking, a
direct descendent of Charlemagne;
Carolingian King of the
Franks, and Holy Roman Emperor.
It’s just a
numbers game:
he had (at least) eighteen children,
and I’m one of his descendants:
it just must be true.
So,
defining ourselves by our genetic or ancestral heritage
is a logical nonsense.
But it
continues to make emotional sense,
and people keep doing it,
as the
events in Charlottesville over the last couple of weeks
have vividly and tragically
demonstrated.
And as I
said, I think this is because we have, in our Western Society,
a crisis of belonging.
We don’t
know who we are.
We’re
programmed, at a genetic level,
to live in villages of about 2-300
people,
which is
about the number of people you can comfortably get to know
and sustain some kind of
relationship with.
Any more
than this and it becomes quickly overwhelming.
Interestingly,
the average number of friends
that Facebook users have on the
platform is 338,
but with a median of
200.
The figure
2-300 is about right for a community.
Churches often struggle to grow
beyond 300,
because they start to
feel impersonal, and people get lost.
It seems we
most naturally relate to smaller communities;
and so, faced with the vastness of
our world,
with all
its diversity of ethnicity, gender;
sexuality, social standing; political
opinion, and religious conviction,
we search for meaning,
for identity, for that elusive ‘sense of belonging’;
and we do it by seeking answer to
the question
of who we are:
Are white or black, British or
English,
European or French,
African, Asian, Neanderthal, whatever…?
Which at
one level is fine.
There’s nothing wrong with a bit of
quiet genealogical research,
I’m partial to it
myself,
and there’s nothing inherently
dangerous about having your DNA sequenced.
But if
these things are symptoms of a deeper malaise,
if they arise from our crisis of
belonging,
then that
same sickness can also manifest itself
in racism, sexism, white supremacy,
neo-Nazism,
homophobia, gay-bashing,
and the worst kinds of nationalistic
sabre-rattling
such as ‘the world has
never seen before’.
But of
course, for all of our technological advancements,
we aren’t the first generation to
experience a crisis of belonging,
we aren’t the first
generation in which people have struggled
to know who they are.
The Roman
Empire dominated the known world in the first century,
and has many parallels to the
globalized media
and financial empires of
our own world.
The Romans
were technologically dominant,
with a massive military machine
and an all-encompassing
trade and financial network,
all held together by the religious
ideology of Emperor-worship.
People who,
just a generation before,
had no experience of life beyond
their village,
found the
Roman Empire on their doorstep,
informing them in no uncertain terms
that they were now part of something
much bigger.
The ethnic,
cultural, and religious diversity of the Roman Empire
was greater than at any time before
it in human history,
and it was
something which would not be repeated
until relatively modern times.
And so, in
the first century, people faced their own crisis of belonging.
To whom did they belong?
To Rome or to Galatia?
To Philippi, or to Palestine, or to Jerusalem?
Who were they to regard as their
tribe, as their people?
This is the
background to what we meet
in our passage for this morning from
Paul’s letter to the Romans,
and you can
see, I hope, that it is a context
which has strong similarities with
the world that we find ourselves in.
My hope,
also, is that as we explore Paul’s approach
to these issues of belonging,
ethnicity,
nationality, and
religion in his context,
we will gain some insights
into how we might
address such issues in our world too.
Paul begins
chapter 11 of his letter to the Romans
by rehearsing his conclusion from
the previous chapter,
which we looked at last week:
Does the inclusion of
the Gentile nations into the people of God
mean that God has broken
faith with, and rejected, the people of Israel?
‘By no
means!’ says Paul in verse 1,
and to prove it he uses himself as
an example:
He’s a Jew,
a genetic descendent of Abraham,
and yet he’s also part of God’s
Christian people.
He’s no
less a Jew because of this,
and just as he argues that the
Gentiles do not need to become Jewish
to receive righteousness
through Christ,
so he remains a Jew, even as he puts
his own faith in Christ.
And, he
says, if it’s true for him, it’s true for others.
God has not finished with Israel.
Then, in
the bit of chapter 11 that the lectionary skips over in today’s reading,
Paul goes over the same ground again
in some considerable complexity,
using his
famous metaphor of the olive tree:
showing that the Gentile branches
have been grafted
into the historic root
and trunk of Israel,
and that while some of the Jewish
branches may have been broken off,
they can still be
grafted in again by God the master-gardener.
Then we
come to the conclusion of this part of Paul’s argument,
which has been running for the last
three chapters,
as he has teased out the
relationship between the Jews and the Gentiles,
and here we
find ourselves in the murky and distressing waters
of racism and xenophobia.
The
incendiary language leaps out at us in verse 28,
where Paul speaks to his mostly
Gentile audience about the Jews,
and says “As regards the
gospel, they are enemies for your sake”.
Interestingly,
the New Revised Standard Version, our pew Bible,
tries to soften this a bit – and
adds a couple of words:
‘As regards the gospel, they are
enemies of God for your sake’,
but that’s not there in
the original Greek.
Paul is
hitting the shock factor here:
the Jews, who he has just spent
three chapters arguing
are still part of God’s
covenant,
are now ‘enemies’ with regard to the
gospel of Christ.
What on
earth is going on?
As we
discovered last week,
when we looked at Paul’s language of
justification by works,
we have to
recognize that we are reading this
in a very different context from
that in which it was written.
There may
be certain similarities,
but we are reading this post-holocaust.
We know where anti-Semitism can take
us,
and so we are careful to
avoid it,
and we are alert to any
hint of it.
We might
criticize the Jewish state
for its current war of attrition
against the Palestinians,
and we are I think right
to do so;
but that is not the same as saying
that the Jews, all Jews,
are ‘enemies’ of the
gospel.
So why does
Paul say this?
Well, of course, Paul is himself
writing this as a Jew
– he’s made that very
clear already.
This is not
anti-Semitism coming from a powerful oppressor
against a minority population.
But there
is certainly a background here of anti-Judaism,
within the congregation that Paul is
writing to in Rome,
and he uses
this inflammatory language to call it out.
The
majority of the first century Christian congregation in Rome
was made up of those who had
converted from the pagan religions,
and only a
minority were drawn from those
with a Jewish background.
And just as
Paul had argued strongly
that the Gentile converts did not
need to adopt the Jewish law,
so he now
has to argue that Jewish converts
do not need to stop observing their
Jewish religious practices.
In essence,
the Gentiles in the Roman congregation
had been picking on the Jewish
Christians,
probably in
retaliation for the efforts by some of the Jews
to tell the Gentiles that they
needed to start keeping the Jewish law
in order to be proper followers of
Jesus.
So Paul
echoes their language back to them:
Yes, he says, the Jews are enemies of the gospel,
but that doesn’t mean
that they are estranged from God,
or cut off from the love
of God.
Their error in rejecting Christ,
or misunderstanding what
it means to follow him,
doesn’t mean that God
has broken faith with them.
And if they are enemies, Paul goes on,
they are no more enemies
of the gospel
than the Gentiles
themselves were before they converted;
so the response of the Gentiles
should be to show the mercy of God to the Jews,
not to mock, belittle,
or otherwise oppress them.
As Paul
says, ‘God has imprisoned all in disobedience,
so that he may be merciful to all’.
No-one is
any better, or any worse, in God’s eyes, than anyone else:
whatever your nationality, religious
conviction,
ethnic heritage, or
political persuasion,
we all equally need the mercy of
God.
In many
ways, this verse 32 of Chapter 11
is a one-sentence summary statement
of the entire
theological argument that Paul has been developing so far
through the letter to
the Romans, so let’s hear it again:[1]
‘For God
has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.’
It may be
short, but it makes some bold theological moves
that it’s worth getting our heads
around.
Firstly,
the reason all humans, regardless of ethnicity or heritage,
are imprisoned in disobedience
is because God has willed it to be so.
Paul’s
observation is that there’s something about the nature of the world
at every level, from the individual
to society,
from human affairs to
natural world in which we live,
which means that when people pursue
paths
other than seeking after
God,
they find themselves more and more
hemmed in
and confined by the
consequences of their decisions.
It’s not
that God punishes us for our unfaithfulness
– it is rather that we punish
ourselves
when our choices in life
take us away from God.
‘For God
has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.’
Secondly,
the great irony of humanity’s imprisonment in disobedience
is that it is at the very moment
when we recognize our disobedience
that we open ourselves up to the
mercy of God.
You know
how sometimes people say that you have to hit rock bottom
before you can start to come back up?
Well,
that’s a good summary of this.
When we
realise how imprisoned we have become
by our own attempts to be strong and
wise in our own strength,
then we
open the door to God’s love
in releasing us from our striving
and effort.
‘For God
has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.’
Thirdly,
the ethnic, cultural,
social, and ideological divisions in
humanity
are rendered
meaningless by the love of God.
Israel’s
covenant privileges have been extended to all,
and all nations are blessed
through fulfilment of the Jewish
covenant in Christ.
Therefore,
there is no basis for any one nation, tribe, or people
to regard themselves as more chosen
than any other.
‘For God
has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.’
Fourthly,
God’s mercy to all
does not negate God’s absolute anger
against sin,
where sin
is understood as that
which shuts human heart from
openness
to the love and mercy that God longs
to pour in.
Stating the
universal love of God for all that he has made
does not stop God hating all that
distorts that love in action in people’s lives.
So where
sin abounds,
where people conspire to put
themselves over others,
and believe the lie that
one life is worth more than another,
then God’s wrath hardens hearts
in order that the
haughty will be brought down
to the point where all, including
the worst of sinners, can be raised up.
‘For God
has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.’
And
Fifthly, there is no mention in any of this about human faith
– it is God’s faithfulness which
does all of this.
God is
merciful to all,
God is faithful to Gentiles in their
unbelief
and to Jews in the
hardening of their hearts,
God is faithful to creation as it’s
creator.
‘For God
has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.’
So, where
does this leave us?
Where does it leave a world living
with
the consequences of a
crisis of belonging?
Where does it leave us in the days after
the
Barcelona terrorist attack?
What does Paul say to us,
as we seek to deal in
our towns and cities
with the ethnic tensions
that blight so many of our relationships?
From Barcelona, to Finland, to Palestine,
to
the streets of Homeland America.
Well, I
think he would say, very clearly,
and particularly in the light of
Charlottesville,
that Black Lives Matter.
There is
absolutely no justification in Christ
for the view that white lives matter
more than any other,
and the
alignment of certain segments of the Christian church
with the views of white supremacy is
an evil to be opposed.
And before
we say that Charlottesville is not London,
and that we it doesn’t happen here –
believe me it does.
I grew up
watching the Black and White Minstrel Show,
which was cancelled when I was six
years old
– with its perpetuation of grotesque
caricatures of racial stereotypes.
The race
riots of the early 1980s
were when I first became aware of
the power
of ethnic difference to
incite violence,
and I now know that they took place
in those very cities
where white people had
become enriched
through the slave and
sugar trade of 17th and 18th centuries.
We live in
a deeply divided country, and a deeply divided city,
with people of all different
nationalities, living and working side-by-side.
And yet if
you are a black graduate of a British university,
you will earn on average 23.1% less
than your white fellow graduates.
Since 2010
there has been a 49% increase
in the number of ethnic minority 16-
to 24-year-olds
who are long-term unemployed,
while in
the same period there has been a fall of 2%
in long-term unemployment
among white people in the same age
category.
Black
workers are more than twice as likely
to be in insecure forms of
employment
such as temporary contracts or
working for an agency.
Black
people are far more often the victims of crime,
and you are more than twice as
likely to be murdered
if you are black in England and
Wales.
When
accused of crimes,
black people are three times more
likely
to be prosecuted and sentenced than
white people.[2]
Saying that
Black Lives Matter is not the same
as saying White lives don’t matter,
any more
than saying that Children’s lives matter
would be the same as saying that
adult lives don’t matter.
But we have
to recognize that we live with a heritage of ethnic oppression,
and Paul’s insight in Romans is that
all of us are diminished by this.
There is
nowhere here for white privilege to hide;
and simply saying that ‘I’m not a
racist’
doesn’t get anyone off the hook.
In 2007, the
bicentenary of the abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,
I was part of the discussions at Baptist
Union Council
as to whether it would be appropriate
for the Baptist Union
to
offer an apology for their complicity in the ongoing legacy of slavery.
And I heard
some interesting responses:
‘I’ve never owned slaves, so what have
I got to apologise for ?’
‘I didn’t ask to be born white, and asking
me to apologise for
who
I am is just racism in reverse.’
The insight I took from this was all
of us are diminished by white privilege.
It has been
said that when you are used to privilege,
equality feels like discrimination[3]
and many
white people will cry foul
when their supremacy is challenged.
And yet,
just as Paul argues that God’s mercy
is big enough for both Jew and
Gentile,
so we need
to hear him telling us that equality is only equality
if it works equally for both white
and non-white.
Anything
less than true equality
imprisons white and black alike
into the prison created by
disobedience.
So as we
pray for our world,
and as we examine our own lives and
our own hearts,
and as we uncover our own
preconceptions and prejudices,
I wonder
what it means for us to hear, in our world
that ‘God has imprisoned all in
disobedience
so that he may be merciful to all.’
x
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