Day 47: Digging into Romans: All Have Sinned

Have you eaten a good breakfast?  are you sitting down and ready to think deeply?  We are out of the stories of Jesus and the Apostles now and into the deep theology of the letters of Paul.  Romans is the longest, and the deepest, and the most systematic of these letters.  I wish we had more than a few days to read the whole thing.

Most of Romans, actually doesn't read much like a letter.  It sounds more like a treatise.  Paul is on his way to Rome, but on the way he is collecting an important offering from his Gentile churches to the Jewish believers in Jerusalem, an important symbol of unity between the two bodies of believers.  In the meantime, he's writing to Rome to share his faith with Gentile believers, at least in part to help them to live with, and be good witnesses to, their Jewish brothers and sisters.  As it is, there is much misunderstanding between them.

Paul is writing this letter to a church he has never met (that is not the case with most of the letters).  Perhaps this is one of the reasons it sounds less personal than many of the others you will read.  After framing his greetings in the common format of letter of the day, he begins his argument for the gospel -- salvation for everyone, "the Jew first and also to the Greek."  (Paul will repeat this phrase many times.) His main point in these first three chapters is to prove that all of us, Jewish or Gentile, are sinners, that we have no excuse, that we have no defense before God.  He debates with imaginary sparring partners, refuting their arguments at every turn in order to make it to his main point and eventually to the height and the depth and the width of the love and grace of God.  On the way, he speaks of sins, which are the result of idolatry -- of worshipping creation rather than Creator, of looking into the mirror at ourselves  (with out selfishness, greed and hard-heartedness) and imagining God from what we see there.

The well-known verse in chapter three, "since all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is Christ Jesus," is a sort of climax to the whole first section.  If you read it aloud (which I actually recommend), imagine it being read in a louder and louder voice, until finally, the words "Justified by his grace as a gift..." make the peak of the mountain, from which we come down now.

Much as I know well this letter, it's going to be a learning curve for me in the next few days to think of compelling ways to write about what I find here, what my thoughts are, and what stories might emerge.

What is your experience of the book of Romans?  Do you know it well?  What are your stumbling blocks?  What do you appreciate here?