Allegiance to Jesus in the Pax Americana

A Summary of Paul's Letter to the church in Rome

Romans 15:4-6

We’ve spent these seasons of Epiphany, Lent, and Easter listening to Paul’s letter to our ancestral believers in Rome, the very center of the empire of the Pax Romana.

Today we're going to attempt a broad summary of what Paul shares with us and our ancestors in Rome.

How we live in the world always comes with a story. What we say and believe about ourselves, and what is said about us, directs our practices, what we do. The convictions behind those practices are given voice in our stories. So when the way things are— the world/our home—  is broken, we need to revisit and question the story being told.

Empire tells a false story about us:

We are merely:

• Commodities. Products to be bought and sold, used and used up. There are forces in this world more powerful than us who use our algorithms, our data, our bodies to accumulate more wealth, more power. Everything is commodified in the empire— engineered, exploited, and controlled; we are trapped, ashamed, enslaved with no choice.

• Consumers. We join in the consuming; devouring land, food, information, stuff, and other bodies in impossible attempts to satiate our hungers, our desires. But we’re devouring the wrong things, never able to satisfy our hunger, so we consume more.

• Citizens. We belong in/to the empire; that is our home, in the shadows. We contribute to the brokenness, the violence; wounding and being wounded, crushing and being crushed. Justice in this story is about the powerful becoming more powerful, the rich becoming richer, using and consuming the bodies of the weak, poor, and powerless. Survival of the fittest, you have to fight to get ahead, by any means necessary, and the ends always justify the means. So we live in fear, and fear is the father of hatred, which fathers violence, which fathers death. Empire is not a place, but a way of being, of seeing the world, a story that is told that contributes to practices that harm. A false reality.

But Paul’s letter to those faithful to Jesus’ way in Rome tells a different story, a different gospel, that is actually good news for everyone and all creation. Paul reminded them (and us) who we truly are:

We are truly:

• Creatures. Together with the rest of creation, we are part of all that God has created; and all the rest of creation waits together with God for us to remember who we are. As creatures created in the image of our Creator, we are liberated from the broken story of empire by the first fruits of the tomb, that is Jesus, raised to life. (Rom 3). We are restored to be creative creatures, imitating and reflecting our Creator, embodying our Creator’s ways of justice, peace, and beauty. The making of a home with the rest of creation is a gift. So we are truly a

• Community. Webbed together with the rest of creation, we give and receive in mutual flourishing; all are welcomed. We are bound together (in Christ) to be generous.

  
  

Those who have received God’s liberation learn to tell a different story than the empire tells:

• No longer do we need to exploit or be exploited, practice violence or self-preservation. Instead, a gift is given that shows us, that is a way of wholeness and health and mutual flourishing for us and all creation. That gift and that way, of course, is the embodiment of God, Jesus himself. Violence is inverted by refusing to wound others and instead absorbing that violence (self-sacrifice) “While Rome makes peace through the shedding of the blood of others, Jesus makes peace through the shedding of his own blood.”* (Rom 4.1-5.11). We, too, become people of peace (14.17), people pursuing peace (14.19).  

• We are part of all creation that declares our full allegiance to Jesus, the embodiment of our Creator. We learn to be faithful to God’s ways. We learn to be faithful because God is faithful, we learn to be just because God is just. Jesus showed us that justice: Romans 3.24-25: We are even now justified by God’s desire and movement towards us [grace] through the liberation that is in the Christ, Jesus. Jesus whom God offered as [both] the place of God’s full manifestation and revelation [and] a peace offering through the faithfulness fully expressed in his willingness to receive a violent and bloody death. We become conduits of God’s justice, not merely receiving it, but letting it flow from us to others. This is active work, not passive. God is the God of justice (8.33).

• God has invited us to dwell in God’s home, giving ourselves to God’s ways, adopted as God’s children and heirs with Christ. We become home-makers with God. We’ve moved out of the empire, dusted off our feet and crossed the threshold into God’s home through our baptism into Jesus. Even still, though we may no longer dwell in the imperial mansion, telling the false story of the empire, we’ve all brought some imperial souvenirs with us into Christ’s cottage (ch 3, 7). We continue to honor remnants of the dead ways, continue to desire the meat of Egyptian slavery. And Paul challenges us to join in the ongoing maturing of our selves— (ch 8) and our life together (ch 12); that is, to "Marie Kondo" the ways of the empire— let go of our imperial souvenirs, be set free.

• We truly are a community, God’s beloved community. Together we love one another with mutual affection. Like the faithful Paul greets in chapter 16, and those with Paul who greet the Roman faithful, everyone is named, everyone participates, everyone receives and gives. There’s not a cult of personality, but a community of the faithful who are known by their embodiment of Jesus’ way. May that be so for us.

• Our creaturely community in God’s home embodies God’s justice: we live lives of care and compassion, actively pursuing peace for and with our neighbors. We are not afraid to name that which is good and name that which is evil. (12.9) As a black pastor here in Indy said this week, we must name the demons that need casting out. Those are strong words, but, as Paul says (15.15), this is the time to speak boldly— the empire’s voice is loud.

• We celebrate with gratitude and thanksgiving the gift of a home with God, a home of mutual flourishing and hospitality, of wholeness and healing (14.5-6). Home, in its deepest meaning, is shalom, it is well-being, whole relationships, a spacious, generous place and way of being together. It is life, in its fullest. And that, beloveds, is what God desires for all humanity, and all creation.

• We must be wise and discerning, though. While we dwell in Christ’s home, it is still in the shadow of the empire (ch 13). The story of empire is one of broken things and broken ways, broken homes and broken relationships. It is the dominant, loudest story we hear; it blares in our ears and on our screens. But. It. Will. Not. Win. For the God of peace will quickly crush and shatter our adversary, the empire of powers and principalities (16.20).

• The God of steadfastness and encouragement fills us, too, with steadfastness and encouragement (that is, passing courage on to others— it’s contagious!). As Paul reminds us (ch 5), endurance in affliction produces character, and character produces hope (steadfastness), and that hopefulness doesn’t let us down because God’s love has been poured into us through the presence of God among us. [5.3-5]

Beloved, I don’t know what you’re taking with you from this gospel story Paul shared with our ancestors. I hope you can read this letter with fresh eyes. In the text read this morning, Paul says this of the OT, that I hope we can receive for this letter as well:  that “by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope” (15.4). I hope you can find us and our time in this story. I hope you’re not afraid to question the false story we’re being told by the world. I hope you ask yourself what you want to carry from this letter. And I hope that it includes steadfast (faithful) allegiance to Jesus and Jesus' way, and contagious courage to live out that way justly and peacefully with one another and our neighbors.

A Blessing (15.13): May the God of hope fill you all with joyful gratitude and peace in trusting God, so that you may also be people full of hope because of the power of God’s powerful presence. May we be people of contagious courage (that “holy urging”), may we be enactors of God’s justice, and builders of God’s peace, living the liberated and resurrected life of Jesus together in the reality of God’s kingdom.

*All quotes are from Romans Disarmed: Resisting Empire, Demanding Justice by Sylvia C. Keesmaat and Brian J Walsh, Brazos Press, 2019. Romans Disarmed has been our primary source (besides the Bible) for this material. We are grateful for Keesmaat and Walsh, and their scholarship and community in Christ.