A sermon preached June 9, 2002

Concord Covenant Church

The Rev. Beth Jenkins Ernest

Text: Romans 5:12-21; Hosea 5:15-6:6

First in a sermon series on Paul

Paul, the Mapmaker

Many of you are familiar with the writings of C.S. Lewis, a British scholar who became a Christian later in life. In his book, The Joyful Christian, he has some helpful words on a topic a lot of Christians are afraid of or skeptical of: theology, the "science of God." Theology might be called ‘the way we explain God.’ I would like to quote Lewis’ words at length, because they offer a wonderful understanding of a difficult subject. C.S. Lewis writes:

"In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the Royal Air Force, an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, `I’ve no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious man, too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt him; out alone in the desert at night; the tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about him. To anyone who’s met the real thing, they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal.’"
Lewis continues: "Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real, to something less real. In the same way, if a man once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from real waves to a bit of colored paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only colored paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out be sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more (of) use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America."

Do you see where Lewis is headed? Listen.

"Now theology is like the map."… "the map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God—experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you or I are likely to get on our own way are very elementary and very confused…If you want to get any further, you must use the map." And Lewis concludes by saying that a religion based on emotions and pious feelings, beautiful sunrises and views of nature is a pretty vague religion.

I find this image of theology as a map researched and written by great Christians of all times to be very helpful. We DO need more than a religion based on vague feelings and pious emotions. When we ponder God and the great theological categories—like grace, sin, freedom, redemption, the Trinity—we are in company with and guided by a host of thousands. In the heritage of the Evangelical Covenant Church, they are guides like Paul Peter Waldenström whom we heard about last summer in a sermon series on the Evangelical Covenant. But in the wider category of Protestant Christianity, as children of the Reformation, we are mostly in company with the Apostle Paul, who was the greatest Christian mapmaker ever. The writings of Paul in the book of Romans are slated for the lectionary readings this summer. I would like to do a sermon series on Paul and his theological gifts to us—the Christian concepts of love, hope, the significance of the cross, the sacraments, and the church (the Body of Christ). Because what Paul did, more than any other, is to express the Christian gospel by drawing the map of faith you and I still hold today.

If you were to leaf through the New Testament, you would find that about half of it is either written by Paul, or attributed to Paul, or is written about Paul’s exciting life as the first missionary to the Gentiles. Paul lets the gospels speak about Jesus of Nazareth. Paul very rarely mentions Jesus. Rather, after meeting the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, he reinterprets life through the lens of the resurrection, the central event of the Christian faith. In essence, he took the Jesus movement and gave it the shape it needed to become the worldwide, Christian church, of interest and meaning to more than Messiah-oriented Jews.
Paul was the first Christian theologian, or cartographer, if you will. He wrote at a time soon after the death and resurrection of Jesus, a period when the church endured great persecution and really expected Jesus to return any day to bring the faithful home. His writings are the basis of Augustine’s thoughts which are the basis of western Christianity, and Martin Luther’s thoughts, which are the basis of Protestantism. But Paul doesn’t explain his theology in a twenty volume set of church dogmatics; instead, he writes letters, letters to the churches he founded, and to the churches he hoped to visit. It is in these letters that Paul develops his ideas about the Christian faith.

If Paul were to write a letter our congregation in the style he wrote to most churches, he would write about matters of pertinence to us. He would spend some time talking about the qualities of leadership and Concord Covenant’s search for a new pastor. He would caution teachers and preachers to present the true gospel, and not be led astray by any new age philosophies. If he had heard through the grapevine about any members who might be angry with each other, he would openly charge them with unChristlike behavior, and appeal to them to be reconciled. Even though he had never met us, he would vigorously defend his right to be our spiritual mentor, based on his qualifications as one to whom the risen Christ had appeared. He would beg us to be a people of prayer, praying at all times for everything. And he would tell us how much he prayed for us, his fellow servants of Christ. He would encourage in our suffering and demand no less strict a code of faith than he demanded of himself.

I must confess that I once considered Paul to be, at the least, off-putting. I know I’m not alone in that. On the surface it can seem like Paul hates women, is arrogant and pushy, and loves being imprisoned and beaten. Going into the ministry, I decided that it would be a good idea if I would read Paul with new eyes. And it would be a good idea to learn a bit about his life and motivation, his style of writing, the historical context of his day, and the characteristics of the very young Christian communities to which he wrote. In doing this, a whole new Paul emerged for me, and a whole new way of looking at what Christians believe and why emerged for me.

You might consider what the Christian faith would be like if there were no Paul—let’s say there were just the Gospels (all different in their emphasis), a couple letters and the book of Revelation! What would we believe? What about Jesus’ life would be important? Or even more so, what about his death would be important? For it was Paul, more than any other mapmaker or theologian, who sketched out the plan by which the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is seen as the route to our salvation. In our text for today, from Paul’s letter to the Roman churches, Paul describes how sin entered the world through Adam. In other words, we are all sinful from day one. Paul reaches back and describes how we tried to regulate or control this nature of ours by rules and laws, laws given by God for humanity’s benefit. But God saw that more was needed. And so, God entered the world in the form of Jesus Christ, through whom the power of death and sin was destroyed. Paul tells us that Christ’s resurrection is to be our resurrection and new life, conquering sin and death, bringing justification to us, a healing between us the God. We didn’t deserve it. We don’t have to pay for it. We just get it. Free. A love gift from God which we accept by faith, an experience of grace.

In a nutshell, that is the good news Paul preached. It was good news then and it is good news now. Paul lived in a day when many ideas about Jesus Christ were being circulated, many of which were just plain, old, wrong. People were drawing maps with the wrong destination in view and the wrong markers along the road. Some said that we still needed to follow the Jewish law. Others said that Jesus wasn’t really human and so never really did suffer. There were many theories. Much of what Paul did was to fight these ideas by insisting that Christians stuck to the one gospel. Sometimes his words were harsh, but the stakes were high—and they still are.

Not only id Paul begin the map in the theological sense, but he also put Christianity on the map in the geographical sense. He traveled all over the known world, enduring shipwreck, ridicule, imprisonment, and hatred, to preach the Gospel to non-Jews. At the time of his death, he was planning a missionary trip to Spain, the outpost of the Roman empire.

As journeyers on the road, we have much to thank Paul for. When our way is hard, Paul consoles and encourages us, because he has known difficulties. He helps us make meaning out of our suffering. When we think the whole world is going to pot, Paul is there, telling us the redemptive work of Christ in the world is not finished yet; that all creation itself is groaning as God brings us to new life (Rom 8). When we need a kick in the pants, Paul is not shy about giving us one. When we become proud of our accomplishments or our heritage, Paul is quick to remind us that even leading rabbis, Roman citizens of the best families and education’s, (like himself) are nothing—except what they are made by Jesus Christ. When we fear death, Paul points us on the road to heaven and says, "For me to live is Christ and to die is gain" (Phil 1;21). When we feel alone, Paul maps out for us the Body of Christ, the Church, in which we find our earthly community. And when we are overcome with guilt and shame, Paul points to the cross and says, "Someone took care of that already. Go and bring honor to his name."

How beautifully we are blessed by the lives of those who have gone on before, who have given us ways to think about the structure and meaning of our faith. How blessed we are by people who have walked the beach, AND have plotted a safe course across the ocean. May we learn from their example and be instructed by their courage and wisdom. Amen.