"Life, for...All"--January 28, 2020

Life, for... All--January 28, 2020

"And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man's sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification. If, because of the one man's trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Therefore just as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man's act of righteousness leads to justification for all. For just as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's disobedience the many will be made righteous." [Romans 5:16-19]

Let me propose a rule of thumb for our talk about God: if we are forced to choose between our tidy, systematized, and orderly theological categories and the Gospel, pick the Gospel.

Even if it that means it messes up our categories.  We'll have plenty of time to sort out the mess, but we had better not let go of the Gospel.

Or maybe, we'll discover, it is more a matter of God's insistence not to allow the Gospel to let go of us.

This passage is one of those times when systematic theologians get antsy.  You can tell it because they start squirming in their seats, or they start furrowing their brows and raising their hands to speak because they are so fast to want to insert some caveat or fine print. Paul's loose talk of free gifts that really are free gifts makes them sweat.  And Paul's cavalier way of saying that "all" will be justified makes them nervous, because they want to protest that it can't mean everybody is accepted by God.  

And so, over twenty centuries of history, we Christians have either avoided spending too much time on passages like this (lest people get the "wrong idea" that God is letting even <gasp!> the riff-raff into the party), or the systematicians with their tidy categories try and inoculate listeners from such pearl-clutching notions as a redemption that is bigger than we imagined possible.  You'll hear a lot of, "Well, I know it looks like Paul says that all are justified, but that clearly can't be what he means, because that messes up Bullet Points 1, 2, and 3 of my theology, and we can't let that happen!" or You'll hear, "Paul doesn't really mean that as many as were caught up in Adam's sin area also the same many who are now made righteous!  They must be different groups of 'many.' Yeah, that's it!"  

Or, again, you'll hear a bit of asterisked fine print to this "free gift*" notion that says, "Well, the *gift is *theoretically available to anybody, but in order to *claim your prize, here is the stack of theological paperwork you must do in order to receive the prize and have it applied to your account, including the proper prayer you must pray in order to activate it, the correct statement of faith and the evidence of sufficient intensity of your faith, possible financial records of how much you have given to the church to back up your faith, and of course, an adequate score on your theology exam to prove you believe the correct things about the free gift."

Some caveat like that has to be added by the neat-and-tidy-category people of the Respectable Religious Crowd in order to make Paul's claims here more palatable, or at least so they can be shoehorned into their existing boxes.  The effect of that, of course, is that it basically means you have to fudge one of the key words in Paul's sentence, "Just as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man's act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all."  So, you'll either hear that "all" can't really mean "all," or "justification and life" can't really mean "justification and life." Something must be conditional!  And of course, that means the gift isn't really a free gift, either.

So how do we deal with the tension in this passage, then, that sure sounds like it imagines God giving away restored relationship with him and life in Christ to everybody, all around?  Maybe we don't have to resolve it.  Maybe we don't have to make the tension go away, any more than you make the tension go away for the strings on a guitar or a piano.  Maybe the tension is how it makes music.

In other words, instead of trying some way to water down Paul's words or to make them say something he has not chosen to say here, what if we just let his message of sheer, undiluted Gospel sit with us... and do their work on us? What if we let them sing in us?  And what if we dared to be joyful at the prospect that God just might have it in mind to bring life to everybody, everywhere, just because that's the way God loves?  Paul, after all, seems to think that what he is saying is good news, not bad news, and certainly nothing to get our faces scowling and our hands fidgety about  Paul is convinced that all the world--even in the midst of our own hostility toward God and deadness in sins--has been loved by the God who raises the dead. And that is something worth celebrating, not running from.

What difference might it make then, today, if we look out at the world--starting on our block and radiating out to our town, our country, our little blue planet, and even the whole universe, too--and dare to imagine that God is intent on bringing life to every part of us that is dead, completely as a free gift?  How would we treat the strangers we meet, then?  How would we treat the people who we already know we disagree with or differ from? How would we care about their well-being, even if it didn't directly look like it affected our own?

What would happen if just steeped, like tea, in the hot water of the Gospel's claim that God in Christ has acted to bring "life for all"?

O God beyond our understanding, let us love you more than our theologies... and let us be ready to be stretched wide by the presence of your indwelling love.