Romans 6-11

Okay.

I wanted to start out by asking you this week, if you think through your reading, was there a word or a phrase or an image that really caught your attention in the reading that we did?

I think it's no form of the tree.

The tree.

Thank you.

And could you speak to maybe where where that took your attention or your imagination or your heart?

I was able to picture people being crafted onto the tree.

People being taken off the tree, cut down.

Okay.

And it seemed like even if it had been pruned off, there was still a chance somewhere along the line you could be recrafted onto the tree.

And that's kind of what I took to that.

Can I ask you, did that um in what way did that image that was strong for you?

Did you hear God calling you to do anything different through that image?

Well I don't think he just I think it I think it demonstrated that we all have a chance to be on the tree.

And uh we shouldn't be looking down upon others, even the Jewish religion can be dragged down in the tree.

I like a strong root with a strong base.

And it had such a strong base in that you can add things to this base.

The base would support.

I feel like you wouldn't each one of us in the power is the right word here.

The ability to be able to make that adjustment and change because you know you can you have the power to change that to he's gonna he's gonna give you that space to uh come back to the tree.

Actually you can grab different plants.

Totally different plants on tree of a mother tree or a child tree.

So that that appealed to me in my inclusive thinking.

Yes.

You don't have to manage you can put an oak branch on an olive root and it'll grow enough.

Kind of remind me of film Avatar where the tree was of all life on that planet.

Yeah.

Anybody else, an image or a phrase or a way in which you thought God might be speaking directly to you from this reading?

On the uh tree, I vision a service going out in the world, like the branches, you know, and sometimes we go out and try something and it doesn't work.

Turn the branch off, some of them we go out and it grows into even more opportunity.

I I I became certified to be a master gardener, so I did a lot of gardening and crafting, and it took me back to when I was doing a lot of that and and how scientifically or in terms of working with plants, and that we can all those things can happen, and that's pretty impressive and pretty amazing within our human being, as being as human, like this, so to speak.

And for me, another analogy is with the branches, like Richard said, you go out into the world and you try to do God's work, and sometimes you are hurt or just illusion.

And even if not, we come back.

That's what we do with our community, we come back to the base, to the roots, which narrates.

So to me it's a it's an analogy of what we do.

And even just the weekly grind can be weary.

And we come back for the reading.

Weekly.

He doesn't say anything about the tree.

Yeah, I'm wondering what kind of tree you think Paul's talking about.

What was your image?

What kind of tree do you imagine when you re-round this?

I'm just curious, because this is, I think, geographic specific.

Olive.

Olive.

Which bears fruit, right?

Anyone else?

You said olive, so I said olive.

I just said okay, olive tree.

Yeah.

I thought of a big oak tree, like big like they had downtown with branches or yeah, yeah.

I I thought of a big tree.

I thought as a child, my mom planted this tree in our front garden for me.

And that I watched over the years of going to teenager, and then the tree just became this magnificent.

And that tree marked the place where we lived.

Anybody else?

The fruit of the olive?

Did you have that specifically in mind?

Yes.

Okay.

Okay.

I think in developmental schemas, uh, the fruit is not edible without processing, without growth, without sanctification.

So to me, there's that analogy again of we produce we have a fruit, but we still have to go through a process of becoming fruitful, becoming edible, becoming uh effective.

Yeah, it's interesting you said that because I yesterday I looked out and we have this satsuma tree, and there's one orange at the very top of the tree that's just been there, and we've got to get a ladder to get, or it's it's it's not gonna come down.

It's it's I stared at that orange just calm down to have a ladder that's calm enough to get you off of there.

But um, so how is that yeah?

Um I I don't know how that applies to this, but it that that orange thing in there just really struck me.

Anybody else have a specific kind of tree you imagine when you read this, just down curiosity?

When I read it, I imagine magnolia, but my notes said it was an olive.

So your study Bible said it's an olive?

That's interesting.

Yeah.

I always imagine that it's an oak.

Yeah.

But of course, oaks aren't indigenous to this part of the world that Paul's writing in.

I'm gonna tell you anytime the scriptures talk about plants and vines, they're usually talking about wine.

And you know, the most important thing in roots with roots is wine.

You know, this is like in a port in a Bordeaux.

The reason the Bordeaux is so uh well known is because the roots are like a thousand plus years old.

So our tendency probably is in Texas and in Florida is to think about oak trees.

Yeah, olive trees may not, maybe a better middle, but I want to encourage you to think about wine.

The root of the wine, because if you're Jewish, um fruit of the vine is a really important symbol that happens over and over and over again still today.

So you know, like um has anybody been to a Jewish wedding?

It's really interesting.

In the Jewish wedding, the first thing that happens is that they they thank God for the fruit of the vine and they have this cup and they bless the wine, usually in a silver cup, saying like you'd have it a Shabbat meal called the Kiddish.

And then the couple is blessed by seven people, and after each blessing they drink from the wine, which is meant to be a symbol and a celebration of the joy in marriage.

And if you know your Isaiah passage, Israel is a vineyard.

So, like you get this over and over again: this vineyard imagery and the fruit of the vine is not just about fruit, it's about a kind of fruit that's able to bring not only nutrition, but it's a symbol for joy.

So um, grafting into roots absolutely happens by wine growers.

And cutting off branches happens quite a bit in the wine industry.

It doesn't mean the oaks are wrong.

It's helpful just to think about how would each image affect how you hear it.

And again, um, wine grapes.

We we don't you go to the store and buy grapes, you're not eating wine grapes.

If you tried to make wine out of those grapes, it would not be good, right?

I mean, um in general, wine grapes are hard to come by unless you order them or go to some kind of vineyard.

They don't even grow very well in Texas.

I think there's like the the whatever hack winery grows some kind of white grape, but they import their reds, you know, uh, because they just don't do well here.

So uh, and again in the grocery you can't get them.

Contrast that to like if you go to countries like Georgia that has a very strong wine culture, and you eat a raisin, you're going to be really surprised by the taste because it comes from like a Cabernet Sauvignon grape.

It does not come from these tasteless purple grapes that we associate with grapes.

So the raisins have this winy flavor.

Like, and if you've ever had a muscadine grape that grew wild or somebody happened to cultivate muscadine grapes, that's maybe a better image of what's going on because there's a lot of like tannin y flavor in a muscadine grape, you know?

Um so it's just interesting to think how what Paul had in mind is often different from what we have in mind.

And how does that affect the analogy?

I mean, it's not more interesting.

I think it just gives you different or just a different emphasis, you know, that the fruit we're supposed to prepare for the world is not strictly about nourishing other people, it's about nourishing celebrations in the world.

Yeah.

I don't know if that makes sense.

Yeah.

And again, the the the strength of the root is that it produces the richest, most possible fruit.

The tree stuff is really interesting because my dad's a botanist and he had a nursery when I was growing up.

And um, of course, everybody knows what plants do is they take poison out of the world and put fresh air back into it, you know.

So, what an interesting image for the community of God that we process the poison of the world in order to make life more breathable.

You know, this is perfectly interesting.

You can do a whole lot with that, and this is what's great about Bible study.

As long as it's life-giving, it's great.

It only starts to become bad, I think, when we force something on something that may or may not be there.

So, again, I think um we can start to think, well, if you're a bad branch, God's just gonna chop you off and throw you away.

I mean, that could be true, but I always sort of think that, you know, there's not just branches.

Every branch has branches.

And what often happens uh whether you're pruning a tree or you're pruning a vine, is you rarely cut off a whole branch.

On one of the branches coming off, there's parts that produce fruit and parts that end up dying, and the gardener doesn't scold the branch, the gardener pays attention and cuts off the little bits where, hey, because there's been damage, like a squirrel bitted or something, or it just dries up, they cut that off so that each branch can produce more fruit, and the parts that weren't making it they get burned up because they're not good for anything.

So I you know again, we have choices.

Does God burn up entire branches, or does God prune off the parts of us that are giving not just no nourishment but no joy?

That's why I think wine becomes really important.

Is God pruning off the parts of us that give no joy to ourselves or others?

Except I I think in the in the natural world, in the plant world, you can always take what is not good and compost it and re- so it re-rivalizes and gives me a few.

Unless it's from the vines, and that's the trick, right?

Dead vines are not good for anything.

They don't even make good fuel.

You put them in a fire and they're like and gone.

They don't produce much heat.

Okay.

It's true of a tree, you get heat.

You get heat from burning stuff, you know.

Well, but it's true in garden, because I've done a lot of composting and we can keep a compost pile and all that.

So we use it so we rarely get fertilizer from any grill.

It'd be interesting to think if you lived, let's say, in Mexico and your dominant image was of a cypress, right?

In which new trees aren't even new trees, they're expressions from the same root.

So like the biggest living thing on the planet might be cypresses.

Or they may be aspens, which apparently are all connected underneath.

It's not bad.

It's sort of interesting to think what each specific species might mean for you when you go about reading this.

A coconut tree is very dangerous.

How so?

Because they fall.

One of the major causes of death around the world is by coconut.

And yet you live and die by the coconut, right?

First time I went down to Mexico and I saw those things at the same time.

If they had that in the United States, it would be illegal because it's so dangerous.

I was nearly killed by an avocado one time.

The powder trees were like as tall as you know, office buildings.

It was so fertile there.

And there'd be a lot of rocks.

And I was walking outside and one of them fell right down by the edge of my foot.

It would have cracked my skull.

People think about things like that, but I remember that.

Because we get to hear it a little.

And a lot of times believe means something to us that's kind of flat.

There's some really good work by the scholar Marcus Bork, who has died now about three years ago, who says, you know, in general, there's three or four Latin words that get mapped onto the English word believe, and often we hear things like, whoever believes in God has eternal life, and we start to have a really strong understanding of what that means, which is like assenting to some kind of fact pattern or putting yourself in the party membership one way or another.

And um, if it's helpful, I just give you the shortcut to what Borg says in his book, The Heart of Christianity.

That these three words are the words that are really at the base of the word believe.

So fidelity, of course, we understand that very well.

That's about commitment.

And it's about a commitment that is rooted in a relational connection, right?

So fidelity and marriage, of course, we understand what that means, but that's part of one of the three roots of the word belief.

Fiduciary, you know, is really the root of stewardship.

This is again what it means to believe, is to be a steward, to tend to.

And the third one he puts at believe is visio, like vision.

So a better understanding of this would be like worldview or if you're a previous educator schema.

This is what it means to believe.

So believing in God, Marcus Borg's says, is almost a word that's so laden because of things like fundamentalism and because we believe in the Constitution that we might benefit from changing the word slightly.

Borg says, it's not about whether you believe, it's about whether you belove.

So do you believe in God or do you belove God?

And I want to suggest that I actually find that very helpful.

Believe, we usually put as a cognitive category, and belove allows it to take deeper root in terms of what that means.

Especially if we branch out, you know, that we express love not just through feeling, but through fidelity, right?

I mean again, if you uh have been married for more than two years, I suspect you understand that there is something more to marriage than feeling.

Because feelings tend to last two years or fewer.

And if there's nothing left, there is nothing left.

Um so I can beloved God, especially when I don't feel like it.

How do you how do you define beloved?

Well, through these ways, I think.

Okay.

It's sort of like being in love with, and again, we have to immediately escape just that it's emotional.

Being in love is a set of practices that certainly is often informed by feelings, informed by vision.

I mean, I beloved learning, which means, you know, I mean, I beloved many things.

Earlier in Romans, um Paul says that the problem with the law is that it does not take sin out of the world.

In fact, it defines what sin is.

Yes.

So inadvertently, what the law does is creates a definition of sin.

Yes.

I'm not sure what we're going to do.

How does how does the love take sin out of the world?

Okay, so I think, I think really what, and I don't want to flatten this, so I keep reading this uh over and over again, what Paul's trying to do here, and I'm not sure I've completely got it.

But these to me are like the critical chapters in some ways for like Christian faith as I understand it.

And I think what Paul's really trying to say, and and in some ways he wants to have his cake and eat it too, but he he he's really trying to say something like there's uh the letter and there's the spirit.

And the letter provides death, but the spirit provides life.

And actually that's really, really appropriate because he even kind of uses those terms himself.

In spirit, uh, he ends up saying something like, the Holy Spirit is the one that replaces the power of sin.

He talks about dying to sin, and that baptism is a way of participating in the death of Jesus so that we can live a new life, using our body for righteousness, being slaves to righteousness.

And of course, as Americans, like this is a little bristling.

Hey, the point is to be free, not to become enslaved again.

So it's really helpful to understand in a patronage system that Paul's writing, everyone has a patron.

So it's really about changing your patronage from Patronage that leads to death and to rule-based living letter to patronage that leads to life that is spirit-filled.

I think what Paul is trying to say, and what he ends up, he ends up saying this in Greek, is that the law is our pedagogue.

Our law is our tutor.

But the tutor does not represent the end of all.

The tutor is there to help you grow in your way.

Again, I hear stages of moral development all over this because when you're a child, you have to get taught categorical thinking.

And then when you grow up, you realize, aha, like sometimes there's violations to categorical thinking.

So how do I love my neighbor as I would ought to do love myself?

Curiously enough, the guy who put that out, Larry Kohlberg, who says that essentially the golden rule is the highest form of moral thinking, he says you can't do that without a college education.

That's really interesting.

And not until you're like 40s.

Not really.

It's a little bit elitist dead in, but part of what he's trying to say is if you don't engage in certain levels of thinking, you may not make it.

I don't know if I agree with him, but um he was the last person to make a meta theory, really, about how it is we develop as moral persons.

If that would case the people of people who would be saved mentally challenged and have a chance.

Yeah, you can push on it really hard and you can start to like stratify people in terms of worthiness, which I don't think is what Kohlberg intended.

Okay.

I don't think so.

But it's an easy thing to do.

By the way, I think you could do that with what Paul is doing, because Paul talks about election here, right?

And John Calvin took what we read so literally that he thought he was taking it seriously.

And I want to suggest to you, I think he might have like overread a bit.

Yeah.

But maybe that's just because I disagree about the doctrine of election with John Calvin.

I don't know that I disagree with Paul.

I think there's a lot of room for interpretation here.

And part of what we have to do again, I think, is what's our criteria for interpreting scripture and knowing that we're doing a good job with it?

Is it that what we say seems to line up letter for letter, or is it about the criterion about life-giving for all people at no cost?

See, John Calvin's criteria was hey, um, God's grace is too precious to be wasted.

It's really how he came at it, which means people don't really have a choice because if they could choose, they could waste it.

And that would be dishonoring to God.

So John Calvin took choice off the table.

He read this and said, Look, God's already picked.

And that way, Jesus' life is the most precious thing in the universe ever, and none of it gets poured out on people who are gonna reject it.

So not everybody gets it.

It's logical, it just is really scary to me.

If that makes sense.

I mean, I can tell you as a parent, I pour out all kinds of life that gets wasted.

It's called giving.

But if I only made investments and not gifts, I just didn't know that there'd be much joy in parenting.

All I would do is train a child to be exactly like I am, and boy, I'm not even happy with myself most of the time.

I don't know if that makes sense.

So Carl Bart read Romans and he read Paul saying, Look, God uses whoever God wants to use.

God chooses.

And Carl Bart said, yeah, look, God chose everybody.

What God chose was not who gets saved, God chose how salvation happens.

God predestined not who gets it, God predestined the mechanism salvation.

And the mechanism God predestined was through Jesus Christ.

Whether you know it or not.

That's how Bart read it.

It might have actually been Bart's secretary, who is a really clever lady.

That makes sense.

It's gonna make a, I think, a lot more sense too when you think about last week when we talk about how um Abraham believed God and reckoned reckoned it as righteousness.

And the question is, who was reckoned as righteous?

Abraham because he chose to believe, or Abraham reckoned God as righteous because God outlaid this huge gift.

And that starts to become really important because God says, I'll bless you, and all the peoples of the world will be blessed by you.

And in some ways, we have that ability to work like Abraham does, to get the blessing of God and offer the fruit of the vine to the world.

And this, I think, is Paul's understanding of what of what's happening with Abraham, is that Abraham just happened to maybe be the first person who said okay to God.

This is great Catholic theologian who says, you know, if you ever wonder why it took so long for Jesus to be born, maybe it's because God tried a bunch of times, and Mary was just the first woman who said yes finally.

It took a long time to find someone who would say yes.

I really like that creative thinking.

It's a little bit like Midrash.

But you could run that parallel with Abraham.

Maybe Abraham was not the first person God talked to.

Abraham was the first person to say, alright.

Could be said about Paul.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And Paul is an interesting guy because he's this Jewish scholar, and yet he's he's really found, this is interesting, his his learning has in some ways closed his heart to Gentile people, but his experience has opened his heart to Gentile people.

And isn't that usually how we change categories?

I tell you, for me, uh, I didn't really know what to do uh with gay people until I met a person and then discovered he was gay.

If I'd met him gay up front, I don't know if I would have changed my thinking because I wouldn't have met him, I would have met a label.

But once I met him, and then I discovered the label was there, then I had to figure out was like the kinship I felt with him, was that just fake?

Or I don't know if that makes sense.

Once you've got a relationship, you have to decide, was I tricked or do I have to flip my category?

And this is why I think there's this dominant analogy, not just in Paul, but we we get it a bunch of times, that we have to die to sin.

Because it is painful to flip your categories.

It might feel like you're dying.

It's scary because everything that has held you together and protected you is no longer there.

Yes.

And this is, if you didn't mind me saying, this I think is what Jesus says a whole bunch of times when he says, you can't take God's wine and put it into your old wineskin.

Because God's wine is going to expand and it's going to break your mind.

You need a new wine skin to hold God's mind.

And maybe you've heard of this guy before, Jean Piaget.

I mean, I don't want to overdo educational theory, but happens to be a pet interest of mine.

You know, he sort of says everybody has an equilibrium or a worldview, and the world makes sense to you until all of a sudden you get new information that conflicts with that, and you have a crisis.

Most of these crises won't even pay attention to because in every crisis he says we do one of two things.

We either assimilate, he's only one S, right?

Yes.

I like to put two in there because I think it's pretty.

I think it's pretty S nine when you do this.

We either change the information to fit the way we look at the world, or I think there's two, right?

Or we accommodate our worldview to fit the information, either way, we end up at a new equilibrium.

So I, you know, this I think is what Jesus is trying to say with wineskins.

You can't take the gospel and put it into your old way of thinking.

You can't just include Jesus in your way of looking at the world.

No, Jesus demands you completely change the way you think about the world.

If you try to do this, you're gonna ruin the wine, you're gonna ruin the skin.

See, Jesus is CEO, I'm sorry, that's assimilated.

Forgive me for saying this.

God bless America is assimilated.

America be a blessing to God is accommodated.

I don't know if that makes sense.

America's blessing.

Can you give some more examples of that?

Well, sure.

I'll give you a religious example.

You don't think women should be ministers, but it's okay if they teach small children.

And then you run into this lady who's extremely gifted and spiritual and guides you to a new place.

So what do you do?

Well, she wasn't really preaching.

She's just a teacher, and women are great teachers, and it's great that benefited me.

So go back to teaching.

Oh my god, you mean God can work with women too?

I was wrong all along.

I wonder who else God could work with.

You meet somebody who you think is a lovely human being.

You share interests, you go out to dinner, you find out that they're gay, but you thought being gay was wrong.

Uh they were lying.

They're actually very evil.

The label holds up.

This was a one-off.

Don't usually happen.

Boy, my whole label system was wrong.

Wonder what else I'm wrong about.

You're a kid and you see these funny things that look like letters, but you don't know what that means.

Then you learn how to read.

You have to accommodate the rest of your life to literacy.

You have to.

This is what PAJ says.

And in some ways, our brain is hardwired to enjoy learning, but as learning accrues, having to when you're a kid, it's really easy to change your whole basis in some ways, because it's not very deep or broad.

The older you get, though, the more this can be very painful.

Curiously enough, the senior adults I know, as they age, they tend to be one of two things.

They tend to get much more conservative, or they tend to get much more liberal.

I will tell you, in my experience, the ones who get much more conservative find the world a scarier and scarier place.

And the ones who get much more liberal tend to find a whole lot more joy in the world.

I know that's bad.

I didn't mean that being liberal is better.

I didn't mean that.

It comes with its own challenges.

But I think this is what Jesus is doing when he talks about wineskins, and I think this is what Paul is doing when he talks about baptism and death.

He's talking about dying to assimilation.

He's talking about the Holy Spirit, the spirit of accommodating the gospel, replacing the power of sin, which is assimilation.

And don't you see spirit means moving air.

That's all it means in Greek.

It does not mean like a ghost, it doesn't mean the third person of the Trinity as we do it.

Paul's saying you have to find a new way of breathing.

Think how hard that is because you breathe without even thinking about it.

There is nothing more painful than having to rethink how you breathe.

You're used to not thinking about it.

The worst thing I could do in the pool is think about how I'm supposed to swim.

It makes it terrible.

Thank God I already know how to swim.

But I've got problems with how I swim.

Don't you see?

Think about your stroke.

Think about how you breathe.

Die to just doing it intuitively because the way you're doing it intuitively is not actually giving you a whole lot of life.

That pattern works for lots of things.

PJ says it works for everything.

For everything.

The only way you learn is like that, is what he said.

Based on hard research.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, no.

That is truth.

That is educational truth.

In a diagram.

That's how you learn everything that you know.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, isn't that the same thing that who was this?

Hegel?

Oh, the dialectical, yeah, absolutely.

Sure.

Okay.

And Kierkegaard says it as either or.

Now I'm not always sure there's only two.

I'm not always sure there's only two choices.

But I think what Kierkegaard is really saying is at the fundamental level, the choices are you change the information to fit you, or you repent.

And also, isn't that something mature in your life?

Well, I'll tell you curiously enough, this is gonna sound judgmental.

I don't want to sound condemning.

I want to sound judgmental.

I know really advanced, intelligent people in the medical field who are at moral development stage one.

Yes, yeah, yes.

And I know people, frankly, who are tree trimmers who were at moral development stage seven.

So this is the thing about Kohlberg that's weird is I'm not sure education guarantees what you do morally.

And it's maybe worth mentioning if you're a woman, Kohlberg's student Carol Gilligan, and she he worked with her a lot, even though she decided not to include him in her bibliography.

Um she says that a woman actually comes back to thinking about herself.

That's the highest stage for women because they skipped that stage when they were kids.

Women weren't ever allowed to think of themselves.

And another factor with women's moral uh judgments, it's based on relationships.

Men's is based on rules.

Principles.

Principles.

Women's women have been criticized for not being morally as highly morally developed.

That's right.

But theirs is based on relationships.

That's where you kind of have to put Gilligan and Kohlberg together, which Kohlberg wanted to do, but Carol wasn't having it.

So let me just say, speaking of what you said, and then I'm curious, men and women reportedly have different ways of dealing with disagreements and conflicts among themselves, such as men who work together can have a big disagreement, and they'll be buddies and still be friends.

And women can just hate you forever because you disagree with them.

Well, I mean, I think it's it's one thing to talk about generalities, and obviously that doesn't include everybody, what you're saying.

And part of that I think has to do with you could say, oh, that's chemical, but I think you could also say it's socialization.

And I and and then I think this becomes even more important.

This isn't off the topic.

I think this is kind of what Paul is talking about, actually.

It has to do with how women and men resolve their differences differently.

If if that is the case.

And what resolution even looks like?

What resolution do we value?

And I think there's different values out there.

Some people value one person's right, the other person's wrong.

Resolved.

Some people value community gets restored at the end of disagreement.

Um that's interesting.

Consider how different our political spectrum would be right now if we valued community instead of victory.

This is really amazingly interesting and fascinating.

So I think again, when you come back to the vine, forgive me for saying this, but in the normative masculine world, yeah, you're wrong, God cuts you off.

In the feminine world, how can you cut off a member of your family?

Yeah, yeah.

So I think it's really interesting to hold those pieces together.

Um interesting fact that maybe you don't know is that in Romans chapter 6, Paul is um does not show up in your translation.

Romans 6 · chapter mention

Paul is really, really fast to use some profanity.

So the Bible translator has not done this.

What shall we say then?

Shall we go on sinning that grace may increase?

By all means, no, is what your translator writes.

What Paul writes is number sign at exclamation point.

Uh no.

Again, are we, is our patron righteousness or is our patron death?

I think that's really interesting.

I can't help but call up Ash Wednesday.

Ash Wednesday is a reminder that we die, a lot of what we do will die with us.

But not everything dies with us.

Like faith, hope, and love.

Those things live on in the Lord.

So uh even in small moments, those things live on.

So since you've got a potential patron of eternal life, faith, hope, and love, do those commissioned works.

Don't do the commissioned works that will take you to things that don't last.

I'm sorry, I don't know what the word patron means.

A patron is like a sponsor.

So, like in the in in the ancient world, really, you have to think that 1% of the population has 99.8% of all the resources.

So there's there's an equestrian class of nobility, and then there's peasants.

There's really no middle class.

And so the way this sort of works is that if you're not one of those nobles, even if you are a noble, you still need patronage from the emperor in order to sort of survive.

Um who is your patron?

Michelangelo didn't sell works on the free market.

They were commissioned by people who had wealth and prestige, and he could not have been an artist without their patronage.

Same thing if you grew wheat.

You didn't own a land, you had to have, I mean, you were a thief.

So you needed the patronage of your lord in order to just do anything.

We could say, oh, that's slavery, but it's not African slavery.

I don't know if that makes sense.

I mean, really, the understanding is everybody is relying on somebody going up in order to do anything that they do.

And the whole societal system was that.

Everything was that.

Everything.

Is it not a little bit like that now?

Yeah, I mean, we like to pretend it is.

We like to pretend it's not.

I mean, I and I you can think whatever you want about Barack Obama, but he made this particular speech that said, you know, we like to think that uh we're self-made people, but you didn't build that road.

Your business relies on it, but you didn't build it.

I mean, and that's that's I think a really interesting thing about what it means to actually live in community and therefore to live in patronage.

And what we can say is, hey, the patron is the polis, like the city is the patron, but we can't really live as true individuals.

You know, I mean there's there's always community ties.

So I think again that the thing is who is sponsoring you?

Or whose sponsorship are you courting or seeking?

Are you sponsoring ways that don't last?

We're gonna call those death with a capital D, or ways that will outlive you, we're gonna call that life with a capital L.

Paul is definitely not talking about our mortality.

We're all gonna die, that doesn't bother Paul.

He's talking about living in death with a capital D, which is just lifelessness.

And I'm thinking maybe I'm thinking that one of the reasons Jesus is teaching about community.

And they don't helping each other was so one of the reasons it was so threatening to the powers that they is that he was encouraging uh to help each other and take care of each other so they weren't so dependent on the powers that they're gonna be able to do.

Yeah.

I mean this is gonna sound really strange, so so don't fly off the handle on me.

But if you take what Paul is saying very, very uh seriously, he's really describing communism, not capitalism.

That doesn't mean like as a government structure, he's talking about maybe I should say he's talking about communalism.

That's probably a safer word to use.

Uh went back and resettled the new Israel.

The kibbutz?

The kibbutz, yeah.

And apparently did it work out, was it not effective for that period of time?

It did some really interesting things.

Okay.

And of course, now most Israelis are not interested in living on the kibbutz.

That would have been but it didn't turn into a new Soviet Union.

No, no, again, I think, and that's why I want to say communalism is probably the better word.

Instead of relying on free markets to create everything, they relied on communities.

And and I want to suggest that's a helpful thing to understand when you hear about the branches.

If you think about, hey, make it or not, cut off or perish, that's one way you could hear it, but that's like a capitalist interpretation.

It this looks very different when you think about communities and and who can you stand to live without.

That becomes really, I think, important when we hear it.

And so I don't think we need to think of a particular set of fact pattern that Jesus did.

Paul's trying to say, there's a there's there's good news, which is that we're living in ways that are not going to outlast us, but we don't have to.

So an interesting way to think about this when you hear eternal life, you could think, oh, that means life after we die.

But any understanding of eternity means, right, that it's it goes, the timeline goes in both ways, which means every moment we have has infinite points of intersection with eternity.

So those moments when we experience God are just the moments we get it.

But really, God would like to get us to get it a lot more.

I don't know if that makes sense.

Um there were some really interesting bits here, right?

That that fundamentalism that taught me these verses.

I mean, I memorized the Roman road of salvation.

Boy, we just didn't seem to really understand.

There's now, therefore, no condemnation for those that are in Christ Jesus.

Again, the question is who is in Christ Jesus?

And no condemnation, no really means no.

The way I really internalized that was no means maybe.

But no means no.

And then what we really worried about is, oh boy, how do you know if you're in or you're not?

Well, it must be because you prayed a particular set of bits.

But then Paul goes on to say, um, we're more than conquerors because neither heights nor depths nor powers nor principalities, nothing can separate us from the love of God that's in Christ Jesus.

So when he says us, to whom does he mean?

Remember, these were read aloud to people who may not have checked all of Paul's doctrinal finger points.

So I these are different ways of hearing these verses that I ingested.

The way I was taught is the us means Christian people who have prayed the sinner's prayer, but that's not to whom Paul Paul didn't even know these people, he's never met them.

So they were going to the Gent the Gent the Greeks and the Jewish community.

Yeah.

And so it's all inclusive.

Well, I I think so, and that's actually where Paul is like a little bit frustrated because his whole way of understanding the good news is run through his own Jewish script and Jewish filtration.

But he's not wildly successful in synagogues.

We read that in Acts.

He's more successful with the people who are thinking about being Jewish, but can't quite circumcise themselves as adults.

Like they just, that's a really tough step for them.

Uh that's his success.

He's really frustrated with synagogues.

But you know, the apostle James was not frustrated with synagogues.

He was very happy to worship at the temple every day of his life.

So Paul got put out in ways that James didn't.

And really, part of what Paul is trying to do is like, boy, how do I be radically inclusive and also honor the heritage that was exclusive?

I don't know if that makes sense.

Because the temple the temple, um, the community, that community, they weren't really all listening to what he was saying.

I mean, they didn't probably didn't like it too much.

I I think I think there's the other sticky wicket here, which I think makes a whole lot of sense.

And we had some like resentment that people could like pray their way to heaven on their deathbed.

We really resented that.

You can tell because it showed up in sermons a lot.

Don't wait till your deathbed to accept the Lord because you could die suddenly and then it wouldn't work.

So you need to take it on now.

What we were really afraid of is that God's grace would be free to people who weren't miserable like we were.

That was really good.

Like you had to be miserable about being afraid of God and and and and converting other people.

And I think what Paul's trying to do is say, no, look, in some ways, this law or this understanding of God is about opportunities, and hey, you could choose to miss out on the opportunity, and that would be tough.

So is that bad?

Well, no, knowing about opportunities is really, really good.

I I think, and then you you get to hear this story in the parables of Jesus.

I think there's always resentment when you've worked really hard on behalf of something.

Yeah.

And then you see other people who haven't put in the work, and you all get the same wages.

You know that you know that the workers in the vineyard.

The workers in the vineyard.

I can tell you, I showed up at six in the morning and I work through the heat of the day.

So people who get paid the same wage as I do, who show up at 6 p.m.

and do what?

Smoke a cigarette, put the shovel in the shed?

The parable literally says the people are mad because you've made those people equal to us.

And the thing that makes the daytime workers so mad is radical equality.

And it's to be honest, it makes me mad too.

When I got a degree from college, I looked at the other people who got the same piece of paper I got, and I know what their work ethic was like, and I did not feel good about my piece of paper anymore because my paper made them equal to me.

I don't know if that makes sense what I'm saying.

How are we supposed to deal with that?

Uh well, I didn't know that's supposed to.

I think we have a lot of options, and hopefully the way we deal with it doesn't cost them very much.

We could be bitter about it, but the question is who pays the greatest price?

We do.

Yeah.

If you're okay living bitterly, go for it.

Uh in some ways, I'm okay living bitterly because uh I go for that sometimes, you know.

It's not even a question about shoulds, what do we choose to set up for?

Because living bitterly is living in death with a capital D.

I can judge the behavior without condemning it.

I'm still trying to work out how to do that.

Or I can I can judge that scenario without condemning the person.

I mean, at the end of the day, the person who got that same piece of paper, I don't think their wheels or machinations were to be evil students.

The institution gave them the same paper I got, you know?

I mean, there you have it.

Part of the thing I think Paul is talking about is our just obsessive tendency to jockey for worth to try to justify our existence.

And some people don't seem to worry about that.

But Paul seems to be worried about that and writing to people who are worried about that.

So, good news, you don't have to justify your own existence.

Well, if that's true, what value was there in religious disciplines I took on?

Well, there was a lot of value if they increased your life.

So we think maybe this is the way to say it.

And I could be wrong.

I'm trying to really make this faith conversion that God's gonna handle reconciliation for us when we're dead.

God's gonna do it.

And reconciliation is a good thing, even though it's painful.

It's God's best idea.

If I'm not able to do it while I'm alive, God will do it for me after I die.

But you see, my opportunity is to start enjoying it now.

And if I don't, I'll get it later.

I'm just missing out on it now.

And boy, life's too precious to wait.

So I'll tell you, there are people who I cannot be reconciled with, and I'm pretty sure God understands that.

I don't think God says, you loser, if you were a real Christian, you'd be reconciled now.

I think God really understands why I can't do that.

And I think God feels not pity for me, but I think God feels empathy for me.

They're there, I'll take care of that for you later.

These are the best kinds of images I can come up with after reading Paul's treatment of Judaism.

There's an astonishing verse in 828.

In all things, God is able to work for the good of those who love God.

I want you to hear that.

God is able.

The question is whether we're willing.

Our willingness determines when it happens, now or later.

That doesn't mean God causes people to be alcoholics.

However, even alcohol abuse, God is able to work toward our good, which is crazy to think about.

Because that's like about the worst thing I can think of.

God doesn't cause people to be raped so that they can have a testimony later.

Rape is absolutely outside of God's imagination.

But the amazing part is that even that God can turn somehow to our good.

I I mean that's really it.

God is just God is able to redeem the most irredeemable things.

When it happens, it's up to us.

That's in times of crisis or devastation, that's always been my prayer.

God, help me know.

Help me do with this what you want me to do.

Help me turn this into growth or closeness to you, or whatever it is.

I don't know what you have in mind for me, but do it.

And I think that's part of like the opportunity before us when we look at ourselves in the mirror of time, is to say, we could say, like, oh, I regret wasting all that time.

I'm, you know, I have all of these scars from relationships that I should have known better and I hate that.

Or we could say, boy, like I'm really satisfied like God is with what's in the mirror, and those scars are part of who I am.

And I wouldn't take them back because that's who I am.

So in a case like that where you have this horrible person or thing that you've had to deal with, and you become reconciled and you feel love and respect and everything, but you can't be around without a deterioration.

Is that okay?

I just think it's is what it is, and I think that's the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation.

Forgiveness is a gift I give to myself.

Reconciliation means we both want a future together after something's happened and we pursue it, and we can never force reconciliation.

I'm saying I think God's gonna force it after we die.

But I can want so badly to be reconciled with people who have hurt me, and if they don't want it, it'll never happen.

And I could be really mad at God that they don't want it, but I can't control that.

And um, there's people who could really want to be reconciled with me, and I just can't do it.

I just can't.

Because to even go there would take me back to just actively bleeding out of the wounds that they've helped cause.

I don't know if it's again right or wrong.

There's a lot to be said for surviving.

Yeah, I do think God understands that empathetically, and does not condemn us for it.

I think that's really important.

And I, you know, I can't help but think of this Japanese thing with pottery.

Maybe you know this, it's called um, I'm gonna say this wrong.

Raken.

It's kinsuki, where um a broken ceramic vessel is mended with gold.

So that the the seam is always visible, and um what it takes to rectify a seam is extravagant.

It's worth more than the vessel ever was.

And it becomes beautiful.

And it becomes beautiful.

I mean, I actually kind of wish I had one of our clay uh communion chalices that I could intentionally break and have somebody mend it so you could see that gold vein, because that's the message of the Eucharist.

It's stronger, it's extravagant.

And you can see all the scenes.

It shows you there's brokenness there, and the brokenness has been exceptionally valued by the artist in reconciling and repairing it.

And it's a beautiful thing.

I'm trying to find someone to lead a workshop here at St.

Thomas because there's something great.

I just haven't been able to find that person.

Kensuki?

I should write it on the board.

But I have to look it up because I this is like not my native tongue.

I'm sure I'm not even saying it right.

Yeah, it is, it's Kentsugi.

K-I-N-T-S-U-G-I.

If you know somebody who does this, please let me know because I would love to hire them to do a workshop here.

K-I-N-T-S-U-G-I.

K-I-N-M-T-S-I-U-G-G I.

Go ahead and Google image that and you'll see it.

You'll see these ceramic bowls.

Some people even embellish it, like they'll put little leaves on these veins that are made.

I don't know what I think about that, but you know, again, like you see this veining, and to me, I don't know what it means in Japan.

It's not my native speech.

I think it means what I'm saying, but um the the vessel isn't even worth that labor.

It would be so much easier to just start over and make a new vessel.

And cheaper.

But and cheaper.

But there's value in mending community, not starting over.

I mean, I think that's where it's really interesting thing about grafting off branches that have been broken.

It takes a lot more work to do that than it does in some ways to start over.

But the reason it's important is those Bordeaux roots are irreplaceable.

And the more challenges they face, the better the fruit.

In fact, there's a wine guy uh who I met recently, and I uh you know when there were those fires in California?

Yes.

Uh big ones, and there were some this year too.

He said, any year there's a big fire, the wine's gonna be great.

Because the vines have to deal with all this complexity in the environment, and they put that into the grapes.

I mean, isn't that an interesting thing?

Wow.

When it's easy, the grapes aren't as good.

That's what he said.

So in years of drought or smoke, the wine will be better.

Sanctification.

Yes.

Turning CO2 into oxygen.

Right.

I mean, again, these are like just little ways of understanding.

And in our lives, right, I think that becomes really how our gifts start to become complex and robust when they come from places of I'm not sure and I choose to give anyway.

Giving when I feel like it is super easy, I love it.

You know?

But the fruit is a lot more complex when I wasn't sure about it.

I want to suggest to you that the most dangerous way we could read what Paul does is to be anti-Semitic.

And a lot of our Christian colleagues have done this.

And I would even tell you I grew up in a fundamentalist church that essentially said Jewish people are inferior to Christian people because Paul says this.

And and I just think it's a complete misread.

And there are enemies seen today.

That's what I was talking about.

Yeah.

It's really, really scary, and I I just I have to mention it because these scriptures are rife for abuse.

And um abuse is the right word.

That is what I get when I was reading it.

I thought, so this is where they get all this.

And that's not that's not what he said.

That can't be what he said.

Absolutely.

He's Jewish himself.

Yeah.

Jesus was Jewish himself.

It's the foundation.

Can you ask at the beginning what were your image?

Yeah, thank you.

Okay, so one of them for me was hell.

So talking about how you can't, you know, to be careful about how you read and how these scriptures can be used abusively.

That was one that, you know, previously reading Romans, that probably wasn't the word that jumped out of.

But this time it was all.

Yeah.

I'm glad for that.

Thank you.

Maybe one other word to offer to you about the baptism metaphor.

Remember that the word baptism, it shows up in your translation.

We were baptized into the death of Jesus, but that's a Greek word, baptized, and it just means like fully immersed or dumped.

You were completely immersed in the death of Jesus.

You weren't sprinkled with it.

You went under so that you could live an entirely new life.

And what Paul is saying, I think, is something like W.

E.

E.

B.

Dubois said, which is we need to be willing at any moment to sacrifice who we are for the sake of who we can become.

And I think that brings us right back up onto the board.

We don't get sprinkled with the gospel, we get submerged.

And in that way, baptism is this analogy for dying.

It's complete.

Transformed, God doesn't want us to be transfigured, God wants us to be transformed.

So if the gospel is another way of being a tribalist, we weren't baptized, we were sprinkled.

I don't know if that makes sense.

We have a lot of worry about alcohol-fueled analogies because of things like prohibition and alcohol abuse, but it's important to remember that this business about wine and nourishment and joy was not written in a context like ours.

It was written in which you needed to drink wine to have basic vitamins.

I mean, it was important.

And because you needed it, boy, some wine's better than others.

I think we get that.

Some wine is really bitter, and it becomes really interesting to think: are we producing bitter grapes?

Vinegar.

Or are we producing good wine?

I mean, I you know, I think this is this is a really helpful way to kind of end this section.

I want to give you a heads up.

Next week is spring break for the school.

So I may be like 9.05, 9.10.

I'm coming.

The doors won't be open, but I promise I'm coming.

So if you feel comfortable, can we just say we're gonna start at 9.15 next week?

That would really help me because my daughter's going to gymnastics camp and I'll be here by 9.15.

Okay.

We'll finish Romans next week.

You know that in the middle of ages, they would feed babies beer because that's a take care of the bacteria and all that in the milk.

My my daughter happens to love beer.

Our pediatrician said it was okay.