Romans 1-5

Okay, so we're going to talk about the first five chapters of Romans, but if you didn't mind, I want to talk to you a little bit more about Paul's use of scripture and frankly how our use of scripture has really changed.

So we normally think of I shouldn't say I don't want to say how we do it, but I think I want you to hear how Jewish people have always used Scripture.

And I'm going to go to the board and just sort of show you that when our Jewish brothers and sisters read the Bible, they don't have one reading on a page.

Still, what'll happen is you'll have the words of Scripture in the innermost parts.

If you're Jewish, you don't call this the Old Testament.

You call it the Bible.

So I would tell you, if you're looking for a lengthened discipline, don't call it the Old Testament.

Call it the Hebrew Bible because Paul's gonna say God did not do away with this.

Old Testament implies antiquated, beat up, no spark plugs.

To me, uh that is a disservice to our roots and to Jesus.

Jesus didn't say, throw that junk away.

Every time Jesus talks, he uses the scriptures.

So if you're Jewish, you read this way.

Now, I don't know if you know this, but our Jewish brothers and sisters, they read right to left.

So you start in the back of the book for us and you go forward.

On the same page is something called the Talmud.

And it may be at the top of the page.

What's the Talmud?

The Talmud is rabbinic commentary on the scriptures.

And it's very old.

Like we think the Talmud was put together sometime.

It depends which one.

There's a couple major ones, like there's the Babylonian Talmud, there's a Spanish one, there's a Jerusalem one.

So it depends what kind of Jew you are, which Talmud you were reading.

Over time, what's happened is some of that's been combined.

And what's really interesting is Rabbi Gamaliel might say it means X, and Rabbi Kiva might say it means something totally different.

And both of those are on the page with the scripture.

Both of them, dissenting opinions, show up.

Then there's something called the Gemara.

And that's written here.

And the Gemara is commentary on the Talmud.

So it's rabbinic interpretation of rabbinic interpretation of the scripture.

Then at the bottom of the page says that the most interesting thing, and that's the Midrash.

Now, Midrash is creative interpretation of the Bible.

So if you've ever heard, has anybody ever heard of Lilith?

Lilith is not in the Bible, but Lilith comes right out of the Midrash.

And it came from rabbis reading Genesis 1 and then Genesis 2 and saying, why does the story happen twice?

And what they decide is at the end of Genesis 1, Lilith wasn't cutting it.

So God had to make another woman.

And this is really, really interesting because it's nowhere in the text.

It's not even anywhere in the Talmud or the Gemarah.

It's the truth that there are gaps in the Bible.

And so they imagined how to fill the gaps.

And that imagination was compelling enough to people that it shows up on the page.

So if you're a Jewish reader today, you're reading four things at a time, not one.

Does that make sense what I'm saying?

In the church, do they read all of them?

In the synagogue?

Well, it depends.

In the synagogue, what they may do is read this, and then your rabbi might reference these, but all any of the three, but also give their own opinion.

Okay.

So I don't know if you've been to a synagogue before.

Again, just like, by the way, we carry the gospel down the aisle because that's what our Jewish brothers and sisters do with the Torah.

They carry it down the aisle, especially if they're Sephardic.

If they're Ashkenazi, they don't take it as far.

But if they're Sephardic, they take it up in this thing called the Bhima and they read it in the middle of a congregation and they bring it back out.

They put it back up.

We have a tabernacle for the reserve wine and bread.

That's where they put the Torah, in the the Ark.

If you're Russian Orthodox, you call that thing the Ark, too.

Okay.

They're reading four things at a time.

Unlike the church I grew up in, descent of opinion is on every single page.

Descent of opinion is not an aberration, it's normal.

If you don't disagree, there's something wrong with you.

Now, you may be saying, yeah, but Mike, isn't the Talmud order old uh isn't that newer than Paul?

Well, not really.

The written Talmud is newer than Paul.

But if you're here Sunday, you heard me say when Moshe goes up on top of the mountain, which is either called, this is really interesting, Sinai or Horeb.

It depends which book you're reading.

When Moshe goes up there, God tells Moshe two things.

One is the written Torah.

The Torah is Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

The first five books of the Bible, which we call in Greek the Pentateuch, because there's five.

But God tells Moses something else called the oral Torah.

That is, Moses didn't write everything down.

So what did he do with the rest?

Moses passed that down verbally to his descendants and the descendants of Aaron, who told their children, who told their children, who told their children.

And rabbis are the people who heard that.

And that oral Torah didn't get written down until around the year 1000 of our common era.

So this was the benefit of being a rabbi is you knew what God told Moses that wasn't written down, and you pass that on to your children.

I'll give you an example, if you don't mind.

You cannot boil a kid in its mother's milk.

Now in Hebrew the word is spelled like so.

H-L V.

And if you do it like this, if you put the vowels E and E, it spells milk.

But if you put the vowels like this, it spells fat.

Now most, almost every scholar who reads the Bible is going to tell you it should say fat.

Because if you cook a kid in its mother's fat, you've killed two generations at once.

And that is not sustainable.

You cannot kill the mother and the baby, or you won't have any more.

This is exactly parallel with if you find a nest of eggs and mama's on it.

You can either eat mom or you can eat the eggs, but you can't have both.

If you have both, there'll be no more birds.

It makes a lot of sense.

So why do our Jewish brothers and sisters translate it as milk, which quite honestly makes no sense.

Not nutritionally, not with the rest of scripture.

They do this because of the oral Torah.

Because Moses said it's milk.

Even though he didn't write it.

So Paul is reading Scripture in these ways.

And here's the interesting thing.

Paul doesn't quote the Hebrew Bible.

Paul quotes the Hebrew Bible in Greek.

And that's called either the Septuagint or it's shown as the LXX.

That's just the Roman numeral for 70.

The story of the Greek Bible is that people could no longer, Hebrew's been a dead language for a long time.

But people couldn't even read it.

So now what they did is they took 70 rabbis and they had them translate the Bible from Hebrew to Greek and miraculously.

Each translation agreed at every single point.

And it's a miracle because two rabbis can't agree on anything.

And 70 agreed on everything, and so there came the belief that this was even better than that.

There are Christians who think the King James Bible in 1611 is the Word of God, better than even this.

They get it because of that.

By the way, they're terribly wrong.

I said that there.

If you like the King James, read the New King James, same language, better manuscripts.

So sometimes we think, oh, look, there's always been a normative interpretation of the Bible.

There's one way to read it.

And what Paul's revealing to us is that that's a recent Christian development and has never been a Jewish way of reading the Bible.

There's always been a conversation on every single page and imagination on every single page.

If you were here Sunday, you heard me notice that Jesus has a conversation with Elijah and Moses, and the disciples didn't record it because they weren't listening.

Imagining the conversation they had is exactly what rabbis have always done.

We say, oh, preachers shouldn't do that.

They're taking liberty with the text.

That's what Paul does.

He imagines how this might play out.

If you read the letter to the Hebrews, it is completely full of Midrash.

The author of Hebrews imagines stuff at every turn, and we've just forgotten we're allowed to read that way.

The criterion for whether something is a good read or not is not whether it shows up in black.

The criterion is does it give more life to the community and who does it cost?

I don't know if that makes sense.

The Bible wasn't meant to be worshipped, is what I'm trying to say.

The Bible was meant to start, not finish, a holy conversation where people come together and disagree but choose to worship together.

And that's what it means to be an Episcopalian, by the way.

I hope I didn't overpresent that.

Paul cites this really strange story in Genesis where Abraham believes God and it was credited to him as righteousness.

Was credited to whom as righteousness?

That's what I'm asking you.

Who gets the credit for being righteous?

Don't be scared, it's not a trick question.

What's very interesting is going predating Paul, the commentators say it's God who's righteous, not Abraham.

Abraham believes God and credited God as being righteous for making a promise God didn't have to.

It's not about Abraham's faith, it's about God's faithfulness to faithless people.

You ever heard that interpretation?

In there.

See, this is the interesting thing.

You can still read it.

Crack the Jewish Bible that's got the commentary, and that's how the rabbis hear it.

It has nothing to do with Abraham's faith.

It's all about God is faithful even to faith-less people, and Abraham chooses to believe in God's faithfulness.

You don't believe in God and earn the reward.

God's going to give it to you anyway, so you trust in it.

That's the rabbinic read of the story.

Now that changes the whole way this hinges in Romans.

Is it the only way to read it?

No, but doesn't it make more sense to you?

Otherwise, faith is something, it's wages.

If you don't believe the right stuff, you don't earn the proper reward.

But Romans is against that whole concept.

Romans is about God being faithful in spite of our faithlessness.

Why did I never hear that in church?

Because we only read that.

And we decided that all of this was the Jewish law.

And that's the worst translation there is.

You can't translate this word very effectively into English.

Paul is reading not the law, he's reading the Torah.

If you're Jewish, the Torah is God's first and greatest gift to you.

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

Because that's where God tells you how to live in community with God and other people.

It's a gift, not an imposition.

And if you're Jewish, and Paul certainly was, he quotes Isaiah a bunch, but Isaiah is always of secondary importance to the Torah.

If you're Jewish, the Bible is ranked.

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy are the most important things always.

Next come the prophets, and last come the Psalms.

If you're Christian in general, when we read the Hebrew Bible, we say, let's turn to the Psalms, which are the least important things.

The reason Paul quotes Isaiah and Psalms so much is because not all Jews read them.

He took for granted that every Jewish person knew the Torah, because by the time you were 13, you had to have it memorized.

That's what happened when you had your bar mitzvah.

You knew the commands.

So then Paul reads the prophets and the writings because not everybody else read those.

I don't know if that was interesting.

But I want you to hear sometimes we take creative license with the scripture, and we're supposed to.

How do we know when we've gone too far?

When it costs other people and when it leads to sin and death.

That's when we did it wrong.

Rob Bell says this another way.

He says, faith and scripture are not a brick wall.

They're supposed to be trampolines that you can jump on and play with and propel us to new heights.

But if someone's laying on the trampoline and you jump on them, you did it wrong.

I hope that was okay that I added that there.

He says Paul read with freedom, but again, that was the normative way to read.

And if you read middle-aged commentary, they make scripture an allegory for all kinds of things that most of us would say, that is crazy.

But it was meaningful for them.

This may be way off, and I'm not sure.

But when I've been with Jewish people over a meal, and they don't agree on some of the history, or they they will disagree amongst themselves, and I don't know what that means, or is that.

I mean, here's what's here's what we've lost because of Christian denominationalism.

We've lost the ability to disagree with one another and still respect each other.

If you're Jewish, it's given.

You're going to disagree, and you're going to come back next week.

That's what we lost.

And you spend the weekend together at this particular third week.

You spend the weekend disagreeing at the same table.

We got table from Judaism.

That's where we got it from.

And what we forget is table in the Lord's house works like table at your house.

And if it's quiet and everybody has to agree, it's not very inviting.

It becomes an altar where you sacrifice your life.

So, no, we're supposed to be nourished at this table.

That's, I think that's where we're meant to go.

And the Hebrew Bible is so important because so many Christian people say, oh, there's the God of the Old Testament, and then there's the God of the New Testament.

Paul did not believe that at all.

There was no New Testament.

Paul was reading the scriptures, the Hebrew Scriptures, and he found them very life-giving.

Well, what do you do with passage where God tells people to kill other people?

Well, you read the rabbis who say, I don't think God would do that.

That's what you do.

Boy, I felt that way, but surely God isn't like that.

I mean, the rabbis were writing stuff like that way back.

If we read the Bible normatively, like when God's mad and wants to kill the people, and we say, oh, that's how God is, we're not even reading faithfully in the Jewish tradition.

Jewish people say that's how those people felt, but God doesn't feel like that.

If you want to believe that, that's okay.

Just make sure you don't do it.

That's the other bit.

So in bar mitzvah, you have to know.

Back then, not anymore.

Now, if you want to have a bar mitzvah, you've got to be able to chant a little bit of the Hebrew text.

That's about it.

And you've practiced that text for a long time.

It's not like we just crack it open and there you go.

But at the time of Jesus, to really be a to have a bar mitzvah, you were supposed to know all of the mitzvot, the commands.

There are, boy, I'm going to get this wrong, 613 of them.

And they're pulled out of the scriptures.

So if you don't know him, you can't be a son of the commands if you don't know the commands.

That's what it means.

Bar mitzvah means son of the commandment.

Vat mitzvah is a new thing.

I mean, girls weren't allowed to study the Torah at all.

And they weren't even out in church.

Or in the synagogue.

Yeah.

So, what about those passages where Paul prohibits women from speaking?

And how can we let females be priests and bishops because we're faithful in the Jewish way of reading the text, don't you see?

The text is not meant to normalize.

The text is supposed to start a holy conversation.

And again, we can say, well, then what difference does it make?

It starts the conversation.

Well, how do you know if you're just making it say what you want?

The criteria is who gets life and who does it cost?

I hope that makes sense.

I've created God in my own image, if God hates the same people.

I do.

What's the answer to that?

Who should it cost?

It shouldn't cost anybody.

Shouldn't cost anybody.

In fact, we read all this stuff about Jesus going underneath in order to lift people up.

So who does it cost?

It costs people who have privilege to lay their privilege down so other people can have it.

But that's how families work, right?

I mean, who changes diapers?

Mothers and fathers, who are supposed to be the top of the family.

They act at the bottom in order to raise babies up.

I mean, that's how families work.

So that's how God's family is supposed to work.

We don't get put out changing diapers, feeding hungry people, washing dirty feet, doing mobile medical clinics.

That doesn't put us out.

We lay our privilege down to raise other people up.

Well, I think so, anyway.

But that's just my idea.

So therefore, God changes your heart?

Through our hands, that's right.

That's the point.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, I think so.

Worse.

I think it's great.

I mean, you when you've got seen about four times my daughter has turned into a Tasmanian devil.

I mean, like her head was rotating 360 degrees.

She was literally like clawing, and I don't know what happened.

You know, I could have said, what's your name?

And she would have said, Legion, for we are many.

And look, it is true that I left her in her car seat until she like got out of that, you know, which was like 20 minutes.

But I didn't not love her because she was crazy.

We just needed to deal with that differently, you know.

And ultimately, I think she was tired and had too much sugar, and then that demon left her, and she was herself.

But I didn't love her any less when she was full of that unclean spirit.

What you said reminded me of the Molot Teresa, which is obviously Jewish people have groups like that?

So, what the Jewish people believe, especially since um you can find this in the Ka'abalah, this came out of mysticism, out of the Zohar, is that every act of small kindness repairs the world.

So they believe that actually God's spirit has been sort of broken and we put it back together.

It's called Tekunolam, the healing of the world.

Now, we may say, oh, that's a little bit too much, but it but it actually is part of what our faith says, especially on Ash Wednesday, a lot of the things we do are gonna die when we die.

Thank God for that.

Our pettiness, our impatience, our greed, all that dies with us.

It will not live on.

But faith, hope, and love outlast us.

And in those sense, those moments when we're faith, hope, and love repairs the world.

Is that sort of the opposite of what Shakespeare said from thinking correctly?

The good men do.

That's a political speech.

Okay.

The evil men does is after them, the good is often teared with their bones.

So let it be with Caesar.

But then he goes on to bring the good of Caesar right back out so he can rile up the crowd.

So that's manipulative.

Yeah, that's manipulative by Mark Anthony.

Okay, I I don't want to overspend my sermon, but I did want to follow up again ways of reading the Bible and how, again, the tradition that brought me up has totally flattened it.

There's one right way instead of how can we have a conversation about this knowing it's okay to disagree?

How can we continue to worship together, especially when we disagree?

I can tell you many days I go to exercise, and there's a lot of disagreement in my body.

Usually the muscles are the first ones to say no, and then the stomach says no, and actually, like my desire also says no, but then there's these other parts of me that say yes.

And that's how bodies work.

It's lovely when we all say yes at the same time.

I mean, you know, those days when you go to exercise and you're like, I feel great, and I've got energy, and my muscles are good, and this is fun, but boy, those are rare days for me.

Bodies are like that.

Okay, we don't have to have that anymore.

We can talk about Romans, or we can talk about both.

And I'm really interested to hear what the first five chapters of Romans are doing for you, or if you've got anything left over from that.

Well, the the first thing that occurred to me as I was reading, um I can see where the idea of original pen came from.

Um I can see where Carl Warner got his the the uh the the anonymous Christian idea.

Um he seems to be very open.

Um he characterizes himself as the apostle to the Gentiles, and I and I kind of like the Abraham story too.

I I I thought that was very fascinating.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah, there's a lot here.

Some people have said the letter to the Romans is one of the most influential writings in the Judeo-Christian tradition, even if you have no faith.

Like this is one of the most important writings in Western civilization.

Well, I think I I think it is because everything else we have built upon this.

Yeah.

Could we maybe talk, or you maybe talk, a little bit about election?

Absolutely.

Let's let's talk about it.

Tell me where you're coming from.

I I just like the discussion of it that we see it all through scripture.

I mean, it's it's I know that uh a lot of people push back on it and it's uncomfortable for a lot of people.

What's it do for you?

I mean, where where are you in the conversation?

I feel I I feel grateful if that's how it happens for me.

I'd be grateful.

Um but then there's the question of of other people and and if if I am a chosen one, I don't want there to be others who are not chosen.

So there's a way to show concern for justice.

Is it fair to others?

I think the Paul provides for that.

Okay.

Because he says basically even even if if you're not a Christian, there are certain basic values in human beings.

Yes.

Yeah, if you emphasize those.

Yeah, I'm not comfortable with that.

I want that to be the case.

I think it is a lot of places in the Bible where it says And I think for the longest time up to, I don't know, 1500s, everybody thought it was everybody.

So how's that?

This is really with a lecture.

Yeah, I think this is really great.

Um, so let me give you a couple of words that uh may or may not be offensive or may or may not be helpful for you.

But I think I think this is actually a really big kind of concept, not just biblically, but in especially the first couple chapters of Romans.

And uh first I want to give you um the fundamentalist words because that's my native tongue.

The first word is called exclusivism, which means if you don't know Jesus by name, you're going to hell forever.

So it excludes people.

If you have not prayed the sinner's prayer, which is the most magical of all spells, Jesus, I know you died for my sins.

I accept you as my Lord and Savior.

If you don't say that spell, you're going to hell when you die.

Well, what about Aborigines in Australia?

And we always think of the craziest thing.

That's why missionaries find it so urgent to get out there.

That's why some missionaries find it so urgent.

To make sure those people don't go to hell in their ignorance.

I never heard that prayer.

I've never heard that in my both.

Well, that's interesting.

The people who come to your door will pray it with you.

Yeah.

Urgent.

They used to be doing it all over the paper that's Jesus development in the 70s, I suppose.

Fundamentalism is not even, it's barely a hundred years old.

I don't know what it was.

Yeah.

People were going around said, yeah.

The wider position is called inclusivism, which means you may not know Jesus by name, but you may know him by relationship.

This comes right out of Romans chapter 1.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

Even the Gentiles have some awareness.

And really what Paul does when he does this is like an argument from design.

Are you familiar with the argument from design?

It means look how beautiful the clock is.

There had to be a clock maker making the gears.

See, look how great the world is.

Clearly, something greater than the world made it.

C.S.

Lewis is an inclusivist.

The proof is, you can read in the last battle, the last book of the Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan's Jesus, and the people who love Aslan go to the heavenly country.

But there's this other fake God called Taz, and the high priest of Taz shows up before Aslan, all beaten down and sorry, because he's worshipped the wrong God his whole life.

And Aslan says, Good job, come into my country.

And he says, Well, Aslan, I didn't worship you.

And Aslan says, Yes, you did.

So comes right out of chapter one.

I want to pause just for a second.

Number one, if God's exclusive, God's not very fair.

Let's let's just be real about that.

It's not justice.

It's not it's uh very punitive justice.

If you don't know and you had no access to hell with you anyway.

That just seems really rough.

This is an interesting argument.

Because if you were born and neglected as an infant, the world will never be a good place for you.

It would be a leap of faith for you to believe life is inherently good.

Or that the world is beautiful.

Because you were taught that the world is capricious, hateful, and random.

I watch these videos sometimes where people say every day is a gift.

It takes a leap of faith to say that.

Because that's not necessarily true.

That's a choice.

What's interesting is God says that in Genesis chapter 1.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

Everything's good, but we have to figure out whether it is or not.

So this only works if you believe in it.

The last position is universalism.

Now John Calvin read the scriptures and said, number six is an effix, number seven goes to heaven.

And the reason he read it is comes right out of here, Romans 3.23.

Here's the word all.

All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

This is also where we got the idea that there was a fall with a capital F that the scriptures don't affirm.

They don't believe in that at all.

Paul goes on to say there's atonement in the blood of Christ.

And this, I think, is part of our question.

John Calman said, Aha.

We all deserve to be punished.

Jesus took the punishment for us.

Jesus was God's whipping boy.

Because God is so perfect that God has to punish us.

So someone has to take the beating, and Jesus did that.

And look, Jesus is not going to waste his precious blood on people who aren't going to receive it.

So Jesus already knows whether you're going to take it in or not.

And if you're not going to take it, you just don't have it.

You can't have it.

That's one reading of this.

Of course, you start to wonder if God's all-powerful, I mean, all powerful, couldn't God just forgive you without having to get beat up?

No, because that's not justice.

Really?

Isn't God more powerful than justice?

I mean, I mean, doesn't that seem right?

So, what a lot of people have done is they said, really, this is all about being at one with God.

And, you know, blood, we could choose to read literally, but Jewish people didn't read it literally.

Your blood is your chi or your life force.

It's not the death of Jesus that makes us at one with God.

It's his life force.

Carl Bart, when he read this, he said, Yes, there is election.

Who did God elect?

Everybody.

And how did God get election working?

God's life force is for everybody.

You hear it in Eucharistic Prayer 1, which we're going to pray all lent, he was a perfect sacrifice for the whole world.

Not for some of it.

For all of it.

So we can't really answer the election question until we talk about atonement or at one moment, because that's part of where it gets limited.

Really, in Abraham, God says, I'm going to bless you, so you'll be a blessing for the world.

And the way that really works is Abraham is like the satellite of God's grace because Abraham doesn't just hear God, Abraham listens.

And then because Abraham listens, he's able to broadcast that signal to everybody he meets.

Is God sending the signal?

Yes, but Abraham amplifies it with his life.

So the elect are all, and the people who claim their election are the ones who broadcast what it means.

That's a way to do it.

That's how I like to believe.

The problem, if we do it any other way, for me, is that our justice is limited, our justice is punitive, but righteousness means everyone has equal access.

And righteousness is not about punishing culprits, it's about restoring communities.

That's how God's justice is different from ours.

We don't know how to restore communities, so we'll just settle for punishing the culprit.

But God won't settle for that.

That's part of the difference.

Please, please.

You can challenge away anyway.

Yes.

But it's only for those who receive it.

Or for those who believe it.

Maybe what I'm saying is the people who receive it are the ones who enjoy it now and later.

And everybody else might just enjoy it later.

And um listen, I'm not the normative interpreter.

I'm not.

So what I'm telling you doesn't have to be right.

I just think there's more life in it than what I heard.

Because some of the most miserable people I've met are fundamentalists.

And they have all the right beliefs, but God, they're so miserable.

And this is what Martin Luther gave us.

We just celebrated him last week.

Martin Luther, he never knew did he believe it enough.

That's why we rededicate our lives and we're afraid of backsliding.

Because if you don't mean it with every fiber of your being, that center's prayer, the spell didn't work.

Boy, I don't know if I could ever live up to that standard.

And that's what Martin Luther put his finger on.

Some people don't worry about that.

I'm related to some people who say, you know what, I'd rather not even worry about those difficult questions because it takes me away from God.

But I'm one of those people who worries about that.

When I said I was sorry, did I mean it enough?

I mean, that's what Luther said.

And finally, he got to the point where he said, I can never mean it enough.

And I don't have to, because God promised us an inheritance and we reckon that to God as righteousness.

So Paul says, What advantage is there being a Jew?

And this is gonna sound crazy, but I had a priest who told me this.

He he uh went to Sawani, which is an episcopal school, and his first semester he had like a 0.75 GPA.

So he went to the military.

And then he came back, and at Suwani you had to take calculus to graduate, and he was not a math person.

And he said, I got in calculus and I realized finally calculus was just a language.

Math was just a language for interacting with the world.

And his conclusion was the gift that Christians have is a language.

We have a gift of expressing and interacting with the world linguistically that people who don't have a faith background may not have.

I don't mean we're more articulate.

I mean what we're able to do is have this deep conversation with holy words and holy stories that guide us deeper and deeper.

Now, can you do math without that?

Absolutely you can.

But this is the gift of the Jew.

Is that they have these stories, they have this language.

We give the language to the world to help us understand and interact with things like grace.

But see, we get grace wrong, and this is, I think, the real point.

Grace is a gift, it's not an investment.

We all know what investments are.

You put resources down so that you can accrue benefit.

We know what bad investments are.

Investments are great, but grace is not an investment, it's a gift.

Right.

But we were fed language that says you only receive that grace if that if becomes a work.

And this is where I'm then that's not grace.

This is why I have to, pardon my French, I have to say it's bullshit.

I do.

Because here was the gospel as I understood it.

God has given you the best, most valuable gift ever, and all you have to do is receive it.

So it's still on you?

It's still on you because no gift requires your reception.

It's given whatever you do with it.

You never have to unwrap a gift and it's still yours.

You could sit on it, you could drive over it, it's yours.

You can misuse it, you can throw it away.

And if the giver gets mad, they didn't give you a gift, they gave you an investment.

And God is not in the investment business.

God's in the gifts business.

And that's how God's greater than we are.

I mean, I'm really convinced of that.

I don't usually give gifts.

I usually give investments.

And if I think really hard and give extravagantly, and people don't do what I want, I'm disappointed.

And any time I'm disappointed, that's a sign to me that I made an investment.

I didn't give a gift.

This is what I wish church had told me to do.

Get out of the investment business and give gifts.

I don't mean financially.

Although I sometimes do mean financially.

Because some people give financial gifts and then they go back and say, there were strings on that I didn't tell you about.

They say that why?

Why'd you do that?

Well, because you gave it.

I had somebody tell me once that they shouldn't pay tuition here because they volunteered all these hours.

And I said, Whoa, friend, we're all volunteers.

We give that.

Yeah.

But tuition is demanded.

And that's right.

I mean, we live in between those things.

You know we do.

Gina, I don't know if that answered your question.

Yes, I think.

I just want to say something that's not for danger, but there's an awful lot of bags.

Because they have the biggest churches everywhere.

So apparently there are many people out there who in their growth really need that to.

To be honest with you, I think we can look at those things up there as stages of moral development.

And if you go around talking to little children about universalism, they don't get it because they don't understand the universe.

So what we do with our children is we put them in selective environments because we don't want to overwhelm them with the bandwidth of the world that they're not ready to receive.

And that's really important.

That's appropriate.

It's a stage of faith.

But if we stay there, we stay minors and we never make it to adulthood.

And I think our tendency is to stay there because I will tell you, it's a lot easier when there are hard, fast rules in the world is black and white.

I know when I've done the right or the wrong thing instead of I just have to live with my choices.

Sometimes you do find people though in these groups who are just, you know, heavenly.

And you know that they they have some restrictions on their beliefs, but it really works because they do a good job.

The most generous people I know in this world are Christian fundamentalists.

They may do it for reasons I don't appreciate.

Like they may be trying to earn something with it.

But until recently, if I had financial hardship, I would go to my fundamentalist friends, not my episcopal friends, because I know they would take care of me.

So we can call that misguided, you know, we can call that work salvation, but they do the right thing.

You know, and I would much rather have somebody who does the right thing with the wrong thinking than someone who has the right thinking and never does anything.

I don't know if that makes sense.

And and all of that is about this conversation.

And our tendency, this is funny, right?

We can say universalism is the best, but I know lots of universalists who exclude other people.

Yeah.

Like those Baptists, those Mormons, those whatever.

Some of the nicest people I've ever met are Mormons.

And boy, I think they get brainwashed, and I do, I think they get brainwashed.

But they're nice.

And I'm not even nice.

You know, I mean, like, that's wonderful.

And this is what Paul says it's not circumcision of the flesh, it's circumcision of the heart.

And really, what he means is not our heart, our feelings.

Circumcision means cutting, and heart is our will.

It's about trimming our will of dead palm branches so that we can bear more fruit for the world.

And I'm also thinking, well, I'm way off base.

You have these uh preachers or whatever that go in to speak to the Aborigines because they don't know the message and they need it.

But maybe they need the message from the Aborigines.

Of course.

And the best missionaries figured that out a long time ago, otherwise they failed.

It was just another way of imperialism and slave ownership.

But the best missionaries went into these cultures that had no written language and they respected it enough that they created a written language.

So those languages have been preserved now.

And the best Christian missionaries took the gospel, at least elements of it, and put it in the context of where they went.

Not saying that our context is the right one.

So I have to first convert you to be an American, and then I'll convert you to being a Christian.

But they said, within your own context, here is God's grace available to you.

That's what real missionaries did.

Imperialists did the other thing.

You can read all about that in the Poison Wood Bible if you want to.

It's Poison Wood Bible by Margaret.

Uh no, no, it's not Margaret Everest.

It's um Barbara King Salber.

Uh it's a great book, and it's full of abuses that we have done throughout time.

But it but don't misunderstand, missionaries have done wonderful things.

Yeah.

As long as they were open to what Paul says, that God's grace is equally distributed in the world, we don't have a handle on it.

Sorry, I've been really preachy.

Okay.

We asked people to be able to do that.

Maybe you're interested about Paul's treatment of homosexuality.

Sure.

Maybe you're not interested.

But this is like the permanent today because there's a lot of people.

Paul says that God's grace and God's nature are abundantly clear throughout the world.

Again, as long as you believe the world is a good place.

If you don't start there, it's really hard to read Romans.

It's really hard.

But Paul says I'm gonna write this in English instead of in Greek, if you don't mind.

The people didn't listen, and so God handed them over to unnatural lust.

God said, Well, you don't want to listen, go for it.

And Paul says, here's the proof.

Even women traded unnatural relationships for lust and to be with one another intimately, and men have traded natural relationships, and the word he uses is catafusis against physics.

He's talking about a natural order with a capital N.

And so what Paul, one way to read this is look, Paul is opposed to homosexuality, so we need to be as well.

But please notice what Paul's saying.

He's saying the relationships he's commenting against are against the natural order.

And we have to really pause to think about what the natural order means.

Now you may not like what I do with this, but there's only one other mammal that has sex for pleasure.

Do you know this?

Really?

Uh huh.

Those are dolphins.

In the animal world, in the natural world, sexuality is for two reasons: offspring and dominance.

So animals don't have sexual intimacy, they have offspring or dominance.

This is really important.

And for the people who say, look, Paul is saying that these relationships are bad, again, because they're against nature, I hope sexuality is against nature.

Because I hope sexuality is about intimacy and union first.

I hope it's about dominance never, which by the way, is very natural.

If you've ever been to a dog park, you will see what natural sex looks like.

It looks like dominance.

The homosexual relationships Paul was familiar with, they weren't homosexual.

They were old, fat Greek men who were who had these young people, these are called pederasts, and because they worship the male body, that's how they were worshiping the male body.

Well, that was a sign of dominance.

One of the big differences between the Episcopal Church and the Roman Catholic tradition, and you may say I'm Catholic and I don't believe that, but in Catholic doctrine, sexuality is for offspring, period.

In the Protestant tradition, sexuality is for unity first, and offspring is optional.

Fundamental difference.

That's why Protestants can have birth control.

But I want to suggest to you that's also why Protestants can condone homosexual relationships.

The question is, are they unifying or are they dominating?

If they're dominating, they're not sacramental, they're wrong.

If they're unifying, they can be sacramental.

The whole bit about even Catholicism saying it's all about offspring is confusing to me because they'll say, look, if you've got a hundred-year-old man and a hundred-year-old woman, of course, they can still be married because God can work a miracle.

But if God is really that miraculous, then God can work through birth control too.

You know what I mean?

If God wants it to happen, you're not gonna thwart it.

Even more so, if God really can work a miracle like we're talking about, then God can impregnate a man.

So I, you know, I don't, I don't we draw these lines in funny ways, but I want to tell you, this has been used to say that intimate loving relationships between two people of the same gender are against nature.

But I hope the way we use all of our bodies, frankly, is against nature.

The point is not that we be ordinary, it's that we be extraordinary.

That's what the word holy means.

So I'll tell you, I've had holier sexuality at certain times in my life than others.

It depended on a lot of things, honestly, like most of life does.

I've probably had moments in which my sexuality was very natural.

But I can tell you I've had supernatural sexuality.

And I'm grateful for those moments.

The older I get, seems the better I get to be at that, too, by the way, which is funny.

It's like the opposite of what you would think.

And in some ways, I think that has to do with wisdom helping us transcend, transcend what's natural so we can have something deeper.

All of what I said could just be my interpretation, but it actually reads the text very seriously.

This is what I want to point out.

Paul says it's against nature.

But Paul is called not to be natural, he's called to be an apostle.

We're not called to be regular people, we're called to be saints.

So, this is all about how do we do something greater than just our genetic code.

I don't know if that makes sense.

Now, we did not, as an Episcopal church, have a big discussion about this and all agree gay people can be priests.

What happened is there was a gay person who was a fantastic priest in New Hampshire elected and bishop, and they didn't ask permission.

Turns out they didn't have to, because every diocese is autor is authoritative in its own area.

They did it, and then people had to deal with it.

And they did.

And a lot of people have left because of that decision, and I would tell you that's against the whole way we're supposed to read the Bible.

It's okay to disagree.

And we're having to figure this out.

We we decided we would be open and inclusive here two years ago, and all that meant is we would allow gay marriage in our sanctuary.

Before that decision, I could have married a gay couple in the North X.

A few people left because they didn't want that thing to happen in their sanctuary.

And the irony of that is they would have never been invited to that wedding.

Because when you're going to get married, you're not going to invite people to celebrate your marriage who don't believe you should be married.

Or if you do, you know they're not coming.

I mean, this is the interesting thing.

How do we live with difference of opinion?

This is really a tough thing.

I know people, gay couples whose intimacy for one another is much more admirable than most straight couples I know.

So there's that text.

Well, he did say that in um so far, Sarkeon, it wasn't a problem.

I don't know.

Again, I I'm glad you mentioned that phrase because to me that's a very natural understanding of look, sexuality is all just about this natural outlet for these natural chemicals.

I sure hope sex within your marriage means more than that.

Yes, yeah, yes.

I mean, I really hope that.

Well, it may be that some people are better off with a partner to and allows them to create a place for people than some other people is like, you know, I don't need that.

I have other stuff to do.

I don't know.

Well, I think everybody in this world was created to have intimacy with somebody else.

Some of us are called to do that through marriage and some aren't.

And some monasteries are full of that kind of intimacy, even though there are monks and or nuns and they're single, they have intimacy with one another.

I mean, I cannot imagine spending your whole life and not having somebody intimately touch you.

I just think our humanity would be incomplete.

But it turns out monks and nuns, they do that.

I don't mean that they're gross, but it's not like they never touch each other.

There's something fundamental to being embodied about having touch.

Or don't do other natural things.

Restrictions.

Well, all of life is about discipline, but discipline is not supposed to take us away from our bodies.

It's supposed to make us occupy them more fully.

Discipline is not supposed to take us away from our bodies, but help us occupy them more fully.

All discipline?

Yes.

This is a great diagram.

This is a really old one.

This comes from now the Orthodox community, but you'll find this in the in the Desert Fathers.

Here's where we are.

We are equidistant from other people, the self God made us to be and God.

Equidistant.

We can never get closer to God than we are to ourselves and other people.

Which means the more we hate ourselves, the more we hate God.

And others.

And if we actually have a religious experience where we draw closer to God, we must draw closer to other people and ourselves.

That's the whole problem with exercise bulimia and anorexia because you hate yourself, which means you cannot love anybody else or God.

Other people make it hard, but what's disfiguring?

That's how you were born.

Who decided it was ugly?

Not God.

We decide that.

Well, I mean, I'm just saying that to be content with that would be very challenging, I would think.

And it might be difficult for people to exist in that triad when they have something they have to carry around that's really what it means to live out the gospel, is we make that less hard, not more.

The most important thing we do when we go to the hospital is we look at somebody who's naked and got iodine and tubes on them and we don't flinch because there is nothing fallen about that state.

And if we can't look at that person in the bed, I can tell you you got no business being a priest.

Because if you can't face your own mortality and all those tubes and disfigurement, get out of the room.

You're just gonna make it worse.

We say words like disabled, and I know it's like what else what else do we say for somebody who's got a club foot, differently abled, or something like that.

But we're the ones who decided that was bad.

Oh, I know, that's silly.

But we treat people that way.

I brought home a friend one time in high school who was black, and we were gonna go play putt-putt together, and boy, it was strictly platonic, and my parents told me while she was changing in the restroom, you can't go out with her, people will think you're dating and they'll be mean to you.

And that is why, because they told me that, that's why it continues to happen.

What should have happened is go have a good time and we've got your back.

You can't wear short shorts like that, little girl.

People will treat you as a sexual object, and that is why people treat girls as sexual objects because they're taught that's what they are.

So, how do we tell our girls, love your body and also be aware?

People will not love your body as it is, they will love it for what they can do with it.

That I think is the tough bit of living in community.

It's tough for women.

It is too, I think anyway.

Yeah.

I mean, it's tough for men.

We don't realize it, but most men have body shame too.

We're confronted with ads about how we're supposed to look and how strong we're supposed to be.

And how strong is strong enough, and how big is big enough.

I would say women have it worse, but it's growing in men, and maybe, you know, anytime something starts to become trouble for men is when we start to change it.

It's really sad.

We don't usually change things until they inconvenience men.

No, it's true.

Yeah, it is.

You know, nurses and teachers are getting paid more now because men are being nurses and teachers.

That's the only reason.

But see, that's part of the gospel too, is upping the pay for women's work.

Because it's equitable.

Oh, that's just social justice.

Social justice is the gospel.

I mean, when the Bible talks about salvation, it's not talking about after we die, it's talking about then and now.

In education, uh, women, it was a long time before women could be administrators or would be administrators.

And even then, women couldn't be superintendents, and then they were paid less than other women.

You know, and there's not just the glass ceiling, there's the stained glass ceiling.

I don't know if you know about this because in the church, women priests get paid less than men priests.

I I was the first Hispanic in Pasadena to be placed in the secondary school.

And a woman and a woman.

We do all of this, and again, like you can I'm my own journey with the smile train ad in the magazine, that's the one where the kids have cleft palettes and they're looking at you.

And I just couldn't look at that because I I just wanted to to go away.

And I don't know what they're planning on doing with their ads, but I guess I sort of felt this call within me to see God and those children.

So I had to stare them down for a long time.

And see that God wouldn't be in them after we fixed their palate.

God was fully there.

So why not spend five dollars so they could eat?

Yeah, yes.

You know, it that wasn't to give them God.

God was already there.

And if we couldn't see the beauty in them, that was our problem.

I mean, I think that's really what you'd put your finger on.

Yeah, it's hard, but it doesn't have to be.

And the places it should be easiest is in faith traditions.

Now there's history in this church and many churches where somebody with autism would get up and pace during the sermon.

They weren't even making noise.

And the priest told them that they needed to not come because they were distracting him during the sermon.

And boy, talk about the epitome of sin.

Because if you can't come pace in church, if that's not safe, where are you going to go?

Anyway, this is holy work for us.

I mean, again, anytime we think, oh, that must be tough, our response should be, how can I help you lift that burden up, instead of, oh geez, that just must be tough.

I think Paul's got that in mind, and that's what it means to be elect.

I I had a student in a building, she was in special ed, and she would call me Ms.

Caboodles.

And uh I just loved it.

And people would say, you know, did you say Ms.

Cabool or Ms.

Caboodle?

She can learn to do.

It wasn't just, you know, that's how she saw me, Mr.

Ms.

Caboodles.

And then I started calling, hey Mr.

Caboodles.

And that became a from their workplace.

They made they teased about that.

And you just come out and say, hey, hey, hey, Mr.

Caboodles.

The corrector to try to fix it was just can you view marriage in the same way?

Absolutely.

And in so doing, you get closer to God.

Right.

Yeah.

Not unequally yoked.

Yeah.

I see people unequally yoked when they haven't thought through what it means to be committed to one another.

I don't think that has anything to do about your faith expression.

No.

If you know in advance what that's going to be like, then you know.

Now listen, that's changed.

My wife, I'm married to somebody who doesn't go to church.

That doesn't mean we're unequally yoked.

It does not mean that.

I was taught that's what it means, and I was misinformed.

Well, I mean, unequally.

You can be a, I would think, a psychopath and a masochist.

But I mean, they sound like they might go well together.

Actually, they might go well together.

Yeah, those people might go well together.

Better, I I I would say that, or two psychopaths, they don't stay together long.

I read that.

From something I read that was about a psychopath.

Actually, I think when you're a psychopath, you probably need a psychopath in order to make it.

Because there's nothing that'll give you PTSD, like being married to anyway.

A couple of the things Paul says that are super important, I think, that again my faith imprint didn't give me.

Like, don't go around judging other people.

I mean, like, that is right up front.

But that's exactly what we did when we start saying who's going to hell and who's not.

We're doing that.

Like, if you're an exclusivist, you're in violation of the scriptures.

If you say people who don't pray this prayer are going to hell, you've just brought judgment on yourself.

I mean, Paul is really clear.

Now, why we didn't hear that, I don't know.

Because the whole fundamentalist enterprise is built up on who makes it and who doesn't.

But that judgment is wrong.

And Paul says that.

So fundamentalism is fundamentally wrong.

I mean, it's fundamentally wrong.

Because it starts from a viewpoint of judgment.

And remember, I think judgment is fine.

Analysis is great.

It's condemnation that's not okay.

And to go around and condemning other people is not gonna work.

And uh Paul says, listen, when he talks about the end of this against nature business, he said, not only did you teach vice, you applauded people for practicing it.

And that's the main problem with fundamentalism, is it teaches and worships condemnation of other people.

That's the main problem I see with contemporary American politics.

We applaud vice from our leaders in the way they talk to one another.

Someone may tell a lie that doesn't make them a liar.

Those are completely different things.

And we applaud hate speech when we call people liars.

Somebody might have a bad policy that does not make them an evil person.

When we call somebody evil, we applaud vice in our practice.

But that's so that's all we can hear now, and Paul is saying nothing's changed.

Nothing's changed.

But we can.

We can change.

We can refuse to talk about politics in a way that applauds vice.

G.K.

Chesterton wrote, very few people disagree about what's evil.

We disagree about which expressions of evil are acceptable.

So there is no way that having intimate relationships with an intern is alright.

It is wrong.

Because the power is unequal.

There is no way that saying you're gonna grab a woman by the pussy is alright.

That's wrong in every single application.

That can never be right, and we cannot tolerate that speech even though we're asked to love both of those misogynists.

They're human beings.

But they're wrong.

They're wrong to say that, and they're wrong to act that out.

They're not always wrong.

They're wrong when they do that.

That becomes really important.

What becomes so hard, I think, is to separate that piece of behavior from the person from the whole person's.

It's hard for children to do, and that's what maturity requires of us, is that we recognize because somebody does one thing I don't like, that doesn't make them unlikable.

It just makes that thing unlikable.

I mean, that's a challenge of maturity.

But see, our our faith tradition has taught us if we don't like something, we don't like any of it.

And that kind of black and white thinking is exactly what leads us to condemning other people.

Boy, it is hard to say, I don't like anything I'm seeing from you.

But maybe there's something else.

If you need something to do for Lent, that's it.

I don't like anything I'm seeing.

Maybe I just haven't seen everything, you know?

Oh wow.

But you know, when Paul's, when Jesus says God won't forgive blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, I mean, I think that's along this ring.

Who says we're elect?

God, not us.

And if God has indeed elected everybody and we say that person's evil, then we just called God a crappy creator.

And that's not okay.

So we get to say, I disagree with that policy, that kind of speech is not respectful.

But when we say that speech reveals you're evil or demonic, we're doing exactly what we just said the other person was doing.

So there is a way in which we resist without being the evil we're trying to resist.

I don't know if that makes sense, but I think it becomes really, really, really important, especially in a campaign year.

As you say, we're inundated with it all over the place.

I mean you can't go anywhere and not here, actually.

And you see it, I mean you see it everywhere.

And Hitler had a personality cult.

Yeah, yes.

And this happens anytime somebody in a prominent position exerts power if they build a cult of personality around them, and people tolerated the evils he was doing.

I mean just what he said.

The way he treated women was also, frankly, reprehensible.

Um people tolerated it because he was in charge.

And so it's okay to say, listen, I have some social obligations to people who are in charge.

There are ways I can engage the system, but we don't worship human beings.

That's idolatry.

So in um I think it's just when bad things happen to good people, and there's something about forgiving people.

And I mean it says in the Lord's word.

But then you can't be going around forgiving people that didn't hurt you.

So I think what it said in that book was, you know, like I mean, can't say I I forgive you because you raped that girl.

That's her choice, not yours.

I'm gonna disagree with you.

Okay.

I think when somebody rapes somebody else, it has hurt my daughter.

Okay, and I need to forgive that person, I may not need to be reconciled.

No, that may not be the best example, but I think it's a great example because there's a difference between forgiving and being reconciled.

And I think forgiveness is all about giving up the hurt of the past.

So when somebody does something dreadful, how does that not affect me?

Ted Bundy affected me.

Do I need to forgive him?

Yes, because if I don't, I'm gonna live in pain the rest of my life.

And what a waste of my life that would be.

So it was awful, and I need to live free from that pain.

But my daughter will not be going to Ted Bundy's house, nor will I.

So forgiveness does not mean we give access to be abused.

It just means we don't live in the past anymore.

We just let go of that feeling of anger or that feeling of it.

I I it's really hard for me to put my words in.

So forgiveness is for ourselves.

Absolutely.

It has nothing to do with anybody else.

Anne Lamont says forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past.

And I think what that really means on Ash Wednesday is whatever I've done wrong, I've done, and it's made me who I am, for which I am extremely grateful.

This is the most important thing about being a drug addict.

If you hate yourself for being addicted to drugs, you will never get out of addictions.

It only works if you say, it's made me who I am.

I would have chosen differently, but it's also made me who I am.

Without that platform of self worth, you can never leave it behind.

So says the research, anyway.

I don't know if I went off the wheels of the crazy train again, but next week we will just pick up with Romans and happy ass Wednesday too.