Sermon for Sunday, August 20, 2023 || Proper 15A || Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
This morning’s sermon is really two mini sermons stuck together – the first is a teaching about the way we read the Bible in church and the second is a look at today’s lesson from Paul’s Letter to the Romans. They teach you in seminary only to preach about one thing per Sunday, but I’m breaking that rule today because these two things fit together pretty well.
Okay, first the teaching. When we read from the Bible during worship, we follow something called the “lectionary.” This comes from the Latin word for “reading” and we use it to refer to the three-year cycle of selections from the Bible that we read aloud in church. Each Sunday, we read four passages. We read a passage from the Hebrew Scriptures, often called the Old Testament. We read a passage from the book of Psalms. We read a passage from the part of the New Testament that isn’t the Gospel. And we read a passage from one of the four accounts of the Gospel.
Over the course of the three years, we read a sizable portion of the entire Bible, but nowhere near the whole thing. This morning’s reading from Genesis illustrates the lectionary’s tendency to skip a lot. Last week, we read some of the beginning of Joseph’s story. And today, we read the end of it. We skipped the eight chapters in between which narrate all of Joseph’s trials which culminate in him becoming Pharaoh’s right hand man, saving Egypt, and (by extension) saving his own family.
Now the Bible is really long. It looks like a book, but it’s not a book. It’s a very small library. If we wanted to read the entire Bible over the course of three years of Sundays, we would have to read so much text every week that we’d never be able to maintain our concentration during the reading. I did the math, and we’d have to read 9 pages from this edition of the Bible every week – aloud – to make it through the whole thing. That’s just no feasible. So we make compromises. The people who created the lectionary decided which parts are most important for us to hear, and we skip the rest.
If you’re curious about all the parts the lectionary leaves out, I encourage you to read your Bible at home. But don’t just start at the beginning and plow ahead. I guarantee you will get bogged down somewhere in the middle of Leviticus and give up. Instead, read a little bit from every section of the Bible each day: the Torah (that’s the first five books), the histories and prophets, the poetic writings like the Psalms, the Gospel, and the New Testament letters. That way, when you’re reading a boring part in one place, another will hold your attention. (If you’d like a plan to read the whole Bible, I can set you up with one.)
Okay, so we’ve established that it’s not feasible to read the entire Bible aloud in church using the lectionary structure. (By the way, there are plenty of churches that walk through entire books of the Bible slowly, one Sunday at a time. So the lectionary model is just one way to read the Bible in church.) The lectionary structure becomes problematic when it cuts and pastes passages together, and that happens in today’s second reading, the one from Paul’s Letter to the Romans.
It’s really short, so here’s the reading in full again:
I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. […] For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, so they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they too may now receive mercy. For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.
If you’re not paying close enough attention, you’d think that was one cohesive reading, right? But look at your program. Look at the citation. Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32. The “A” means the passage cuts off in the middle of a verse. So, we skip the second half of Verse Two and all of verses 3-28. The passage then picks back up in Verse 29, which is actually in the middle of a sentence.
In the bulk of the passage left out, Paul is doing some very strenuous thinking. These verses are the end of a larger chunk of the Letter to the Romans, in which Paul is trying to come to grips with how this new church (that believes Jesus is the Messiah) relates to the older witness of Paul’s own people, the Israelites. It would have been easier for Paul to jettison the older witness completely, to say that God was doing an entirely new thing in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ and that nothing that came before matters.
But Paul doesn’t do this. Paul doesn’t do this because he believes the words he writes in today’s passage: “The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” Another translation says, “God’s gifts and calling can’t be taken back” (CEB). And because Paul believes this, he theologically bends over backwards to make sure that his new faith does not obliterate his old one.
Now, I’m not saying that some of Paul’s reasoning isn’t a bit tortured. He basically says that the Israelites stumbled so that the Gentiles (that is, everyone else) could believe, and in their belief make Israel jealous enough to come along for the ride. But even in the midst of this strange argument, Paul absolutely affirms his old faith’s holiness. He says, “If the part of the dough offered as first fruits is holy, then the whole batch is holy; and if the root is holy, then the branches also are holy.” The root here is the faith of Israel. Paul continues, “But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot [that is, the people of the church in Rome], were grafted among the others to share the rich root of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember: you do not support the root, but the root supports you.”
And that root remains strong because the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. God entered into a covenant with the people of Israel, and even though they broke that covenant over and over again, God never did. The covenant remains because God is faithful. We are grafted into this covenant through God’s abundant blessing and grace, and the witness of Jesus Christ shows us that God’s promises last forever.
The witness of Paul’s Letter to the Romans proclaims that God never forsakes those God has called. And that God calls, not just a chosen few, but everyone back into right relationship with God. So, if you know someone who has fallen away from church and is too embarrassed by how much time they’ve spent away to think about coming back, invite them anyway. Because God’s gifts and calling are irrevocable. They are still a branch fed by the root of God’s love, and we would love nothing more than to graft them back into our community of faith.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.
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