Putting God first, what does it mean?

Romans 8:1-11

Does anyone else find the letter to Romans a bit difficult to get to grips with?  I remember having to do my very first exegesis on a verse in Romans as part of my training and I got it totally wrong.  From these things one can learn. – Hopefully, anyway.  I will let you judge for yourselves.

The first thing for me in looking at scripture readings for services is never to look in isolation at the reading, because for the simple reason is that it is attached to chapters either side and forms an important part of the whole.  If you were reading a letter, or lets say an email from a friend or colleague, would you take a sentence out of the email and seek meaning from that without looking at the rest of the message.    What if there was a sentence that said, “Leave immediately”.  What could that mean.  It may make more sense of course if you took it in context if the email said, “Make sure that in the event of fire.”

What if you took just the words, taking them out of context so that you just read, “Leave immediately” and acted on them, would you resign your post?

Well, the same stands for scripture, so we try and understand what Paul was saying to the group of Christians in Rome.  To set the scene then, Paul wrote this letter in @ 55AD, from Corinth, to a fledgling group of house groups in Rome.  It wasn’t as if he was writing to the Vatican or anything, it was an informal underground movement that met in houses in the evenings after a hard days labour.  It is quite likely that there are a number of Jewish Christians in this group as in Ch 7 he writes to those who know of the law.  A gentile would be deemed outside of the law, so we must be looking at Jews here.

If we go back to Chapter 6, Paul is talking about being a slave to God or being a slave to sin.  He is presenting an either or state here which is probably a bit uncomfortable for us in the 21^st Century, especially for someone likes me who follows an inclusive mode of living.  So right at the beginning this is challenging, and it echoes John who in his first letter says this. “ If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. ⁷ But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all^[b] sin.”  Being congruent with other parts on scripture it cannot just be ignored them.  What can it mean?  I think Paul is talking about union with God, about where our focus is.  Are we seeking God with all of our heart, mind and soul, or have we actually rejected God, even inadvertently, by setting up other gods in our life.  Do we love ourselves too much?  Do we focus too much on what people think of us?  Do we worry too much about how we look or what we wear? Do we worry too much about money and status? 

Note the “too much” here, it skews the balance, and we place that which we love too much in front of God and in so doing reject God.  That makes us in a sinful state that separates us from God.  This is the either or that Paul and John are talking about.  It is of course totally redeemable, by turning back (repenting) to God, and the best way of doing this according to Paul is through a living relationship with Jesus, the risen Messiah.

In Chapter 7, Paul uses Adam as the arch example of humankind in sin, comparing the state he found himself in to the original state that he was made in.  Adam starts in a state of Grace but being given information that shows him what is right or wrong, he becomes self aware, and loves himself too much, perhaps he loves being in charge too much, perhaps within the story of Genesis we see a warning about power, after all God placed Earth and all in it under the authority of humankind.  We failed at that, because we couldn’t cope with love of God and love of others, we turned it into an either or situation and turned away from God, so that even when we want to do what is right, we do what is wrong.  The only way to do what is right is to act from within union with God.  God in the end was the only one who could put that right, and he did so in the person of Jesus, to whom is given all authority on Earth and in Heaven.  So that which was initially given to Adam is now given to Jesus who can deal with the sense of power, because He never leaves union with God, because he is God.

Jesus didn’t just come to show us how to live proper lives though, style of dress, cleanliness, length of hair etc wasn’t exactly on his agenda. No, Jesus came to accomplish something much much bigger.  Nothing less than the healing of the whole of creation. The most inclusive project in fact that you can imagine.  It is the dysfunction in the union of creation with God that Jesus came to put right, it wasn’t just to save your  or my soul I am afraid.  That was part of it, but what happened on that dark Friday was in truth so much bigger and so much more mysterious than we are ever really likely to fully understand.

In the end then, as now we finally get to Chapter 8 whose meaning hinges on what comes before, our life comes from God.  Not necessarily our biological life, if we just focus on that we miss the point – again – but our sense of life, our sense of our place and who we are and what our responsibilities are, which in turn impinge on how we live our life.  That life, that inclusive balanced sense of life comes from God and comes from being in and within what we as Christians would call the Trinitarian relationship.  When we live in this life we are part of the healed Creation, we live in the New Age that Jesus announced on Easter Sunday.  This is the power of the gospels, the message that the Early Church shared and that led to a radical transformation in the world.

What then does this mean for us?  It is those old nuggets, do we put God first in our lives.  What does that mean?  Does that mean we need to read the Bible every day or be what has been called a good Methodist.  No, that doesn’t mean these are bad things by themselves but they don’t mean that we are putting God first.  The challenge is for us to live our lives in a constant state of being in union with God.  How do we do this?  It probably takes a lifetime but finding out about Jesus is not a bad place to start so reading scripture is a good thing after all, it is just part of the answer and not the whole answer.  We need to live out Jesus shaped lives, and to do that we need to delve into the Gospels and question ourselves regarding our beliefs and ideas.  We need to become more reflective, more humble, more self questioning, so that we can then reflect what we truly are to our fellow beings.  For we are made in the image of God, and our one purpose is to reflect that image to the rest of creation, so we reflect God to the world.  If we actually did that, instead of reflecting the warped image we tend to, I wonder what effect we might actually have.

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit

Amen