Sermon: March 2, 2021
The Rev. Charlie Bauer
Chaplain, The Episcopal Church at William & Mary
March 2, 2021
Psalm 68:1-20; Romans 1:16-25; John 4:43-54
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel;
it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith.”
(Romans 1:16)
I wonder about that word here in the first line of our Epistle today, ashamed, to be ashamed of the Gospel, or in the case of Paul here, who is arguing that we ought not be ashamed of the Gospel. This word, ashamed, appears a handful of times in the New Testament, some of them referring to our own human action, or as in this verse, a reminder to fight against being ashamed. But some references also use this word to talk about a quality of God, that God is not ashamed to know us and for us to be known as our God.
I suspect my reticence here with this word, ashamed, is that I fear it describes too closely and too often my own action, my own heart. Now, that may be an odd thing for a priest to say – clearly I have not exactly gone running from the Gospel kicking and screaming. But to what extent do I wear the Gospel on my heart, does my life reflect what living into the Good News of Jesus Christ might look like? This all comes down to evangelism, I suppose – that it isn’t just enough for us Christians to follow Jesus quietly, but we also must bear witness to Christ, to share this good news that is just that, good news, the gospel to all we encounter.
Paul speaks to the Romans about precisely this: that God grants the power for salvation to all – but the key here is that salvation is given to those who have faith in God. I don’t think this is quite going as far as saying that salvation is reserved to those alone who have faith – that’s really a conversation for another day – but that the Gospel, the good news here, is that the way to eternal life in Christ is by faith in God. That’s what we’re called to live and to share - What that looks like for you, and for me – well, evangelism takes many forms.
Karl Barth, in his Commentary on The Epistle to the Romans, remarks then that the Gospel is not the doorway, but rather the hinge, to use a rather specific metaphor (Barth, Karl, The Epistle to the Romans, 35). In other words, the Gospel is what opens us up to salvation in Christ, the Gospel is key to our understanding of God that brings us into faith, and it is this faith, this relationship with God, that is the open doorway for us to walk into a life in closer knowledge of Jesus. Sure, we can shout scripture at people, or memorize Bible passages, or any number of other things, but in the end that could all be meaningless if we don’t point ourselves and others toward a real, deep, lasting relationship with God.
So that’s the key, really – relationship. I think that’s why this word, ashamed, is used both ways in scripture, to describe the way we ought not to be, and the way God definitely is not. This transforms that word, ashamed, from something we’re worried about to something we can control. We can always do more: we can always mirror Christ more closely into the world around us, live more into the life Jesus calls us into. But relationship – well, that’s easier. Living a sinful life is one where we have broken relationship – relationship with those around us, and with God. Living a faithful life, then, is living a life seeking and enriching these relationships: first with God, then with our fellow humanity.
The key is not worrying about whether we’re projecting our faith sufficiently, or whether we’re living our lives in precisely the right way – as important as those things may be – but whether we are in relationship with God. If we are ashamed for knowing God, if we are not fully investing our lives in the Gospel, the hinge that opens the door of salvation to us all, then we don’t really know God. But this is something we can all do, for the burden of the way of Jesus is light, and by our mere creation we are given the ability through God’s grace and love to live just such a life. And just maybe, by living lives overflowing with the Gospel and the love of Christ, we can be a hinge, too, to open that doorway to everlasting life in God just a little bit wider for all those who we encounter. Amen.
Photo: Used by permission of CC BY-ND 2.0 license; https://www.flickr.com/photos/ranger78/5384599831