To God's Beloved: Paul's Letter to the Romans

July/August 2009

Dear friends in Christ,

Grace to you and peace from God our father and the Lord Jesus Christ. There is nothing quite like a letter! Even in these days of e-mails, Twitter, Facebook, texting, and ubiquitous cell phone conversations, a letter allows us to express ourselves a little more fully and a little more personally. Through letters, we can be more thoughtful about what we want to say and share lots of emotion. So, like St. Paul, I am delighted to write to you all. So many of you, I have met or will meet. So many of you, I will never know in person. But, again like St. Paul, I am confident in our bonds in Jesus Christ and the love that we pour out for one another more and more (Philippians 1:9).

“Pouring out love more and more” sounds great. But what does it mean in day-by-day life? Like every one of you, I live as part of a network of relationships. We are all part of such a network simply by virtue of having been born to real parents! Whether or not they are still alive, they are part of that web of relationships that helps make us who we are. Sisters and brothers, children, spouses, cousins, friends—all these, whether present or absent—are part of us. Our lives continue to be interwoven with too many others to count. They have taught us what love means from our earliest childhood. Then we get to spend our lives revisiting those deep early learnings and becoming better “lovers” of God’s creatures, including God’s beloved earth.

I was truly blessed by my family and how I learned to be a person growing up in their midst. Oh, we were far from perfect, just as far from perfect as I most certainly am myself. But I grew up in a wonderful small city—Easton, Pennsylvania—in a stable home and town and extended family. My brother and sisters and I knew our aunts, uncles, cousins, great-aunts, great-uncles, and grandparents. We lived in the house my grandparents had built and hung on to through the Depression. My grandma lived with our family and died in that very same house as we gathered to care for her. You can imagine there were stories galore about life in previous generations that we all heard. Closeness, care for each other, thriftiness, hard work, responsibility, honesty—not to mention good cooking—were hard-wired into my ideas about what grown-ups valued. Kids too, for that matter.

A big part of our family life was St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church. My parents met in the choir there. All my life, we went to church and Sunday school, vacation church school, and junior choir. The Cub Scouts and Brownies, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts met at St. Paul’s. And we were there for all of it.

One of my earliest Sunday school memories is hearing the story of St. Paul being dropped over the wall in a basket in the dead of night (Acts 9:25). It was just that kind of story and picture that stayed deep in my heart and mind. I loved adventures. When I began to study the Bible in college and at seminary, I came back to that powerful image of how adventurous life is with God. What a blessing to come to the Bible expecting the unexpected, to be surprised, engaged, and challenged. Surely this has much to do with why I have been called to make studying the Bible my vocation.

What We Learned

It took a long time for me to realize the depth of truth about love, about the Bible, about the Lutheran teachings I had learned in confirmation class. Perhaps this is true for most of us. As my siblings and I grew up and experienced the joys and anguish of relationships and responsibilities, as my parents grew older and their health declined, as grandparents and beloved aunts and uncles died, two very difficult lessons were brought home to me.

The first lesson? Love costs. Love makes us vulnerable to pain.

People to whom we give our hearts and lives may reject us, leave us, disappoint us, grow ill and frail, and die. This side of the grave, love always makes us vulnerable to pain and loss. Yet the Bible tells us that we are commanded to love one another. We are made for one another.

The second lesson was this: Thrift, hard work, responsibility, and honesty do not protect us from suffering, grief, death. My parents had been telling the truth when they said that life is not fair. In the face of all this, the Bible became to me a book not only of adventure, challenge, and engagement, but also a book of promise in the face of the real dangers, turmoil, conflict, and suffering that are part of every human life, one way or another.

Has there ever been another book that tells it like it is quite so openly and honestly as the Bible? The human beings in the Bible, the cosmic events, the lives of birds and beasts and all creatures were created to live in praise of God and enjoyment of one another. Sometimes we do both. More often we are not able.

Yet these women and men speak to us across the ages of God’s promise and invitation to trust it. Whether in war or peace, from a king or a slave girl, from wind and fire, God’s promise is spoken again and again to let us know that love is our calling and love is God’s last word for this creation. To let us know that God, even God, pays the cost of love and returns to a life of love forever. God calls and empowers us for such a life. We are not protected—how could we be safe and also be free? But we are saved from a bleak world that ends in darkness everlasting. We live in a world that is unfair, but are promised that creation belongs to a God in whose being justice and peace kiss one another.

In a Nutshell

We belong to God in Christ Jesus: the very same one about whom Paul wrote and thought, to whom he prayed, upon whom he relied; Christ Jesus, through whom, Paul says, we have access to God. The longer I live, the more I cling to Paul’s rich determined hold on the truth that God was in Christ re-shaping the world in God’s way, re-bonding us to one another as God’s people.

The world may be unfair. We may be misguided and resistant to the claims of love on us. But God does not wait until we are strong, healthy human beings with our acts together. “While we were still weak” “God loved us so much that Christ died for us” (Romans 5:6, 8). “Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:39). There is the gospel in a nutshell.

Paul is full of those nutshells, declarations of why Jesus matters and why God’s gracious longing for us matters. “We have been graciously granted by God to trust in Christ and suffer with him” (Philippians 1:29). Our lives are caught up and re-interpreted in Christ. For this re-interpretation, I am forever in Paul’s debt.

Now as my mother’s health declines, I struggle with sorrow at not having her in my house and caring for her in the same way she took care of my grandma. Is my love less? Do I pour it out on her as she did for all of us? I do not know. It is a different world. My family no longer lives close at hand to help and support each other in the same way. What is the best way to love in this different world?

Paul asked this question too. As he worked to establish communities of those who believed in Jesus, Paul pondered and wrote about how life is to be lived “in Christ.” One insight that he offers us over and over is to rely deeply on one another. It is to one another and for one another that we show our love for God’s glory. Paul writes not simply in terms of congregational and personal love and support, but on God’s—and our own—commitment to helping us love those entrusted to us in Christ Jesus.

Part of my answer about how I pour love upon my mother is in supporting her at the wonderful church-supported home where she lives. I rely on all those other members of Christ’s body to help me love her well. Paul reminds us that our closest sisters and brothers are those of our baptismal family.

These brothers and sisters have helped me raise my children at church-related colleges. They have formed a fountain of prayer to nourish my relationships with husband and siblings. I have done the same for them. Paul reminds me of this power at a level too deep for words. We’re in it together.

After years of living in the church, studying for ministry, and now teaching those who study for ministry, I have been privileged to know and love many people who belong to God and this amazing earthly body animated by God’s Holy Spirit. Wow! It’s a mouthful, but you know what I mean.

Paul has taught me that the adventure is always before us, the adventure of being vulnerable in love. Paul does not invite us into some sentimental version of love. Use your heads, he says, but have the disposition that Christ had. Have the mind that is available to you in Christ Jesus. Have the disposition that builds one another up and welcomes one another for the good of all.

I took on writing this study of Romans because I am convinced that Paul has necessary words for us, in the daily lives we lead. So often the final chapters of his letter go unread and unstudied. I believe the heart of Romans comes in Romans 12-15. Here Paul suggests a way of being Christianly, to coin a phrase. Here Paul helps us imagine what belonging to Christ is about constructively for our life together. Even this insight was given to me by the church: I first really paid attention to the end of Romans when preparing Bible study for the Grand Canyon Synod assembly many years ago now.

God is at work among us, inspiring us to want to do and then to do that which we are also always called to do (Philippians 2:13), to work out what it means to trust Jesus every day in our family, our friendships, our political, economic, and social worlds. I hope that some of Paul’s words in this study lodge in your hearts and minds and lead you into such confidence in God as we know God in Christ, that your lives are filled both with adventure and with the peace that passes all understanding.

The Rev. Sarah Henrich is associate professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minn. She is the author of the upcoming LWT Bible study, “To God’s Beloved: Paul’s Letter to the Romans.” In 2005 she wrote the LWT summer Bible study on acting boldly and presented it at the Triennial Gathering in San Antonio.