St Paul Sermon Series Week 3: Richard's sermon on A New Creation? Part 2 'Romans 8.18-25 Paul the Visionary Philosopher

St Paul Sermon Series: Week 3

‘A New Creation? – Part 2’: St Paul the Visionary Philosopher

The Feast Day of the Birth of John the Baptist

I’m sure we all remember those wonderful characters Del Boy and Rodney from one of the greatest of all tv comedies Only Fools and Horses. One of the most famous episodes is when Del’s son Damian is born. At the end of the episode Del takes his new son to the window of the delivery room to gaze at the night sky and dreams big dreams on his behalf of all the wonderful things they will do together. Del looks to the stars and talks to his dead mother, holding his new born son for the first time. He then promises his boy he'll give him everything he never had. "I wanted to do things, be someone, but I never had what it took. But you, you're different. You're gonna live my dreams for me. You're gonna do all the things I wanted to do, and you're gonna come back and tell me if they're as good as I thought they would be..."

All parents have dreams for their children of how they are going to change the world or how they will look after them or the opportunities they will have. I wonder what those of you who are parents dreamed for your own children. I’m sure that Elizabeth and Zechariah had their dreams for their son John. After all they were well aware of the circumstances of his conception and birth – two older parents, the vision in the temple. They will have known that ‘the hand of the Lord was with him’ (Luke 1.66) and that he was destined to be someone special. Indeed all the neignours were asking ‘What then will this child become?’

Usually the church marks saints on the date of their death, or marks their martyrdom or the contributions of their lives looking back. It’s unusual to have a birthday celebration. But John is unusual and it is appropriate to mark his birth because it marks part of the heralding of the new creation that God has planned in and through his son Jesus.

The bible is full of stories of amazing births – Abraham and Sarah producing Isaac when they are well into their 90s, Jacob grasping his twin Esau’s heel as he emerges from the womb, Moses and his basket, the longed for and prayed for Samuel, John the Baptist and Jesus himself. In many ways and in retrospect we might see what happened to Saul, Paul, on the way to Damascus as a birth. Certainly his vision of Christ left him helpless as a baby, needing to be led and housed and fed and then sight coming. He himself saw the whole experience in that way as a new birth, just as all Christians should talk of their own baptisms as a new birth. The old is cast away and a new human emerges, one who soon assumes a new name.

  

Writing to one of his favourite churches at Philippi many years later Paul lists all the parts of his old life that might have given him pride – ‘circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews, as to the law a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless’ (Philippians 3.5-6); but then he goes on to say ‘I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.’ (Philippians 3.8).

So what are the dreams of Paul for this new life? When it comes to dreaming, Paul dreams big. He doesn’t just have dreams for his own life and how his future will pan out. He sees things in cosmic terms. He looks back at all those events heralded by the birth of John the Baptist, the life of Jesus, the cross of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, the promise of the return of Jesus and he understands that this affects not just believers but the whole of creation. That’s quite a claim!

The passage we have just heard read from Romans chapter 8 is the pivotal part of what is seen as the pivotal chapter of the letter that bears the fullest working out of the Paul’s thoughts and beliefs. Creation is not now what it was created for, things are not how they should be. Creation itself waits for the fullest revelation of God in the coming again of Jesus. Those of us who know him and wait for him are the first fruits of all that God wants to accomplish and we are marked therefore by hope.

Paul talks of creation waiting with eager longing and brings home the point about new birth and new creation by writing how ‘the whole of creation has been groaning in labour pains until now’.

It’s a big dream that the new creation that God has begun through Jesus is for all people and all creatures and all plants and all rocks and all time.

Paul may be a big dreamer but what he dreams isn’t just pie in the sky, the wishful thinking of someone who feels they have been born again. His head may be in the clouds but his feet are grounded firmly in the scriptures and in his people’s knowledge of the God they follow. The story of Paul has many gaps, especially in the years following his conversion. Like all new births a time of growth and maturing was needed. From Damascus he goes to Arabia, possibly to Mount Sinai to reflect. And not long after his first visit to the church in Jerusalem there are ten missing years back home in Tarsus. Ten years to test what he has come to find out about Jesus against the scriptures in which he is steeped and finding that his Jewish beliefs , that righteousness of which he was once so proud have not been disproved and left behind by Jesus but instead have found their fulfilment in him.

Bishop Tom Wright who knows Paul a whole lot better than I ever will and who has been thinking and writing about him for decades says ‘Saul came to see that the two stories, Israel’s story (of a faithful remnant with its focus in a coming king, messiah) and God’s story (of all that God had already achieved and could therefore be trusted to do in the future) had, shockingly, merged together. Both narratives were fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus was Israel personified but he was also Israel’s God in person. The great biblical stories of creation and new creation, Exodus and the new Exodus, Temple and the new Temple all came rushing together at the same point. This was not a new religion. This was a new world…..’ (Paul: A Biography pp71-2)

‘Put some of the great royal psalms together. Dip them in the prophetic scriptures such as Isaiah 11 (the shoot from the stump of Jesse, that is David, will inaugurate the new creation of justice and peace) and you have a composite picture of the hope of Israel.; hope for a new world not just a rescued or renewed people and hope for a coming king through whose rule it would come about. Put all that into the praying mind of Saul of Tarsus, who is sensing a new energy transforming and redirecting his earlier ‘zeal’ and what do you get?...What might it mean to say that the crucified and risen Jesus is the king of whom Psalm 2 had spoken. How would that work out, what would it look like in practice?’ (ibid. p74)

And that’s the question we have to grapple with in our life and worship together today. What does that great dream and realistic hope look like in practice today, look like in us today?

Paul’s answer might be ‘a community of grace’! Like the one spoken of in Romans 8 – waiting, stumbling onwards, suffering ridicule and hostility, all too aware of and caring about the dreadful state of the world, filled with the Spirit, guided by hope. A community maybe also a bit like ours. We look at the state of the world and are concerned. We wait in hope. We suffer, if not hostility, then at least huge apathy. We are filled with the Spirit. We are guided by hope.

It is perhaps difficult to get to grips with big, complex and rather overwhelming passages such as this. We somehow know that it is important but Paul isn’t always the easiest writer or thinker to grasp and we may wonder what is all that to do with us as we try to do our best for this place and for God?

Well we all have dreams. So like Paul dream big. The story we have to tell isn’t just about a man who went about doing good and who was an amazing teacher. It isn’t just about the possibility of resurrection after our mortal life. It isn’t just about being the body of Christ for this community. It is about new creation and hope for all that God has made.

And like Paul make sure your dreams are well grounded. Saul, Paul, knew his scriptures so well. He knew through them that God could be trusted in the future because of all that he had dome in the past. Do you know your scriptures? Are they the means for testing and proving the hope that is in you. There is so much biblical illiteracy in our culture but it begins in our churches because so many don’t spend time with the story of the bible. They are content to have it explained to them once a week by people like me. Use those opportunities to study the scriptures, as Paul did, and like him you will find that your hope grows.