Sermon at Evensong, St Pancras New Church, Trinity 6 2012

Job 4:1;  5:6-end

Romans 15:14-29

All the ladies fell for Rudolph Valentino,
he had a beano back in those balmy days.
He knew every time you meet an icy creature,
you got to teach her hot-blooded latin ways.
But even Rudy would have felt the strain,
of making smooth advances in the rain.

Oh, this year I’m off to sunny Spain, eviva España,
I’m taking the Costa Brava plane, eviva España.
If you’d like to chat a matador, in some cool cabaña,
and meet señoritas by the score, España por favor.

Back in 1974, when that song was on Top of the Pops, package holidays and Franco’s impending demise had opened up the Spanish Costas to millions of Britons for the first time. And most of them, unused to the sunshine, came back boiled red like lobsters. 

For many of us I expect the idea of a holiday in Spain might be quite attractive at the moment. Certainly when I was writing this sermon, looking out of my window at the pouring rain, it did cross my mind.

But that’s not St Paul’s idea. When he says towards the end of his letter to the Romans that he’s off to Spain, he’s not thinking of a holiday. In fact his route takes him from Macedonia to Jerusalem and then to Spain via Rome - the whole length of the Mediterranean. A long and hazardous journey with many dangers and uncertain prospects at the end. And this was by no means unusual. In 2 Corinthians Paul gives us a brief account of his travels as follows:

Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked.

Now that’s not the kind of recommendation you’re likely to read in a Thomas Cook brochure. So you have to ask, why did Paul bother? What drove him to undertake all these lengthy and hazardous journeys to out of the way places like Spain?

And the answer is what he has been telling us throughout his letter to the Romans. The answer is the good news of God in Jesus Christ. And that good news was the reversal of everything that Paul had thought about God. 

That Good News, as Paul tells it in Romans, is that our justification, our new life in Christ, is God’s gift. It is not something we construct for ourselves, not something we earn. And Paul came to that good news through his conversion, that is, by the discovery that he was wrong.

Paul, of course, had been a violent fundamentalist, who really hated the annoying new sect called the Christians, and pursued them from city to city, trying to kill or imprison as many as possible. 

Until he met Jesus. Jesus, who had been killed by religious zealots just like Paul, met him on the road to Damascus, and turned his life around. When Paul met the risen Christ his old self collapsed. Paul had been living inside a myth that he was perfect, but when he met the one he was persecuting he found instead that he was loved. All of him. His sins, his flaws, his failures. The dark depths that he hardly even guessed at. Everything about him was known, and forgiven, and embraced in a love so strong that it had raised Jesus from the dead. And this love came to him as a completely unearned, unmerited free gift.

Throughout Paul’s life, up to his conversion, he had been trying to justify himself. He was trapped inside the idea that his life was something he put together himself, that his self was his own construction. That his worth, his fundamental true and eternal value, lay in his own achievements. 

And the whole of the letter to the Romans, in one way or another, is telling us how that is completely wrong. Paul is telling us how his entire world view, his entire conception of himself, collapsed and was overturned when he met Jesus. 

So, for Paul, new life in Christ means a completely new beginning. It means both discovering that you have got it all wrong, and discovering that God has been waiting for you all along in the place of your wrongness, just waiting for you to let go. Waiting for you to let go of the false self you thought you could construct so you can receive the free gift of your true self, the Self which is hidden in Christ in God. The Self whose existence is founded not on anything we have done but in the truth that we are loved. 

The risen Christ who met Paul on the road to Damascus shattered his illusions and broke through the shell of his ego. It was really a death; the death of what Paul calls the “old Adam”, our fallen human nature turned in on itself and its illusions. And it was a rebirth, birth into the new life of the Resurrection, the deathless and utterly loving life of God.  So complete was this transformation that Paul could afterwards say, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”. 

And it was Christ living in Paul who drove him on, carrying him through trials and dangers and persecutions for the rest of his life. Paul was so captivated by Christ that he could not but proclaim the good news of God in as many places as possible. The good news that we are loved. Anyway. In spite of everything in our nature that wants to fight against being loved. In spite of everything in us that wants to reject God’s gift of life. In spite of our deep-seated desire to construct our own death-dealing ego-centred imitation life instead. 

Paul of course eventually had his head cut off by the Emperor Nero, a man who was the very embodiment of death-dealing ego-centred imitation life. But Nero did not understand, and could not touch, the true secret of Paul’s life, which was hidden with Christ in God. Because of Christ, crucified and risen, Paul’s death became a sharing in Christ’s triumph. It became his personal final victory over sin and death and all the illusory world of the false self.

And Paul’s gospel, the good news of God in Jesus, still shouts and sings from the pages of his letters, and in the life of the Church which he spread and planted in so many places, through so many dangers.

And the good news of God in Jesus is our good news, too. The good news that we are loved. Anyway. Loved even in the midst of our wrongness. Loved even in the midst of all the ways we try to resist being loved. Loved where we are, in the place where God is waiting for us. Loved, in fact, in ways we could not have discovered so gloriously had we not been so wrong. Loved, and loved, and loved, until we can finally let go of our death-dealing ego-centred false self. Loved until we can receive God’s abundant free gift which is both God’s own life and our deepest and truest Self, Christ living in us. 

This is the mystery that captivated Paul, and in which we too are caught up. His gospel is our gospel. Good news in this place, and in every place. The good news of God in Christ Jesus, to whom be glory, honour and praise, now and for ever.