Paul begins the whole letter with the words, “Paul, a servant of Christ.” This opening might not catch us off guard, but maybe it should. What does it say about the Church that we would willingly gather around a letter written by someone who considers himself nothing more than a servant? It is common to give our attention to those who are the most charismatic and most successful. Many books are sold on the premise that a successful person will share his or her advice on how to become successful ourselves. But to open up Romans is for all of us in the Church to agree that we will gather around the words of someone who has devoted his life to being lesser than. If that’s how Romans begins, it’s a safe bet that the letter will make servants of Christ out of us, too.
Paul draws this out even more with his next words, “called to be an apostle.” An apostle is simply someone “sent” for a task. Paul did not choose to be an apostle. He did not graduate or pay his way into it. He was called. He was acted upon by something else, something other. Paul is not the sender, but the one sent. Paul was on his own path (a path making him successful and influential) when God reached into his life, uninvited, and yanked him into a new world with a new role to play. For Paul, the gospel is not just a bit of crucial information that we all must memorize. The gospel is a sweeping narrative playing out on the grandest of stages. The gospel gives us a role to play in the story God is telling.
And so Paul goes on to tell this story in just a few verses that pack quite a punch anyway: Centuries before, God started making promises, promises that he would someday act in the world in the most definitive, history-altering way from which there would be no return, no going back to the way things were. The prophets and other voices of scripture couldn’t stop talking about these promises. And we finally learned what name to give to these promises: Jesus. Jesus is how God came through and acted in the world in the most definitive, history-altering way. He was descended from David, but even more importantly, was vindicated as the Son of God by his resurrection.
As a result, there has been a worldwide explosion of grace and apostleship by which the whole world has been claimed for Jesus and the gospel. This is the good news, that all people, even these Roman Christians, are “called to belong” to Jesus. What a wonder that a group of pagan converts in Rome would give their lives to Jesus, a man crucified by Rome’s government, who lived all the way over in Galilee in Israel!
God has called, and is calling, us into his story. Paul is called to it. Some Roman Christians 2,000 years ago are called to it. And so are we. God has reached, and is reaching, into our lives to yank us out of every other story and into a new world with a new role to play. Do our lives move with the flow of the Jesus story, or against it? Are we playing the role God has given us, that of servants and ones sent to embody the gospel for each other? Or do we sometimes insist on carving out our own role in our own story? Can we see our lives, all its movements and conflicts, victories and failures, and fellow characters within God’s bigger story, playing out on the grandest of stages?
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