Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 14, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

In the verses that are the focus of this five-part sermon series, Paul tells us that nothing in all creation, not even life itself, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Last week I talked about the ways in which the love of God is made known to us in Jesus Christ. He makes that love known to us in his teachings, his life, his death, and his Resurrection. Jesus Christ is very good news for us and for the entire world. Yet Paul doesn’t say just "Christ Jesus." He adds a modifier. He says: "Christ Jesus our Lord." Why? Why does Paul end his great statement of God’s unfailing love for us by calling Jesus Christ "our Lord?" Our understanding of these great verses, indeed our understanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ that they so concisely express, will not be complete until we understand this word and why Paul included it in Romans 8:39. To try to get that meaning we have to set something aside. Today when we hear the word Lord we automatically think of Jesus, and that’s what we need to set aside for a moment.

Jesus is the only one we call Lord. The word has become virtually a part of his name for us, or at least it has become his title, and his alone. We don’t call the mayor Lord. The English might, but that’s their problem. We don’t call the Governor Lord. We don’t call the President Lord. It would sound very strange to us to hear any of them addressed as Lord. Yet there’s a reason why I used those political examples. You see, in the first century CE when Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, Lord was a political term. Paul used the Greek word kyrios. It’s Latin equivalent is dominus. In both Greek and Latin the words meant ruler, one with authority over another. Slaves referred to their masters as kyrios. One’s lord, one’s kyrios or dominus, was the one to whom a person owed allegiance and loyalty. He (it was always a he) was the one a person had to obey.

The person most prominently and significantly called Lord in the Roman Empire in the first century was none other than Caesar, the Roman Emperor. The Emperors claimed the title kyrios, Lord, for themselves. They put it on their monuments. They even put it on their coins. In Paul’s world, anyone who heard the word kyrios would immediately think first of all not of Jesus but of Caesar, the autocratic ruler of the known world, a political figure to be sure but also a religious one who claimed divine status and demanded the worship due a god.

And Paul called Jesus Christ Kyrios, Lord. He called him by the title that Caesar claimed for himself. He wasn’t alone. Lord was one of the earliest titles the infant Christian movement applied to Jesus. In Christian circles the word kyrios got transferred from Caesar to Christ. The earliest Christian confession or creed, before the Apostle’s Creed, before the Nicene Creed, before any other Christian creed that we know of was the seemingly simple statement "Jesus Christ is Lord."

It sounds so innocuous to us. It sounds so harmless. It sounds like nothing more than the statement of a person’s name; yet when we understand what it meant when it was first used we see that it is so much more than that. In the first century, saying "Jesus Christ is Lord" was revolutionary. It would be today too if we could recapture that original meaning.

The confession Jesus Christ is Lord was revolutionary because it carried with it a necessary negative implication. Ultimately a person can have only one Lord, one person to whom one owes ultimate allegiance, one person whom one will obey above all others. Because that is true, the Christian confession "Jesus Christ is Lord" necessarily includes the meaning "and no one else is." In the Roman world of the first century that meant in particular "Caesar is not." It meant: I give my allegiance to Jesus Christ and not to Caesar, no matter how much Caesar may demand it. It meant: I will obey Jesus Christ and not Caesar no matter what Caesar may do to me as a result. It meant: Jesus Christ governs my life and not Caesar. That, after all, is why the Romans persecuted and killed so many Christians. Those Christians proclaimed Jesus as their Lord and not Caesar. They said they believed that God was present in and is known through Jesus Christ and that Caesar was just a man and no sort of god no matter how many statues he may have erected portraying him as a god. They said that the one true God known in Jesus Christ has the ultimate claim on their lives and Caesar does not.

All of that was true of the claim Jesus Christ is Lord when it was made in the Roman Empire of the first century CE; but of course we don’t live in the Roman Empire of the first century CE. So what does all of that have to do with us? You could dismiss everything I just said about the proclamation of Jesus Christ as Lord as mere ancient history having nothing to do with us; but before you do, please consider this. In our world, in our lives today, many things make claims on our allegiance. The most obvious thing that does is our nation. True, it isn’t the Roman Empire; and the President, while he may claim that he talks to God and that God talks to him, doesn’t claim to be a god the way the Roman Emperors did. No one says that George W. Bush is lord, or at least I hope no one says that he or any other President is their Lord. Still, our nation demands our allegiance. Most of us grew up pledging our allegiance to the flag every day in school. We don’t use the word Lord to describe its leader, but our nation demands our allegiance and expects our loyalty and our service, sometimes even unto death, much like the Roman Emperors did so many years ago.

And the claim we Christians make that Jesus Christ is our Lord has something to say about that. I am not saying that a Christian can bear no allegiance to her or his country. I am saying that if we truly take Jesus Christ to be our Lord as Paul says he is, then that allegiance to nation must always be a conditional, secondary allegiance. We must all decide for ourselves how to resolve conflicts between our different allegiances; but for the Christian one thing is clear: If Jesus Christ is our Lord, our loyalty to him must always come first. That was true in the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago. It is true in Monroe, Washington today.

Jesus Christ is Lord, the one to whom we owe allegiance, the one whose word and will we are to obey. Yet there is more to it than that. To say that Jesus Christ is Lord is to acknowledge that in and through him God makes claims on us. The famous Barmen Declaration of the "Confessing Synod" of the German Evangelical Church, written in 1934 in response to the way most German Christians were capitulating to the demands of the Nazis that they recognize Hitler as their leader, essentially as their lord, said that "Jesus Christ is...God’s vigorous announcement of [God’s] claim upon our whole life." Paul’s inclusion of the term "our Lord" in Romans 8:39 reminds us that while God’s love never lets us go, it also makes radical demands on us.

What are those demands? They are many, and they are radical; but they can be summed up as a demand that we respond to God’s love in love ourselves. It is a demand that we respond to God’s agape for all people with our own agape for all people. When we talked about the nature of God’s love a couple of weeks ago we learned that God’s love wants not what is best for God but what is best for God’s beloved creatures, that is, for us. We know that kind of divine love in and through Jesus; and when we say that he is our Lord we acknowledge that God demands that kind of love from us.

What does that mean, precisely? It means that we are not to put self-interest above the interests of others of God’s people. We are not above all to put our own self-interest ahead of the interests of the poor and the marginalized in our society and in the world. It means that we are called to do radical justice for the poor. It means something else too. God’s love includes a commitment to nonviolence. We know that that is true because Jesus taught and lived nonviolence. God’s demand that we respond to God’s love with the same kind of love includes a demand that we too be committed to nonviolence-nonviolence not just as a tactic but as a way of life. Nonviolence not just when it’s safe but also when it’s dangerous. Nonviolence not just when it "works" but even when it fails. "Lord" may have originated as a worldly term, and the worldly lords who dominate history have always been people of violence. They still are. But our Lord is not of this world. Our Lord is Jesus Christ, and he is a Lord of nonviolence. He calls us to nonviolence as well.

So we see that Paul’s inclusion of the phrase "our Lord" at the end of Romans 8:39 is hardly an afterthought. It adds an entire new dimension to Paul’s claim about God’s unending love. It makes that claim reciprocal. It says that we are called to love as we are loved. That may sound difficult, and it can be. But as we try we can take courage and comfort from the fact that Jesus is our Lord, and he is a Lord of unending love that will never let us go. And that is very good news indeed. Paul says that Christ Jesus is our Lord. Paul’s right. Believe him. Trust his truth, for it is God’s truth. Nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.