Christ in Me

Homily for Sunday, August 9, 2026
The Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost
Romans 10:5-1

My eleventh-grade English teacher used to tell us, “If you find a text difficult to understand, read faster.”  This summer we have been hearing from Paul’s Letter to the Romans. I must say – keeping in mind my eleventh grade English teacher’s advice–  there are days on which I can’t read Paul’s Letter to the Romans fast enough!

Using this morning’s text from Romans chapter 10 as an example, my homily today is a primer on how to “read fast” a scripture passage that may be difficult to understand.  But first, two examples of how a “slow read” might make today’s epistle difficult to understand.

To do a “slow read” means to focus only on the eleven verses in today’s epistle. Even though when we focus on these verses ostensibly we are trying to dig deeper into the passage, a slow read risks a shallow reading of Paul.  For example, when we hear Paul in this morning’s passage distinguish between “the righteousness that comes from the law” and “the righteousness that comes from faith,” we might think that the Law no longer matters, for now we live by faith. But such a reading misses one of the main points Paul makes in chapters 9-11:  which is that for the Hebrews, God’s covenant still holds, and for them the law is still good.  As we heard last week:  “They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, the promises.”  And as we will hear next week:  “God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew.  For the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable.”  The Hebrews are still God’s people, Paul argues, and God’s promises to them still hold. Or another example… In a slow read of today’s passage, we risk misunderstanding salvation as a kind of spell – “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead,you will be saved.”  As though, as in Harry Potter, if we say the right words and with the right frame of mind, our spell will work.

Let’s move to a “fast read” of today’s passage.  To read fast means to read the passage not too closely but quickly, all the while keeping an eye on the verses that surround it, as well as on Romans as a whole, and also on the corpus of Paul’s writings.  At least two things emerge from a fast read.  First, a fast read of Paul’s other letters reminds us that Paul is Jewish and could not be more Jewish.  As he writes in Philippians, Paul was, “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 righteousness under the law, blameless” (Phil 3:5-6).  Paul is a Jew through and through… who had an experience of Jesus.  Paul did not read about Jesus; no one taught him, he writes in Galatians (Gal 1:12) – Paul experienced Jesus.  Though Acts tells a perhaps embellished account of how Paul encountered Jesus on the Damascus Road, Paul himself more modestly called the experience a “vision” – “Have I not seen Jesus my lord,” he asks in 1 Corinthians (1 Cor 9:1). Or again in Galatians, “But… the one who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace was pleased to reveal his son to me” (Gal 1:15).  Paul is a Jew through and through who had an experience of Jesus so profound that (as he writes in Philippians) he came to “regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil 3:8).  

A second thing that a fast read of Paul reminds us is that for Paul, God is God not merely of the Hebrews but of all people.  Paul understood that the reality of God as manifested in Jesus Christ concerned not only Jewish people but everyone.  We see this universality in Paul’s speech to the Athenians in Acts chapter 17:  “Men of Athens,” Paul begins, “I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way…” Then, pointing to the statue to “an unknown god,” Paul says that this “unknown god” is the one true god of everyone, for whom we all search, for “indeed he is not far from each one of us,” says Acts (Acts 17:27).  Or recall, too, how in the opening chapter of Romans Paul wrote of what we now call “natural law;” that is, there is an innate law planted in all human hearts by God and which all can understand:  “Ever since the creation of the world,” writes Paul, “God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood” by all “through the things God has made” (Rom 1:20).  

Let’s bring these two insights from a fast read of Paul to bear on the eleven verses in today’s epistle from Romans chapter 10…   When we hear Paul in this morning’s passage distinguish between “the righteousness that comes from the law” and “the righteousness that comes from faith,” a slow read in which we focus only on these verses and perhaps become “stuck in the weeds,” as it were, might lead us to think that the law no longer matters but has been replaced by faith.   A fast read that takes in the surrounding verses and Romans as a whole and that takes in what we know about Paul from his other letters, suggests that Paul here does not say the law has been superseded,but rather that God’s covenant and promises to the Jewish people still hold.  Today’s verses are part of Paul’s larger argument that, in Jesus, God has extended the covenant and the promises to the Gentiles also.  If the law is specific to the Jewish people, says Paul, yet the God of those laws is the God of everyone.  

And when we hear Paul say,“If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved,” a slow read that with blinders focuses only on these few words at the expense of the wider context might lead us to think that there is a correct formula to say and a right frame of mind in which to say it if we would be saved. But a fast read takes in what we know of Paul from his other letters and suggests that Paul writes not as one who has merely considered Jesus or thought about him intellectually, but who has experienced Jesus and who now lives his life for him to the point that (as he writes in Galatians) “it is no longer I who live, but… Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20).  “If you, too, allow yourself to have an experience,” says Paul in effect, “of this God who is within and who speaks within all human hearts and whom we see manifested in Jesus, then your heart and your believing, and your mouth and your speaking, cannot but be transformed.  And your trust of this inner encounter will allow Jesus to heal and save even though you are not Jewish, even though you do not follow the Mosaic law.”

I’m guessing that most of us (probably) have not had an encounter as dramatic as Paul’s on the Damascus road as described in Acts chapter 9.  But I’m guessing,too, that as Paul “saw” Jesus, so have we in some way seen Jesus; as God “revealed” his Son to Paul, so God also has revealed his Son to us.  I invite us this week to set aside time to allow ourselves to bring to mind our experiences of Jesus.  And maybe ask Jesus to show you, “Is there within me a desire to more fully center my life on you, Lord?”  “Is there within me a desire to more fully live my life for you?”  Perhaps,with God’s grace, we with Paul will come to regard “everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord.”  And perhaps we, too, with God’s help, with Paul will come to say, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”  

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