Word & World 1/1 (1981) Copyright © 1981 by Word & World, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN.

Seminary, St. Paul, MN. All rights reserved.

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Three Sermons on Texts from Romans

ROY A. HARRISVILLE
Luther-Northwestern Theological Seminaries, St. Paul, Minnesota

These sermons were preached at a convocation of alumni of Luther-Northwestern

Seminaries in January of 1980, and are here reproduced as delivered. Rather than taking them as
model or example of the preacher’s art, the reader had best regard them simply as one person’s
struggle with two great texts from Paul’s Letter to the Romans, one from the beginning, the other
from the end of the epistle.
The fact that the period in which these sermons were prepared included exegetical study
on the epistle is, I think, merely coincidental. To quote one scholar of an earlier generation, “I
incline to get from Paul my theology, in the sense in which I have one—and it is from Paul that I
get this sense.” All my teaching years, I have heard from colleagues and students that Paul is not
the only biblical author, and his theology not the only theology in the New Testament. Now,
there are sufficient historical grounds for using Paul’s “perspectives” by which to view the
remainder of the New Testament witness. In contrast to the final form assumed by the synoptic
Gospels, for example, the letters of Paul are the most proximate to the event of Jesus’ death and
raising. But such “scientific” considerations are not the reason for my preoccupation with that
“least of the apostles.” Nor is the reason that Paul represents the greatest challenge by far to the
intelligence of the interpreter, though he is indeed a vast, towering thing, each of his “faces”
written with two thousand years of failure at attempts to scale him!
Heritage, kept alive through training in the home, reinforced by education in the great
readers of Paul with whom I have fallen in love again and again; Luther above all, to whom my
father introduced me (together with Aesop!) when I first began to read; the experiences of the
years—these things, rather, have made that mountain of a man my own, his peaks never reached,
but for all that still my mountain, the interpreter of my faith and my existence. Far more—Paul is
preacher of the Christ to me. For if it is true, as I believe it is, that “Christology stands at the
centre of Christian tradition,” that “everything else is a prelude and an epilogue, footnotes and
glosses,” then it is Christ I must have, not only a Christ who calls me to follow him—so that
some distance between us might still be preserved—but who has taken me up into his own life
and history. There’s the

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crux of the matter. It is so because, for reasons I do not altogether understand, I can neither
believe nor follow nor love Jesus Christ, but I have heard—and the news has struck whatever
chord there be in my crabbed, little soul—that he has first loved me and will never let me go.
And I have heard it from Paul.
On the plain, it is relatively easy to turn the eye inward without stumbling, relatively easy
to observe one’s own faith, hope and love, but on the mountain, dear heaven what a sight—Jesus
Christ, “who has made me his own,” to serve him!

NOT ASHAMED (Romans 1:16)

Paul has taken to his pulpit again. And you need no degree in philology to note the
sudden change in mood or style. The amenities with which the letter begins, that solemn
procession of courtesies, loaded to collapsing with a mountain of traditional stuff—“Paul, a
servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God which he promised
beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son, who was
descended from David according to the flesh and designated Son of God in power according to
the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord,” and on and on in
one of those syntactical curiosities which belonged to ancient rhetoric, Apollos’ specialty, but
which Paul could never sustain for long because he had other fish to fry—the amenities are over
and done with, and Paul is preaching again: “I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of
God....”
There’s no whining martyr behind these words; no readiness to put up with something
shameful in the teeth of all common sense, since that way lies sainthood; no thought of having
struck a bad bargain with Jesus, and thus of having to hug him all the tighter. The words are a
confession, a boast, and by a man who trumpeted it on every point of the compass from the
Mediterranean to the Adriatic, “from Jerusalem to Illyricum” who kept his companions huffing
and puffing to keep up till dragged to prison at Caesarea by the sea, and then to Rome. “I
magnify my ministry,” he said. So much for Paul.
And we? Of course, there’s more than one reason for wearing a clerical collar at the
hospital, getting attached to the staff of some clinic, having “doctor” printed ahead of one’s name
on the letterhead, substituting counseling sessions for ringing doorbells like some demented
sectarian, but it helps reduce the onus! A clergyman of my father’s vintage once built a cabin by
the lake and into his cement walk inscribed the legend, “Reverend So-and-So, Master of Arts.” It
helped reduce the onus. Someone has always been playing at So-and-So, M.A., but now we are a
fellowship with a structure to rival that of any Wall Street bank; with titled personnel to equal
that of any royal house; with investments in Pizza Hut, and first-class flights to everywhere, and
every other blessed one of us with a degree. “Well,” you say, “a church needs system; not even
the first century community was run by whooping charismatics; ‘let everything be done decently
and in order’—it was the apostle himself said that!” But when a few seers had predicted we
might have a toe-hold on the future, who decreed we couldn’t learn from history, but had to
repeat what had already occurred to a thousand and one communities here, so that we finally
emerged just one more religious thing-a-mabob? And the result of achieving distinction as
compensation for our shame is

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that we have come trendily bringing up the rear. Setting out to be mod, we have ended like those
silly parsons from the roaring twenties, reading the marriage service in a diving bell, on the wing
of a monoplane, or from a flagpole. I never cared for that hymn, “Jesus, and shall it ever be, A
mortal man ashamed of Thee?” I doubt the reason is that it wounded my aesthetic taste. “One
O’Clock Jump” or “ As Time Goes By” never did—nor does the new hymnal. (By the way, who
assigned Bach two whole hymns, and Carl Schalk only thirty-five?) No, that song raised a kind
of Ebenezer to my shame.
What has happened, what taken place to put us at such distance from this text; what has
intervened to embarrass us, and prompted us to compensate to the point where we’re no match
for good, honest, clear-eyed unbelievers? It’s the identification of gospel with the power of God
has done us in. Paul was convinced that if whatever holds this universe together and gives it
coherence, purpose, and which most of us call God, if whatever or whoever exists behind or
within everything that is, intends us something good, then the intention is not only expressed or
advertised in, but takes it shape, its muscle and bone from the story of a crucified Galilean.
How can this be? The question is not out of order here. We are as impressed by the lack
of evidence for the identification of God’s power with the message of the life and fate of Jesus of
Nazareth as any generation of the clergy has ever been. Indeed, the identification of purpose in
the universe with the story of a crucified Jew as sheer, naked assumption, prejudice, has struck us
full in the face! It may be that our inability to draw the equation and hence our shame is only the
other side of our loss of ideals, so that now we have become sceptics, demanding a mountain of
evidence for every tiny ounce of truth. It may be that we needed a whole world hospitable to our
faith, and once it turned hostile, we began to doubt and be ashamed. At any rate, what the most
ruthless of historical critics could never accomplish, “time, tide and the affairs of men” have
done—left us a world in which, though God may not yet be ruled out as possibility, as
hypothesis, still the notion of His appearing in a Man of Sorrows, an event everlastingly made
contemporary in preaching and faith, has become one veritable waif or orphan of an idea. And,
some of us are becoming immoral, hoping, perhaps, to be found out and expelled from a situation
marked by inner doubt, inner torment, and public, pulpit confidence.
So then, that word “power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith” really can be
read to mean that faith creates its object, makes it up out of whole cloth? Indeed it can! And Paul
was as much a realist, as much impressed by the probabilities as ever you or I. At the end of his
miserable journey from Caesarea to Rome, Christians came to meet him on the Appian Way, and
Luke writes that “on seeing them Paul thanked God and took courage.” But when there was no
friendly face in the crowd, when every guarantee to his apostleship and preaching was lacking,
and to the moment his life was drained from him outside the walls of the Eternal City, he knew
enough to hang between heaven and hell, sick and trembling over the possibility of having hoped
in Christ “only for this life,” as he put it. And he knew also it was inevitable he should hang
there, since no disciple is above his Master. For what establishes existence “by faith” is the cross
of Jesus in which grace, forgiveness, is a judicial act of execution; a share in the life of God is
veiled in a Father’s forsaking His Son; reconciliation, life for my

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neighbor, is buried in a cruel and inhuman passion; and the future, life with God, the face of
Christ and every other saint I’ve ever known or loved between these two hands, is concealed in
an ancient, two thousand year old deed.
But why “by faith,” why all this life by things hoped for and never seen; why not
something more than an option or assumption, however momentous or “forced,” as William
James used to say; why not some little thing to inch the equation of gospel and power of God out
of probability toward certainty; some little thing to rescue us from the habitual taunt that we are
in love with failure! For openers, why not at least a church in which pastors need not crush their
pride and go begging to committees for another call?!
“By faith” because we are human; “by faith” because we have the freedom to undo the
good; “by faith” because we have undone a whole world of good and created another in which
truth is forever in the dock and Christ forever on the gallows. “By faith” because it is we who
have sentenced God to this hiddenness! And He suffered it, without demanding justice; He went
into the darkness and the long night we made for Him, but once more He appeared, this time with
a new name—“Son of God in power!” What a magnificent turn of events—it’s as though He had
reckoned on our evil, given it a home in heart and mind all the while, even before the world
began. And all for love of us. Therefore, for that reason, on that account, because of that, no need
to be ashamed! No need at all!

THE TWO WAYS (Romans 1:16-17)

To whom does the gospel belong? For whom does it have power, and what happens in it?
Here’s where the spirits divide. And as long as I can remember, they have always divided there.
Is the gospel yours? Does it belong to you? If you answer, “yes,” then you’ll behave much
differently toward it than if you suppose it belongs to someone else. When your car needs repair,
you don’t take a plebiscite. You talk it over with the next of kin, proceed to the garage and then
wait to pay the robber. Is that how it is with the gospel? Is it something in your possession, of
which you may dispose—within certain limits, of course—so that at any given moment you may
proceed to its repair or rehabilitation, and without ever taking a vote? And even if you took a
vote, gathered a hundred or a thousand others to make some disposition regarding it, wouldn’t
the underlying assumption be that somehow the gospel belonged to you, not you to it?
Or is the gospel God’s? Does it belong to Him, so that no one with or without a
turned-around collar could ever assume it was his to define, hers to interpret, to preach or
teach—that its definition and whatever else belongs to it can never be left to him or her, to us?
“Well,” you say, “stated in such fashion, of course the gospel belongs to God.” But it’s one thing
to say so and another to behave as if it were. Many concede the gospel existed before the church
ever drew breath, but then they adapt it, accommodate it, adjust it, attune it to some real or
imagined need. If it’s your house, you can buy a can of Sherwin Williams or you can let the paint
peel. But to whom does the gospel belong? Over that question, there’s deep division.
For whom does the gospel have power? When the membership rolls are plumb full to
bursting, when it’s time to knock out a wall, substitute an organ

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with five ranks for the old wheeze-box, when health results in answer to prayer, when I speak in
the tongues of men and angels—is it then the gospel has power? Or, when the summer soldiering
is done, the Galilean springtime past and gone, when there’s snow and bloody feet at Valley
Forge, when there’s weakness and a cross, nothing but the assurance of things hoped for, that
desperate clinging to the word that God for Jesus’ sake forgives me all my sins and forges me to
His likeness, is it then, not just then too or then in addition, but supremely then, then above all,
that the gospel has power to salvation? On this question too, there’s deep division.
And, what happens in the gospel? Everything which ought to happen? Or does it require a
supplement? Does the gospel bring remission but need some second thing to hammer existence
into its God-intended shape? Can the gospel really exist like a jewel without a setting? Does it
create for itself its own “spring of action sure,” or must that spring come from somewhere
outside itself? Is it enough to live and die by the gospel? Or, is all God’s righteousness, that by
which He reclaims what once was His—the earth, the stars, the sun and moon and you and me
into the bargain—is it all and none of it left over lodged in that news of Jesus’ death and rising?
Is the gospel not merely gift but power as well? In the moment I am struck to my knees with the
blow of that incomparable love, have I in that moment gained a new Master, become a slave to
that love, so that I do the good, not because I must, but because to do anything else is to deny my
true self, what I have become? What happens in the gospel? There’s deep division over the
question.
But with all the division, there’s no doubt as to where majority opinion lies. And that
opinion seems to hang together with our experience. Experience dictates that “possession is
nine-tenths of the law.” In some ancient time or far-away place “the wondrous gift was giv’n,”
but it’s been left with us now, its exposition and consequent success or failure dependent on
human ingenuity or know-how. Experience reads that “nothing succeeds like success.” The
power of the gospel is determined by results concretely established. So the resurrection of Jesus
is not an event which signals His cross as the hinge of human history; it is rather its cancellation.
And, experience teaches that “there oughta be a law,” not merely for bullies and fascists, but for
Christians as well. Almost every event in our history is calculated to lean us in the direction of
construing the gospel as our own, of assigning its power to whom it can be proved, of denying it
can or even should stand on its own. Almost every event in our history runs athwart the notion
that anything at all can be given, not earned, that anything not battering the senses can be true,
least of all that weakness, cross and death can be an arena for grace, or that it is ever possible to
live only with a “yes,” not also with a “no.” It is problematic whether or not a church or
fellowship which preaches such strange things, and in such strange and awful contradiction to an
entire national experience can long endure.
But what saith the apostle? If the gospel is not God’s, however well or poorly we may
state the case—“no hands but ours, no feet but ours” and all that sort of thing—if it is not His,
then, lacking any belief in human talent and accomplishment, my assurance has gone clean out
the window! For I need what is God’s; I need a place to stand which He has made, a Word which
is His—to be sure, refracted through your poor, stammering lips, but something on which He

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has staked His life and Godhead, for good and all. You and I draw distinctions. If the gospel were
ours, we should reserve it for one smart fellow or another, for the rich or poor, the moral giant or
the pigmy, for the greater or less gifted. But God “has consigned all to disobedience, that he may
have mercy on all.” Hurrah for God!
And if the gospel has power only for those to whom it can be proved, then what of those
who can point to nothing within or without to attest to its truth? Is it on that account disqualified?
Hundreds, thousands would answer “yes” to that question; whole churches are built on that
assumption. But Paul says it is to faith and faith alone—not to faith against sight, nor to faith
against my understanding; faith is not eyeless nor without intelligence—but to faith before ever
there’s a seeing or an understanding there is power to salvation. And if I must go through life
fretting over God’s refusal to burst the clouds at last and show Himself, so that there can be no
shadow of doubt that He exists, no matter—the power is present to faith, for faith is what every
creature under heaven can possess, since faith is His gift.
And, if all God’s righteousness, all and nothing left, as the edges on grandma’s pie, if all
of it is not present, resident and at home in that blessed gospel, then it is all over with newness,
all over with beginning again. Then, what we are summoned to is just one more trip to Sinai. But
with every law there’s someone waiting to pare down the demand to the size of his own willing.
I’ll tell you a secret—it is not merely evil men and women who bring a whole land to ruin, but
well-intentioned, pious folk who believe they can will the good, do the good, struggle for the
good in response to mere external stimuli. But what I need is not a legislator, rather a Creator; I
need total, radical transformation at the core of the self. I need to be made new, created out of
nothing by a Spirit which can set me free from “the law of sin and death.” Then, if at all, then, if
ever, but then surely, I shall sometime do the good, because Christ, not self which ever and anon
uses law for its own devices, but because Christ lives in me. “Sometime,” for though the life I
now life I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me, I do still
live it in the flesh. But what is it constitutes a benediction on the status quo, what gives licence to
inactivity—the God who is setting me free, that restless, brooding, lean and hungry Spirit of the
risen Christ who pounds me on His anvil into what I was always meant to be, or the code,
everlastingly tailored to my shape?
Here’s where to begin—with the gospel of God, the proof of its power to faith, and in it
all the world and us made new. We have not always begun here. Is it possible we have not yet
begun here? There seems to be some question whether or not we ever shall begin here. But if, by
some great and wondrous power we should begin here, we shall know a truth, clear as crystal,
and be a bright shining to the world.

ANTI-NARCISSUS (Romans 15:3)

There’s an old myth—old as the world itself, I expect—which reads something like this.
Once upon a time there was a clear fountain, with water like silver. Shepherds never drove their
flocks there and goats never ate there. It was never filled with fallen leaves or branches. The
grass was fresh around it, and the rocks

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sheltered it from the sun. One day a youth, thirsty and tired with hunting stooped to drink at that
pool, and in it saw his own reflection. He thought it was some beautiful water-sprite living in the
fountain. He gazed at those eyes, at the glow of health on those cheeks and fell in love with it. He
brought his lips near to take a kiss and plunged his arms to embrace the object. It disappeared,
but after a moment it returned and renewed its fascination. The youth couldn’t tear himself away;
he lost all thought of food or rest. He said to the imagined spirit: “Why do you shun me?” His
tears fell into the water and disturbed the image. When he saw it disappear, he called to it to stay.
By degrees the youth began to lose his strength, and at last he pined away and died. The
water-nymphs would have burned his body on the funeral pyre, but it was nowhere to be found.
In its place appeared a flower, purple within, and surrounded with white leaves—all that was left
of the name and memory of Narcissus.
People who earn their keep with writing books about the differences between one
generation and another suggest that nothing fits the generation of the seventies so well as this
myth of that poor fellow who fell in love with himself. But it fits us all—children of the
seventies, the sixties, the fifties or the twenties—all of us. Watch white folks and Gentiles when
blacks or Jews struggle for their rights; they worry about white folks and Gentiles. Watch men
when women object to being used; they worry about men. When farmers run the power company
off their land, the power company worries about the power company. When someone wants to
paddle his canoe without inhaling Phillipps 66, snowmobilers worry about snowmobilers, and
when we’ve had our fill of being blown to kingdom come with Saturday night specials, the NRA
sets up a howl at the mere suggestion we register the wretched things and then lies to the entire
populace that our legislatures want to take away our right to bear arms. That myth is appropriate
to any generation. We’re all in the dreadful dilemma together, all, as some of those dead saints
who line my shelves put it in their old, dead Latin, curvatus in se, turned in upon ourselves. We
are all of us, without exception, Narcissus.
Now, it isn’t that playing Narcissus doesn’t have its advantages. It surely does. It is
politically expedient, for one thing, to be narcissistic, at least to a degree. At the basis of our
political life there lies that principle we call “the national interest,” which being interpreted
means that if we show Afghanistan an open hand or if we do not, it will be because it is to our
advantage. Playing Narcissus is economically expedient, at least to a degree. I once knew an
independent business man who sold radios and television sets, but couldn’t bear to charge friends
the going rate, and gave his stuff away for cost. He’s no longer in business, but his banker is.
And, there may even be personal advantage to playing Narcissus. Robert Ringer’s book was a
best seller not long ago because thousands had discovered the benefits which accrue to “Looking
Out For Number One.” A bit of “enlightened self-interest” on the part of a nation, then, and some
attention to profit in a business is no doubt necessary, but it’s no principle on which to base a
life, an existence.
We’re made for each other. The child needs the milk man; the milk man needs the bulk
dealer; the bulk dealer needs the farmer; and the farmer needs the child. We preach the
individual, self-sustained, alone and tall in the saddle, but our physical existence is a network of
dependencies. The money in your pocket is proof enough of that. That dollar of yours is a
worthless scrap of paper, but be-

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hind it still lies the trust of millions to trade with one another by means of this curious tender,
and trust, however reinforced by law, spells dependence. The less trust, the more ballooned the
dollar, and back to the peanuts with Jimmy Carter! And not merely physical life makes our
playing Narcissus an impossibility—we can’t even think without one another. Logic, reasoning is
a social affair. Hole yourself up in some gloomy tower, reflect till the cows come home, and
without the other to corroborate or correct your findings, chances are you’ll invent the Arian
heresy all over again, or, if you do create something new, it will be because you brought your
memory with you into that gloomy tower—the history of a thousand and one attempts by all the
living and dead who preceded you. You can’t think without the other.
And, you’ve no identity, no self, no “I” without the other. What made you strong,
beautiful and intelligent, or weak, ugly and dull—did you come from the womb already fitted out
with such awareness? It was the other in whose eyes you saw attraction or revulsion and took that
message to your innards and gave it a home. Part of the hell of existence is that people’s
perceptions change—what Peter Paul Rubens believed was beauty four hundred years ago would
serve only as a “before” in a Weight Watchers’ ad now—but there it is, you’ve no self without
the other.
Now it’s time to play my last card. I know Someone who not merely recognized that He
couldn’t live without the other, think without the other, be a self, have an identity without the
other; not merely submitted to the inevitable truth that there’s no kind of existence at all without
the other, much as we submit to some distasteful business—mastery of the liquid future or the
kings of Judah—but who positively revelled in the other, took all his joy, all his pleasure in the
other; who used himself up; threw himself away for the other. There never was such a man
before, and there’ll never be such a man again. And if to be God means to behave in such fashion
as he did, if the word “God” by definition means to be altogether and entirely for the other and
nothing held back, so that whatever power He has is only to make us strong, whatever goodness
He has is only to make us good, whatever love He has is only to make us lovely—and any other
kind of God I neither want nor need; someone in this vast cosmos must not merely put up with
me but take delight in me and that for no reason at all!—then all of God was in that Man. You
know his name—it is Jesus of Nazareth, the one called Christ.
I know, this occasion is not for the purpose of recruiting Christians among the clergy. The
occasion be hanged! The surest, the most certain deliverance from playing Narcissus, from
falling in love with self, being for the self, devil take the rest and repeating all the agony, all the
misery of humankind to this moment in your own generation, is to become that Man’s disciple
and love the other, all the others, just as He loved you—for no reason at all. It may be, the
precious few who call ourselves by His name do not serve as any kind of recommendation, but
not a miserable one of us has ever been able to detract one whit from the truth that His life and
death had one single, one solitary purpose, ground and aim—to be for us, to be nothing else but
for us.
One thing I cannot do, and that is call you to imitate Him. That would only allow the
difference between you and Him to stand. To be His disciple you must surrender your autonomy.
But if you should want to be His disciple and bring the

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world some bit of redemption or hope or strength or creativity, if you should desire to turn things
’round a bit, should want not merely to consent to the truth you’re all made for each other, but to
take delight, glee, joy, rapture in the other and to the point of burning yourself out, then you’ve
made a beginning. preacher! Then you’re ready to hear my text—from Christ’s oldest and
greatest interpreter: Paul, one-time Saul and lover of self: “Let each of us please his neighbor for
his good, to build him up. For Christ did not please himself; but, as it is written, ‘The reproaches
of those who reproached thee fell on me.’” There’s your answer to Narcissus!