While We Were Still a Mess

Paul's ship lay smashed to pieces off the island of Malta, but his letter had reached Rome years before he did.

He wrote it in the city of Corinth, at the house of his friend Gaius. Paul talked, and a man named Tertius wrote every word down. Then a woman named Phoebe, who was going to Rome, carried it. There was no post office. A letter went as fast as whoever carried it.

Paul had never been to Rome. The believers there met in people's houses, like the home of Priscilla and Aquila, his old tentmaking friends. Some had grown up Jewish. Others had grown up bowing to statues of Roman gods. They did not always get along. They even argued about whether it was all right to eat meat. (Some of them ate only vegetables, just to be safe.)

So Paul wrote them something that belonged to all of them at once.

"When we were still helpless," he said, and Tertius's pen scratched along, "at just the right time, Christ died for the ungodly."

Ungodly means people who live as if God does not matter. That was everyone in those house churches, Paul included.

Then Paul gave an example. "Hardly anyone will die for someone who does what is right. Maybe, for a really good person, someone might be brave enough to die."

Picture a stranger who gives his life pulling a kind old grandmother out of a burning house. People would talk about him for years.

"But God shows his love for us like this," Paul said. "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."

Jesus died for the believers in Rome before they had cleaned up a single thing, before they had stopped squabbling over dinner, while they were still a mess.

Paul pushed it further. "We were God's enemies," he said, "and we were brought back to God through the death of his Son. Now that we are his friends, how much more will his life keep us safe!"

There is a long word for this: reconciled. It means two people who were enemies are made friends again. God does the making. Jesus died to do it, and he is alive to keep it done.

"So now we are full of joy in God," Paul finished, "through our Lord Jesus Christ, who has made us his friends."

Tertius dipped his pen again. The letter was nowhere near finished.

Paul finally came to Rome as a prisoner, with a chain on his wrist. The believers heard he was on the road, and some of them walked more than forty miles to meet him. When Paul saw them, he thanked God and took courage.

Forty miles is a long walk, and they walked it for a friend. Jesus came all the way from heaven, and he came for people who had their backs to God and their arms folded. He went to the cross for his enemies. Then God raised him from the dead, and he is alive now, holding on to every enemy he has turned into a friend.

The people on that road had once been strangers to God and to each other. Now they walked it together, Jews and non-Jews side by side, friends of God and of each other, out to welcome a man in chains.