Home » New Testament » Romans »
Romans 6:1b-11
Proper 7A
Be who you are. That is Paul’s most basic message in Romans 6. Paul tells us who we are and so reminds us how we are to live from now on as a result of our true identity. Romans 6 is a landmark passage. Scholars can write (and have written) whole books on any one…
Romans 5:1-8
Proper 6A
By now many of us have heard about the recent flap regarding the well-known contemporary hymn “In Christ Alone.” Seems a certain hymnal committee wanted to formalize what a number of congregations had already done informally on their own and that is swap out language about how on the cross “the wrath of God was…
Romans 8:6-11
Lent 5A
Romans 8: is there a better loved, more soaring passage in the New Testament than this one? There is much here to linger over, savor, celebrate. The Lectionary carves out only six verses but the truth is, Romans 8:1-17 form such a logical—and also lyric—unit that I would suggest reading all 17 verses, and indeed,…
Romans 5:1-11
Lent 3A
Tragedy and strength. Carnage and hope. It’s the kind of paradoxical combination we Christians know about because most every time we step into a church sanctuary we are confronted with symbols that point to hope in the midst of sorrow. We see a cross, which has somehow transformed from a grim reminder of death into…
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
Lent 2A
Considering that we all love gripping courtroom dramas at the movies or on TV, it’s a wonder people don’t find parts of Romans more engaging. When you read Romans 4, for instance, it’s not the least bit difficult in your mind’s eye to picture Paul as an attorney, pacing furiously in a courtroom as he…
Romans 5:12-19
Lent 1A
Princeton Seminary President Craig Barnes has a way of opening just about each one of his sermons with a pithy one-liner that grabs your attention even as it sets the tone for the whole sermon. In one of his sermons he opened with this: Sooner or later we all face the frightening thought that we…
Romans 1:1-7
Advent 4A
“To God’s beloved ones in Rome.” Such a simple, such a commonplace way to open a letter. We read such a salutation in all of the New Testament’s many epistles. And it’s easy to breeze right past it, hurry on by to get to the meat of the letter, the real important stuff about the…
Romans 15:4-13
Advent 2A
Acoustics are everything when it comes to how a text is heard but in these days of political turmoil—a roiling pot of many feelings that is bubbling up in also the church—Paul’s call to “accept one another” for the sake of God’s greater glory is bracing. Right now a lot of people I know—including the…
Romans 13:11-14
Advent 1A
As with any number of Lectionary readings, we have a “this” in Romans 13:11 whose antecedent you cannot know unless you back up to the first ten verses of this passage. The immediate context of the “this” (as in “And do THIS . . .”) is the command to love your neighbor as yourself. The…
Romans 5:1-5
Trinity Sunday C
We forget it most of the time when we read Romans but the fact is that Paul was writing to a group of Christians for whom hope was no doubt in short supply. They lived in the heart of Roman darkness, right under the nose of the Caesar himself. They lived in an empire in…
Content related to Romans