Toward the end of March, 2003, I gave a sermon called "The Thunderbird and the Crucifix." In that sermon I used an image that captures the spiritual warfare in which the Church finds itself engaged in our time. It is an image taken from nature, and specifically, from the world of large, wild animals.

Television offers several natures shows that film these animals in their native habitats. Maybe you have seen the drama in which a lioness or cheetah chases and captures a zebra or an impala. What catches my eye are the times when there is no chase.

A herd of zebras will be grazing, and very close by a pride of lions will be lying around, apparently uninterested in the zebras. More astonishing, the zebras seem aware but unfazed by the lions. They share the same space in spite of a million years of lions' eating zebras. You want to say to the zebras, "Get out while the getting's good." But they never run until they are chased. They graze side by side with their lethal enemy.

That's how we live with the world around us. We share the same space with values, trends, allurements and people that can make the world of Christ seem irrelevant and tear to piecees our relationship with God.

You will notice something else in these life-and-death chase scenes. When the lions attack, the entire herd of Zebras runs. Dozens of zebras flee in the face of three lions, so that it is always one on one between a lion and a zebra, and the lion has most of the advantages. The zebras never get together and say, "Let's turn and face the lions, and if a lion gets too close to one of us, the rest of us will attack and kick and bite the lion. She won't have a chance." They never do it. It's every lion for himself.

That, unfortunately, is how in the past we have often dealt with the spiritual danger around us. Evangelical churches have prized their independence so highly that they didn't notice the nearness of the lions. However, the predatory moves of the lions over the past forty years have begun to change individualistic, Evangelical ways.

Among pastors in my circles a new awareness has grown that congregations need each other. The congregation that stands alone will go one on one with the lion, and, as always, the lion has most of the advantages.

Within congregations like ours there is a new and cautious sense of solidarity. The letter to the Romans comes into our shared experience and offers a distinctly Christian perspective on the world we share with the devouring beasts. That perspective contributes to our new-found solidarity.

A Place to Stand
It is hard to get outside your own skin and see yourself as other people see you. It is equally hard to get outside our own culture and see that culture through foreign eyes. Cherishing the Bible as we do gives us a great advantage. It makes it possible to see our culture from the outside. In Romans we hear a biblical voice speaking to issues that are being discussed today, only they take a position that contradicts that New York Times, CBS editorial policy, and the Democratic National Committee.

For example, Romans one does not consider homosexuality an alternative lifestyle but a symptom of divine judgement. It doesn't consider contempt for parents a rite of passage but evidence of a depraved mind. It doesn't view the extrusion of God from academic life and the public square as academic freedom or the separation of church and state but as foolishness.

Romans gives no assurance that once these cultural forces are released into a society that things will even out after a while, and the ship of state will sail on in tranquil waters. It says God has decreed that those who do such things deserve death. Crises will accumulate, and from Vietnam to September 11 the crises have been accumulating, gentle reminders that the Judge of all the earth is no respecter of persons and will do what is right, even with the last, remaining superpower on earth.

Romans, this contrarian voice from the past, goes even deeper. It traces the cause of our cultural malaise to its root cause. It doesn't deny the intermediate causes of human suffering: bad laws, bad public policies, bad working conditions, absentee fathers, lack of education, and poverty, to name some of the more obvious. God cares about intermediate causes, because they are matters of justice.

But why not also address root causes? Romans insists loudly on addressing root causes. The apostle's first conclusion in Romans 3:9 showed the root cause of our woes as a race. He concluded that (we) are all under sin.

Human nature has become ensared by the force called sin. It does harm to human life. It contradicts our good intentions. It can mushroom into demonic, global proportions. We all have first hand experience of it in large and small ways. This dominion of sin is just as true of religious people as it is true of irreligious people, and no one can shake off this power just by trying.

Paul pushed the envelop even further in the crucial conclusion of Romans 3:19 that the whole world will be held accountable to God. Not only can we not shake off the power of sin, but God also holds us responsible for it. That conclusion defines the human dilemma. All right thinking about humanity starts there.

The Centrality of Jesus
But it doesn't end there. Perhaps one of the greatest sentences ever written in any language gives the human race hope in the face of the root cause of its sorrows. Romans 5:20-21 says this. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Inasmuch as humanity is answerable to God for repeated and willful sin, how can we have grounds for hope on the day of God's wrath? Does God demonstrate to us clearly now that He will treat us with mercy then?

The apostle says He does, and the death of Christ makes that possible. Jesus' death at first looked like a particularly cruel and unjust way to die. But when God raised Jesus from death, people took another look at His death and found a new way and powerful meaning. Guided by the Jewish Scriptures, the apostles came to view the death of Christ as the permanent and material sign of God's merciful intentions towards humanity.

We can have hope on the day of God's wrath, because the death of Christ atoned for the sins that separated us from God. We know that God loves us, because the death of Christ embodies that love for all to see.

These benefits of Christ's death come to bear on human life through faith in Jesus Christ. Our faith in Christ releases the power of His atoning death into our experience, and God's merciful offer of forgiveness becomes personal for us.

Nowhere did the force called sin show its true colors more clearly than in the killing of Jesus Christ. Nowhere did the purpose of God seem so weak and foolish as on the cross. But nowhere did the love of God for frail and fallen humanity shine as on the cross. Nowhere did the power of God and the wisdom of God show their true colors so clearly than at the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Paul saw all that and said, "That is what God is like. That is how God will win the battle with evil. His grace will always absorb the worst that sin can do and then reassert its supremacy until some day evil is finished."

We are invited to join the battle on the side, which from our culture's point of view, has all the disadvantages, but which from the apostolic point of view has all the advantages. For the battle Romans also teaches us that God has provided us great resources and specific guidance.

Divine Resources for Spiritual Warfare
In Romans 8:31-32 the apostle summarizes those resources in language that calls attention to the last, full measure of devotion of almighty God on behalf of men. He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us aall - how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?

If God has already given His best on our behalf, why would He hold back on our behalf, why would He hold back any other resources we need for spiritual warfare? What ugly images we have of God. We say He is out to get us, out to spoil our fun, kill our joy. You might as well say the sun shines to make the world dark. People can be killjoys. The God of Jesus is the great Joy-giver. He is also the great Wisdom-giver and the great Patience-giver. He has just what we need for the moral and spiritual crisis of our age. Romans points out three prominent resources for our age that "advances progressively backwards:" inner power, future hope and God's inalienable love.

Romans 8:3-4 say that Jesus Christ condemned sin in sinful man in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit. the Holy Spirit is the new source of strength that empowers the Church to be people of integrity in a world where we are free to do anything we can get away with. Our responsibility is to live according to the Spirit.

Romans 8:5 defines more closely what it means to live according to the Spirit. Those who live acording to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires.

Another writing of Paul tells us exactly what the Spirit desires. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. The Holy Spirit desires such things, He is the power at work in us to produce those nine behaviors.

Along with this inner power God gives us a future hope. In Romans 8:24-25 Paul expressed that hope in these words: We ourselves, who have ... the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. The redemption of our bodies refers to the resurrection of our bodies to an indestructible life.

Christianity does not merely believe in the immortality of the soul. The doctrine of the resurrection teaches that your immortal soul will some day have an immortal body that will be fit for new heavens and a new earth.

Finally, the apostle expresses God's inalienable love memorably in Romans 8:38-39. For I am convinced that neither death by weapons of mass destruction nor life in vitro, neither angels nor demons, neither the present, which is most uncertain, nor the future, which we cannot know, nor any powers, political, military or economic, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The Mystery of Israel
But there is more. Nowhere else in the New Testament does anyone try to address more bluntly the mystery of Israel and its meaning to the Church and all humanity. Romans 11:28-29 lays bare the foundation of Paul's deepest convictions about his people Israel. As far as the gospel is concerned, they are enemies on your account; but as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for God's gifts and his call are irrevocable. Israel may have by and large missed their supeme moment in history, but even that has not separated them from the love of God who chose them, nor from their mission to be a blessing to all humanity.

Why should we be surprised that the blessing would include not only the Christian gospel, but also the Jewish role in both the creation of Capitalism and the Communist effort to destroy i, and that both its creation and destruction would further the Christian gospel?

Why should we be surprised that the blessing would reinsert Israel into Palestine as an irritant to the Muslim world that is least interested in the Christian Gospel and open that world up to the good tidings of Jesus Christ?

Why should we be hesitant to hope with the Apostle Paul for the day when Jews, without losing any of their Jewishness, will acknowledge Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah of Israel?

The divine election embraces Israel and the Church, and in both God has ordained that His name will be planted irrevocably in the earth, until every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

This is Our Story
This is our story. This is the story of one third of the population of the earth. We pray for the day that it will be the story of all humanity. Outside Western Civilization its chief rival is Islam. In that confrontation Christianity holds the high ground, because Islam needs force and the threat of force to maintain its hold on people and to spread.

Within Western Civilization it has no rival. Its chief competitor, Communism, has been exposed for the fraut it always was. Evolution is still around in ever more defensive academic circles, but fewer and fewer people care about it. American individualism finds itself threatened by militant Islam without and militant indulgence within.

This is our story, but it is not ours to keep. It is ours to experience and to tell. The Church is the greatest success story in the history of the world. Without force or the threat of force it opens new franchises every day in every culture on the face of the earth, as it experiences and tells the incomparable story of how the Lord foils the plans of the nations; he thwarts the purposes of the peoples. But the plans of the Lord stand firm forever, the purposes of his heart through all generations (Psalm 33:10-11). And so, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.