Pentecost 7A 2026

THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

​I once worked with a congregation that sponsored a monthly food pantry. Folks would pre-register with evidence of household size and income so that the truck would arrive with enough food. We usually had a lot left over, with nowhere to store it. 

One day we had so much canned food left over that someone called a friend from a large charismatic congregation some twenty miles away. A man arrived in a cargo van, and we loaded the remaining cases into it. As he was preparing to leave, he told me, “We appreciate the food. We want to use it to get folks into the church so we can get them saved.” 

I was stunned. After he drove away, I thought, "We don’t need to get them saved. We need to find a way to tell them they are saved.” 

The eighth chapter of Paul’s letter to the church in Rome is the centerpiece of the Epistle. Paul sets the stage in the first four chapters as he describes the difference between observance of the law and dependence on grace. Chapters five through eight are one long crescendo following that preliminary discussion. It’s helpful to read those four chapters straight through in a different translation so our minds are stirred anew by Paul’s words. 

We take so much for granted. We hear each Sunday’s lessons from the same translation and mostly with the same ears as we’ve always done. We assume that what we’ve always thought we believed is true without questioning whether that is so. I began asking questions about that before I went to seminary; in fact, it was the answer that startled me and led me to believe my call to ministry might not be on the organ bench but in the pulpit. 

It’s no secret that I was raised in fundamentalism. I heard repeated altar calls that followed an hour or so of singing and testimony and then at least thirty minutes of hellfire and damnation preaching. I’m surprised there weren’t some primed to light a match somewhere so the smell of sulphur might cause us to think we were staring into the very fires of hell if we didn’t go get ourselves saved, maybe for the second or third time. 

My startling answer came when a minister, also named Paul, dared to tell a group of us the truth, much in the same vein as the apostle he loved studying. One of our group had been badgered by classmates at college, who told him that since he didn’t believe what they did, he couldn’t be saved. 

I have since described that way of thinking and what is truly spiritually abusive as so much “male bovine residue.” 

​Paul begins this section by saying, “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” He begins to sum up his argument with today’s words: “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” While Paul’s rhetoric can be difficult to understand, what he basically says is this:

There is nothing you can do, nothing you need to do, to earn salvation.

You are saved, in a relationship with, and at peace with God through the saving work of Jesus of Nazareth. Not because you earned it, but because that’s how much God loves you. That’s how much God desires to be a part of your life. You are one whom God felt worthy of dying for.

But it goes beyond that. You, I—we are ones to whom God offers the life of the risen Christ. Faith in Christ, made real by participating in the creative and creating work of the Word made flesh, still living among us, is the sign to others of the same life-giving love that we believe saves us all.

That means we don’t attempt or need to bribe others to come into our fellowship to get them saved. It means we offer them food because they are hungry. It means we offer clothing and soap and, yes, toilet paper, because they have enough, shall we say, residue to deal with because we live in and often support a system that wants to bury them under all that.

The life of the Spirit isn’t reserved for some future time and place we call heaven. The life of the Spirit is here, right now, waiting for doors to open through which we enter into that life by making room for the Spirit to enter into our own.

We don’t, and cannot, get saved. But we can live in the Love that saves us, which Paul tells us is ours because God desires it to be so. As the words so often spoken, and which we probably take for granted, tell us, our true offering in response to God’s gracious gift is to “walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself for us.” That walk is our life in Christ. The gift keeps on giving. The Love is forever.