Not Ashamed
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, April 12, 2026
Reading: Romans 1:16-2:1
A bit of a dismal litany, wasn’t that? Quite the change from last week, when we had tombs opened, an angel afire, a people astounded to find ourselves saved. One of you asked, “Can we have Easter every week?” The answer is yes, we do, the whole church’s whole existence is Easter. This week we get a list of sins: 20 some odd by my count. Where did things go so wrong?!
The book of Romans was written several decades prior to the gospels. It’s Paul’s longest book, written to a Christian community he doesn’t know personally, but from which he needs help. So, he’s introducing his gospel to fellow Christians who are weighing whether to help him or not. Romans is massively important in Christian history. Some say every significant renewal of the church comes with renewed attention to the epistle to the Romans. May it be so among us as we study it these next two months. When I first heard the gospel as a kid, really heard it, it was in a form called the Roman road. I still have the verses memorized.
“There is no one righteous, not even one” Romans 3:10
“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” 3:23
“But God proves his love for us in this: while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” 5:8
“The wages of sin is death. But the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” 6:23
“If you confess with your lips the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” 10:9
There it is. We’re all in trouble—that’s what Paul is arguing in the reading for today. But God has made a way in Jesus Christ for those who believe. That’s good news, I wanted in on that when I first heard it as a kid and still do.
The gospel is like your doctor starting out with the good news first: there’s a cure! Uh, for what? N.T. Wright gives an analogy here. There was a great 200-year-old oak tree he loved to look at. But experts said its root system was rotten, it had to come down, or it would crash down. He saw no evidence. But when they cut into the tree, sure enough it was hollow, blackened out, rotten not just in the roots but to the core. That’s humanity. We might look good on the outside, but our condition is grave. Paul is diagnosing humanity’s disease. After promising there is a cure.
This is a strange case where our wider secular culture echoes us, but without the cure. Humanity is rotten at the core. Think of the worst prognoses of our ecological moment: that Earth is irredeemably ruined. Grim. Or those who are most critical of our colonial history. All of us are guilty of genocide and can’t atone for it. Rotten to the core. Neither prophets of ecocide nor culture-cide seem to hold out any hope, but they’re both borrowing from the Christian gospel, usually unawares, with their calls to repent. They just don’t have any hope of redemption. Paul starts out with good news: there’s hope! Uh, for what doc?
One of his chief examples is this. Sometimes described as a clobber verse: one trotted out to beat up on gay and lesbian people.
God gave them over to dishonourable passions. Their females exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, 27 and in the same way also the males, giving up natural intercourse with females, were consumed with their passionate desires for one another. Males committed shameless acts with males and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.
I feel badly even reading that in here, knowing there are always beloved queer people in our midst, and the rest of us love them. There are 6 or 7 other passages that mention something about homosexuality in the Bible, but those are easier to contextualize and show they don’t apply. Most are really against prostitution or sexual slavery. This one seems to say there’s a natural way to be that’s good and an unnatural one. What do we make of it?
First, Christians have always been considered odd in our sexual behaviour. Queer, if you will. Jesus Christ had no spouse or children. This is already a bad way to be Jewish. Jews keep the command to fill the earth and multiply. That’s humanity’s very first commandment. Jesus doesn’t do that. So, the church’s first option for sex is to say no altogether. Christ is coming back soon—who has time for marriage? Our sexual habits then deviate from our Jewish forebears. To be a Christian means Jesus Christ is your first spouse, no need for any others. Christians have also said, that if you marry, it should be for life to one person. That’s pretty narrow to most Greeks, gentiles, pagans. But a marriage to one person best reflects God’s faithfulness to Israel, Christ’s to the church.
St. Augustine, in 5th century north Africa, gathered our fragmented thoughts on marriage this way. Sex is for three things. One, for raising children: the home should be a little church, a house of prayer and a school to learn forgiveness. Two, marriage is for restraining lust. Being sexually intimate with a spouse keeps us from being tempted by or tempting others. And three, sex is for growth in friendship between the two people making covenant. Augustine himself needed a few failures to realize no human relationship can satisfy. And this is the key thing we have to say on sexuality—everyone needs to hear this. The other person can’t be your whole life. That’s a crushing expectation. Only God can be that.
In the late 1980s the United Church of Canada surprised other churches, surprised even ourselves by saying that queer people could be married and ordained. Most of the rationale at the time was analogous to the civil rights and feminist movements. We should be proud of that history. But I’m not sure we did the theological work to explain ourselves to other churches. Meanwhile most LGBTQ+ people I know are used to churches rejecting them and a little tired of being “the problem.” And one thing I admire about queer people is their ability to make chosen family. Often rejected by families of origin, often for purported religious reasons, they find others to celebrate holidays with, to summon bedside in illness or death, to be human with. I see a glimpse of the church there, don’t you?
Paul starts out by saying something we probably don’t notice that I certainly didn’t when I first learned the Roman road. “The gospel is God’s saving power for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek.” Jew? Greek? Why these two? God’s first move to heal creation is to summon a family. Abraham’s family, through which to save the world. The Jew first. Then God extends that saving lineage to those who have faith in Jesus Christ. Paul calls us Greeks here, elsewhere we’re called gentiles—the nations. In Yiddish, Jews would call us goyim, the not chosen. To be rude, you could call us pagans, unclean by nature. People who don’t worship the God of Israel or follow Torah. You know what’s surprising? Jesus Christ makes unclean things clean. That is, us gentiles. We’ve lost all sense of surprise at this, but it is surprising: those of us who are not Jewish are snuck into God’s covenant with Abraham. You’ve heard me say before that Jesus Christ saves all the wrong people. Like there’s a front door for respectable types, fully credentialed. But Jesus has propped open the back and side doors and folks of ill repute are sneaking in. In church, the first are last, and the last first.
So, here’s the mistake liberal churches often make. We praise diversity. We look around and see too much of one kind of person, and we say we want all families of the earth represented. That’s a good Pentecostal desire. But praising diversity for its own sake seems not actually to attract diverse people. The more you praise diversity, the older and more monochrome you’ll get. That’s precisely what’s happened to mainline churches in North America since we made diversity our idol in the 1960s. And we’ve been shocked as people of colour have preferred Pentecostal and charismatic churches instead of us who praise diversity. It seems to be the case that if you lift up diversity you get less diverse. But if you lift up Jesus, you can watch as he draws diverse peoples to himself. Then you look around and say hmm, this is weird, we didn’t expect to find ourselves here in God’s family, we’re gentiles after all. But we’re drawn to Jesus. Ah, you are too? Well, let’s get busy being church together.
And what we find with our fellow surprise guests at the feast is that some families look different than ours: same sex partners, or no partner at all but some kids. But hey, we have no right to be here, no one does, we’re all illicit invitees, drawn to Christ. In fact, difference is kind of the new norm. So, let’s get busy being church together—loving each other and learning to forgive, as Jesus’ people are commanded.
One more surprise. Some of the families we find ourselves intertwined with include divorced people. Jesus of Nazareth never mentions queer relationships, but he talks a lot about divorce, all in the negative. But in the church, we have learned that divorce is a tragedy, but not always blameworthy. We welcome divorced people and hope to be part of their healing. All Christ does is repair broken things. So, we’re used to being surprised to find ourselves, and others, among Jesus’ people. Oh, you’re married? Weird, Jesus isn’t, but hey, I don’t make the invite list. Oh, you’re queer, tell me how God is at work in your life? Ah, you’re divorced, that must have been painful, tell me about that. Hey, you’re single? Jesus seems to think it best to stay that way, but if you marry, do yourself a favour and listen to our experience and make new and different mistakes.
There are lots of other sins mentioned this morning. But we tend to fixate on the sexual ones. A friend of mine says we focus on sex because we think we can tell who’s doing it wrong. How can you tell if you’re a gossip? Or greedy? I mean, we all are a little, but what’s too much? Paul is working his hearers into a froth—you’re right, injustice is bad, evil too, murder terrible, foolish faithless heartless ruthless gentiles. At the time, this was how good religious people denounced pagans. Paul is showing his new Roman friends he can denounce evil with the best of them. Here’s what’s surprising: Chapter 2, verse 1, “Therefore you are without excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others, for in passing judgement on one another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.” Whoever. You. Are. Ouch. As I quoted earlier, no one is righteous, not even one. It’s way easier to denounce the people over there than the people over here, or the person in the mirror. In the next chapters Paul will do the same for himself and his fellow Jews: you think the law makes us righteous? Nope. All it does is show what sinners we are. All humanity is in a pickle, gentile and Jew alike. Gentiles have their conscience to know they do wrong. Jews have God’s Torah to know the same. That’s the cancer. But there is a therapy incoming.
Another surprise. We tend to think punishment works this way. We do something bad. God punishes for it. Right? Seems logical. The book of Romans says no such thing. Instead, what it says over and over, is “God gave them up.” If we choose to do wrong God won’t stop us. Instead, God gives us up. No punishment, no lightning bolt. Sin is its own punishment. It’s hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. Please stop, that must hurt. Take being a slanderer—just one of the offenses from this list. It’s not that we slander, God gives us demerits, and eventually a punishment. No, the punishment for being a slanderer is you’re the kind of person who slanders. Wouldn’t it be better to be caught speaking well of others? That is, the opposite of slander? Yeah, that’d be better, more human, and humanizing.
Even before God gives us up, we worship idols. Remember we’re Greeks, gentiles, pagans, goyim, that’s what we do, worship stuff, rather than God who makes stuff. We start by worshipping lizards and pretty soon we’re disobeying parents. In the text Paul accuses us of worshiping images “resembling a mortal human or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.” Not on my list of idols personally that I’m aware of. But here’s what we more obviously worship: money, sex, power, celebrity. I mean, I see folks in my profession with more money, power, celebrity, and am jealous—just think what I could do with that! And then it devours them, makes them less than human. And isn’t it interesting what Jesus seems to have refused: money, sex, power, celebrity even. He doesn’t want people to say out loud who he is, he’s always sneaking off to pray alone, he dies abandoned.
So, here’s the progression of things: we worship the wrong things, God gives us up, and we become the sort of people who do all these things in the litany of disaster. But you know what God does not do? Give us up forever. Instead, God comes among us first in Israel, then in Jesus Christ, to bring repair, healing, restoration. God doesn’t abandon us to our devices; God joins humanity and turns us away from our devices. God gives us up like a mother who is “through” with her child. I’m done with you. Then she runs after us. Here’s a lunch. And some money. Call me. She won’t leave us alone.
Let’s use alcoholism as an example. It destroys, devours, makes us subhuman. I get why our grandmothers pushed prohibition—look what the bottle does, especially to women and children. Wrong way to fight it, but it’s still a bad thing. It’s not that God punishes alcoholics for drinking. The drinking is its own punishment. And the drink becomes its own false god, an idol. The thing one lives for. I’ve known some who’ve gotten sober suddenly, like a flash from heaven. I’ve known more who get there slowly, day by day, with miracle making support groups like AA, doing Jesus’ work for new life in our auditorium, quietly and out of sight week to week, God bless ‘em.
I bring this up also because it comes up a lot in discussions of homosexuality. Traditionalists on sexuality will bring alcoholism up to agree, sure, sexual orientation may be biological to some extent. Alcoholism seems to have a genetic component; some are more predisposed than others. But that doesn’t make it good. We resist it, set up communities of resistance like AA, and so on. Here’s the problem. Sin is supposed to make you less human. God gives us up and we become miserable and misery-making. But what about queer people whose relationships seem to make them more human? More humanizing and tender? More like Jesus? Only the Holy Spirit can do that. That’s what Paul is not considering. He is only imagining transactions of conquest and humiliation. But relationships of mutual self-giving that teach us something about God? That’s different. And here I can only say I’ve known queer people whose singleness and whose marriages make me and others better. Only God can do that.
Let me tell a personal example from a friend, told with permission. My closest friend in seminary before I met Jaylynn was Roman Catholic. He looked like Matt Damon, so girls would flock to him, and I’d be nearby, so this was good for me. If he had plastic surgery and hair treatments every now and then he’d still look like Damon (I sent this sermon to him, and he objected: dude I’m still hot). A few years after graduation, he joined a Catholic order and was on his way to priesthood. Then he and his closest friend in the order left to be together. I’ve told them I can marry them anytime they want, we can do it over dessert guys, and they look at me like I’m just a silly Protestant. Now he and his partner argue about who spends too much money and who gets to choose the next vacation. They’re an old married couple effectively. That’s what gay equality is largely about—the right to have as ordinary a marriage as anybody else. Whatever magic is in their relationship I’d like a little of it. It’s Christlike. More of this, please.
I got invited to a fancy church in Vancouver to talk about sin. Cheerful topic, I said. My host was gay, most of his clergy staff too, and he said we’ve so emphasized affirmation, and that’s good, but I fear we’ve lost a sense that we’re all sinners too, and without that, what need do we have of Christ? Touché.
A final warning—I could be wrong. So could you. Those who’ve been previously excluded for no good reason are the last ones to want to exclude anybody else. Whoever we are here, we’re doing our best to interpret the scriptures and live our lives faithfully, but we’re all fallible. The only One who’s not is a single Jewish rabbi (already a contradiction in terms) who constantly draws all the wrong people to himself. We’re going to lift high his cross and extol his resurrection and then watch him build a community in our midst that no one can stand not being a part of.