Enduring with Our Values: Romans 5:1-5

 Ordinary Time
"Great Choice" series on discernment
October 2026

Therefore, since we have been made righteous through his faithfulness, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 We have access by faith into this grace in which we stand through him, and we boast in the hope of God’s glory. 3 But not only that! We even take pride in our problems, because we know that trouble produces endurance, 4 endurance produces character, and character produces hope. 5 This hope doesn’t put us to shame, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. (CEB)

 

          There’s a Facebook group I’m in that I never remember to actually check on called “Things They Didn’t Teach Us in Seminary.”  It’s a pretty solid resource of people telling each other all the weird little details that weren’t in our church history textbooks—what kind of shoes to wear to a graveside so you don’t slip if it rains, or what the best ratio of staff to congregation size is, or where to find the best Bible commentaries for sermon prep, or what the best insurance company is to work with for building care.

          Yeah, this is a tremendously sexy job.

          The group is also a fantastic source of memes.  This one lands rather differently for me than it used to:

  And this would be nice were it real—and I’m willing to bet many of you could also use this in your various professions:

          But one thing that repeats over and over in variations of the question is how do we respond to unhelpful theology.  This isn’t just a question for pastors; I’m fairly certain everyone has run into a platitude or two about how the death of a person was “God needing His brightest angel to come home” or that a clash of serious life events is proof that “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.”  These are bad theological statements, even harmful in their dismissal of grief and suffering and in their image of a heartless god who leaves us to our misery.

          Far and away one of the most popular things people say when they don’t know what to say is “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”  It’s not necessarily a theological statement, although some have made it so by connecting it with the idea that God’s will is you either die or strengthen.  And some folks genuinely do find meaning in that reassurance.  I find it infuriating, not least because what doesn’t kill you sometimes maims you for life and causes ripples of pain for years.

          It is tempting, perhaps, to read today’s verses from Paul’s letter to the Romans as an unhealthy platitude essentially saying the suffering will make you better, and I caution us against that parallel.  Romans is a tricky thing to pull verses from because it’s one long argument of Paul’s understanding of why Jesus being the Christ, the Messiah, mattered.  Rev. Dr. Mary Hinkle Shore writes that these verses are the “bridge between the ‘What?’ of Romans 1-4 and the ‘Now What?’ of Romans 5-8. In Romans 1 and 2, Paul demonstrates the universality of the power of Sin over human beings: both Jews and gentiles have fallen short of the glory of God. In Romans 3 and 4, Paul announces God’s response to humanity’s plight: because of Christ’s righteousness, humanity now stands justified by God’s grace (cf. Romans 3:21-26)….[but] Romans does not end at the end of chapter 4. Justification is not the religious equivalent of the fairy tale ending, ‘They lived happily ever after.’ In chapters 5 through 8 of Romans, Paul turns to answering the ‘Now what?’ question.”[1]

          “Since we have been made righteous through his faithfulness,” Paul starts—and the “he” here is Jesus, Whom Paul was just discussing as the one risen from the dead—“we have peace with God.”  We have it, now, present active indicative tense.  Because Jesus lived and died and lives again, we have peace.

          But where is it?  I don’t know about you, but the rest of the verses that talk about suffering seem way more applicable to the current world than peace.

          Rev. Cynthia Briggs Kittredge writes, “The ancient audience of Romans would have recognized the echoes of imperial rhetoric that claimed the peace of the Pax Romana as the benefits gained by the emperor (Georgi 1991). Unlike the forced pacification of the Pax Romana through perpetuation of violence, here it is Jesus’ death (‘through his blood’ 5:9) that is the means of peace.”[2]

          One of the things that is true about Paul is that he, a man who was in the highest echelons of religious power and still had to maneuver under the power of the Romans and their view of Jews as second-class humans, will always take time to poke at the foundations of empire.  Even before his conversion, Paul knew what it was to speak jabs without explicitly saying them, and here is no different.  “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ”—not through our lord the emperor, although he claimed the title of “lord” rather a lot.  Not through the empire that forced peace that wasn’t peace but was merely the absence of outright fighting.  Not with the gods of the empire who were wrapped up in the power of men.  We have peace with God, τὸν θεὸν,[3] God-above-gods, through the willing death and wondrous resurrection of God-become-human.

          From that, we can talk about Paul’s string of causality: “trouble produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope”.  It is not a matter of “trouble makes you stronger” but that because of the peace we have, already have, we who hold faith look at trouble differently.  Hinkle Shore writes, “The message is not that Paul and his readers rejoice because they are suffering but rather that they rejoice in the midst of suffering. Suffering does not produce our rejoicing or boasting; rather, it cannot squash them.”[4]

          “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”—no.  In the peace of God, you endure a world bent on your death, your suffering; in the peace of God, you are changed over time by the Spirit Who breathes into you, remaking you in the image of the Christ, in the faith and grace of the God Who loves you enough to care deeply about whether you are suffering and endures it with you.  In the peace of God, we become people who hope.

          “Hope is the thing with feathers” is a famous Emily Dickinson poem, but I’m rather enamored of the description that makes its way around the internet every so often.

  If hope is the thing we pull from suffering, from endurance, from building and rebuilding a character that faces the world with justice and mercy and love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—you know, those fruits of the Spirit we talked about a while back—then hope is a rebel, a revolutionary, a thing with a steel spine and an open heart that refuses to settle for false peace or platitudes.  Hope is what draws us back to the work of loving our neighbor, of fighting fascism, of calling out injustice because suffering may transform us but it was never intended for us.  Hope is the thing we hold with both hands close to our chest when people say harmful and useless things because we know there is more than this, there is more than this, and by God we will work for and fight for it and hope for it until the very last days.

          “‘Character,’” writes Rev. Eric A. Thomas, “is a word used of metal that has been so heated by fire that all the impurities are refined out.  The hope born of suffering is the confidence that God is transforming one’s character and will continue to do so until believers share in God’s glory.”[5]  We’ve been talking about discernment—how do we decide what to do, which way to go.  To talk about discernment, we’ve been talking a lot about values; what values do we have, where did we learn them, who helps us strengthen them.  In this letter to the Romans, Paul who has been arrested seven million times, Paul who has suffered the injustices of empire even though he is a Roman citizen tells his readers, tells us that the hope that is within us will be tested.  But, he writes, through the peace we have, through the faith we have, through the grace that is given to us, the hope will hold true.  The values will hold if they are anchored in God; if we are truly open to listening to the Spirit’s direction, She will not lead us astray.  We will suffer, because we are part of a fallen world filled with those who have lost compassion and justice, but that suffering is not the end of the story.  We will endure, and we will remain, and we will lean into the peace that God-become-human has given us, and the empire will fall. 

          This means that we need to care for ourselves in the marathon of this work.  I keep a folder of saved images on my laptop that I’ve been curating for more than 15 years at this point, and one image is from the sex educators who make up AfroSexology.


  Yes, we suffer, we resist, we endure—and we laugh, and love, and rest, and create, and believe, and pray, and dream, and sing, and hope, and hope, and hope “because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit”.

          How holy the peace that outlasts war.  How beautiful the hope that lives in resurrection.  How good the reality that the story is not over, for the Light shines, and the shadow shall not, has not, will not over come it.  Amen.

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