Proper 10 / Ordinary 15 (July 10-16)
Texts: Romans 8:1-11;
Matt 13:1-9, 18-23; Isa 55:10-13
YouTube: https://youtu.be/9yJ6w4AC8OE
Excerpt Page from Douglas Campbell
GLEANING FROM STAR TREK HOW TO PROPERLY READ ST. PAUL
April 5, 2063. Let me give you that date one more time: April 5, 2063. No, that’s not my prediction for the end of the world. You probably won’t be surprised that it comes from the world of Star Trek. It’s the date of the First Contact. Let me explain.1 The world has barely survived World War III, in the Star Trek universe, with small pockets of human beings living in remote parts of the globe. In a small community in Bozeman, Montana, Zefram Cochrane successfully tests a warp drive engine, exceeding the speed of light for the first time, with a very short burst. And the Vulcans, who have been watching humanity for a long time, decide that, having achieved the warp drive, it’s time for First Contact. Even if you aren’t into Star Trek, perhaps you relate to the fabulous moment in the movie E.T.,2 a spaceship from another world lands on earth and extra-terrestrials step out of the door. Humankind is not alone in the universe.
It was beyond the imagination of St. Paul to think of alien beings coming from another planet to visit the earth. No one in the first century had ever really imagined that there was anything beyond the earth. Earth was the center of the universe. All that was above were the heavens and the lights in them — the sun, the moon, the stars. And for a Jew, who insisted that the Creator God who had made it all was beyond standard representation — no images, no idols, no other gods — it was even hard from Paul to imagine the Creator God as a human being. But that’s exactly what he had been forced to do when knocked off his horse one day, when Jesus of Nazareth, the one he would come to call the Messiah, appeared to him.
I want for us to consider today that the revelation to Paul that Jesus was God’s Messiah, God in the flesh, was as startling — as shocking! — and world-changing to him, as an alien landing on earth would be for us. With an emphasis on the world-changing part. In the Star Trek universe, that First Contact by the Vulcans changed everything. Not all at once. But with the meeting of other humanoid creatures, humanity began to have another model for being human, gradually leaving behind our old warring ways. First Contact was the moment in history when humanity began to live into their full potential as beings who could more truly live for life — rather than continuously killing each other. Instead of living selfishly for oneself and one’s clan, human beings, in the Star Trek universe, began to live for one another, working to help everyone to flourish. It’s certainly a positive way to imagine our human potential. But given our history, is it realistic?
I would like to propose to you this morning that St. Paul encountered Jesus the Messiah more like earthlings encountering Vulcans in Star Trek. Namely, with potentially world-changing effect for human history. Where there had been little to no chance for human beings to get beyond the limits of our bloody history to this point — life lived “in the flesh” as Paul calls it — “the flesh” not simply in terms having bodies, but naming the way humans have evolved to this point, leading to the dead end of so much violent death. Finally, we have a chance, living with God’s spirit at home in us, to begin living into our full potential.
The revelation of Jesus the Messiah changed everything for Paul. He could see both things more clearly. He could see how drastically humankind was trapped by the powers of Sin and Death into a way of living that was literally killing us. Human history was an endless cycle of violence against one another. There seemingly was no way out. No way out unless God intervened by becoming human in the man Jesus. In the cross of Jesus God was exposing us to the reality of our enslavement to violence. The cross, the crucified Messiah, is what our lives of Sin look like.
But Resurrection is what our lives can begin to look like. Jesus is the world’s true Lord, not Caesar. We need to follow him, not anyone who lives by violence. Moreover, by ascending into heaven for a time and by pouring out his spirit on all who will receive it, Jesus is showing us another essential difference from the caesars of this world. Namely, God is not about hoarding power but rather about sharing power, the power of love. In other words, a different kind of power that moves us to work together in serving one another so that everyone’s life may flourish. Instead of a power that seeks to dominate others and have power over them. This is the way we human beings were supposed to live our lives from the beginning, until the powers of Sin and Death intervened and held us captive. This is the drastic language Paul has been using for several chapters, which we’ve been reading for several weeks. That it took God’s sending of Jesus into the world, like an invasion of aliens from another world, te free us to truly live as we were meant to live.
But that means something else, first of all this: we need to see that the Lutheran way we have come to read St. Paul comes up sorely lacking. Luther missed the main point of Paul’s apocalyptic experience of the revelation in Jesus. He focused so much on the justification language in Romans 1-3, that he missed the sanctification message in the rest of Paul’s writings.3 By sanctification, I mean being able to actually become better human beings. The revelation of Jesus should knock our socks off. It should change everything for us so that we begin to feel free from the Sin that binds us. ‘No condemnation’ means that we can now begin to live in the spirit in ways that begin to fulfill God’s intentions for us from the beginning.
Do you see the radical difference between the way we used to live, which Paul calls living under “the flesh,” and the way we can begin to live, which Paul calls life “in the Spirit”?
Again this week, I’ve not done sermon take-home notes but another excerpt from an essay by Douglas Campbell on how to properly read St. Paul.4 Last week’s page lays out the proper way to read Paul; this week’s page applies it to the Letter to the Romans, which we will continue to read for several weeks. It’s important that you read these last week’s readings and this week’s to begin to understand how essential it is to read Paul correctly. If we continue with the mistaken Lutheran way of reading Paul, then we leave ourselves open to not changing, to not becoming better versions of ourselves.
If we read Paul correctly, then it has the potential to change everything. It has the potential to be like the dramatic change in the Star Trek universe, when First Contact by the Vulcans began to change human beings to be better versions of themselves. With St. Paul, though, it’s not just benevolent beings from outer space, it’s God coming to visit us in human form. It’s God’s spirit being poured out upon us and living in us so that we can finally be the creatures that God made us to be. Do you see how big this is?
Let me end with two examples of how important I think this all is. The first is about standing up against Christian Nationalism. When the Gospel is chiefly about being justified so that we can go to heaven when we die, then it leaves the door open to being enslaved to the powers of Sin and Death as so many civilizations before us. But if the Gospel is about the Good News that God in Jesus the Messiah came to deliver us from that, so that we can actually begin to become the human beings we were designed to be, then we begin to live quite differently than before. We begin to follow a different Lord than the typical human authoritarians. Instead of following the model of hoarding wealth and the kind of power that seeks to control others, we follow the way of sharing wealth through the power of love, the power that seeks to have everyone in the human family to achieve lives that are flourishing. Luke shows us those first communities in the Church, where they held everything in common so that no one lacked anything essential to life.
In short, we need to recognize that Luther’s deficient way of reading Paul has left the door open to the kind of nationalism that currently threatens our democracy and threatens the peace of the world. That’s why I preach about this so much. Because it’s at the heart of seeing the true Gospel as God’s loving way of reigning coming into the world.
The second example involves telling you how proud I am to be your pastor. I bragged about you at the conference I attended this week. This is an ongoing pride because of how loving a group of disciples you are, dedicating yourselves to the work of love in such great ministries like Thread-by-Thread. But I want to share my pride with you after the last several weeks of Pride Month. You invited Sage Robles to share with you the importance of names and pronouns for LGBTQ+ people, and the kind of violence they have had to endure for so long — not being allowed to publicly be and express who they experience themselves to be. And you heard Jeff Alderson preach an extraordinary, amazing sermon about two stories: the first story being one we weren’t taught in our history books, how the events around Stonewall Pub launched a movement that is still meeting so much resistance today. The kind of resistance revealed in Jeff’s second story about how a local high school band was not allowed to play a piece of music simply because it was linked to Stonewall. But also how a sister Lutheran church responded by inviting the band to play it the next week at their church.
I’m truly proud to be your pastor as we move to join sister churches, like Immanuel Lutheran in Watertown, WI, as a “Reconciling in Christ” congregation. We’ve talked about how big a change this represents. Many or most of you are like me, having grown up in a world where we lacked any awareness of anything beyond standard heterosexuality. We never talked about it. After Stonewall forced our country to begin talking about it, I know that I began by assuming that anything other than heterosexuality is wrong. But as I began to learn better ways of reading the Bible and understanding the Gospel — especially Paul in the difficult passages we’ve been reading — I began to see things differently. I began to see with St. Paul, for example, how even God’s law had been corrupted to oppress other people rather than to help free them to be more truly who they are. That’s what we’ve been reading about the last several weeks in the middle part of Romans. How even the law has become corrupted and needs to be set free. When we understand how far the powers of Sin and Death have held the law captive, we begin to understand how it’s LGBTQ+ people who have been wrong. No, it’s been us. We’ve been using the law in corrupt ways to keep them oppressed rather than to free them to be who they might become in having their lives to truly flourish. You see how big a change this is, right? From thinking, “Well, the laws says that homosexuality is wrong.” To, “No, the law has been corrupted, when we see it oppressing people rather than setting them free.”
It’s as drastic as aliens from outer space having landed to show us how to more properly be human. Only better. Better because it was our Creator who landed on this earth in order to not only show us how to be better human beings but also to have the divine spirit of love to live at home in us so that we can finally become God’s family of loving creatures taking care of our home. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, July 12, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/9yJ6w4AC8OE
Excerpt Page from Douglas Campbell
Notes
1. This storyline of First Contact in the Star Trek universe is most fully developed in the 1996 movie Star Trek: First Contact, directed by Jonathan Frakes (Paramount Pictures).
2. E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, directed by Steven Spielberg (Universal Pictures, 1982).
3. This is essentially the main argument of Douglas Campbell and Jon DePue in Beyond Justification: Liberating Paul’s Gospel (Cascade Books, 2024). They maintain that Paul uses Justification language in only 10% of his letters (including Colossians and Ephesians but not the Pastoral letters), while the remaining 90% is dominated by participatory language for which participation in the spirit of Christ leads to genuine sanctification.
4. The Excerpt Page from Douglas Campbell is from an essay that I highly recommended reading, “Romans and the Apocalyptic Reading of Paul,” pages 40-58 in Preaching Romans: Four Perspectives, edited by Scot McKnight and Joseph B. Modica (Eerdmans, 2019).
