Year A: Proper 12 | Romans 8:26-39
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
July 26, 2026
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
People like to make Paul say a whole lot of things that he almost certainly never even thought about, and today’s Epistle reading is no exception. In fact, during the Reformation people latched onto a couple of words and phrases from here, extracted them from their natural setting, and built an entirely new branch of theology around them.
If you’ve ever heard any discussions about foreknowledge and predestination, now you know exactly where those arguments come from. These two terms[1] underpin several of the five primary hypotheses of what’s known as Calvinism. Calvinism, which remains a strong[2] player within Modern American Evangelicalism, emphasizes: Total Depravity (everybody’s inherently evil and offensive to God), Unconditional Election (God chose who would be forgiven before even creating the universe), Limited Atonement (Jesus’ sacrificial death only applies to those God already chose), Irresistible Grace (those God choses WILL be saved, whether they like it or not), and Perseverance of the Saints (those God chose maintain a righteousness pathway until the moment they die).
As a celebration of God’s freedom and sovereignty, Calvinism excels. Its philosophy of humanity, however, which draws from a misinterpretation of Paul’s earlier discussion of the old and new man as represented in Adam and Jesus, leaves a lot to be desired. Most modern theologies, in fact, leave a lot to be desired. The reality is that much of the Church’s current thought—Calvinism included—is rooted in an upside-down conception of God.
This is partly due to the influence of Christendom—the unified Church/State monstrosity that ran Europe for roughly 1600 years—which is the same thing Christian Nationalism seeks to implement in our own country today. Early Christianity viewed God as Emperor, which, as an image, isn’t untrue. The Gospels revolve around God, a being far higher than any other Imperial authority, appointing Jesus as heir to the throne. Unfortunately, though, once Christianity became a branch of the Roman government in the late 300’s, we abandoned any effort to implement Divine structures of love and mercy as exemplified through Jesus’ life and teaching and chose instead to reimagine God in the guise of a human emperor, divining for ourselves a Zeus-like Sky King who reigns, controls, and manipulates everyone and everything from on high. We rapidly and thoroughly embraced this entity of utter power and command—one moving angels and planets and people and molecules like pieces on a chessboard—one who’ll ultimately act in vengeance against anyone or anything that doesn’t toe the line exactly.
This is a very convenient god for governments and others who wield command. As this power-down god has blessed them with control, clearly their will must reflect that of this god. The State thereby authorizes itself to stand as mediator between common people and the Divine, and only the state and its appointees can correctly interpret and implement this god’s desires.[3] Under Christendom and other similar systems, religion operates as a means of power, manipulation, and control. The State becomes its own god, decides how it must be worshipped, and selects which of its people are to be valued and extolled and which are expendable in its crusade for “righteousness.” Any religious leaders who have bought into the system must, like all of State’s other employees, promote and implement the current revelation among the masses.
Fortunately for us, that Top-Down God is a lie. There is no Sky Emperor tracking numbers or performance or conformity. It exists—and has only ever existed—within the halls of human power. God did not in any way invent humanity for Hell, nor does God threaten the weak or cash in the poor to line the pockets of despots, dictators, or demagogues. That foundational error, this core misidentification of God, is what the Gospel was meant to address in the first place.
So to make things clear, and despite what you may have been told, the Gospel is not “Jesus died to take away your sins so you can someday go to Heaven.” That’s a gospel, and it’s certainly been a popular one over the course of Christendom and among Christendom’s early offspring, like the United States.[4] The Gospel, however, reaches much farther and runs much deeper. In fact, it’s so massive and unintuitive to our little minds that it keeps falling out of our heads. The Gospel—the one Jesus preached and lived and gave his life for—is that God is good and loving and kind.
Paul has been relating God to what his Roman audience knew as the pater familias, the head and foundation of an extended family—but he was reframing that image for them. This greatest Family Head isn’t simply the exaltation of yet another person wielding authority. Rather, God fulfils the responsibilities from which the role had arisen. God is the “Father” who provides for and takes care of the needs of the Family—the entire family—but without demanding the worship and sacrifice human leaders lust for and exact. When Jesus mentions “the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old”[5] at the end of our Gospel reading, God is the reality behind that image, generously providing for the needs of the family.
Many of us imagine God standing there with a switch and a sharp eye, prepared to smack any of us back into line without warning. We cower before a God intent on ensuring we as individuals somehow muster standard so they can finally deign to put up with our continuing imperfection after we die.
But we grovel before a false god. God, in truth, isn’t cruel. God isn’t vengeful. The Top-Down God, the God of State and Empire, may be like that, but the Top-Down God doesn’t exist. It’s simply a convenient lie we tell each other to manipulate ourselves and those around us.
The Gospel Jesus and Paul embodied is that God is good. God is not some mythical Sky King looming in the shadows, seething with judgment and destruction. God is, rather, Source and Provider. God is the supportive foundation underlying existence itself, an ever-flowing fountain erupting with life and energy and matter and time and everything that can be. God is not Destruction. God does not consume their enemies amidst eternal pain or respond in hate toward anything that they’ve made. God nurtures and provides and gives—not because they’re seeking anything in return but simply because God is good.
And we here today are God’s children. That’s what Paul’s been emphasizing for weeks now. We—like the Romans to whom he was writing—are already God’s actual children. We breathe with God’s Breath—God’s Spirit. That Divine Breath brings energy to our bodies, allowing us to set aside “the flesh”—our lizard-brained lusts and cravings—so that we can more clearly bear the image of the True God in the world around us. As we continue to infuse ourselves with this Breath over time, we, in turn, transform, becoming more and more a part of the Anointing that God has placed on Jesus, the regenerative blessing in which God calls us to participate.
We don’t lose ourselves when being “conformed to the image of [God’s] Son.”[6] Rather, we invite God’s Breath to fill and empower us to such an extent that our true selves can finally and freely shine. As Paul was trying to emphasize, we already are foreknown and predestined and called and set in alignment with the Divine and made to share in God’s renown. And we reveal that truth when we, as citizens of God’s Kingdom, incarnate the same God that Jesus did, living as fully and mercifully and generously as God desires to live in, among, and through our own lives.
[1] which only appear in a scattering of other texts (nearly all Pauline) and never together apart from here
[2] Perhaps even primary
[3] This is the system where “patriotism” becomes the primary virtue, worship becomes compliance with top-down power, and zeal involves imposing authority’s demands on those around us.
[4] As the founders of the United States chose not to adopt any specific form of Christianity as the official national religion, ours was the first Western nation in more than a thousand years to not be “a Christian nation.”
[5] Matthew 13:52 | All Bible quotations are from the NRSVue unless otherwise noted.
[6] Romans 8:29