George set up our journey through the Apostle Paul's letter to the Romans by beginning at the end (chapter 16). He also offered us some context to understand how to read it as ecclesiology (about the church and who makes up the people of God).

Paul's point is who benefits from Jesus? Everybody! Exactly as they are. Romans is not about individuals apart from the collective. It's a church made up of people with what seems like impossible lines of difference to cross.

But at the center of it all, Paul saw a love drawing us toward God and one another. Romans will be teaching us how to do the actual work of building community.

SLIDES GEORGE READ IN OUR GATHERING

The earliest Jewish interpreters of the Torah were concerned that the biblical text remain a living text. This meant that it constantly had to be reinterpreted faithfully in new cultural contexts. If it was just being repeated as it had been in the past, then it was a text that no longer had a living word for the present. 
—Michael Fishbane, Inner-Biblical Exegesis of Interpretation in Ancient Israel

To Paul, as with Jesus, any disagreements leading to potential disunity were in direct opposition to the gospel message and its power to save all people.

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them” 
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island

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