I co-led continuing education courses for ministers in worship and preaching for several years. I was surprised to learn how many colleagues shied away from preaching on the epistles of Paul. Partly this was because even pastors aren’t immune to the generally bad rap Paul has these days, but this only affected a few. The more widespread reason was that narrative preaching had become the fashion. Everyone likes to hear a story, and creating such sermons from gospel accounts or even from the Old Testament seemed easier. Somehow, it seemed hard to do that with epistle texts.
A. Katharine Grieb’s book makes its approach clear in both the title (“Story”) and subtitle (“narrative”). In less than two hundred pages, she interprets Paul’s longest and most complex letter and demonstrates that it is, at heart, a story, “the gospel.” For Paul, the narrative of God reconciling humanity to himself through the man, Jesus, was the story. It became his own story through his experience on the road to Damascus, and he’s convinced it’s also the story of his readers. To recount it involves many sub-stories, including those of Adam, Abraham, and Moses with Israel in the wilderness.
I like how Grieb directs attention away from the usual view of Romans as a theological treatise about justification or faith versus works. Instead, by focusing on the long narrative arc, she can integrate the three chapters Paul devotes to the continuing election of Israel (chapters 9–11), a challenge for many other commentators.
There have been many commentators of Romans: Luther, Calvin, and Barth. One recent standard commentary runs 1250 pages. The vast amount of secondary literature can seem as intimidating as the epistle. Grieb’s book is not meant to displace these, but it would be an excellent place to start. I recommend it particularly to any minister who, week after week, when consulting the texts suggested in the lectionary, avoids the epistle for their sermon text. ( )