Twelve Baskets of Hope
Romans 15:13 (NRSV)
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
In Paul’s letter to the Roman church, he spends the first eleven chapters building one long argument: Jew and Gentile stand on identical ground before God. No distinction, he says in chapter 3 — all have sinned, all are justified freely by grace. In chapter 11, Gentile believers are branches grafted into an old olive tree, sharing its root with Israel rather than replacing it.
A few years before this letter, the emperor Claudius had expelled the…
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