Uncle Abraham
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Reading
Series I, Cycle A
I have good news for you this morning. None of you are good enough to be here.
Sorry about that. I thought I saw a few of you flinch. Maybe I need to be a bit more sensitive in how I begin. Let me try again.
I have good news for you this morning: God is not impressed with a person in this room.
By the look on some of your faces, I'm not sure that was any better way to start a sermon. Give me one more opportunity to get this sermon started. Here it goes.
I have good news for you this morning: Every single one of us is a complete and utter failure.
How am I doing so far? I thought so.
It is difficult to preach Paul's letter to the Romans. This document is heavy in all kinds of ways. It is a dense and demanding piece of correspondence.
Paul writes this letter to a congregation he did not start, to people whom he had never met. From the first sentence forward, he lays out chapter after chapter of his deepest theology. "The gospel is the power of God for the salvation of the world" (v. 16), he says in chapter 1. "It is possible for every creature in the creation to know God, and to love God" (v. 19). Yet this knowledge and love gets tangled up somehow. By the end of the first chapter Paul says, "All of us have a tendency to exchange the truth about God for a lie, we worship the creature rather than the Creator " (v. 25), and "we have no excuse" (v. 20).
In other words, none of you are good enough to be here. God is not impressed with a single person in this room. Every single one of us is a complete and utter failure.
Or as Paul puts it, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23).
I will be the first to admit it: this is a lot to swallow before ten o'clock in the morning. It's heavy. Very heavy.
I have a friend named Dan. He recently retired as a minister. When Dan moved to Florida, he left behind with me a seventy--pound commentary on Romans. I think he did it out of self--defense. This is a heavy piece of scripture, in all kinds of ways.
When we hear Paul speak, this is the context for all that he has to say. If I did not know better, I would think Paul was simply going to tell us how bad we are. Yet as Paul begins his letter to the Romans, he issues a heavy indictment because that is the beginning of God's good news.
None of you are good enough to be here. Yet look around: you are here, because God has called you. God is not impressed with a single person in this room. Yet God loves us in spite of our spotty records of achievement. Every single one of us is a complete and utter failure. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).
This is what it says in Romans, and this good news is the power of God for the salvation of the world.
I don't know if you have ever personally found your way into these verses. Maybe for you, as it was in my case, you did not find the verses as much as the verses found you. However it happens, I know from my own experience that when these words sink in, they can set you free.
There I was, a freshman in college, a certified Sunday school graduate, a retired president of my church youth group. We were having a student Bible study on the letter to the Romans. I knew all the Jesus stories, the Genesis stories, a few memory verses here and there. But I had never read Romans.
We were flipping through the chapters for some reason, and I found that verse in the third chapter where it says, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). That verse struck me between the eyes, in all of its honesty. "All have sinned. All have fallen short."
Suddenly a strange sense of relief came over me. All of us have sinned, and no one is any better than anybody else. All of us have fallen short - that's the truth! So we can stop punishing ourselves for not measuring up. The truth is, no matter how good we are, we will never be good enough. In an ultimate sense, that's okay, because life is not about us ever being able to measure up. Life is about God, who moves toward us in Jesus Christ to bridge the distance.
If you do nothing else this morning, just let that sink in for a minute.
There is something very comforting about this. If we came to church this morning thinking we were "good enough," Paul says, "Get real." Nobody has the capacity to be good enough, and the good news is that God is not bound by our limitations. God loves us because of who we are, in spite of who we are, before we even know who we are.
"There is no distinction," says the Apostle Paul, "since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Then in the very next breath he says, "And they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus ... (made) effective through faith" (Romans 3:22--25).
That is the point of why we are here, after all. Before the church got to be big business, this is what all the excitement was about. God loves us, and for that reason alone, God has sent Jesus Christ into the world. Sometimes a preacher needs to stand up and say it.
Essentially, that is the claim Paul is making in this section of the letter. It is so large, so heavy, that it is tough to let it sink in.
We find some help at this point from an Episcopalian priest named Robert Capon. He writes theology books and cookbooks. One of his books is called The Supper of the Lamb, and a reader is never really sure if he is talking about eschatology or mint jelly. Capon is a highly imaginative theologian, which is probably why I like him, and he had been known to overdose on the letter to the Romans.
In one of his books he raises the question of how we are to make it through this world. One way is the high school yearbook way, and another is by way of the ticket window.
Remember the high school yearbook? It is full of good things that happened in the past. We see the pictures; we remember the accomplishments. In particular, we fondly recall all those special events that happened years and years ago. Capon observes that, for a lot of people, faith is a memory of past events, like the crossing of the Red Sea, or the death of Jesus, or the high school prom. If some of us hang on to those events from long ago, we think we can get through life. But Capon says that is a dead end. Remembering the past does not always get us through troubles here and now.
By contrast, consider the ticket window. You go up to the box office, make a purchase, and then you are allowed in. We can think of God in Christ as the official ticket agent who lets us into the stadium, and that is true enough. The problem with a ticket window, however, is that you must have some earning power to get your ticket. You need to work hard and long to accumulate enough money, and then you will be allowed through the gate and shown to your seat. The problem, however, is that the ticket costs too much for anybody to buy. Nobody else can afford it, either. The only available tickets are the tickets that somebody gives you.
So how do we make our way through the world? Not by remembering memorable achievements in the yearbook. Not by buying our own admission. We make our way through the world by responding to the free gift of God.
Imagine, says Robert Capon, a sign over a stadium that announces, "Open to all for free." You draw near and discover somebody has already stuck a free ticket in your pocket, given you a fine seat, and brought you a hot dog and a drink. You did not ask for any of it. It is given to you, and you have to decide if you can accept it. There is nothing else to remember or forget. There is nothing you need to do to earn your way inside. You are already there, as a gift - unless, of course, you refuse the offer which has been offered to everybody.
Capon says the work of Jesus on our behalf is like this.
It says not only that we don't need to have the wherewithal (good works) for a ticket, but that even to think we could buy a ticket is to misunderstand the whole setup ... The only appropriate thing to do about such a fantastic arrangement is just shut up, believe it, and enjoy it - because we've already got it.1
In the church, the ten--cent word which we use for all this is "justification." It's the idea that God--in--Christ justifies us; that Christ makes us right in God's sight; that in our unacceptable state, God accepts us, because Jesus has done all the necessary work on our behalf.
Can you believe it? That's the question upon which all of this pivots. Can we believe it?
I know people who work their entire lives to make themselves acceptable. They put in long hours, they keep at it all the time, they bring work home with them. If you get them in a chair long enough and say, "Why are you working so hard?" they might admit, "I work so hard because I always wanted my father to accept me; I always wanted my mother to approve of me."
Listen, there's a news flash: our Parent in heaven already accepts you and approves of you. So stop working so hard. If you wanted to earn your way into the pearly gates, you would never be able to make enough money. You would be so busy trying to prove yourself that you would overlook that free ticket that Jesus has already slipped into your pocket - before you even knew he had done it.
That, my friends, is something of what it means to be justified before God. The point is, life is not about us and our long list of checkered achievements. Life is about God, and what God has accomplished in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
For our part, all we need to do is trust the ticket has already been slipped into our pocket.
It's like old Abraham. Remember him? According to the book of Genesis, he was an amazing man. When Abraham was 75 years old, God said, "Go!" Abraham didn't ask where; he just went. You might think that God loved him because he was obedient to God. The truth is, for some reason, God said, "Abraham, I'm going to make you somebody special," before Abraham could even respond.
When Abraham was 99 years old, God sneaked up on him and said, "Abraham, I'm going to make you the father of a huge multitude. I'm going to change your name to mean 'Grand Exalted Father of an Exceedingly Large Family,' or in short, I'm going to call you 'Big Daddy.' " And Abraham laughed, and said, "O God, get serious." And God said, "I am serious; in fact, I'm so serious, I want you to get circumcised at the age of 99, after which you're going to become a father." Abraham did as he was told, even though it felt like his body was as good as dead. Maybe you might think God loved him because he did what God wanted him to do. The truth is, God had already said, "I'm going to make you the father of a huge multitude."
Then came that day, that very dark day, when God sneaked up on him one more time, "Abraham! Take your son, your only son Isaac, the son whom you love, and offer him on the mountain as a burnt offering." Abraham didn't say a word. He saddled the donkey, stacked the wood, and took his son up the mountain. He built the altar, put Isaac upon it, and raised the stone knife. There was a great silence, and God said, "Stop! Now I know that you fear me." You might think, "What a test that was!" Abraham passed the test, and therefore that's why God loved him. But all these events came long after the moment when God had already reckoned him righteous.
That happened late one night, many years before. God said, "Abraham! Go out and count the stars. That's how many children you're going to have." I picture the old man squinting toward the sky, and beginning to count: "One, two, three, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, one hundred, two hundred, ten thousand and one, ten thousand and two...." As he counted, for some miraculous, inexplicable reason, he believed the promise of the Lord.
That is all it took. Abraham believed that God was going to keep the promise. For the first time in all the Bible, God said, "Here is a child who is made right with me." Abraham believed, and said, "Yes," to God. That's all it took.
That is all it ever takes. All that faith requires is to trust that the one ticket you could never earn has already been slipped into your pocket.
____________
1. Robert Farrar Capon, The Mystery Of Christ ... And Why We Don't Get It (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1993), p. 84.
Sorry about that. I thought I saw a few of you flinch. Maybe I need to be a bit more sensitive in how I begin. Let me try again.
I have good news for you this morning: God is not impressed with a person in this room.
By the look on some of your faces, I'm not sure that was any better way to start a sermon. Give me one more opportunity to get this sermon started. Here it goes.
I have good news for you this morning: Every single one of us is a complete and utter failure.
How am I doing so far? I thought so.
It is difficult to preach Paul's letter to the Romans. This document is heavy in all kinds of ways. It is a dense and demanding piece of correspondence.
Paul writes this letter to a congregation he did not start, to people whom he had never met. From the first sentence forward, he lays out chapter after chapter of his deepest theology. "The gospel is the power of God for the salvation of the world" (v. 16), he says in chapter 1. "It is possible for every creature in the creation to know God, and to love God" (v. 19). Yet this knowledge and love gets tangled up somehow. By the end of the first chapter Paul says, "All of us have a tendency to exchange the truth about God for a lie, we worship the creature rather than the Creator " (v. 25), and "we have no excuse" (v. 20).
In other words, none of you are good enough to be here. God is not impressed with a single person in this room. Every single one of us is a complete and utter failure.
Or as Paul puts it, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23).
I will be the first to admit it: this is a lot to swallow before ten o'clock in the morning. It's heavy. Very heavy.
I have a friend named Dan. He recently retired as a minister. When Dan moved to Florida, he left behind with me a seventy--pound commentary on Romans. I think he did it out of self--defense. This is a heavy piece of scripture, in all kinds of ways.
When we hear Paul speak, this is the context for all that he has to say. If I did not know better, I would think Paul was simply going to tell us how bad we are. Yet as Paul begins his letter to the Romans, he issues a heavy indictment because that is the beginning of God's good news.
None of you are good enough to be here. Yet look around: you are here, because God has called you. God is not impressed with a single person in this room. Yet God loves us in spite of our spotty records of achievement. Every single one of us is a complete and utter failure. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).
This is what it says in Romans, and this good news is the power of God for the salvation of the world.
I don't know if you have ever personally found your way into these verses. Maybe for you, as it was in my case, you did not find the verses as much as the verses found you. However it happens, I know from my own experience that when these words sink in, they can set you free.
There I was, a freshman in college, a certified Sunday school graduate, a retired president of my church youth group. We were having a student Bible study on the letter to the Romans. I knew all the Jesus stories, the Genesis stories, a few memory verses here and there. But I had never read Romans.
We were flipping through the chapters for some reason, and I found that verse in the third chapter where it says, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). That verse struck me between the eyes, in all of its honesty. "All have sinned. All have fallen short."
Suddenly a strange sense of relief came over me. All of us have sinned, and no one is any better than anybody else. All of us have fallen short - that's the truth! So we can stop punishing ourselves for not measuring up. The truth is, no matter how good we are, we will never be good enough. In an ultimate sense, that's okay, because life is not about us ever being able to measure up. Life is about God, who moves toward us in Jesus Christ to bridge the distance.
If you do nothing else this morning, just let that sink in for a minute.
There is something very comforting about this. If we came to church this morning thinking we were "good enough," Paul says, "Get real." Nobody has the capacity to be good enough, and the good news is that God is not bound by our limitations. God loves us because of who we are, in spite of who we are, before we even know who we are.
"There is no distinction," says the Apostle Paul, "since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Then in the very next breath he says, "And they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus ... (made) effective through faith" (Romans 3:22--25).
That is the point of why we are here, after all. Before the church got to be big business, this is what all the excitement was about. God loves us, and for that reason alone, God has sent Jesus Christ into the world. Sometimes a preacher needs to stand up and say it.
Essentially, that is the claim Paul is making in this section of the letter. It is so large, so heavy, that it is tough to let it sink in.
We find some help at this point from an Episcopalian priest named Robert Capon. He writes theology books and cookbooks. One of his books is called The Supper of the Lamb, and a reader is never really sure if he is talking about eschatology or mint jelly. Capon is a highly imaginative theologian, which is probably why I like him, and he had been known to overdose on the letter to the Romans.
In one of his books he raises the question of how we are to make it through this world. One way is the high school yearbook way, and another is by way of the ticket window.
Remember the high school yearbook? It is full of good things that happened in the past. We see the pictures; we remember the accomplishments. In particular, we fondly recall all those special events that happened years and years ago. Capon observes that, for a lot of people, faith is a memory of past events, like the crossing of the Red Sea, or the death of Jesus, or the high school prom. If some of us hang on to those events from long ago, we think we can get through life. But Capon says that is a dead end. Remembering the past does not always get us through troubles here and now.
By contrast, consider the ticket window. You go up to the box office, make a purchase, and then you are allowed in. We can think of God in Christ as the official ticket agent who lets us into the stadium, and that is true enough. The problem with a ticket window, however, is that you must have some earning power to get your ticket. You need to work hard and long to accumulate enough money, and then you will be allowed through the gate and shown to your seat. The problem, however, is that the ticket costs too much for anybody to buy. Nobody else can afford it, either. The only available tickets are the tickets that somebody gives you.
So how do we make our way through the world? Not by remembering memorable achievements in the yearbook. Not by buying our own admission. We make our way through the world by responding to the free gift of God.
Imagine, says Robert Capon, a sign over a stadium that announces, "Open to all for free." You draw near and discover somebody has already stuck a free ticket in your pocket, given you a fine seat, and brought you a hot dog and a drink. You did not ask for any of it. It is given to you, and you have to decide if you can accept it. There is nothing else to remember or forget. There is nothing you need to do to earn your way inside. You are already there, as a gift - unless, of course, you refuse the offer which has been offered to everybody.
Capon says the work of Jesus on our behalf is like this.
It says not only that we don't need to have the wherewithal (good works) for a ticket, but that even to think we could buy a ticket is to misunderstand the whole setup ... The only appropriate thing to do about such a fantastic arrangement is just shut up, believe it, and enjoy it - because we've already got it.1
In the church, the ten--cent word which we use for all this is "justification." It's the idea that God--in--Christ justifies us; that Christ makes us right in God's sight; that in our unacceptable state, God accepts us, because Jesus has done all the necessary work on our behalf.
Can you believe it? That's the question upon which all of this pivots. Can we believe it?
I know people who work their entire lives to make themselves acceptable. They put in long hours, they keep at it all the time, they bring work home with them. If you get them in a chair long enough and say, "Why are you working so hard?" they might admit, "I work so hard because I always wanted my father to accept me; I always wanted my mother to approve of me."
Listen, there's a news flash: our Parent in heaven already accepts you and approves of you. So stop working so hard. If you wanted to earn your way into the pearly gates, you would never be able to make enough money. You would be so busy trying to prove yourself that you would overlook that free ticket that Jesus has already slipped into your pocket - before you even knew he had done it.
That, my friends, is something of what it means to be justified before God. The point is, life is not about us and our long list of checkered achievements. Life is about God, and what God has accomplished in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
For our part, all we need to do is trust the ticket has already been slipped into our pocket.
It's like old Abraham. Remember him? According to the book of Genesis, he was an amazing man. When Abraham was 75 years old, God said, "Go!" Abraham didn't ask where; he just went. You might think that God loved him because he was obedient to God. The truth is, for some reason, God said, "Abraham, I'm going to make you somebody special," before Abraham could even respond.
When Abraham was 99 years old, God sneaked up on him and said, "Abraham, I'm going to make you the father of a huge multitude. I'm going to change your name to mean 'Grand Exalted Father of an Exceedingly Large Family,' or in short, I'm going to call you 'Big Daddy.' " And Abraham laughed, and said, "O God, get serious." And God said, "I am serious; in fact, I'm so serious, I want you to get circumcised at the age of 99, after which you're going to become a father." Abraham did as he was told, even though it felt like his body was as good as dead. Maybe you might think God loved him because he did what God wanted him to do. The truth is, God had already said, "I'm going to make you the father of a huge multitude."
Then came that day, that very dark day, when God sneaked up on him one more time, "Abraham! Take your son, your only son Isaac, the son whom you love, and offer him on the mountain as a burnt offering." Abraham didn't say a word. He saddled the donkey, stacked the wood, and took his son up the mountain. He built the altar, put Isaac upon it, and raised the stone knife. There was a great silence, and God said, "Stop! Now I know that you fear me." You might think, "What a test that was!" Abraham passed the test, and therefore that's why God loved him. But all these events came long after the moment when God had already reckoned him righteous.
That happened late one night, many years before. God said, "Abraham! Go out and count the stars. That's how many children you're going to have." I picture the old man squinting toward the sky, and beginning to count: "One, two, three, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, one hundred, two hundred, ten thousand and one, ten thousand and two...." As he counted, for some miraculous, inexplicable reason, he believed the promise of the Lord.
That is all it took. Abraham believed that God was going to keep the promise. For the first time in all the Bible, God said, "Here is a child who is made right with me." Abraham believed, and said, "Yes," to God. That's all it took.
That is all it ever takes. All that faith requires is to trust that the one ticket you could never earn has already been slipped into your pocket.
____________
1. Robert Farrar Capon, The Mystery Of Christ ... And Why We Don't Get It (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1993), p. 84.
