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June 5, 2005 North Park Presbyterian Church Gospel Basics: Faith Patricia K. Townsend Genesis 12:1-9 Romans 4:12-25 Today we are beginning a series of sermons in June and July drawing from the lectionary readings in Romans. I’ve felt timid about preaching from Romans because this epistle can be a scary book for a lay person. One reason that it seems challenging is that it is encrusted with so much theological and church history, for example, “justification by faith alone” from Romans 3 was the essence of Martin Luther’s contribution to the Reformation. In the 20th century, Romans was pivotal in Karl Barth’s theology. Another difficulty is that Romans can seem abstract and relentlessly logical in its progression. This is probably true because Paul wrote it before he had visited the church in Rome. Unlike his other epistles, he doesn’t write with an intimate understanding of the problems of the church, grounded in nitty-gritty of his personal experience with the churches he founded in Galatia and Corinth. Instead he writes a more formal theological essay. Paul had met some folks from Rome because they had to leave when the Emperor Claudius issued an edict expelling the Jews from the city. After Claudius died, some of them had been able to return to Rome. So the final chapter, chapter 16, is more personal with individual greetings to those women and men—Prisca and Aquila, Mary, Adronicus and Junia, Tryphaena and Tryphosa, Persis, Rufus and his mother, and the other brothers and sisters. Despite those greetings tacked on, Romans reads more of like theology text than a personal letter. In this short series of sermons, I will not attempt to plumb the depths of this epistle but will draw from these chapters some basic concepts of the gospel: faith, grace, sin, and salvation. Paul hopes to visit Rome; this is a letter of introduction for himself, and also for Phoebe, who is hand-delivering the letter to Rome from Corinth for Paul. Phoebe is a wealthy businesswoman and a church leader. So it is a happy coincidence that we begin delving into Romans on this Sunday, which in the church calendar is designated as a day to celebrate the gifts of women. Today is the 75th anniversary of the ordination of women in the Presbyterian Church. At General Assembly in 1930 the delegates (all men) voted to ordain women as elders, while turning down two motions to ordain women as ministers of word and sacrament; that would take another 25 years, but was approved in 1955. I have a friend who, like Phoebe, is a successful, well-traveled woman. She once said to me that she would like to be a Christian but she just doesn’t have faith. I refrained from commenting that she did have faith, indeed it would be hard to get out of bed in the morning without it. We take it on faith that gravity will continue to operate in predictable ways. We trust that our breakfast cereal hasn’t been poisoned by a disgruntled worker, that the other drivers on the highway will keep to the right, and so on. I think that what she meant by faith was intellectual assent to a rather long set of propositions about God, the Bible, the sacraments, and the church, sort of a religious package deal called “the Christian faith.” My friend wasn’t the first to think about faith in this way. There is a long history of over-intellectualizing the concept of faith. The philosopher Thomas Aquinas defined faith as, “the act of the intellect when it assents to divine truth under the influence of the will moved by God through grace.” (Summa Theologica.) Paul has something more elemental and basic in mind when he uses the word “faith” in this passage in Romans 4. My own definition based on Romans is that faith is trusting God for life. …Trusting God for life. In his memoir, preacher William Sloan Coffin writes of an insight that came to him as a skeptical college student listening to the Bach organ chorale when he attended the funeral of a friend: …”the leap of faith was not a leap of thought after all. The leap of faith was really a leap of action. Faith was not believing without proof; it was trusting without reservation.” “Trusting” is a verb. Faith is an action not a thing. Faith is a verb, not a set of propositions. Faith is a journey with its ups and downs, like Abraham’s life journey, where some of the ups were his entry into the land and the birth of Isaac. Some of the downs were his cowardly introduction of Sarah as his sister rather than as his wife, and his short-circuiting God’s promise of a son by Sarah by having a son, Ishmael, with the slave-girl Hagar. Speaking of journeys with ups and downs, our journey to the mountains of Utah these last two weeks was marvelous, but I have to admit to a slight fear of heights. The expression “fear of heights” is a misnomer because I don’t have any problem trusting an airliner at 30,000 feet or an enclosed tram car full of skiers riding up a skinny cable from 8000 to 11,000 feet altitude in the Wasatch Mountains. My fear is more appropriately called a fear of precipices. The palms of my hands and the soles of my feet sweat when I watch a photographer walk right out to the edge of a cliff to get a better view of the canyon below. Or in our conference hotel at Snowbird, appropriately named the Cliff Lodge, where the walkway from the elevator to our room overlooked an atrium with an unobstructed view over the railing to the restaurant on the lobby level, ten floors down. Faith walks right up to the cliff edge or the atrium railing instead of hanging back with sweaty palms. Faith dares to dream the impossible dream like Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha:
To dream ... the impossible dream ... And by saying, “faith is trusting God for life,” I intend a double meaning. That is, we make a life-long commitment of faithfulness. But also, we trust “for life” we trust God’s promise of life. For Paul this was placing trust in the God who raised Christ from the dead and raises us from death to life eternal. For Abraham it was faith in God’s promise of life, fecundity, the continuation of his lineage, when his wife Sarah was barren and both of them were too old to expect a child. You heard the reading from Genesis chapter 12. Some years later, when the promise of descendants had not yet been fulfilled we read in chapter 15 of Genesis: After these things the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision, ‘Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.’ But Abram said, ‘O Lord GOD, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?’ And Abram said, ‘You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.’ But the word of the LORD came to him, ‘This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir.’ He brought him outside and said, ‘Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ And he believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness. (NRSV)
Paul uses the patriarch Abraham as a model of faith. This underlines the point that faith, as Paul is speaking of it, is not the same as a “faith tradition,” as we might say “the Christian faith” or the “Hindu faith” or the “Bahai faith.” What was Abraham’s religion, after all? Jews, Christians, and Muslims all acknowledge him as ancestor. None of them had taken form as religions in Abraham’s day. Judaism had not taken shape: At the time of the promise recounted in Genesis 12, Abraham and his household would not yet be circumcised for another 25 years. The law would not be given at Sinai for another 500 years. Christianity had not taken shape: Jesus would not be born for another 2000 years. And Islam had not taken shape: The Koran would not be written for another 2500 years. So the faith of Abraham was not one of these faith traditions, it was simply trusting God. As another of those great chapters of faith, Hebrews 11, says: 8By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place ( that) he would receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. 9By faith he dwelt in the land of promise as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise; 10for he waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. 11By faith Sarah herself also received strength to conceive seed, and she bore a child when she was past the age, because she judged Him faithful who had promised. 12Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born as many as the stars of the sky in multitude--innumerable as the sand… by the seashore. (Peterson, The Message) Abraham and Sarah trusted God for life. They believed God and it was reckoned to them as righteousness. They dared to dream the impossible dream of a multitude of descendants. They set out on a risky journey. Let us remember them and do likewise. Let us trust God for life.
Romans 4:13-25 13For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. 14If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. 15For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation. 16For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, 17as it is written, "I have made you the father of many nations")—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. 18Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become "the father of many nations", according to what was said, "So numerous shall your descendants be." 19He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. 20No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, 21being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. 22Therefore his faith "was reckoned to him as righteousness." 23Now the words, "it was reckoned to him", were written not for his sake alone, 24but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, 25who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification. |
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