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SERMONS

Second Sunday in Lent
March 8, 2009

By The Rev. Alston Johnson

I remember the stop light, and that the sun’s glare was so bright that it hurt my eyes.  The car was hot as the air conditioner tried to keep up with the stifling air.  I remember thinking that our priest, Stan Runnels, looked hot in his beard and collar.  I felt that the huge seat of his Suburban was swallowing me whole.

“Are you ever afraid of being martyred?” I asked him. 
I was deep into my college studies in history and philosophy, and had finally broached the question of becoming a priest with my family and friends.  Much of the church history I was reading generally involved somebody going to jail, somebody being killed, somebody taking a hard fall for the Galilean carpenter who goes to Jerusalem for a showdown with “the man.”

The thought of dying for the faith haunted me.  Loosing my life so that I might save my life.  Would I flinch?  If a court were convened to convict me of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence for them to reach a conviction?

Stan looked over at me, without missing a beat, he said, “Alston, God is raising up martyrs every day.  If you are called, He will give you that door, and the grace to walk through it. We don’t face that door alone.”

PAUSE:

There is a 2000 year story of faith with us this morning.  Paul is telling us that our story of faith in God began long before the word “Christian” was used on the streets of the ancient city of Antioch.  It is Abraham’s story.  Abraham, who walked out into the night, and looked up at the sky, and the sky spoke back to him.

“No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations.”

For hundreds and hundreds of years God’s people understood Abraham’s righteousness before God as matter of his being a kind of icon of submission, a dutiful man, a man of the Torah, the Law, a man who gave his life to be sculpted by the intentions of his maker.  All of this is most likely true, however Paul is pointing out where the true seed of righteousness lay.

The true rightness, righteousness, of Abraham’s example lay not only in the externals - good conduct, religious obedience, honorable living.  The true righteousness, the primary gift, lay in the internals - Abraham’s trusting heart, his faith, his intangible and baffling willingness to throw his heart and soul into God’s hands.

“No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. Therefore his faith "was reckoned to him as righteousness."”

This kind of hope in God is counter-intuitive, it goes against the grain of our most natural instincts, and there is no amount of “common sense” that will describe or justify it; it is only justified by faith, by trust, by hope, and by a love that is not contained in the brittle limitations of our lives.

“Hoping against hope,” Paul tells us.  “El pida Ep El pidi.”  Hoping beyond hope.  As scholar C.E.B. Cranfield says, “Abraham’s believing beyond hope is a defiance of all human calculations: his hope is contrary to all human expectation.”  Paul is opening a window in his letter to the Romans.

Our story with God begins not with having the right bloodline, the right social standing, not even the right opinion of ourselves and others.  Our story begins with having the heart and the soul in the right place; trust and faith in God.

A right relationship, a living relationship, with God is not built upon how you are born, or simply following a manual of good behavior, or some other sort of wishful thinking.  No, it is built upon the faith of a person like Abraham, who Paul is holding up as a template, a pattern for Christian faith; the person who comes to believe that there very well may be life, hope, possibility, in places that we thought were dead.  Hope against hope; Hope beyond hope.

This will leave most of us feeling helpless; especially if we are score keepers and handicappers of our own and others’ righteousness.  In the end, we do not get to drop our merits into a piggy bank of salvation.  There is no tally that we can keep; no scorecard kept, no handicaps, when it comes to living forever with God.  We don’t know how to do that math; we don’t know what to count; we are helpless if we make salvation a game to be won.

You see, we are helpless.  We have no means to judge ourselves, or others, in the accounting of faith, because the only one who can do that accounting is the Risen Lord.  We can’t earn our salvation; all we can do is surrender, like Abraham, fall on our faces, and then rise and give our lives to God out of an appropriate and real gratitude that with God there will always, always be another chapter in our story.

Jesus tells us to lose our lives in order that we may save our lives.  The Good News that my friend Stan, and that the Apostle Paul, have for each of us is that we don’t have to go about constructing the means for our own martyrdom or our own salvation.  It is already beyond us.
There is no trigger that WE get to pull in order to accomplish, to achieve, our own salvation - that trigger lay in the hands of God.  Accomplishing our own sainthood would be too easy; we might be tempted to wear it as a merit badge.

Actually, I believe we are given a harder invitation.  It is the invitation to accept from God a free gift - a gift with none of our strings attached to it - a gift that we do not have the option to manipulate, or confuse with our selfish and pride filled agendas.

God wants to win us, not with excessive demands, but with the gift of excessive love.  If we hold onto the illusion of earning our salvation, if we insist on keeping the reigns in our own hands, there will not be enough room for God to give us this gift; God will not be able to hold onto us.
Letting go of our lives in this way feels counter-intuitive; it is frightening, it will feel as if the water is flowing backwards, and that our lives are turning upside down, and inside out.

In fact, it will feel that we are losing our lives, that is when we need a hope beyond hope; and that is precisely the moment that we find our life.