City of Belief

City of Belief

A Sermon on Romans 4:13-25 & Genesis 15-18

By Griff Martin

For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith

On the Second Sunday of Lent

February 25 2018

Incarnate God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing Resurrected reality we can all together experience. Be present here in this space and in these words God for if you are present here then nothing else will matter, but if you are not present here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Risen Christ and the Comforter.  Amen.

For centuries there were social and religious directives against cutting into a dead body. Those being trained in the medical profession were not allowed to do so, many believed that dissecting a dead body would hurt the deceased’s chance of going to heaven because to ascend to heaven required an intact body, a belief based on a certain reading of Scripture (you still hear those today who talk about cremation and don’t understand how those folks will experience resurrection of the body).  Additionally there was a belief that real knowledge came from books, medical books, and not through practice or working with an actual human body. These beliefs resulted in medical professionals leaving their medical training and having never worked or practiced on a person before, but having been very well read. 

I don’t know about you but I don’t want someone operating on me if they have never cut into a body before, I don’t want my heart or spleen or lung or bone to the first heart os spleen or lung on bone they have ever seen and touched before. Certainly I want some book knowledge but I want some hands on experience too… last year when I was skiing I saw a horrible snowboard fall, the guy dislocated his shoulder and had some friends around him trying to put it back, on the chair lift on the way back up I witnessed one successfully relocating the guys shoulder and once he did he yelled out “that’s awesome, I’ve never done that before.” That is not the medical attention I want. 

I am glad that today medical students are not only encouraged but required to work with cadavers because we now understand the difference between knowledge and practice and the need for both…. It takes both. Simple knowledge is not enough. Knowing the right answers is not enough.

I’ve been thinking about that this week with this text and the questions of belief and faith Paul puts in front of us.

Because we are in a crisis of faith and belief in our world today, a critical moment.

So what does it mean for us to believe?

I was raised with the understanding that to believe meant that I had invited Jesus Christ into my heart to be my personal Lord and Savior because he died on the cross for my sins, I had confessed my sin by saying the sinner’s prayer and I was no longer was destined to burn in hell for all eternity. I had the golden ticket, or so I believed.

But then this got really confusing when I started paying attention to Scripture. You see in the Gospel of John, believe and belief is used over 90 times but most of those occur before the cross and resurrection, so what did this belief ,which was often affirmed by Jesus, mean? And why was this sinner prayer never quoted by Jesus if it was so important? Or why did he not explain this accept me as personal Lord and Savior business (personal being a word we probably need to realize was not a positive for Jesus)? And what about everyone who came before Jesus? Or those who had never heard of Jesus?

Others of us were raised that belief looked more like a check list… the Nicene Creed for example… Do you believe in God as creator? Do you believe in the virgin birth? Do you believe in the one holy catholic church? And if you can check enough boxes, preferably all the boxes even if some require a bit of magical thinking on your part or even saying them with your fingers crossed, then you are good. For some baptist the Baptist Faith and Message served a similar purpose. Faith was a checklist to help you verify you believed, it was a requirement exam. 

But this too gets really confusing because there is a lot in those statements that is not Scriptural… for instance the line that stops all of us from believing the Baptist Faith and Message statement: “the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” Except it isn’t, it isn’t even close to that, so I can’t believe that.

For others belief is simply thinking something exits and is real, as simple as I believe in God or I believe in gravity. For others belief is thinking something is good, I believe that book was the best book I have ever read or that was the best brownies I have ever tasted. And then you look at other ways we use the word: I believe in Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny, I believe in you, or I believe that Ladybird will win an Oscar next Sunday night. 

Believe is a complex verb. So what does it mean for us to believe? Because that is an important question for those of us who are known as believers. 

This is one of the questions that Paul poses in Romans, a book often known as Paul’s greatest theological contribution, a book that certainly wrestles with the issue of Christian belief. Paul writes this to a specific community, to the church of Rome. A church located in Rome, which is the center of just about everything back then- religion, art, politics just to name a few. A city that had earned the slogan, all roads led to Rome.  A beautiful city full of possibility. 

This is an important church and an impressive church in many ways, a church Paul does not know well. It’s a church that is trying to figure out what they believe and what it means to move forward, to live into their future and not to live solely on their history. This was a church that did not want to think too much about it’s future because that was scary and change would be involved, but loved to live on it’s past. One theologian described it as a church where “they debated past and present, with all their pride and their scruples, and their passion for control.” I will let you make the logical leap here that it sounds like a church we know well. 

And in this letter to this church Paul asks this central question: What does it mean to believe? 

And to answer that question Paul goes back to one of the most important and central texts in our Scripture but also a very confusing text. It’s the story of Abraham, for many of us a model of belief, the father of not one but 3 major religions. 

Abraham who becomes a central figure in Genesis 12 when the entire grand narrative finally reaches it’s epic conclusion and the spotlight focuses on this one couple, Abram and Sarah. They are 75 years old, just settling into the golden years and suddenly God uproots everything for them: promises of lands, children, greatness, relationship. Except this promise was not immediate. In fact God makes this promise to them when they are 75 and then for over two dozen years God shows up from time to time to renew the promise with no results. 

There is land, but no children. No one to enjoy the land, no one to pass all this on to.

There is a son from a handmaiden, but that son is not the one. All they have is promises. 

And in the midst of Abram’s story comes this line that is fairly important, in fact Paul quotes this line in our text today: “And Abram believed and it was credited to him as righteousness.” And I have some questions about that line…. Mainly what did Abram believe? Because if Abram believed it and it was credited to him as righteous than it would stand to reckon that if I believed that it would be credited to me as righteous and if we all believed that it would be credited to us all as righteous.

But that is all we get. And looking at the text I can observe what it certainly was not. It was not this message of Jesus and the cross and the sinner’s prayer because that comes much later in the story. And it was certainly not some sense of systematic beliefs because there is nothing close to that in the story, in fact we are not even sure Abraham is a monotheist. And it was more than just believing this was fact, because it was not fact for decades for Abraham.

So belief here has nothing to do with salvation or a check list of quailifiers or facts. Which to be honest I might prefer at this point because it seems that belief here has something to do with trust. 

Surely Paul is going to help us here. Here we are in Paul’s letter, worlds removed from Abraham’s story and we have Paul telling us this is what faith looks like, like the story of Abraham. In a book that is high theology… a book that tackles justification, judgement, assurance of salvation, transformation of believers. A book that is central to so much theology that we hold. A book that was central to Karl Barth forming his theology, as well as to reform the theology of the Protestant church. Highly important theology.

And in Romans, in this highly important theology, for Paul faith is not believe this or believe that. Faith is trust. Faith is not believing in God, faith is believing God, which might be quite harder. 

Faith is holding nothing back. Faith is not living cautiously. Faith is not waiting to see. Faith is not being careful. Faith is not planning it all out so that you are certain for the best outcome. 

Faith is the exact opposite of all of that. Faith is trust. Faith is giving everything. Faith is living fearlessly and boldly. Faith is jumping blind. Faith is a bit reckless. Faith is going all in.

Trust that our God is in the business of creating something from nothing, of bringing life into what looks like death, of whispering hope into the hopeless and bring salvation and love into the places that look the least likely to receive it.

And I think that is exactly what Paul would say to us again today. 

In the words of Walter Brueggemann, faith is “a plunge of love when we risk ourselves into the power of bottomless love.” Hear that again because it’s so good, faith is “a plunge of love when we risk ourselves into the power of bottomless love.” 

All based on Abraham. Who let’s be honest might not be quite such a rock solid example of faith for us. He comes with a host of problems. He has his doubts. He has his moments of talking back to God. He can be a bit irreverent and impatient. He takes matters into his own hands. There is the whole bit about lying and passing his wife off as sister to save his own life. There is a lot in his faith story that I would not prescribe as model behavior for a faith journey.

And yet there is also this… his plunge of love… Abraham is one who trust God and God’s promise even when that means he has to take huge risks and step into the unknown. 

To leave home for a place that we don’t even know exists, a place that is certainly not on our map……To leave the comfortable place we have worked so long and hard to get because God is calling us somewhere new and following God matters more than our comfort….To believe God that something wonderful might come from a place of deep pain…. To trust God that where we believe there is only death there might actually be life…. To choose dangerous routes, unsafe routes but the routes God has put in front of us…. To do something new that God is calling us to do without knowing for sure it will work out…. To give up control and choose following…. To take “a plunge of love and risk ourselves into the power of bottomless love.”

For Paul that is what a church who is looking to find their future needs to be reminded is faithful living. 

And maybe that is exactly what faith looks like… trust enough to take huge risks and step into the unknown.

And the good news, the Gospel, is we are seeing that today… with the brilliance of the gay rights movement and how that has made our world so much more beautiful and with the call of the Black Lives Matter movement and the justice we finally see at the very least named. there. We see it with the women of the #MeToo movement who are making our world better and safer and fairer. We see it with teenagers speaking up when we adults have failed them, these students finally saying enough is enough and demanding more of us than just sitting by why they are innocently slaughtered in their classrooms.

And hopefully that inspires us to do so in our own lives…. To trust enough to take huge risks and step into the unknown… to finally be bold about who we love and who we are… to say to God, “yes I will follow you there.”… to finally say yes to the big adventure God is asking of us…. To hold nothing back in our prayers or our actions. 

So what do you believe? And as a result what are you going to do?

Hellen Keller once wrote: “avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure, life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” The same is true of faith, it’s either a daring adventure or nothing. 

So may we be people of faith… taking huge risks and stepping into the unknown.

Amen and Amen. 

*artwork: The Promise, based on Genesis 15:17-21, Renata Fucikova, renatafucikova.cz