A Sermon by Fr. Wood, March 8, 2009

The Second Sunday in Lent

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Psalm 22:22-30
Romans 4:13-25
Mark 8:31-38

+ In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

You’ve heard me say before that our God is a great maker of promises.  We can’t get away from them this Lent – last week was God’s promise to Noah (the Noahic Covenant), next week is the Ten Commandments (or the Sinaitic Covenant), in two weeks it’s Jeremiah and the New Covenant, and today it is God’s covenant with Abraham.  What comes to mind when we read and think about these ancient events?  Are they just interesting stories, fables about how our ancestors rose to prominence in their time and their continuing influence in ours?  Or do you hear the words “And it came to pass when Abram was ninety years old and nine,” and your eyes glaze over?  “Here we go again with the stories from the Old Testament about things that probably didn’t happen, and, if they did, that’s the Old Testament; that God doesn’t look much like the God I worship, and I don’t know how these stories have any relevance to my life.”  The question is:  What’s Abraham got to do with me?

If that sounds like something you’d say, and you’re about to pull out your grocery list or your iPhone, St. Paul would say wait a moment.  For Paul, these weren’t just stories akin to myths about George Washington and a cherry tree; they were the fountain of his understanding how we relate to God and how we understand his promises, and they were the fuel that drove his life. 

First, Abraham is, for Paul, the paradigm for how we relate to God.  “[F]or the promise, that he should be the heir of the world, was not to Abraham, or to his seed, through the law, but through the righteousness of faith.”  In the paragraph right before those words, Paul asked how faith made Abraham righteous.  Or maybe a better question is when?  Go back and read the story from Genesis 15:  God called Abram to leave his home, to go to a land God will show him, where God will make him a great nation, but on the way, Abram gets worried; how is he supposed to be a great nation if he has no children?

There’s a scene in the movie “My Cousin Vinny” where Vinny, a screw-up, wannabe lawyer from New Jersey in Alabama to defend his cousin from a murder charge, is prepping for trial on the porch of the cabin where he and his girlfriend, Mona Lisa Vito, are staying. 

Mona Lisa:  “I’m watchin’ you go down in flames, and you’re bringing me with you, and I can’t do anything about it.” 

Vinny:  “And?” 

Mona Lisa:  “Well, I hate to bring it up, because I know you’ve got enough pressure on you already, but we agreed to get married as soon as you won your first case; meanwhile, 10 years later, my niece, the daughter of my sister, is getting married; my biological clock is tickin’ like this, and the way this case is goin’ I ain’t never gettin’ married.”^[1] 

That’s the image I have of Abraham out in the desert because he and Sarah ain’t getting any younger, so God tells Abraham “Go outside; look up; count the stars, if you can; that’s how many descendants I’ll give you.”  And that is when the story says Abraham “believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”  (Gen. 15:6)  Not after, but before God gave him a son.  Not after, but before he was circumcised (Abraham’s part of the bargain under the covenant).^[2]    

My point is this:  Abraham is a model for us because he didn’t stand before God on the basis of anything he did, but simply by faith that God would keep his word.  He believed God, and it was credited or accounted or reckoned to him as righteousness.  And so it is with us.

Then there’s the flip-side of Abraham because he also shows us just how hard it can be to believe God’s promise sometimes – Another Paul, Paul Krugman, recently caused a bit of a stir by ending a column he wrote in the New York Times by saying “Hope is not a plan,”^[3] but hope was the only plan Abraham had.  St. Paul writes of Abraham:  “Who against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations.”  The original language makes it emphatic by putting the little clause about hope in the front:  “Hoping against hope . . . he believed.”  Abraham was 100 years old; Sarah was well past child-bearing age.  So when they did have a son, remember what they named him?  Isaac, which means “laughter,”^[4] because they hadn’t been able to help but laugh at the absurdity of God’s promise.

If we don’t hear the promise of the gospel and say “That’s too good, so what’s the catch?” then we haven’t really heard the gospel.  The gospel says “God loves you regardless of who you are, what you’ve done, what you’re going to do.”  And nowhere, maybe, is the audacity of that promise more obvious than in Lent, when we take on a list of disciplines and some days we keep them, some days we don’t.  The feeling I have when my head hits the pillow most days shows that the gospel is so weird and fantastic that I don’t have the capacity to believe it consistently – If I’ve had a good day, I think how lucky God is to have me for a follower.  If I’ve had a bad day, I kick myself for letting God down.  But notice the mindset behind both responses is that I’m responsible for my own standing before God.  I save myself.  That’s what Brennan Manning says is the root of our problem:

We fluctuate between castigating ourselves and congratulating ourselves because we are deluded into thinking we save ourselves.  We develop a false sense of security from our good works and scrupulous observance of the law.  Our halo gets too tight and a carefully-disguised attitude of moral superiority results.  Or, we are appalled by our inconsistency, devastated that we haven’t lived up to our lofty expectations of ourselves.  The roller coaster ride of elation and depression continues.

Why?

Because we never lay hold of our nothingness before God, and consequently, we never enter into the deepest reality of our relationship with Him.  But when we accept ownership of our powerlessness and helplessness, when we acknowledge that we are paupers at the door of God’s mercy, then God can make something beautiful out of us.^[5]

God is making something beautiful out of our powerlessness and helplessness, and our smugness about how holy we are, or dejection at how unholy we sometimes act, is evidence that we’re trying to do for ourselves what God has already done, namely make us righteous.  The gospel says God loves us regardless, and if that isn’t hard to believe, if we don’t have the urge to laugh at the sheer absurdity of how good that promise is, then perhaps our gospel isn’t good enough. 

Last point:  Go back to the question raised at the outset – What’s Abraham’s story got to do with me?  “Now it was not written for his sake alone, that it was imputed to him; But for us also, to whom it shall be imputed, if we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead . . . .”  Paul’s point is that Abraham’s story doesn’t have anything to do with us, it has everything to do with us.  If we really think about it deeply, it changes the way we handle situations in our lives hundreds of times every day. 

One example – We live in a society of people who try to distinguish themselves by how we dress, the media we consume (music, magazines, newspapers and books), our education, jobs, even our families.  We build our identity on these things, even down to the kind of church we attend.  But there’s a danger in that:

If a group believes God favors them because of their particularly true doctrine, ways of worship, and ethical behavior, their attitude toward those without these things can be hostile.  Their self-righteousness hides under the claim that they are only opposing the enemies of God.  When you look at the world through those lenses, it becomes easy to justify hate and oppression, all in the name of truth.  “[P]eople who are no longer sure that God loves and accepts them in Jesus, apart from their present spiritual achievements, are subconsciously radically insecure persons . . . .  Their insecurity shows itself in pride, a fierce, defensive assertion of their own righteousness, and defensive criticism of others.  They come naturally to hate other[s] in order to bolster their own security and discharge their suppressed anger.”^[6]

God loves you.  I could say it a thousand times and not emphasize it enough.  God loves you, and how you dress, the work you do, the books you read, the way you worship, nothing can make God love you any more or any less.  God loves you because he loves you.  Let that be what distinguishes you.  Let that be what saves you.  Find security in God’s acceptance of you, build your identity on that, and it’ll make you take up crosses and revolutionize the way you live your life.

+  In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.