Do You Believe God's Promise?

Sermon for II Lent, Year B Revised Common Lectionary

Romans 4:9-25

Preached at St. John’s Lancaster 4 March 2012

Circumcision was very important in the Jewish community in the time of Jesus and Paul. It was, like Baptism for us, the mark of entry into the community of faith. It physically identified every Jewish boy eight days old or older as a member of Israel, the people of God. I suppose that many Jews of that day, like many Christians today, came to rely on the rite of the sacrament, instead of that which it represented and accomplished and fulfilled, as the primary indicator of their relationship with God. As long as the ceremony was done in a proper manner, they were of Israel and In God. When St. Paul, missionary Archbishop to the Gentiles, wrote to the believers in Rome in the first century, he did not seek to downplay or minimize the importance of the ceremonies of the people of God, but he worked hard and logically to demonstrate that the importance of any ceremony, might we say any sacrament, is in the true reality it proclaims rather than the outward forms of the ceremony.

Paul’s legal mind was well suited to make such an argument. God’s promises to Abraham took place before he was circumcised, indeed before he even knew what the law was. It could not have been that Abraham’s participation in the ceremony, or even his righteousness in keeping the law, were the causes of God’s promise and blessing to him, because at the time of the promise, the rite of Circumcision had not been introduced and the law had not been revealed in its fullness. Abraham was blessed by God because when God looked at his heart, he saw that Abraham was “fully convinced that God Was able to do what he had promised” (Romans 4:21).

None of this is to say that the sacrament (circumcision) or the law (obedience to God) are unimportant. They are means of instruction and grace that God has ordained. But it is to say that God looks upon our hearts in his dealings with us. He looks for people who are on the adventure of growing into that state of heart, mind, and life whereby our reality can include a willingness to see beyond the realities and limitations of this life and embrace what the writer to the Hebrews called “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). That is precisely what Abraham did when he believed the promise that he, an old man with a wife well past menopause, would be the father of many nations. He was willing to see beyond scientific probabilities and human expectations to believe that “what God had promised, he was able also to perform” (Romans 4:21)

Because of this belief, Paul continues, God “reckoned this faith unto him as righteousness” (Romans 4:22). An older translation says “imputed to him for righteousness.” You see, God proclaimed Abraham righteous not because of ceremonies and obedience, as important as those things are. He proclaimed him righteous, because of the attitude of his heart and the nature of his expectations. As F.F. Bruce from the University of Manchester wrote, “Abraham’s justification and attendant blessings were based on his faith in God; they were not earned by effort or merit on his part…but conferred on him by God’s grace” (TNTC Romans 109).

In its simplest form, to be righteous means to fulfill the claims of right. Thus when Penelope mourns for Ulysses, Homer says that she fulfills the sacred obligations of a wife. When Antigone buries her brother and incurs the wrath of the state, she embodies that higher unwritten law against barbarism. The translators of the Septuagint, the Jewish translation of the Old Testament into Greek, often translated the word “Righteousness” as “Mercy,” or “Kindness.” As Professor Vincent of Union Theological Seminary and so many other scholars have pointed out over the years, “Righteousness is union with God in character” (Vincent’s Word Studies in the NT iii12).

And all of this takes us back to circumcision. Blessed Paul was writing to Romans, Gentiles who had not been circumcised. He wrote with the good news that their ability to participate in the blessings of God, their ability to be “unified with God in character,” was based not on their participation in the rites and ceremonies of Judaism, or in the moral uprightness of their past life, but in their decision to “believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification” (Romans 4:24-25).

Have you made that decision today? Are you willing to consider those things, or that thing in your own life which seems insurmountable? Are you willing to believe that God will help you to forgive that ex-spouse or that parent who hurt you so badly so many years ago? Are you willing to believe that God will give you strength , presence of mind, and persistence to take something as persistent as clinical depression or alcoholism to God on a daily basis and work a program of recovery and healing? Are you willing to believe that God will help you to push away from the buffet table or the internet console which has been the source of so many failures and so much sin in your life. Are you willing believe that God will give you the strength to walk away from a relationship or lifestyle choice which the Bible says is contrary to God’s will for his sons and daughters?  Are you willing to believe that God will give you the perseverence and strength to make restitution to that person you have wronged, and to fulfill those responsibilities you have failed to live up to?   Are you willing to believe that God is able to do what he has promised?

If you are willing to take that step today, God will meet you just as he met Abraham. He will impute to you union with his own character and give you a strength beyond what you have ever known. It will be a struggle, a war in fact. Satan will marshal all of the forces of hell to block your success. But our God is greater than Satan. And he has sent the Blessed Holy Spirit to accomplish in our lives that victory which Christ Jesus accomplished for us on the cross.

If you have been living your life in a sort of low grade discouragement which seeks to serve Christ but seems to fail with disturbing regularity, I invite you to come to him in faith today. If you have been relying on the ceremony of baptism or communion, or on church attendance or being a good person to get you into heaven, but have never been quite sure that you will make it, I invite you to come to him in faith today. The Bible says with absolute clarity that if you believe on him who raised up Jesus from the dead, if you are willing to commit yourself to the life changing conviction that God is able and willing to do what he has promised, the very character of God will be imputed to you and your life will be changed forever.

Now Father, in this holy season of Lent, help us to believe as Abraham believed, that you are able to keep your promises to transform us and give us strength to fight the temptations we face every day. Make us victorious Lord. Assure us of your presence with us every day. And help us to know in our hearts that we will live with you forever. Through Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and forever. AMEN.

Sermon Preached at St. John's V Epiphany

Fifth Sunday after Epiphany (Sexagesima) year C

Psalm 138
Isaiah 6:1-13
I Corinthians 15:1-11
Luke 5:1-11

Today’s propers are obviously about conversion. I find it singularly instructive that all of the objects of today’s Scripture lessons are people who had been initiated into the people of God by appropriate sacramental observances carried out at the appropriate times of their lives. Isaiah was a good and observant Jew. Certainly he was circumcised on the eighth day and participated regularly in the Passover and the other feasts of God’s people. At Corinth, Paul was addressing Christians who had been baptized and were presumably regular in their attendance upon the sacrament of the body and blood of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Luke spoke of Jesus coming to Peter, James, and John, all good and observant Jews, like Isaiah. Even King David in today’s Psalm speaks of experiential meetings with God subsequent to his Circumcision as a child.
So, what do today’s lessons say about the sacraments of the Church? Are they of no use? Are they merely forms that we go through in order to mark the turning points of our lives in the hope that there is a God who cares for us? Heaven forbid and perish such thoughts from our minds! The sacramental ceremonies of Circumcision and Passover, which are fulfilled prophetically in the Christian Gospel Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion, are means of imputed grace instituted of God and commanded us as outward signs of that inward and spiritual grace given us by a loving heavenly father. When you receive a sacrament, it is as if God plunges a syringe filled with grace into your arm, and you are given a bracing dose of that spiritually enabling favor which only comes from Him who has made you and named you as His own. If you receive it well, in obedience and with love towards God and man, your soul is refreshed and strengthened. If however you receive it poorly, without thought or consideration and with no intention of living a well examined and obedient Christian life, you receive the life giving sacrament to your damnation. So saith the Apostle.
To us Christians, Baptism and Holy Communion are life giving sureties of our membership in Christ, and of God’s favour usward. And so what is this “conversion” demanded of and experienced by the players in today’s Scripture lessons? It is in short a turning, a going the other way, a transformation so radical that we can never again be the same. I find it interesting that those whose transformations are chronicled in the lessons all came face to face with the living God in a way which revealed His glory and underlined their own inadequacy. Isaiah’s vision of the very throne of God, David’s realization of God’s mighty deliverance, Paul’s recounting of the power of the eyewitness accounts to the resurrection of the Christ, and the Apostles’ personal experience of what they knew to be an absolutely inexplicable miracle- all of these events led to an humble acknowledgement of the individual’s need for God in the immediate present.
There is a pattern here which is replicated so many times in the Bible:
1. God reveals himself to a human being.
2. That human being recognized that he, or she, has come into the presence of God.
3. The mystery of God’s holiness overwhelms the vision’s or experience’s recipient and leads to an immediate acknowledgement of personal human insufficiency, or what we generally name humility.
4. The recipient gains an immediately increased appreciation of their need to be closer to God, of His overall plan for human history, and of their own place in it.
5. The recipient is changed forever, as are their habits and their passions, and they come to see themselves as the very ministers of God on Earth.
And now we come to the question. Everyone here has been baptized. Everyone here is at least moderately regular in attendance upon the holy Sacrament of Christ’s body and blood. But, have you come face to face with the living God? Have you met Him in a way which is unmistakable and life altering? Granted, not everyone is called to be an Isaiah or a Peter, but there is ample evidence in the Bible, and in the history of our Holy Mother the Church that God calls all who will receive Him to a life of continual conversion, transformation, and setting apart for His particular use. It should be the desire of us all to seek such an experience of the living God that the comfort which leads to complacency shall never be known among us who bear the sign of the cross. The evidence of the Scriptures tells us that God chooses the time and place and manner of his appearance to each of us. It also teaches us that like Hannah, who went every year before the shrine of God to seek His face, we are called to yearn for this transforming experience, this overwhelming revelation of His glory.
And so this day, as you come faithfully to receive that sacrament which gives us strength and assurance that we are God’s own, I bid you to pray that the heavens might be opened, and that God would grant you such an experience as Isaiah had that day; an experience which will change your life forever and send you forth to do the work of the kingdom with a fervor and an intensity that you have not known. Pray that he will allow you to see your own needs, your own sins, and that He will forgive you, wash your conscience, and give you the grace to walk in obedience to His commands. Pray that he will imbue you with a sense of gratitude which will make humility and godly sobriety the characteristics of your life. Pray that he will grant you a glimpse of His purpose being fulfilled in human history, in the events all around us, and that He would help you to see your purpose and mission in the same. Today, as you come in faithfulness to receive the blessed sacrament which is His gift to all Christians, God calls you to be so much more. Seek Him now, while he may be found, and claim the inheritance and the mission prepared for you before the foundations of the world were laid. AMEN.