Family Membership: A Matter of Trust

Sermon delivered on Lent 2A, Sunday, March 12, 2017, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of today’s sermon, click here.

Lectionary texts: Genesis 12.1-4a; Psalm 121.1-8; Romans 4.1-5, 13-17; John 3.1-17.

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

Among the many things Jesus and Paul address in our gospel and epistle lessons is the idea of family membership and this is what I want us to look at today. How does one become a member of Abraham’s family? This is more than just an interesting rhetorical question because as our OT lesson reminds us without equivocation, it is through Abraham’s family that God intends to bless the families of the world. In other words, it is through Abraham’s family that God intends to right all the wrong in our world that human sin and the evil it unleashed has caused.

How then do we become members of this critically important family? For ethnic Jews, the answer is simple. Circumcision. This is the sign God commanded Abraham and his male descendants to perform to indicate that they were part of the covenant God made with Abraham and his family (Genesis 17.1-14). But a funny thing happened along the way. Because Israel was as broken as the people she was called to bless, God became human and entered history as Jesus of Nazareth to break the power of evil, sin, and death by dying on a cross for our sake. As John reminds us in our gospel lesson, God did this in Christ because God loves the world. God loves you and me despite who we are and wants to rescue us from the clutches of the dark powers that have enslaved us through Sin so we can be the restored image-bearing creatures God created us to be in the first place. And in doing this for us, God also reconstituted Abraham’s family around Jesus so that the entire race could be part of the family, not just ethnic Jews. This is how God always planned to bless the nations of the world, folks like you and me, thanks be to God!

And now we are back to Paul and our epistle lesson. How does one become a member of Abraham’s family reconstituted in Jesus? For the Judaizers of Paul’s day, the answer was simple. Acknowledge Jesus was God’s Messiah and agree to submit to physical circumcision and to follow the requirements of the Law. Only then could one hope to be part of Abraham’s family and the promise linked to it. One’s ability to follow the Law (the rules and regulations that had been developed over the years in addition to the Ten Commandments God gave Moses on Mt. Sinai) determined one’s standing with the family. In other words, the onus of membership was on the individual. As Paul noted elsewhere, for the Judaizers, the scandal of the cross was just too much (see, e.g., 1 Corinthians 1.18-25). They may (or may not) have believed Jesus to be the real deal, but they couldn’t get past the idea of a crucified and publicly humiliated Messiah. And so in their minds, if you were going to be a follower of Jesus, you had to do what good Jews did—agree to circumcision and to follow the Law to establish your identity in Christ.

Nonsense, scoffed Paul. If you want to be part of Abraham’s reconstituted family in Jesus, you must have faith that our Lord is who he says he is. Look at his life, death, and resurrection with eyes of faith. See that in Jesus God was putting to rights all that is wrong with this world and our lives, especially in conquering death. Believe even when it appears nothing has changed (the dead, after all, are still dead, so how can death be conquered?). Trust that in Jesus, God is being good to his word to Abraham to use him to bless the nations of the world and restore us to our right minds and place. In other words, Paul emphatically rejected the notion that the onus of proving one’s family membership rests with the children, with you and me. No chance, says Paul. This is God’s work, God’s doing, God’s initiative. And then Paul offers proof.

First he tells us to consider God’s call to Abram. But before we do that, we have to put that call in its proper context in the biblical story of God’s rescue plan for us. As we saw last week, our first human ancestors sinned in paradise and that got us kicked out of the garden and resulted in God’s curse on his good but corrupted creation and creatures. You can (and should) read about that in Genesis 3.1-24. Genesis 4.1-11.9 then recount the cascading effects of human sin. Cain murders Abel (Genesis 4.1-16). The sons of God mate with the daughters of humans (Genesis 6.1-8). Whatever that looked like, it was grievous in God’s eyes so that God spoke the terrifying words in Genesis 6.6 that he regretted making humankind because of our wickedness. This brought on the flood and its aftermath, culminating in the sad story of the tower of Babel, where humans once again tried to usurp the role of God and resulted in God scattering the families of the nations, bringing even more chaos and confusion to the human race (Genesis 6.9-11.9).

This is the reason for God’s call to Abram in our OT lesson. If you ever wondered what God is doing about all that’s wrong in God’s world, this is the beginning of the answer. God didn’t send in the tanks to defeat evil. God called Abram and his promised family, which ultimately included Jesus, to bless the world because God loves the world. And this is Paul’s point. The initiative is God’s not ours. Consider the story. When Abram was a pagan, God called him to go to Canaan. We aren’t told why God called this man. The text doesn’t say that Abram was a particularly holy guy who deserved God’s call. We simply don’t know that. We don’t know what kind of person he was. The text doesn’t tell us because the author frankly doesn’t care. It wasn’t (and isn’t) about Abram. It’s about God’s gracious and sovereign call to Abram to be a blessing to the nations. Neither does the text tell us why Abram trusted God. Apparently that wasn’t important either. The only thing that was important in the story was God’s call to Abram and Abram’s trusting response to that call. So at the tender young age of 75, this pagan packed up his bags and family and moved to a new land without any further direction or marching orders from God. Most of us would be too tired to get out of our rocking chairs at 75, let alone make a life’s journey to a strange and distant land. But Abram trusted God and obeyed, and as Paul tells us, that was pleasing to God.

One of the things we can conclude from this short story is that if God can call Abram, God can (and certainly does) call us. It’s not about our character, it’s about faith, our response to God’s goodness. From Abram’s story, we see that faith is much more multidimensional than we often think. To be sure, faith can involve an intellectual assent, as when we affirm that Jesus died for our sins. But as our OT lesson shows us, faith also involves trust and obedience. Abram’s faith would have been worthless if he had said, “I trust God, but I’m not going anywhere. I’m getting too old for that kind of nonsense, dude.” But Abram didn’t do that. Abram believed God’s promise to him and obeyed God, despite the glaring absence of details that we all crave in a massive life change like that. Simply put, what Paul is telling us is this. God invites us into his family. God initiates, we respond, not the other way around. Jesus tells us something similar in our gospel lesson when he talks about being born from above or born again. Babies don’t choose to be born into a family. Neither do adopted children choose to become part of a family. To be sure, the latter might have some say in the matter, but the fact remains that if the parents don’t decide to adopt, membership in that family doesn’t happen, despite the child’s qualities (or lack thereof). The parents have to initiate. This is why I find it highly ironic that we sometimes ask each other if we have been born again (or born from above), as if it is our choice outside of God’s gracious initiative. As Jesus reminds us, to be born again is indicative of God’s action, not ours. At best, we simply respond to God’s prevenient grace (grace that precedes belief) toward us.

And this should make sense to us because as we have talked about since Ash Wed-nesday, if it were up to us to prove we are qualified to be part of God’s family in Christ based on our own merits, we would be without a family. God gladly calls and invites us into his family because once again, God loves us just like he loved Abram. What we initially bring (or fail to bring) to the table really doesn’t matter to God. The only thing that matters is God’s love for us.

But here is where I suspect many of us are closet Judaizers. We might want to believe all this stuff about trusting in the promises of God as the criterion necessary for approval into God’s family, but at the end of the day, we secretly fear we have to do more to prove our merit so that God will want us to be part of the family. Funny thing is, God wants us to be part of the family despite who we are. God loves and accepts us as we are and has acted decisively in Jesus’ death and resurrection to free us from our slavery to Sin and death. But God loves us enough not to leave us where we are, and so God gives us his Spirit to live in us to heal and transform and shape us back into real human beings over time. This is God’s initiative and God’s power, not ours. Simply put, based on our own merits, none of us get invited into God’s family. Instead, we are called to trust God and his promise to make us part of God’s family in and through Jesus. And we are called to live out that trust.

But this is where it can get messy because like Abram, we’re not given a good deal of specificity to help us live out our faith, and this makes us anxious. How can we be certain we are getting it right? To be sure, we have the Ten Commandments and the Great Commandment to love God with all we are, and others as we love ourselves, to help guide us. But here again, this often isn’t good enough for our inner Judaizer. We feel compelled to make it all about us and our performance rather than God’s faithfulness and love for us and his world. Don’t follow the rules enough? Hell awaits. It’s all about following the rules. Must follow the rules (sound of heads exploding in the background). Where is the Good News in that way of life, my beloved?

But this is not what true faith is about. True faith knows the real character and love of the One we are called to trust. Does God judge? Of course God does. But for our good. And God is also gracious and kind and merciful. The cross is the eternal witness to this truth. Not only that, God has a track record for delivering his people. Think about the Exodus and about the times God relented from destroying his wayward and rebellious people Israel because God loved them. In other words, God gives us a reason to trust him. God created us in his image and wants us to live with him forever and enjoy him for the loving, wise, gracious, just, merciful, and generous Creator God is. And how do we show that we trust God and his promises? By being the fully human beings God created to be, our primary example being Jesus Christ. God calls us to stop trying to be God and to be his faithful creatures instead. He calls us to love others and be merciful to them, especially our enemies. God calls us to pursue justice and goodness and truth and beauty, to have our character shaped by God in the power of the Spirit and through the regular disciplines of prayer, fasting, Scripture reading and study, partaking in the eucharist, fellowship, worship, confession, and repentance (turning away from ourselves and back toward God). Is this easy or straightforward? Not a snowflake’s chance on water. We will suffer setbacks and distractions. We will take two steps forward and one step back. We will sometimes look for improvement in our character and moral life and see none. Evil still exists in this world despite the NT proclamation of its defeat. And this can be quite disconcerting, not to mention discouraging. But Jesus warned us it would be this way. The work and ways of the Spirit aren’t always so easy to identify and understand. Of course there is some clarity in the life of the Spirit, but there is also a lot we don’t get. For example, how do we know we have the Spirit in us, especially when we fail? Jesus tells us that answers to our concerns are elusive sometimes. Objective truth there is. Clear moral guidelines there are, of course. But there is also a lot of ambiguity so that we are sometimes perplexed and unsure how to proceed. Despite all this, Jesus calls us to trust him. I wouldn’t be surprised if Abram had these kinds of questions and concerns when he traveled to Canaan with only God’s promise that God would make him a blessing to the families of the world.

But Abram trusted and so must we. This is what the disciplines of Lent are all about—to help us learn to trust. This is why we must live our Christian lives together as God’s family called first through Abram and ultimately through Jesus our Lord. We need each other to remind us of the truth and reality of God’s love for us in Jesus, that God is on the move and in our lives, even when we cannot see or sense his movement or presence. To be sure, we will not have all the answers about living life in the Spirit that we desire. But as long as we are content to let God be God and trust God’s promise to heal and rescue us from all that bedevils us, both internally and externally, we can have a real and powerful faith and trust in God, a faith and trust that manifests itself in action that is consistent with that trust, despite the ambiguity that sometimes confronts us, and despite our occasional setbacks. We can trust God and God’s promises because we have read the story of Abram and seen all his desperate flaws. Despite those flaws, God remained faithful to Abram, just as God remains faithful to us. We have seen the cross and the empty tomb that testify to God’s great love for us, and we have the Spirit of the living God in us who testifies to the truth that God is good to his word and faithful in all his works.

This Lenten season, resolve to put to death, with the help of the Spirit, all that is within you that makes you want to be a closet Judaizer. Ask God to help you learn to trust him as you participate in the ordinary means of grace so that you are freed to love God for all God’s worth and to love your other family members as you love yourself. Dare to love those who are not yet part of God’s family enough to invite them to respond to God’s gracious call to them to join the family, and then dare pray for this to happen, believing it will. This is the essence of the Good News we are to live and proclaim, my beloved, during Lent and for all eternity. What an awesome privilege. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.

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