Faith Before Physics (Sermon)

“Faith Before Physics”

Romans 4:1-5, 13-17  3/12/17

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

3/12/17

         Sitting with this passage last week reminded me of sitting in my high school physics class. And that was not a pleasant memory. Now, I realize that understanding and applying all those numbers, letters, and formulas have led to things like bridges, cars, moon landings, and yard darts. As a teenager, though, I had the attention span of a squirrel. Physics never captured my imagination. It never felt like home to me.

Forty years later, I’ve realized that in response to all my teacher’s actions, I managed an equally opposite reaction. I flunked my one and only physics class with such speed and efficiency that I made failure look, well, effortless.

         In his epistles, Paul’s calculated theological and philosophical arguments often make my eyes glaze over like they did in physics or trigonometry. He takes four chapters to say what can be said in three sentences.

Having said that, I’m beginning to appreciate that when reading Paul, it helps to step back, like one does when viewing a pointillist or impressionistic painting. The individual dots or brush strokes have meaning and purpose only in relationship to the rest of the dots and brush strokes. Paul uses lots of words to say that God deals with humankind on the basis of that unconditional Love called grace.

Grace is hard for us, though. It’s just too gracious. Even Paul wrestles with it, but he knows that to profess Christianity, and to qualify grace, leads us to a deconstructing legalism. Legalism, aka fundamentalism, renders a person sanctimoniously fearful of God. One decides that one must, deserve God’s favor. And when I decide that I have worked hard enough to achieve favor, I will inevitably claim the right to judge who else deserves God’s favor – and disfavor. Formulas tell me who’s in and who’s out. I insist that every one of us, every dot and brush stroke must earn its place in the painting – in the outpouring of God. When belonging in God must be deserved, grace no longer refers to God’s radical gift of Love. It refers to God’s withholding of revenge. If we have to activate God’s Love, as if it were a credit card, we are redeemed by works, not by grace.

Now, Paul knows his audience. The Romans are experts at dialectic debate, and Paul speaks their language. So, using complicated argument, the Apostle invites them into a faith that has more in common with the artistic process than with generating mathematical proofs. He invites all of us into a story – the story of Abraham.

Eyewitnesses to Abraham’s story disappeared millennia before Paul ever took up a pen. So, no amount of argument will verify the story. Abraham’s story is a spiritual portrait, a mural, a collage. It’s a gift of grace. We enter and experience it the same way Abraham begins his journey – on faith.

“Go,” says God to Abram. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.

“So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.” (Genesis 12:1-2, 4a)

When Paul speaks of “faith…reckoned as righteousness,” he’s not referring to a characteristic of a law-abiding citizen. He’s talking about the spiritual gift of trust, a gift that cannot be earned. It’s already there. We learn to live into it. A well-reasoned discourse may grab the Romans’ attention, but because spiritual passion wells up not through arguments won, but through a journey experienced, Paul offers the story of Abraham as the archetype of trust. Read this story, he says to the Romans. Enter it. Experience it. Follow it.

Paul tells his own story, too. His spiritual passion wells up from his experience as a sadistic legalist who, on his way to waterboard Christians, gets knocked from his horse, blinded, and compelled to trust where he cannot see.

The writer of Hebrews echoes and expands on Paul’s appeal to story. “Faith,” he writes, “is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen…By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.” Then, using a kind of litany, he recalls the story.

“By faith Noah, warned by God about events as yet unseen, respected the warning and built an ark to save his household…

“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance…

“By faith Isaac invoked blessings for the future on Jacob and Esau.

“By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called a son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to share ill-treatment with the people of God…

“By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as if it were dry land…” (Selected verses from Hebrews 11)

It’s all about the story. The story stories us toward righteousness, understanding, and belonging that formulas and arguments cannot offer.

During officer training last fall, the most interesting and energizing discussion we had occurred during our blitz of Church history. What makes us Christian is not nearly so much the doctrines we profess, but the story we share. That story goes all the way back to Abraham. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all go back to that story. We all take different trajectories. And we all have to name and confess the errors and brutalities that our stories commit in the name of God. Interestingly, most errors and brutalities occur when we try to make righteousness a matter of principle and process, that is, a matter of law rather than faith. And faith is a matter of grace, a matter of untethered Love.

A lawyer asks Jesus, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” [Jesus] said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and…soul, and…mind…And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Mt. 22:36-40)

Paul will say the same thing to the Romans: “The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder…steal…[or] covet’; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love…is the fulfilling of the law.” (Romans 13:9-10)

Neither righteousness nor Love can be argued and proved. Righteousness and Love are not courses for us to pass or fail. Ready or not, we are called into the journey of Love. Because righteousness is about relationship, God stories us into righteousness. The story is far from over. And these are days when followers of Jesus must recommit ourselves to the story. We cannot collude with Herod’s calculated vengeance and physical violence. We must recommit ourselves to the kind of trust, righteousness, and Love that overcomes fear, that defies division, and breaks down walls.

Each of us is a dot or brush stroke on the canvas. Together we are Christ’s body, continuing his story in this particular time and place. His story transcends any place or time, so like those before us, righteousness is our call. Love is our means. And faith is our story.