Pilgrim Preaching

Redemption, Reformation

Reformation, Years ABC | Romans 3:19-28

“They are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24). 

Paul has just spent two chapters making sure that all the Gentiles among his hearers and all the Jews alike will recognize themselves to be pretty much out of wiggle room. Gentiles, he argues, might not have had the law to guide them, but they had revelation from God in the natural world, and they did not follow what they knew. Jews have even less of an excuse. They had the law and yet did not remain faithful to the covenant God made with them. Quoting Psalm 14, Paul concludes, “There is no one who is righteous, not even one” (Romans 3:10). 

While all the religious language in Paul’s argument might not speak to you, you don’t have to be a particularly religious person to look around the world and see that it’s a mess. And it doesn’t take much for most of us to admit that at least some of the mess has our fingerprints on it. Sometimes we can draw a straight line from something we did to some harm that happened to another. Most of the time, the lines are messier than that. We are part of systems that are broken, so we are not the only ones responsible. Or it’s not that we did something; it’s that we failed to act when an action might have helped someone else, or we tried to help and we made things worse. 

I remember the preacher, Will Campbell, somewhere telling the story of his grandfather taking him to see a public execution, a hanging. Reflecting on the experience as an adult, Campbell commented that he thought the old man was trying to show him, “The world is this way, and it should not be.” We kill each other, legally and illegally.  We kill each other, locally and globally. We kill each other, literally and metaphorically. The world is this way, and it should not be. 

The Righteousness of God

So Paul sets up this scenario where everyone listening to his letter is staring at their shoes and wishing it would just be over soon, and then he says, “But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed” (Romans 3:21). 

Of course, it is not immediately good news that the righteousness of God has been revealed. In Luke, “the righteousness of God” is pictured this way: 

51 He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the 
thoughts of their hearts. 

52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly; 

53 he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:51-53).

When Old Testament prophets speak of the God’s righteousness, they are pointing to God setting things right for God’s people. The little people will be vindicated, and Israel will know justice, peace, and prosperity. 

Paul has just spent those opening chapters of Romans documenting how far we all are from that vision. Now, when he says the righteousness of God has been revealed, you have to wonder, is this good news or bad news? If no one is righteous, not even one, then a righteous God might just give up on the human project altogether. 

Redemption

Paul continues, “For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:23f). When you redeem something, you recapture its value. Think of a coupon or a returnable bottle. The store or the manufacturer buys them back from you. They are worth cash. 

In Christ Jesus, God redeems not coupons or bottles, but people. Paul would not have had to look far for a case in point. He himself had tried to do the right thing and ended up persecuting the church. The book of Acts tells us that when the deacon, Stephen, was martyred, the men doing the killing laid their cloaks at the feet of the young man we know as Paul, and he “approved of their killing him” (Acts 8:1). The world is this way, and it should not be. Paul had been on the wrong side of God’s righteousness. And God’s response? The Lord Jesus had found him on the road to Damascus and redeemed him for something better.

The whole ministry of Jesus was dedicated to this kind of buying back. He healed people—a few he even raised the dead—and he gave them back to their families. He ate with tax collectors and other sinners, people everyone else had already written off as a loss. He bought them back. The justice he embodied in his life and his death was not content to rail against sin. The justice of God that Christ lived out so faithfully aimed to break the power of sin, to restore sinners so that they could love God and those among whom God has placed them. 

Reformation

The Protestant tradition speaks of God as always reforming the church. Not just individually, but also together, in the body of Christ, we drift away from the righteousness of God as Jesus lived it out and made it available to all. Sometimes we abandon it altogether. Part of what we observe with Reformation Day is this movement of God, in Christ and through the Spirit, to redeem not just individuals, but also the church. 

One of the stories of Protestant Reformation is the story of God buying back a church whose creative ways of keeping the budget balanced (that is, through the selling of indulgences) had effectively put a price on “the free gift,” as Paul describes being right with God (cf. Romans 5:15f). The reformers rejected the idea that anyone could buy or sell the righteousness that God bestowed. 

It is easier to recognize the compromises of the church in a previous century than it is to see such failures in our own time. Yet just as it is always true in our individual lives and in our societies that “there is no one righteous, not even one,” the same is true of our individual congregations and of the church as a whole. (Those who have spent any time at all in the church are likely to find that illustrations of the way, “The church is this way, and it should not be,” come rather too easily to mind.) The people of God lose our way. To say that the church is always being reformed is to say that God is still paying attention, and paying the price, to redeem our communities from all the ways we sell out to sin, death, and the power of the devil. God is still buying us back for something better.

Light Switches & the Obedience of Faith

Advent 4A | Romans 1:1-7

Other Texts for the Day

Isaiah 7:10-16
Matthew 1:18-25 (See also "Do Not Be Afraid")

"Through him we have received grace and our apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles on behalf of his name" (Romans 1:5, NET)

Trusting the Switch

Do you know that experience, during a power outage, of going into a room and flicking the light switch on? What amazes me about it is how I never learn. I know the power is out. I may even have a flashlight in one hand, and still, with the other, I’m feeling for the switch. I find it. I snap it on, and nothing. Power outage or not, I do it, and every time I do, I expect the lights to come on.  It is second nature when you walk into a dark room to turn on the light.

When Paul talks about “the obedience of faith” in Romans, he is getting at the relationship between what we believe and what we do. We flick a light switch with total trust that light will flood the room. The fact that we flick light switches even after we know that the power is out is a testimony to a trust so embedded in us that it shows up in our actions even when we should know better. The simplest of actions bears witness to faith, that is, faith in the way lights and light switches work. 

Part of what “the obedience of faith” means is that our faith, that is, our trust in God, becomes observable, just the way your trust in a light switch is observable in your action to change its position. Trust in God comes out through our hands and feet, as it were, not by some force of will and not by some resolution to turn over a new, more trusting, leaf. The obedience of faith is just faith made manifest in actions, and all of us are always acting on the basis of what we believe. 

But here a problem presents itself. You know this problem well if you have ever confessed anxiety to a well-meaning friend and heard in reply, “Don’t worry,” or “You just have to have a little faith.” Hearing that the obedience of faith flows naturally from one’s trust in God is great. You can stop worrying about the “obedience” part of the obedience of faith. But that news does not make the “faith” part actually happen. Trust in the future is related to performance in the past. I trust that light switch so much because it has so often demonstrated its trustworthiness to me.

God's Obedience of Faith

God demonstrates trustworthiness too, but not quite on the same terms as the light switch. 

In the first lesson for today, the prophet Isaiah is the king’s well-meaning friend telling him not to worry so much. The Lord has told Isaiah to tell King Ahaz, “Take heed, be quiet, do not fear, and do not let your heart be faint” (Isaiah 7:4). Ahaz is not easily quieted. He has heard that two different kings are joining forces to come against him in battle, and he is worried. 

On the theory that it would be easier for Ahaz to trust in something he can see, Isaiah tells him to ask for a sign of God’s faithfulness, and when Ahaz will not do that, Isaiah says, “OK, the Lord will give you sign anyway. A young woman will conceive and bear a son. Before he is old enough to make decisions for himself, the two kings you are so worried about will have been assigned to the dustbin of history” (cf. Isaiah 7:14-16).  

Joseph is worried too. In the gospel reading, Joseph is on the verge of dismissing Mary quietly. He has found out Mary is pregnant, and he knows the child is not his. In a dream an angel tells him, “Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:20-21).

Signs?

A young woman, a little child, and several years to see how it will all work out…. These hardly seem like elements of a sign from God; they seem more like the “wait-and-see” of everyday life, along with a little something unbelievable thrown in: powerful kings overthrown, a virgin bearing a son, a child growing up to save his people from their sins. Even so, after a few millennia of watching God’s redemptive work playing out in the arena of everyday life, it does come to look like something you can count on. 

Paul offers his own version of the story. He tells the Romans that Jesus was descended from David according to the flesh. That is the ordinary part: like tens of thousands before him and millions after him, Jesus was a Jew. Paul also tells the Romans that Jesus was raised from the dead. Not so ordinary. Again, the ordinary bumps up against the unbelievable, and again, the grace of God bursts forth. 

Trusting the saving activity of God to be manifest in daily life is never as mechanistic as the exchange between me and my light switch. Real relationships are involved in trusting God. When Paul talks about the obedience of faith, he is talking about life with God and with other human beings. The news of what God has done in Jesus Christ inspires an obedience of faith that is faith in God’s saving, redeeming righteousness and obedience that we live out with a whole lot of other people of God who are, like us, sometimes obedient and sometimes disobedient. Relationships have more variables, and a greater margin for error, than your standard human-to-light-switch equation. 

Nonetheless, God proves trustworthy. We watch God’s redemptive work playing out in the arena of everyday life, this insistence God has on redeeming people to love God and one another (cf. Romans 13:10), and we realize it is something we can count on, something we can trust. The obedience of faith is that trust made manifest in our own ordinary lives. It is also, Paul says, what God intends for all.