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St George’s Church, Nashville

Father of the Ungodly

Sermon by Fleming Rutledge Second Sunday in Lent 2011

Genesis 12:1-4a; Romans 4:1-5. 13-17; John 3:5-7

The Public Library in New York City (the one with the beloved pair of stone lions out front) is currently featuring an exhibition called “Three Faiths”—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Its purpose is to show off the Public Library’s extensive collection of manuscripts in order to teach the public what the three “Abrahamic” faiths have in common. It’s a beautiful show, and you can’t help being impressed by the similarities between the three—most especially monotheism.

On the other hand: I have here a copy of the beautiful, expensive booklet that was given out at the Public Library exhibition. It’s designed to minimize the differences among the three religions and maximize the similarities, as though the differences didn’t really matter very much. Even the culture critic for The New York Times noticed this and objected to it.[1] It’s very well-meant, since the intention is to increase mutual respect; but it’s not a good idea to build respect on misrepresentation. For instance, here are two things that the exhibition says about Abraham:

·         Monotheism was “an innovation of the patriarch Abraham”

·         Abraham was “a man who made a covenant with God”[2]

What’s wrong with this picture? Believe it or not, St. George’s, your faith stands or falls on this. The Old Testament story of Abraham from beginning to end tells of a living God who called to Abraham out of a clear blue sky without Abraham’s preparation, a God who made a covenant with him before he could cooperate.[3]

Now wait a minute! Didn’t Abraham show great courage and faithfulness in leaving his patrimony and trekking across foreign lands for decades? Yes, he did; but the question is, did he do this as a precondition of God’s favor, or as the result of that favor?

You might be surprised to know that Jews and Christians significantly disagree about this. A rabbi came to speak at my husband’s church last month and taught that God called Abraham because of Abraham’s spirituality, his godliness, his righteousness. I’m not sure that the Episcopalians listening to this were aware that this is not what the Hebrew text actually says. A great deal of what the rabbis teach about the Hebrew text is from the later commentaries, the Talmud and the Mishnah. That’s their tradition and we respect it, but its not our tradition. Christian theologians and biblical commentators have taken another path. We read the Old Testament text as it stands by itself. That explains a lot of the differences in interpretation.

The biblical text itself says absolutely nothing about Abraham’s qualifications for being chosen. It simply says, “God spoke to Abraham [Abram].” Here’s what we know about Abraham up to this point: He’s the son of a man named Terah; his family migrated from “Ur of the Chaldees” (today’s Iraq) to Haran; and his wife Sarah was barren. Period end. Nothing more. The text does not tell us the slightest thing about Abraham’s previously existing righteousness, or his faith, or his human potential. The point in the text is to show that Abraham and Sarah had no human potential, because they had no children. That was the worst of all possible fates for people of that time and place. God chose a couple who had no human potential in order to show his power to create out of nothing. That is precisely what Paul the Apostle wants us to see in Romans 4:

….Abraham [is] the father of us all…—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. In hope Abraham believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations as he had been told…He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead because he was about a hundred years old, or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb…He grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.

Paul makes a point of saying that Abraham was “hoping against hope” because human hope was “as good as dead.” God made Abraham and Sarah wait for decades in order to show that God can raise the dead. If we change the story to highlight Abraham’s qualities, we’re giving Abraham a larger role than the story intends. Making this move takes the initiative away from God—which is exactly what we human beings always want to do.

Bishop N. T. Wright points out that if God chose Abraham because of his spiritual superiority, it’s only a short step away from the idea that we, as Abraham’s descendants, are also spiritually superior, or that we must become so in order to gain God’s favor.[4] This presents some difficulties. Either we become smug and self-satisfied about ourselves and our own group, or we feel deficient and insecure, worrying about our spiritual development, never sure if it’s good enough.

Actually, we’re likely to experience both of these things at the same time—we look askance at other people in order to shore up our own position. It’s classic human nature. It’s a good description of the Episcopal Church. It’s nothing new, though. During the 1960s (how well I remember), Southern Episcopalians who had been born again in the matter of race relations became deeply scornful of those who were still living in darkness, and many congregations split. Will Campbell, who I think still lives in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, has been one of the very few who understood the truth about Abraham. More about Will in a minute.

The story of Abraham is not about a man of superior religious attainments who invented monotheism and then established a covenant with the God that he’d invented. It’s a story about God calling an aged man and wife who had never been able to produce children and promising them something impossible. Listen to what happens in chapter 15. Abraham complains bitterly to God that decades have passed and still he has no legitimate child. God brought him outside his tent, and said, “Look toward heaven, and count the stars (if indeed you are able to count them).” Then God said, “So shall your descendants be.”

And then this revolutionary sentence: “Abraham believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to Abraham as righteousness.”(Genesis 15:4-6) Where do we hear that sentence again? We hear it in Romans, when Paul says,

What then shall we say about Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.”

It was reckoned to him as righteousness. Did you know that sentence was a bombshell? It was, and it is still. It’s a living bomb that we should approach while wearing protective gear. Who is the acting subject here? Abraham, or God?

Human boasting, human righteousness, human religious achievement fall away before the righteousness of God. We are not justified in the sight of God by religious or moral superiority but only by God’s gracious and merciful “reckoning.”[5] So Abraham is not our father “according to the flesh,” not our forebear according to worldly attainments—not even religious attainments—but according to the Word of God. John the Evangelist says exactly the same thing, in a different way, in today’s Gospel. Nicodemus is a righteous man, mind you—but here is what Jesus says to this ruler of the religious establishment:

Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born anew.’ (John 3:5-7).

Even the so-called righteous man must be born again. A better translation is “begotten anew,”[6] receiving a new beginning from a new source: What does the word genesis mean? You know: it means “beginning.” So the word regeneration means new beginning. You hear people talk about reinventing themselves; my husband is finding it difficult to face retirement and I’ve been bugging him: “Reinvent yourself.” But being begotten from above, or born anew, in the biblical sense, is not that kind of new beginning. It can be received only from the initiative of God. This is made plain in the baptism of infants, who can do nothing for themselves. Baptism has always been described as regeneration—begotten from above by adoption and grace, “born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). Let me tell you, when I started this sermon, I wasn’t going to bring John’s Gospel into it at all, but the Word of God is this astonishing unity—one passage leads into another, one part of Scripture interprets another.[7]

Born anew—begotten from a new source—re-generate from a different Father: begotten, not of the will of the flesh but of God—“the God in whom Abraham believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”

When Paul says that God calls into existence the things that do not exist, he’s of course thinking of the story of creation.[8] With his mere Word, God can call a world into existence where no world existed before. But for Paul the first creation is by no means as great a miracle as the second, the new creation. The new creation is the new humanity, the new human being who is reckoned righteous before God because God and God alone is able to work such a transformation. And God knows we need one.

Back to Will Campbell, probably the most significant white theologian and civil rights activist of the 1960s. When I met Will I was quite young and full of myself. I had grown up as a segregationist and I had come to see the light. I told Will that my poor benighted family members were racists. He said, “Fleming, we’re all racists.”

As you can see, I never forgot that. A lot of people think the Christian gospel is “God loves everybody” and that’s all there is to it. Well that’s true in a sense, but it isn’t the full story. We need a lot of cleaning up. God does not love us “just as we are” in the usual sense of that term. It would be more accurate to say that God loves what he has promised to make of us. And what he will make of us is what he made of Abraham and Sarah, the couple who had no human potential. Paul is quite specific: Abraham had

nothing to boast about before God. Neither you nor I have anything to boast about before God.

Here’s what Paul says in Romans 4. The promise made to Abraham comes from the living God “who justifies the ungodly.” The truly blessed person here this morning is the person who recognizes that in the sight of God, he or she has reached the limit of human potential and is in solidarity with the rest of the human race as being one of the  ungodly. And in that moment of truth, you will find that the Holy Spirit of God has moved upon you, and that your faith is reckoned to you as righteousness, and that you are already being built into the new creation being fashioned by the God who raises the dead and calls into being the things that do not exist.                                                               

AMEN.

[1] Edward Rothstein, The New York Times, =========

[2] The first caption is from the booklet. The second was a caption on the wall of the exhibition.

[3] The covenant ceremony in Genesis 15:7-16 is carried out entirely by God. Abraham is a spectator to the solemn commitment made by the deity.

[4] N. T. Wright, Paul for Everyone: Romans, Vol. 2.

[5] The Greek word is logizomai. It has many depths of meaning. It comes from accounting, as in “reckoning” a column of figures, but theologically it means to speak into (logos, word) a condition of righteousness.

[6] Raymond E. Brown strongly favors this translation.

[7] Scriptura sui interpres—-scripture interprets itself)

[8] This is called creation ex nihilo (out of nothing).

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