The Things That Do Not Exist

The occasion for this sermon was a very large gathering of clergy and lay people from the Church of Scotland, which is experiencing steep decline, and members of the four largest Presbyterian congregations in Charlotte

 

 

The Scotland Connection

 

Sardis Presbyterian Church

Charlotte, North Carolina

 

THE THINGS THAT DO NOT EXIST

 

September 26, 2006

 

Romans 4:17

 

Last week my husband and I went to a screening of Sophie Scholl: The Last Days, a film of unforgettable power. Its subject is The White Rose, a small group of German university students, ardent Christians, who resisted the Nazis. Every one of them was captured and executed. This riveting movie was nominated for an Oscar this past April and a lot of us were very sorry it did not win. It is essentially a reenactment of the transcripts of Sophie Scholl’s trial, conducted by the man who was called “Hitler’s Hanging Judge.”[1] After the movie there was a discussion. A man in an imposing suit, obviously a person of some means accustomed to having his way, got up and said very angrily, “What good did those students do? What is the point of throwing your life away like that? Did it shorten the war one day? Did it save one life?” There was a shocked silence as the man stalked out.

 

Abraham is the father of us all, as it is written, “I will make you the father of many nations”—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.  (Romans 4:17)

 

What are some things that do not exist? Peace does not exist where there is war. Growth does not exist where there is decay. Faith does not exist where there is disbelief. Love does not exist where there is hate. But most of all, life does not exist where there is death. Death is the great nothing, the ultimate negation.

 

Try as we may, we cannot bring life out of death. When the legendary American baseball player Ted Williams died, the nation celebrated his career and mourned his death—until we found out that his head had been frozen in a can and his body suspended in a tank at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Biostasis, they call it. At that point Ted Williams became a joke; but which of us can come any closer to preserving life when death comes to pay its call? As Shakespeare’s Hamlet says, “This fell sergeant, death, is strict in his arrest.”

 

Death is the great stalker of us all—in more ways than one. The recent fifth anniversary of the terror attacks on the eleventh of September called forth a concentrated focus on death that we rarely see in America. This might have been healthy were it not for the fact that we seized the death inflicted on us and directed it outward toward a huge and growing number of civilians in Iraq who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. Death begets death. That is the human story. Life out of death is not the human story. Life out of death is the divine story. It is God who gives life to the dead and calls into being the things that do not exist.

 

We’re confused about this. We use analogies to suggest life out of death, like that of the brown tulip bulb that emerges in the spring as a brilliant flower, or the green shoot that pokes out of the apparently dead tree stump. These natural processes are wonders, of course, that bring genuine refreshment to our hearts; but they only point to life out of death; they are not the thing itself. In the natural world, there is no resurrection of the dead. The bulb, the tree, the butterfly—all will some day die.

 

Now in our text this morning, the apostle Paul is talking about Abraham. Why Abraham? If you follow Paul’s train of thought in chapter 4 of Romans, you’ll remember that he wants us to understand that Abraham is the father of us all, the “father of all who believe,” or, if you prefer, the ancestor of all who believe. The reason for this stands against reason. Abraham is called the progenitor of all people not because of his strength but because of his impotence. Abraham’s place in the story of salvation depends not upon Abraham’s sufficiency, but upon his lack. He is renowned not because he was righteous, but because he had no righteousness. As theologian Douglas Harink has recently pointed out, in an age when talk about “human potential” is everywhere, we who are biblical people need to remind ourselves of Abraham’s distinguishing feature: he had no human potential.[2] His human potential did not exist.

 

Remember God’s promise to Abraham. In the book of Genesis God promises on at least four different occasions that Abraham’s descendants would be innumerable. Yet, as Paul emphasizes in Romans 4, Abraham’s body “was as good as dead because he was about a hundred years old” and he had a wife who was almost as old and had never conceived any children. In the passage from Genesis that especially impressed Paul, God brings Abraham outside his tent at night time. We need to imagine the night sky as it must have been four or five thousand years ago—no city lights, no pollution. If you’ve ever been out in the desert at night you’ll have some idea of what Abraham saw:

 

God brought [Abraham] outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” And [Abraham] believed the Lord, and [the Lord] reckoned it to him as righteousness.

 

Fasten onto that word reckon, as Paul did. Logizomai. What a universe of meaning is there in this “unromantic word”![3] The root is logos, word. Abraham was not righteous in himself. God reckoned, “worded,” spoke him into righteousness. Logos, the Word of God. Go back further: Genesis, chapter one: “And God said, ‘Let there be light.’” As the preacher Will Willimon so rightly declares, the entire Christian enterprise depends on the three words, “…and God said.”[4] “And God said, Let there be light; and there was light.” Creation by the Word! God spoke; and it was so.

 

Move forward to the New Testament, the stupendous prologue of the

Gospel of John:

 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He (the Word is a “he,” not an “it”!) was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made (nothing was made without the Word!)…. And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.

 

This towering passage links the creation of the world by the Word (“all things were made through” the Word) with the coming of Christ into the world that was made through him? It boggles the mind, doesn’t it? There is no other story like this story of the creation by the Word of God—the Word that comes into the world incarnate as Jesus Christ. This is the Word that gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist—creation ex nihilo, creation out of nothing.

 

So this is the Word that “reckons” life where there is no potential for life, and righteousness where there is no human capacity for it. This is the Word that calls forth faith in God’s promise when there is no earthly indicator that it will come true.

 

It is rare to hear this passage from Romans preached. I don’t think we want to believe that God can create something out of nothing. We want to reserve some of the credit for ourselves. I love the writings of St. Augustine; he is still so modern! When he was arguing with Pelagius, he made fun of what Pelagius had written. Pelagius wrote that we need God in order to help us “more easily to resist the evil spirit.” Augustine says (I’m paraphrasing): What’s with this “more easily”? Why not just say simply, we need the help of God to overcome evil? What does that “more easily” add? It adds human potential. We can beat evil on our own, but we appreciate God’s help so we can do it “more easily.”[5]

 

I can give a very similar example from my own Episcopal Church. In the old baptismal service, when the sponsors were asked “Do you renounce sin, the flesh and the devil?” the response was, “I will, God being my helper.” See how the “I will” is completely dependent on God being the helper? Now listen to the new version, where the verb to be is taken away from God: the new version is “I will, with God’s help.” In other words, I’ll do it, and God will help so I can do it “more easily.” Pure Pelagius, alive and well.

 

The letters of Paul and the prophecies of Isaiah are saying something radically different. Why Isaiah? Because the portion of that book written during the Exile (40-55) is a sustained outpouring of promises from the God who is going to do a completely new thing, something out of nothing:

 

Behold…new things I now declare; before they spring forth I tell you of them. (42:9) From this time forth I make you hear new things, hidden things which you have not known….before today you have never heard of them…(48:6-7)

 

See how the prophet emphasizes that God’s new thing is completely out of our power. We cannot even imagine it, let alone create it. It is declared, spoken, announced by God alone without our cooperation.

 

Paul links this creation out of nothing with the promise made to Abraham. What does he promise? What is the essence of the nonexistent thing that God will call into existence? It is a new creation, with a new humanity as its crown and glory.

 

A new humanity. The old humanity is named Adam and it is imprisoned by Sin and Death.. We are locked into this cycle of destruction. Last week there was a rumor that Osama bin Laden had died. If he had, would that make any difference? Not really. Terror is abroad in the world. We need a God who can create peace where peace does not exist.

 

There was a time when people believed we ourselves could make a new humanity happen. Some people still seem to believe that. Americans are known to be incurably optimistic about human nature and about our own nature in particular. President Bush reminds us regularly that Americans are good, compassionate people. Christian faith says not so. The Christian view of humanity is tragic. The Christian view of humanity means that we are horrified but not surprised that nice American boys do terrible things to Iraqi civilians, and who can say that you and I would not do the same thing under certain circumstances? I have just finished reading Ordinary Men, a book about a World War II battalion of reserve police who were deployed to Poland from their home town of Hamburg, Germany. They could have been from Charlotte, or Glasgow. They were just regular guys, laborers, teachers, shop owners; hardly any of them had ever seen military service. They were set to work in Poland rounding up Jewish men, women and children and shooting them at close range, leaving the bodies in the woods or in hastily dug mass graves. When they weren’t doing that, they were loading Jews onto death trains, packing them in so tightly that there was no room for them to move. By the time their tour was over this one battalion of fewer than 500 men had murdered more than seventy thousand people. Ordinary men.

 

A striking article appeared last week in The New York Times. A Cambodian man named Youk Chhang somehow managed to survive the Khmer Rouge genocide which killed two million Cambodians, many of them intellectuals, professionals, and educators. Youk Chhang has committed his life to collecting testimonies from Khmer Rouge killers. The article describes his interview of one of them, who was a boy of 14 at the time and became a killer for fear of his own life. Youk Chhang [the interviewer] concluded that he and the man he interviewed could quite easily have changed places. “They are us, and we are them. [The killers] are the evil side of us. Crimes are committed by human beings, by people just like us.”[6] In other words, only circumstances separate you and me from the white people who lynched black people in Virginia and North Carolina and had their pictures taken on the spot, for souvenirs.[7]

 

We need a new humanity. But where is it to come from? The message of the Bible is that it is to come from God.

 

Let us now return to Sophie Scholl, the White Rose, and the question, “What is the point of throwing away your life like that? What good did it do?” This question deserves a response. After all, the new humanity, the new creation of God exists at present only in the form of promise. Signs of it in this life are only signs; they are not the thing itself. Yet signs are what you and I are here to give. Our lives as Christians are signs, pointers to the promise, purpose, and power of God. Today, when young Germans are asked which Germans in history they most admire, Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans are consistently in the top five.

 

There was another young German Christian resister, Helmut James von Moltke. He also was executed by the Nazis, condemned by the same judge. His letters to his wife, suffused with his Christian faith, have been published; the book is called simply Letters to Freya. You probably know the name of George Kennan, perhaps the most revered diplomat of the 20^th century. Kennan knew Moltke, from their prewar days in the diplomatic service. Many years after Moltke’s execution, Kennan wrote these words:

 

[Moltke was] the greatest person morally…that I met on either side of the battle-lines in the Second World War…The image of this lonely, struggling man, one of the few genuine Protestant-Christian martyrs of our time, has remained for me over the years a pillar of moral conscience and an unfailing source of political and intellectual inspiration.”

 

I wish I had had those words with me to read to the angry man in the movie audience. Well, the angry man was right about one thing: courageous deeds do not in themselves bring in the new creation. Only God can do that. Nor do people who perform such deeds usher in the new humanity. Not yet. However, such deeds and such people are signs; and because they are signs of what the Word of God has promised, their deeds are “reckoned” by God as the power that raises the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

 

A few days ago I read a story in the paper about a man in the small town of Stonewall, Mississippi who has done quite well in business. He has decided to use a significant amount of his company’s money to rebuild the municipal swimming pool. The pool, which had always been for whites only, was filled in with dirt many years ago, when the civil rights movement was gathering steam. More than forty years later, it is about to be opened again to all the citizens.[8] Now what does this mean? What good will the new pool do for a whole generation of children who never learned to swim? What good will it do in a community where racial tensions remain? Maybe there will be fights. Maybe the whites won’t want to swim in it. Maybe. But it is a sign.

 

Full reconciliation, lasting peace, universal liberation: at the present time these things are present to us only in the mode of promise. The Resurrection of the dead does not yet exist. If the human race were capable of restoring life by “biostasis” or any other means, it would just be the same old life—more Sin, more Death. We cannot create the things that do not exist. It is God who can do this, and who promises to do this, and who makes it powerful in us even now through the Resurrection of Christ, our hope of glory.

 

I recently spoke with a woman who is forty years old and feels that her dreams are already gone. She is only forty! Yet she feels that her youth is fled, that there is no chance to start over. I am nearly seventy and I can assure you that my sense of this is acute. Humanly speaking, there is no new creation.

 

But we are not speaking humanly. We are speaking of the God who created us without our cooperation and spoke to us before we could imagine him.

 

I have not come from New York to Charlotte to preach human potential. I have not come as an American to suggest human methods to the Church of Scotland. I have come by the grace of God with the apostolic message entrusted to me, to declare to you the presence and power of the God who raises the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. AMEN.