“ It was not through the law that Abraham and his offspring received the promise that he would be heir of the world, but through the righteousness that comes by faith. 14 For if those who depend on the law are heirs, faith means nothing and the promise is worthless, 15 because the law brings wrath. And where there is no law there is no transgression. 16 Therefore, the promise comes by faith, so that it may be by grace and may be guaranteed to all Abraham’s offspring—not only to those who are of the law but also to those who have the faith of Abraham. He is the father of us all. 17 As it is written: “I have made you a father of many nations.” He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed—the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not. 18 Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”19 Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. 20 Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, 21 being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. 22 This is why “it was credited to him as righteousness.” 23 The words “it was credited to him” were written not for him alone, 24 but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness—for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. 25 He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification. Romans 4: 13-25
Every week I try to figure out: Now how can I stir up interest in this Bible text? To what crying and deeply-felt human need can I connect it, so that we’re all sitting on the edges of our seats wanting and waiting to hear how this Bible passage points toward the deliverance we so long for? I should hear how well I do in a few weeks, after my first annual review.
This week I’ve had a harder time than usual making that connection, because Romans 4 is about something that very few people seem to be interested in anymore: righteousness. Just saying the words, “righteous” or “righteousness” feels so…..so….. Fifteenth Century, when people were fearfully and tearfully concerned with doing right for God and being right with God, because you never knew when the Huns or the Turks would ride in from the East, or the Black Death would knock you stiff. “Righteousness” then meant stockpiling religious merits, by doing right for God, and so being right with God, because you could be called to account at any moment.
For five centuries, Martin Luther has been the poster child for this anxious sensitivity toward righteousness. When, as a young man, a storm came up, and lightning struck a tree nearby, thinking that God was seeking to punish him for his unrighteousness, he cried out, “Save me, St. Anne, and I shall become a monk!” which he did. As a monk, he did all the required devotional practices and penances, trying so hard for so long to do right for God and be right with God, that one day his father confessor said to him, “Martin, Martin….Next time, come to confession with some truly interesting sins.”
Despite his anxious, scrupulous religiosity, Martin didn’t feel like he was yet right with God. In fact, he even started to suspect that there was something blasphemous about his fearful, anxious attempts to earn God’s favor through his due diligence to religious works, that he was presuming that he and his works could ever be pure enough to impress God, that he was treating God like a merchant with whom he might strike a bargain, or as a banker who owes him what he has deposited in his own account, even, that God should count himself Martin’s debtor because of all that he does, but for reasons that he knows deep down are really selfish, just to save his own hide. Then he began to realize that, as terrible as it was to live with the fear that he might never earn God’s favor, it would be at least as terrible to believe that he had.
Was there another way?
Today, however, people seem to be more concerned with if and how God and the church might do right by them, and be right for them. How will the church, the pastor, its programs, its gospel and its God, interest me, engage me, even entertain me? Will they be relevant to my interests and my causes? Will they affirm my beliefs, my desires and my identity, and so confirm my worth? If not, I’m off to another church that does. Or, next Sunday, I’ll just sleep in and attend the Church of the Inner Spring.
But then there’s this powerful scene at the end of the movie, Saving Private Ryan, in which an Army veteran returns to a military cemetery in France, and goes to the grave of the soldier who saved his life, at the expense of his own. His lifelong mix of survivor guilt, grief and gratitude well up in him, and the veteran turns with tears to his wife and says, “Tell me that I’m a good man; tell me that I’ve lived a good life.” Other than that part, I kind of wish I hadn’t seen the movie.
So, maybe there is more of this medieval Martin Luther in us than we might admit, crying out for justification, vindication and the assurance that we can do right, and be right with someone, somewhere, with God or the universe or society, especially whenever we too are struck with both gratitude for the sheer magnitude of the gift of existence, and with guilt for the ways and times in which we have taken it for granted, or squandered, misused and abused that gift. If I don’t go to church to endure sermons, then maybe if I buy this cereal in the grocery store, with the picture of different kinds of people on the box, that will show that I am a good person, because of how much I support diversity and good nutrition. Or if I buy that chocolate, or this coffee, it will show that I care about the rain forest. Those are good things to care about and support. But if I stop there, am I settling for a cheap and easy way of self-justification through consumption and spending?
Or maybe I’ll put this bumper sticker on my car, or post that slogan on Facebook to show that I support this cause, or that person. I’ll keep checking back in, several times an hour, to see how many people like it. The more Likes it gets, does that make me feel more I feel justified, vindicated, righteous. Or if I vote this way, won’t that make me more righteous than those liberals or those conservatives or those fundamentalists or those progressives, and so justify myself? However right or wrong our positions may be, can they become a kind of salvation and justification through politics, performance and partisanship? Is there not another way to look at righteousness that might give us another angle on our controversies and culture wars, at least one which doesn’t have to pit people against each other, to seek our justification and our vindication at the expense of someone else’s? Our secularized, politicized, polarized ways of seeking righteousness, vindication and justification at each other’s expense are not working for us any better than the medieval religious way did for Martin Luther.
And if we feel no such need for vindication, nor justification as “righteous,” there is still one other thing we might listen for in today’s message. It’s about something like a puzzle, or one of those pictures in which you turn it one way and you see one thing; turn it upside down and inside out, and something else different and surprising emerges. Again, it has to do with that old, outdated word, “righteousness.”
Last Sunday, I said that the renewing, recreating Grace of God is such an Upside Down, Inside Out puzzle, because of the way it upends and reverses what the world usually thinks of by way of power, wisdom, wealth and worth. I also spoke of how this Grace can be a disorienting, discombobulating thing, first of all, because it is a sovereign work of God. It is at God’s initiative, by God’s power, for God’s purposes, according to God’s promises, and so can overcome all opposition and resistance.
Next week, I’ll speak about how God’s resetting, restoring, renewing grace also seems counter-intuitive, even foolish, Like Jesus, telling his disciples in today’s Gospel reading, that to save their lives they must lose them. Later, we’ll focus on how the grace of God is costly. Jesus served notice about that in today’s Gospel reading when he says that “the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and elders and suffer many things,” and that the disciples too must be willing to take up their crosses and follow him. And yet, however costly it is, God’s grace always gives us more than we gave up.
Today I wish to focus on another surprisingly upside down and inside out aspect of God’s grace: that it is so extravagantly beyond any question of merit, earning and deserving on our part, that our own goodness and merit don’t even enter into the equation; grace is about God’s infinite goodness and merits, not ours. And when God extends his goodness and merits to us, and when we accept them in trust, the word that Romans 4 uses for that kind of relationship is “righteousness.”
That’s how I understand verses 23 and 24 of Romans 4, where Paul writes, “ The words ‘it was credited to him’ were written not for [Abraham] alone, but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness—for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”
So, to answer the first question in the outline: What is the Romans 4 understanding of “righteousness?” Righteousness is a right relationship with God, that God gives us, not one that we earn, a relationship of trust in God’s virtues and good works, more than our own. It’s a right relationship with God driven by faith in God’s faithfulness, in God’s rightness, rather than in our own. It’s a right relationship with God received as a gift from God, rather than earned as a reward. This Romans 4 kind of righteousness then is not a human achievement but a divine gift. It’s about God setting us right with Godself, before we can ever do right for God.
This is such an extravagant gift that Paul even uses the word, “credit.” Now, whenever I go through the checkout line at a grocery store, and run my bank card through the scanner, I have to decide whether I’ll touch the Credit icon or the one that says, “Debit.” If I say, “Debit,” I’ll have to enter my pass code, which some scanners do better at recognizing than others. If they balk and act goofy, when I know I had punched it in right, all four times, then the customers behind me get restless, and the cashier looks at me like I stole the card. And that’s one more use of the passcode that some hacker can catch. So I poke the word, “Credit,” and the screen immediately says it was accepted, and I’ve saved everybody a step or two. I call it “credit,” but I’m still drawing on something that I have stockpiled.
Which brings us to the next question in my outline, Why is righteousness a matter of credit, even like a credit card? Because it is about a relationship which God extends to us, rather than one which we first earned and stockpiled, and then can expect back from God.
Which is quite Inside Out and Upside Down compared to the ways in which the world calculates righteousness. There are righteous deeds and unrighteous ones, of course. And they always have consequences. But in Romans 4, Paul speaks of righteousness as a relationship, not a performance, as a gift, not a reward; it is the enjoyment and the experience of God’s inexhaustible account of favor and love for us, so that we let God do good to us, and do good through us.
Exhibit A of this kind of righteousness in Romans 4 is Abraham, the first recorded Jew. Along with his wife, Sarah, of course. Paul mentions Abraham and Sarah so he can get the Jewish Christian in the Roman Churches on board with his train of thought. He’s trying to get Jewish and Gentile members to accept each other fully as brothers and sisters in Christ. Once he gets them thinking about Abraham and Sarah, however, he adds this surprising little stinger: you know, when we read in Genesis that God first counted Abraham and Sarah “righteous,” technically, they weren’t Jews yet. They didn’t have the law of Moses. Nor was Abraham circumcised. The law came after the righteousness relationship, as an expression of it, and not before the righteous relationship, as a condition for it. And the first and most important thing that God ever counted righteous about them was their trust in God, however imperfect and inconstant that it was. That makes Abraham and Sarah the first ancestors of both Jews and of Gentiles who trust their righteousness-sharing God. So Jew and Gentile are in the same boat.
Is that surprising? Trust, or faith, is the first and most necessary precondition of any living, growing, fruitful relationship. If children never learn to trust in someone’s unconditional love early on, they may live the rest of their lives as fugitives and adversaries of everyone, even of themselves. Jesus called trust, “the first work of the law.” And in Hebrews 4 we hear that, “without faith, it is impossible to please God.” Otherwise, doing right enough, and being right enough on our own power to earn God’s favor, is not something we are even capable of. Or why else did we need a savior?
This understanding of “righteousness” is that other way which set Martin Luther’s heart at ease, and set in motion the revolution of the Reformation. And when our Chairman Menno, Menno Simons, read Luther’s works on the sly and learned how blasphemous was all his religious bargaining with God, “twas grace that taught his heart to fear.” But when these same words of Luther convinced Menno of how much God is already pleased with us as his children, his handiwork, so that it is not only pointless to try to earn God’s pleasure in us, it’s insulting, then “grace his fears relieved.”
This Romans 4 kind of righteousness is also like credit in that it is given freely to those who have no way to pay it back, but with more of the same. But we can pay it forward, to others. And here we start to address the next question in the outline: Why does it matter? What difference does it make that God does not pay us for our righteous acts with a right relationship, but that we simply receive a right relationship with God by way of our trust?
First of all, it matters to God. God delights in our relationship of trust in him, out of his delight in us. And so Jesus willingly, gladly, welcomed the thief on the cross next to his into Paradise long after that thief had lost the capacity to do anything good or right, other than to receive the gift.
Secondly, it makes a difference for us, as well. And not just for our own peace with God, though I can think of nothing greater than that. There is all the difference in the world between righteous acts that grow out of a loving relationship of trust in God’s good pleasure in us, and those works which are done with the fear that we must earn God’s good pleasure. There is all the difference in the world between feeding the poor or tending the sick because it just flows out of God’s love for us, and doing so to prove that we are worthy of God’s love, or more worthy than others. The one arises from faith, the other from fear. The first leads to acts of love and service that are unconditionally given, simply to express and to share God’s favor. The second, however, is conditional and manipulative, in order to earn something. It might lead to righteous deeds, but not to righteousness. And people know when our service and witness is treating them as means to an end, rather than as worthy ends in themselves.
Furthermore, righteous deeds flowing out of a righteous relationship lead to renewal: renewal for those serving, and the renewal of those served. Righteous deeds flowing out of fear, however, lead to resentment: resentment by those serving, and resentment by those being served. Then we are like the older brother of the Prodigal Son, who was resentful, to the point of furious, at his father for killing the fatted calf and celebrating the return of “this son of yours, who has squandered your property on prostitutes!” His hard work and stern sense of justice only alienated himself from his father’s homecoming party.
If we’re worried that such an understanding of righteousness will lead to lawlessness and license, that people will presume upon God’s favor to do evil, expecting no consequences, it happens, and it’s tragic. But as a preacher of the Gospel, I would rather risk that than loading people down with fear that there’s always one more thing to do, or to do better, before God can love you.
Besides, if we truly share Abraham and Sarah’s kind of trust, that will actually lead to good works and better lives. In his commentary on Romans, Martin Luther said that, “It is as impossible to separate works from faith as burning and shining from fire.” About this Romans 4 kind of righteousness, he wrote (project), “It is called God’s righteousness, or that righteousness which is valid in God’s sight, because it is God who gives it and reckons it as righteousness for the sake of Christ our Mediator. It influences a person to give to everyone what he owes him…Thus he gives God the honor due him and pays him what he owes him. He serves people willingly with the means available to him.”
As for the last question, So, what do we do about this Romans 4 kind of righteousness? If we haven’t taken that step to surrender to God’s love for us, and so receive from God what God has already given, now’s the time to start. Talk with me about it, if you have any questions. But even if we can say, “This has always been Christian faith 101 for me,” beware of how easily, how subtly this whole market of merit can creeps into our heads and hearts, and say, “I’ve done all the right things, I’ve got the right theology, the right politics and the right practice, unlike them, and you-know-who, so God owes me things like long life, status, health and happiness, that I can draw on like Debit.”
I know that I have forgotten and switched tracks back into this market of merit, or this debit and entitlement way of thinking, whenever I obsess in fear, jealousy and resentment against those who seem to be enjoying goodies in life that I think I deserve more than they, or whenever I fixate on what others are doing wrong, or on why they’re wrong.
Let’s beware of any such thoughts and fears and resentments and chase them out of our heads whenever they seep in and seek to dethrone God. Beware of that tendency to make comparisons over and against each other, and so justify ourselves. To discern the hard questions of our time, to take principled stands and to advocate for them is one thing. To use our positions as ways to distinguish the righteous from the unrighteous and so justify ourselves is something else.
If we’re looking for anything to repent of and to give up for Lent, we can start with giving up such comparisons. Any differences in virtue and wisdom among us mortals are measurable only in meaningless millimeters compared to the infinity that is God. Let’s keep our eyes off of ourselves and each other, off any comparisons of worth and mercy that we might want to make among ourselves, and turn them to Jesus. Keep them focused on God and on God’s inexhaustible riches of mercy and goodness. Then we’ll find that the peace we have with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, leads to even more peace with others, and ourselves.
This, then I suspect is Jesus’ prayer for us: That his disciples will ever open themselves, more and more, to keep receiving by faith even the gift of faith itself, and so live in the peace and the freedom of God’s beloved children, and joint heirs with Jesus, accepting the blessings of a right relationship with God as gifts to be enjoyed freely, and to share just as freely.