Father Abraham

The Rev. Amy Morgan

May 22, 2011

 

 

 

 

She sat in the last pew, all alone, every Sunday.

No one would look at her.

No one would talk to her.

People were permitted to curse her, even spit when they walked past her.

 

Judy was under communal exclusion in the Jehovah’s Witness community.

She had gotten pregnant out of wedlock,

and in order to regain membership in the community,

she had to endure this exclusion for an entire year.

 

Her exclusion wasn’t based on what she believed.

It wasn’t based on who she was –

what family she belonged to,

what social class she came from,

how she looked or spoke.

Her exclusion was based upon what she did.

Her pregnancy was proof of a behavior that was unacceptable to the community,

an action that put her outside this community

which lives under a strict code of behavior.

 

Judy’s son was brought up in the Jehovah’s Witness community.

 

And the God he came to know there,

the God he later rejected,

was demanding, judgmental, and exclusive.

 

The practices of that community reflected their understanding of the character of God.

 

In Paul’s letter to the Romans,

we find God characterized in a radically different way.

 

In earlier chapters, we’ve heard Paul’s argument that God doesn’t play favorites.

God is the one who redeems us,

and God is the one who calls us into relationship,

calls us into belonging.

And here, in the fourth chapter,

Paul moves toward the climax of his argument

that our righteousness,

literally, our right relationship with God,

is purely, exclusively, and undoubtedly

the free gift of God to humankind.

 

And this is a gift that is expansive, inclusive, and given in love.

 

This is not a God who would ostracize a woman for getting pregnant out of wedlock.

 

As familiar as the gift of God’s free grace may sound to our Reformed ears, this was not a familiar or welcome message to all of Paul’s audience in Rome. The church in Rome was an interesting mix. In the middle of the first century, the Emperor had ordered all the Jews to leave Rome, primarily because of uprisings and clashes caused by Jews who were following Jesus. After they left, Gentiles began filling up the churches, so when the Jews were later allowed to return, the Jewish and Gentile Christians suddenly had to learn to live under the same roof.

 

And instead of allowing their faith in Christ to unite them, they often let their differences divide them.

 

Many of their differences had to do with practice of faith, what you did or didn’t do as a Christian. What marked you as a Christian, a member of the household of God? For centuries, circumcision was the physical trait shared by all the sons and daughters of Abraham. But what about all these Gentile Christians? Did they need to be circumcised to belong? Did they need to keep the Law, the Torah, to be included in God’s family, to claim Abraham as their father and therefore share in his blessing and promise that culminated in Jesus Christ?

 

In classical Jewish thought, Abraham lived in right relationship with God, meaning he was righteous, because he followed the Torah, followed God’s commands even before the Law was given to Moses generations later. Abraham somehow anticipated God’s desire for right living and lived that way and that is why he was righteous. Therefore, only those who are circumcised, as Abraham later was, and continue to keep the Law are part of Abraham’s family, part of God’s covenant community.

 

Paul, on the other hand, insists that circumcision and the Law are not what made Abraham righteous. He finds it ridiculous to assume that before God’s covenant with Abraham, before the Law was given to Moses, Abraham mysteriously knew how to act, how to behave toward God and other human beings. Paul insists that Abraham was circumcised after he was declared to be righteous, and that his circumcision is a “seal of the righteousness that he had by faith.”

 

The Roman Christians were caught up in these disagreements over what people needed to do to be in right relationship with God, and Paul tries to help them find unity by instead focusing on the character of God.

 

Their difference were what they were. The Jews were going to be circumcised and the Gentiles were not. The Jews were going to keep the Torah, and the Gentiles probably weren’t. So the only way to help these different groups live under the same roof was to provide them with similarities. They worshiped the same God. They had faith in the same Messiah. But clarifying the character of this God, a God who would take on limitation and humiliation and get up in the mess of humanity in Jesus Christ – is what would ultimately unite this divided community.

 

And the character of God, according to Paul, is the one “who justifies the ungodly.”

 

Here, Paul opens for the Roman Christians a way to live in the same family, to exist under the same roof. But the door he opens is wide. And that can be as threatening as it is hopeful.

 

In our globalized culture, we are struggling to live in the same family, under the same roof, sometimes literally, with people we are divided against. We spend a lot of airtime debating what people should and shouldn’t do. From abortion to gay marriage, from economic policy to military policy, we are a nation divided over what we do. We have lost track of any uniting force of character.

 

We may not all worship the same God in this nation or this world, but if we as Christians take seriously the claim that Jesus Christ is Lord of All, then what we believe about the character of God matters a great deal and effects what we do and how we act in the world.

 

Most of us have no problem admitting that we worship the same God as people in the Jewish tradition. But for many of us, there is some level of discomfort in the question Miroslav Volf asks in his new book, Allah, which is, Do we worship the same God as Muslims? Maybe that is not a problem for you, but what if I asked you if we worship the same God as Terry Jones?

 

We are more fractured, more tribal, more contentious in our religious family today than the Roman Christians of the first century. Even within our own denomination, we’d rather throw each other under the bus than have honest, authentic conversation. Many of us celebrate that the way has been opened for our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters to serve in positions of ordained ministry, but I have no hope that this will end the battle over this issue that has been raging for my entire lifetime. At the heart of this battle, and most schisms in the church, is what people do. Are they doing the things we think the bible says they shouldn’t, or are they not doing things we think the bible says they should?

 

We are more concerned with what people do than with who God is. And that is why we remain as divided as the Roman Christians, and more so.

 

I preach a lot about how what we do matters. And it does. But it matters not because we are working for wages, earning our salvation. And what we do doesn’t matter because it proves our membership in God’s exclusive club.

 

What we do matters because it shows people the character of God. The practices of our community reflect who we believe God to be. That is why many of us squirm at the idea that we worship the same God as a man who would burn the holy writings of another faith tradition. That practice doesn’t reflect the character of a God who justifies the ungodly, a God who puts us in right relationship before we follow all the rules and do the right things.

 

Paul puts us all in the same family, points us all back to Father Abraham, in order to show that the followers of Christ are those who believe in God’s promise to Abraham, God’s promise that Abraham’s descendants would be as numerous as the stars. If we want to get literal for just a moment, there may be as many as one septillion stars in the universe. I don’t even know how many that is, but that’s kind of the point. There are more than we could possibly ever count. The number exceeds our reason and can only make sense in our imaginations. God’s promise to Abraham is, and can only be, fulfilled by God. Abraham had no control over what happened to his lineage after he died. And he certainly didn’t have the ability to create for himself a family of a septillion people. Instead, he had faith, he trusted, that God would fulfill God’s promise. Paul asserts that anyone who has that faith, that trust, is a member of Abraham’s family and is in right relationship with God. Anyone who believes that the character of God is that God is so merciful, so loving, so compassionate as to justify the ungodly, to love us even before we know how to love God – those people are all descendants of Father Abraham.

 

There are two challenges to us in this text:

 

The first is: What is the character of God reflected by the actions and practices of our community? In what we do as a community of faith, do people see a God who loves the ungodly?

 

My second question is this: Who do we have trouble living under the same roof with, and how can focusing on the character of God help us live more peaceably with these family members? When Paul throws wide the doors of God’s love and mercy, who are those people we’d rather not see walking through? And then let’s consider what characteristics of God we might agree on. Can we agree that God is loving? Can we agree on what loving means? Does loving mean something different when we use that language about God than it does when we use that language about creatures? This is a long and deep conversation, not a simple wink and a handshake.

 

Globalization is not a force outside of God’s plan for the reconciling of the world. In fact, it may well be a central part of the plan. We have been forced to live under the same roof as people with radically different values, world views, practices, and beliefs. But Paul claims that we are all Abraham’s children, we are all the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham. Those who would claim that comes exclusively through profession of faith in Jesus Christ miss Paul’s point entirely. In fact, in these 12 verses, Christ is never mentioned. We share in the promise to Abraham, we are part of the covenant community, we are put in right relationship with God because of what God has done, is doing, and will do. Abraham could not have anticipated the inclusion of Gentiles in his family through faith in Christ any more than we can anticipate what God might do next in the reconciling of the world to God’s self. So we continue to believe in the promise, to have faith, to trust in the God who loves the ungodly, who loves us before we know how to love, and who has made us all part of the household of God.