Third Sunday After Pentecost Year A 2008

June 1, 2008
03 Pentecost A 08
Romans 1:16-17 (NRSV) Romans 3:22-28 (NRSV)

Bidding for Salvation

If eternal life were on eBay, what would you bid?

Would you bid your marriage? Was it a good marriage? Were you faithful the whole time? Never had a real argument?

Would you bid your military service? Did you serve with honor? Did you risk yourself for your comrades and your country? Were you wounded, perhaps?

Would you bid your church attendance? Have you been in church every Sunday for most of your life? Been in Bible study? Given a lot of money? Volunteered for everything?

Would you bid your kids? Did well, did they? Great jobs, good money, big achievements? Beautiful grandchildren?

Would you bid your career? Did you do something really meaningful? Get a lot accomplished? Manage a boatload of employees? Built something lasting and useful?

I will celebrate the sixteenth anniversary of my ordination this Thursday. How well I remember my first congregation. I remember riding around the little suburb of Boston and looking at the neat yards and well-kept homes and thinking warmly of the simple honest people there.

I remember too how once I was ordained and was wearing the uniform of the pastor people seemed to change whenever I came around them. There were even jokes. “Hey, Bob, there’s the preacher, better watch your language now!”

And I will never, ever forget how, during that first week after my ordination, a young girl came to my office and told me her father had been abusing her for years. And there were so many more like her. Soon those neat, well-kept homes became almost sinister. I wondered, what sadness and tragedy and pain did they hide?

Marilynne Robinson wrote a novel called Gilead from the point of view of an old preacher. It’s a wonderful book, full of wisdom and insight. At one point, the old preacher writes to his son:

That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry.
People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those
very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things.
There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice
and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to
find it, either.

The simple truth is there’s a difference between our public actions and images and what we feel deep within ourselves. Many of us hope our actions or at least our refraining from doing wrong will somehow earn our approbation before God. But then inside ourselves, we have doubts, resentments, fears.

If eternal life were on eBay, what would you bid?

A number of great preachers and thinkers of the church would probably agree that these passages from Romans are the most important verses in the bible. I would say, if you were going to memorize one verse, forget John 3:16, or Psalm 23. Make it Romans 3:28.

“For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from the works prescribed
by the law.”

The book of Genesis tells us that God was rejected and ignored by humankind, and yet continued to be faithful to them. He was within his rights to destroy the world, and he almost did, but he nevertheless showed mercy to Noah and his family, along with all the creatures of the earth, and then he made a promise that he would never again destroy the earth, despite the fact that humans really hadn’t improved at all.

This is God’s righteousness. God’s righteousness is not some high standard of personal morality. God’s righteousness is in God’s continuing love and care for people who ignore, reject , mock and even try to kill him.

This is not remotely like human ideas of goodness or righteousness. People think in terms of tit for tat, an eye for an eye, the time for the crime. Humans, each and every one, are therefore enemies of God, not because they do evil things, but because they base their faithfulness to God and to each other on the question, “What have you done for me lately?” or “How have you hurt me lately?”

There is no such thing as good guys and bad guys. There is one good guy and the rest are bad. Even Jesus refused to be called good, saying “No one is good but God alone.”

Now, this consignment to judgment sounds like one of those hellfire and brimstone sermons, doesn’t it? I don’t find it so. Tell you the truth, I find it a relief. If anyone is righteous before God, well then, my hope is lost. But if we are all sinful, if we all fall short, I am still in the game, there is still one possibility left: that God can do for me what I cannot do for myself. What a relief. No one is good but God alone.

And the goodness of God is precisely in his faithfulness. The story of the bible tells us that God remained faithful no matter how we have ignored him, rejected him, spat on him and hated him.

God called Israel to be his servant, and they struggled against their calling, but in the fullness of time, a child was born, not of the flesh but of the Spirit, who finally revealed God’s image in himself. God was revealed to us as a man broken and rejected and yet who nevertheless forgives, the dying man on that cross. But this was not all. Jesus, the Son of Man, accepted the judgment of God and still gave himself in faith, saying, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” and immediately thereafter, “Into your hands I commend my spirit.”

Do you see? The two are mirror images. God remained faithful in spite of our rejection of God and Jesus remained faithful in spite of God’s rejection of humankind. It is therefore only in Christ that we can find this God and receive him into ourselves. This is the only salient truth for us. God is faithful no matter how much we say “no” to him.

So if eternal life were on eBay, how about bidding our sin?

How about bidding our dishonesty? How about bidding our malice and anger and judgment of others? How about bidding our loneliness? How about bidding our lust? How about bidding our racism or sexism or classism? How about raising the bid and adding on our greed? How about bidding our self-righteousness? How about bidding our desire to control others?

How about bidding the truth that is in us, the truth hidden under the well-kept home and the neat yard?

This is what Luther called “the blessed exchange.” We offer our sin, which is precisely our tit-for-tat faithlessness to God and to each other, and Christ takes it all upon himself on the cross, and in exchange he offers us a new righteousness that is not our own. We human creatures do not love our enemies. Are you kidding? We don’t bless those who curse us. You must be out of your mind. This is not human righteousness, but God’s righteousness, the righteousness of a God who loves us, his enemies, and blesses us, who curse him.

So, when we receive this righteousness from him, we become faithful no matter how much he says no to us and we become faithful to other human beings no matter what they do to us. We remain faithful toward God despite his condemnation, and we remain faithful to our enemies despite their hatred, we remain faithful to the sinful despite their sinfulness, we remain faithful to the self-righteous and the judgmental and the deviant and the lazy and the cruel. We don’t give up on God, we don’t give up on each other. We are made new. We are no longer merely human. We have become children of God.

If eternal life were on eBay, we could offer a bid of all the wealth in the world, of all the good deeds of Mother Theresa and Ghandi and Mrs. Miller and St. Francis and every great saint of the past, and Jesus would still say to us, “I do not know you.”

And he would be right, because we would not have truly given him ourselves.

But if we offered our loneliness, our dishonesty, our malice and all the things that spring from our self-centered fear, then God will offer us salvation. God will offer us himself. God will put within us his own faithfulness, the faithfulness that cannot die, the faithfulness that loves all humankind in the face of the worst that humankind can do, a faithfulness that will enable us to do what we cannot do, to love God even in the face of the worst that God can do. This is eternal life. This is salvation. As Charlotte Eliott in that well-beloved hymn:

Just as I am, though tossed about with many a conflict, many a doubt, fightings
and fears within, without, O Lamb of God, I come.

Amen.