"Since we are justified by faith.."

“Since we are justified by faith…”

Romans 5:1-8

A friend and fellow pastor wrote something that really stayed with me this week:  “There were no white people in the Bible.  Take whatever time you need to process this.”  It is one of those stunningly honest truths that we just never really consider, especially since nearly all the religious art and religious dramas and movies that we’ve ever seen have featured Jesus as a white guy—usually with penetratingly blue eyes.  In truth, Jesus was a Middle Eastern Jew, as was nearly every other ancestor in faith that we had until Christianity began to spread into the Roman Empire and eventually made its way to Europe.  Even today, the fastest growing places for Christianity are among people of color, in Latin America and South America and Africa and Asia.  

I’ve been trying to spend some time in the last year sharing another of these obvious but seldom observed truths about our faith:  Jesus spent almost no time going to church or even talking about church.  He didn’t teach us what a church should look like or how we should worship or how a church should organize itself.  The few times when he got near a synagogue, he got in trouble for breaking the rules or for saying what people didn’t want to hear.  So, he was almost never there and when he was there he was a bit of a trouble maker—hardly your stand-up, church-going guy.

There are reasons that we go to church:  to support each other; to be more effective in bringing faith to life among us and beyond us in the larger world; because somehow we have a better shot at hearing God’s calling and staying connected to God’s presence if we are working together.  What brings us together is the desire to worship God as a community of faith.  Or, to say it differently, we go to church because someone might need us and that someone might even be God.

Jesus went out into the world to find the people who needed him.  He gravitated to the people who religious folks normally avoided—the kind of people who might make you unclean.  He sought out the lepers, the tax collectors, the foreigners, the sick, the women— people who were often excluded from religious life altogether.  When Jesus found those people, the ground they were standing on became holy.  The one who was God-incarnate made love-incarnate.  The word became flesh and dwelt, not in a designated holy place, but among us. 

 So, the Bible isn’t full of white people and the New Testament isn’t a blueprint for a church.  You can take the time you need to process that, too.  Here’s the third obvious but not often mentioned truth:  Jesus really didn’t speak the kind of religious language that we’ve come to associate with Christians.  He was baptized by John. At the end of the Gospel of Matthew, he tells the disciples to go and baptize people.  However, he never weighs in on infant baptism verses believer’s baptism.  He never offers a theology of the sacrament.  He never mentions the word, “sacrament” at all.  He shares the last supper with the disciples but he never calls it communion.  He seems to be talking about what we should do when we eat or when we drink, not what we should do in church as a ritual.  Again, he offers no theological opinion on the meal.

In Christian history, people have literally hated one another and attacked one another and even killed each other over the meaning of things like baptism and communion.  In stark contrast, Jesus seemed far more interested in what we do than what we think.  Many Christians seem to say,“Here are the ideas that you have to agree with in order to be a Christian.  Are you in?”  When you go back to Jesus, himself, though, whenever he teaches something, the message that usually follows is, “Now, go and do this and you will live!” Are you ready to live this truth?

Lots of Christians talk about things like heaven and hell, sin and damnation, righteousness and a kind of holiness that always seems to veer in the direction of “holier than thou.”  Jesus talked about forgiveness and love and the kingdom of God already being among us.  Jesus told stories in which leaders are servants, in which a despised foreigner is more faithful than two religious leaders, in which a banquet is thrown and everyone is invited but the rich and the powerful and the respectable just can’t be bothered.  Jesus said that the question was never whether God loved us.  The question is whether we love other things more than we love God.  It is hard to embrace God’s love if our hands are busy trying to hold on to lesser things.

Christians often seem fond of “sin” as a way to see ourselves as completely broken and unlovable.  We have lots of opinions on which sins are worse than others. (The answer is often that your sins are worse than mine!)  Jesus, in contrast, looks at the people whom everyone agreed were broken and worthless and declared that they were, in fact, children of God.  It’s not that we were perfect—not one of us.  We’re not perfect but we are perfectly loved.  The people who struggled to hear this good news were the folks who thought they were almost perfect and still had a shot.  It was the folks who knew they were never going to be perfect, whom society attacked for their imperfections every day, who could take this message of love to heart.  Maybe as long as we think we still have a leg to stand on it’s hard to believe that what we are, in fact, standing on is God’s grace and God’s love.

All of this takes us back to the notion of faith being about what we do, not what we think.  I should clarify that statement.  Faith isn’t about what we accomplish.  Faith is about what we are willing to try.  Here’s the thing.  Conditional love is a crippling force in our lives.  People are happy to love us on our good days, when we are successful, when we are riding the wave of good fortune.  However, when we have a bad day or we fail or we just make a mess of things, those same people abandon us (or keep threatening to do so if we don’t make things right—fast!)  When we’ve been through that cycle once, we feel incredible pressure.  The only way that I’m going to be loved again is if I get things right the next time.  If the stakes of my actions are whether or not I will be loved, then it is tempting to do nothing at all.

That’s why the true order of things in Christianity is so crucial.  Lots of Christians broker the idea that God will love us if we believe their list of things or if we don’t mess up or if we somehow leave our broken humanity behind.  However, for Jesus, the point of this life is not to find a way to make yourself lovable.  The starting place is this:  God loves you—end of discussion.  If you take that love to heart, it is going to change things.  Yes, you are going to be bothered by things you see in the world, things you will want to change.  However, with God’s love as the foundation for your life, you will feel freed up to actually try to respond.  If I’m not doing what I’m doing to prove something about myself then maybe I can do what I’m doing to actually try to make a difference in the world. 

 In the same way, if I take that love to heart, I’m going to see things inside of myself that bother me, too.  I’m going to see the ways in which I “miss the mark,” in which I’m less than the person I was created to be.  Again, though, if I know that I’m loved, then it is possible for me to work on what needs to change about me.  Rather than hiding from my flaws or trying to hide my flaws from God or from others, I can finally try to grow.

This is the meaning of what Paul says about being “justified by faith.”  Paul, in his previous life as Saul, was a religious authority who hunted Christians for a living.  You may remember the incredible story of how all that changed, how God knocked him on his keister on the road to Damascus and asked Saul, “Why are you persecuting me?”  Saul is blinded and sprawled on the road and yet he is not “finished off” by a vengeful God.  Instead, he is cared for by a Christian on God’s behalf until he can see again.  Somewhere in that span of time, Saul is renamed “Paul” and becomes a Christian, himself.  When he shows up among the Christians he had been hunting a few days earlier, they accept him and listen to him and eventually are led by him.  There is God’s grace.  There is the grace of the man who cared for him.  There is the grace of those who forgave him and accepted him.  Paul takes all this in and offers up a vision of a loving God because this is the God whom he met on the road.  This is the God whose people had surrounded him ever since.  For almost all his life, Saul had been sold on the notion that we are justified before God by our perfection by upholding the law.  Now, we are justified by faith, by receiving the good news of God’s love and by allowing that love to transform us.  If God could love him, Paul thought, then God must truly love everyone.

That’s not all, though.  When you’re loved and you know it, Paul writes, that changes everything.  Before when we suffered, we wondered why God was punishing us.  Now, when we suffer, we realize that this suffering is not because God loves us any less.  We also realize that what we are going through is an opportunity to grow.  In Paul’s words, suffering produces endurance.

Think of our own recent experiences.  No one knew how long the pandemic would shut life down.  No one knows what’s coming next.  However, knowing that God loves us and is with us makes it more possible to hold on.  We are being forced to deal with a life that is less about being able to prove our worth by accomplishing things.  We are being invited to see that we have worth even when we don’t get that much done, even when the best we can do is learn how to wait, even when our hair is a bit shaggy.

When we learn how to endure through difficulties, we learn that there is more to us than we thought.  We find out something about our character.  I don’t have to give in to the lesser impulses that are always there or give in to the temptation to be like everyone else.  I find out that I can wait, that I can be patient, that I can value the people around me in ways that I had overlooked before, that I can see the goodness that is present, even in tough times.

When I discover this sense of character that is hard won through hard times, I learn what real hope is.  I spend less time trying to figure out how to make things work my way and more time hoping that I can be a part of things working out in God’s way.  I spend less time wanting things to go back to the way they may have never been and more time being open to the notion that, however things turn out, God will be present and waiting to lead us through even the most challenging times.

So, we open our hearts to the obvious but overlooked truths.  The Bible is not the story of white men.  Perhaps we should be more open to all of God’s children, who happen to come in every color.  Jesus didn’t spend a lot of time talking about the church.  Perhaps, like him, we should focus on the world of hurting people and the world of needs that surrounds us.  Finally, if we are already loved, then, maybe, it’s time to stop trying to prove something about ourselves and start trying, instead, to be a part of God’s work in this world.