Lent 2, Year A | Romans 4:1-4, 13-17
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
March 5, 2023
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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Faith and belief are hallmarks of modern religious expression and experience. The two terms permeate not just the Bible but the Book of Common Prayer and many of our hymns. Just this morning the Apostle Paul told us that “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.”[1] Our Gospel passage included one of the most famous verses in any scripture: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”[2] We sing about the “faith of our fathers, living still…”[3] and about “how precious did [God’s] grace appear the hour I first believed.”[4] Various beliefs distinguish one faith tradition from another, sometimes leading to collaboration between different groups and at other times to conflict. As Christians, we believe that we are saved by grace through faith in God’s gift of Jesus Christ. The apostles tell us to “believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved.”[5] Faith and belief lead to a rich inner life and help us to continue forward through rough and challenging circumstances.
I’m grouping those two terms because in the New Testament, they’re essentially the same word; we translate the noun as “faith” and the verb as “believe.” The terms have remained constant in our religious texts since a priest named John Wycliffe first translated the Bible into English in the mid-1300’s. However, usage and meaning of different terminology frequently drifts over the course of generations. Our language has changed dramatically in the past 700 years, and few of us could made sense of the way people wrote and used particular words in that era. Unfortunately, both “faith” and “belief” are victims of that drift and carry significantly different meanings now than when Wycliffe initially used them.
For us, to “have faith” or to “believe” are largely mental processes. We believe things in our head, even when we don’t have particular evidence of their truth. We describe faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”[6] It is, once again, largely a feeling or intellectual commitment to the truth of an idea whether or not that idea is rooted in reality.
Consider how during Wycliffe’s day European societies used to believe that the world was flat or that the sun, moon, and starts rotated around the earth. People were extremely committed to those ideas, to the point that even a few hundred years later authorities considered scientists who challenged those beliefs not simply to be strange or deluded; they denounced and condemned them as religious heretics! Fast forward a few hundred years more, and now we think that people who fall for those long disproven theories are the foolish ones.
In the 1300’s, to “have faith” or “keep faith” wasn’t something that just happened inside your head. It had very real and physical consequences. The modern equivalent to what they were talking about are our words “fidelity” or “faithfulness.” Likewise, to “belief in” wasn’t to assent to an unprovable concept but to offer one’s sworn fealty to another person. It was the equivalent of pledging allegiance, a formal commitment to faithfully serve and obey one’s ruler no matter the cost to oneself. So the opposite of that era’s concept of faith wasn’t an internal questioning or doubt but active infidelity or unfaithfulness. It was violating an oath. It was treason.
We in the Modern American Church proclaim salvation by faith alone, but we’ve mistaken that faith for magical thinking, which isn’t remotely what the Bible is talking about. On top of that, we frequently transform our idea of “faith” into one of the works Paul rejects in this morning’s Epistle. So if I’m skeptical or disagree or simply understand something differently than other religious people around me, either I or they end up thinking that I can’t possibly be Christian. In our pride, we’ve divided the body of Christ and fallen anew into last week’s Original Sin of rejecting or separating ourselves from one another. We’ve become thought police, turning intellectual uniformity into the hallmark of right relationship with or orientation toward God—of righteousness. But God doesn’t expect—or even desire—uniformity from their children—not in our physical bodies; not in our personalities; not in our occupations, and not even in how we think! God made each of us—every single aspect of Creation, in fact—distinct as a way of expressing the vast and complex reality of who God is.
So the righteousness “reckoned” to Abraham didn’t have anything to do with him coming to correct conclusions or understanding God differently from the society around him. Nor is it something we receive or become or participate in by behaving a particular way or accepting certain truths or living a moral life/following particular customs/doing things I hope might make God happier with me. To be righteous is simply to line oneself up with God. God didn’t declare Abraham to be a morally upright person because of what was going on in his inner life. The truth is, despite his many public failures, Abraham was faithful to God, and God, in love, decided to look at that faithfulness as aligning with God’s character.
Christian faithfulness boils down to a commitment to repentance. And repentance occurs whenever I realize I’m heading the wrong way and then turn my path back toward God. Repentance is never simply “one-and-done.” It happens continually over the course of a lifetime. That means salvation isn’t simply the “get out of Hell free” point of conversion that it’s become throughout the Modern American Church. It isn’t the result of saying magic words or believing something hard enough (in the modern sense of that word) that somehow makes God pronounce me righteous or just. We really need to consider what the Bible refers to as salvation to be more in line with our idea of restoration. God takes something that’s falling into ruin and invests the time, effort, and expense necessary to renew it to prime condition. “Salvation” is far less an instance of sudden rescue from danger or a moment of emotional breakdown on our part than the process of faithfully turning to our loving and merciful God again and again.
And that’s what we really need to remember this Lent: to keep turning, to faithfully change our paths not just once but as many times as are necessary as we grow in our understanding of what following God even means. The word “Christian” means “little messiah,” and that’s what we ought to be: miniature versions of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We listen to his words and enact his teachings in the world around us and keep doing what he did and going where he leads. But we’re human. We’re bound to find ourselves on the wrong path or get distracted or confused or deceived from time to time. However, when we realize what’s happened, we return to the trail Christ has blazed for us. We turn not just once but as many times as we need to throughout the courses of our lifetimes.
Maybe you’ve never formally considered following Christ. Maybe you have but you’ve reached a point in your life where you’ve discovered that you need to make some really big changes to get back in line with who God actually is and what God actually wants. Maybe you thought you were serving God but are starting to question whether or not the god that’s leading you is the one you thought they were. Or maybe you’re already committed to Jesus’ path and simply need to make adjustments from time to time. None of those locations are necessarily any worse than another. Our present circumstances may differ, but every single one of us faces the same situation: the need to follow God. And what God calls us to is identical: to look at where God is, compare that to the reality of where we are, and then to head—faithfully—in God’s direction.
[1] Romans 4:3b | All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] John 3:16
[3] “Faith of Our Fathers” by Frederick William Faber
[4] “Amazing Grace” by John Newton
[5] Acts 16:31
[6] Hebrews 11:1