A Good Ending

 For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.”

—Romans 1:16,17

Start at the end—the one who is righteous will live by faith. 

To be righteous is to walk with God, keeping God as an intimate presence, allowing God to lead you through life, guiding each decision, and helping with each conundrum.

Faith is trusting God—trusting God to care for every aspect of one’s life. It is placing oneself in the confines of God, knowing all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

St. Paul, quoting the prophet Habakkuk, sees that the two are intricately woven together. To be righteous is to live by faith; faith leads one in the ways of righteousness. 

This observation may seem worthy of Captain Obvious, the star of a recent ad campaign, stating as profound the stuff everybody already knows. And, yes, there is a certain obvious quality to what the Apostle teaches here, but it is also something we need to be reminded of again and again. 

Now is a time when the efficacy of faith is continually called into question. More and more people declare themselves free of faith. The “nones” are the fastest growing religious group in America. That indicates that an increasing number of our neighbors have lost faith in faith. They no longer trust religion, and of its inherent institutions, and certainly not people of faith. Their superficial critique stings—that those who claim the name of Jesus seem to be a horribly judgmental lot, quick with painful rejection of anyone outside a confined moral code, and slow with the mercy, grace, and compassion Jesus made central to his being. We gathered here today certainly do not fit the stereotype—and I am sure that the vast majority of congregations are comprised of folks earnestly trying to do the right thing and be whom Jesus would have us to be. So, we have work to do to reclaim our identity as people defined by love, justice, and mercy. 

Here is where Paul’s declaration meets us.

First, there is that walk with God. To walk with God is to live by God. You begin to see the power of prepositions in this walk—that with and by are too powerful to bypass. To walk with someone is not simply to walk beside them, it is to be engaged with them, to share the road, the experience, and their presence. So it is with the practice of faith. We go with God, acknowledging God’s presence, seeking an experience of that presence, and acting accordingly as we encounter others. 

We had an interesting conversation over our family pizza the other night. My daughter reflected on a recent reading (Rob Bell, Love Wins) that offered the counsel that when we meet someone else, we are meeting someone God loved into being. There is no person alive who did not spring from the creative will of God. We proclaim that God is love, so what has to follow is that there is no person whom God does not love. My daughter was struck by the writer’s assertion that what this means is that God loved Osama bin Laden every bit as much as God loves you and me. That is the radical reorientation of our view of the world. 

My suspicion is that such an outlook, rather than comforting the lot of us, scares us. Wait a gol-darned  second! If THAT is true, what about justice? what about fairness? what about…? 

The thing with God is that justice as we define it (quite often as a system of retribution) rarely plays in God’s presence. Instead of retribution, recompense, and retaliation, God works with another “R” word—reclamation. 

God seeks to save the lost, even the most lost person we can name or imagine. That begins with those who walk by faith. If we trust God’s power to redeem, we fear no risk. Think of it this way—the radical good news of the Gospel is no less than if someone kills us, they win nothing, for through resurrection, death cannot hold us. I think of that quite powerfully when I visit a family whose loved-one died to cancer or some other illness, despite hours and hours of prayer for healing. Failure, right? No, actually—healing came, it simply did not look like Lazarus rising from the tomb, but rather the passage into the New Creation. Prayer did not fail, it got another answer. 

But materialists that we are, such an answer is hard for us to accept. To that, I would simply reflect that Lazarus rose to die again.

God works in transcendent and transformative ways, ways that lead to realizations beyond our material experiences. God works over hearts, minds, and spirits. Yes, there can be and will be very real world experiences of that transcendent, transformative power, but those are not the real and essential point. Yes, Jesus performed miracles, but they were always signs of something still greater—they were indicators of his walk with God, a walk that lead right through Good Friday into Easter Sunday, and then on into Ascension. 

That is now our walk.

We are to walk in the world, trusting God with every fiber of our being to see us through to that same walk Jesus took. Freed for such a walk, we can reach out to all whom we meet with assurance, hope, and care. So much of the ill that pervades all over the world has at root fear. God seeks our reclamation from fear. Hope becomes the central feeling, experience, and outlook. In hope, we can tackle the hardest problems, enter the most hellish existences, and even make it through our ordinary days

That is the place where Paul ends.

Thanks be to God.