Who Is Always Righteous?

Psalm 9:7-14, Genesis 15:1-18a

 

            Is anyone interested in or excited about the Academy Award show that’s on television tonight?  Curious about who is going home with a coveted Oscar?    Or maybe just to watch all the glitz and glam as Hollywood gloriously salutes itself yet again?   There are some big contenders this year for best picture, all supported by great directors, scripts and actors.    I’m quietly hoping it’s a big night all around for the quirky romantic comedy Silver Linings Playbook, but I know it’s in serious company with the likes of Lincoln, Life of Pi and Les Miserables.    Among others.     

            Overall, I have to agree with a news article I read this past week that noted how this year the envelope is going to stories of loss and hope.[i]    There is more to these contenders than what it calls “sentimental pablum.”  There is the real and relevant theme of “great loss and heartache redeemed by grace and hope.”   My understanding of this is that in various contexts of sin and suffering, there is a focus on characters who, in the end, exemplify morally upright decisions and actions for themselves and for a greater good.  We emotionally and spiritually connect with them because we need to believe we’d do the same.     We need to believe that we can be good light in the world, that we can help bring about the redemption of dark realities.

            Let’s put this in biblical perspective.     What we are talking about is being righteous.   When thinking about how to live righteously, we have to be very careful.    In our sin, we can so easily slip into self-righteousness.  This never has a good consequence.    

            Take police inspector Javert from the Oscar contender and classic story Les Miserables as a prime and cautionary example.   Criminal behavior was his dark reality.   In his rubric of righteousness, there was one and only one way to deal with it -- by ruthlessly holding people accountable to the law.   The law is the law and a criminal is a criminal.      His was a zealous zero tolerance approach.    “Men like you,” he tells Jean Valjean, “can never change.”   He was as sure of this as he was sure of the stars all having a fixed place in the sky.     There wasn’t any room for mitigating circumstances in his quest to secure justice.   Not even an iota of mercy for thieves forced to steel in order to get a mouthful of bread for starving children.    Javert’s cleanly mathematic[ii] way of living was in line with his belief in the retributive character of God.   God punishes sinners.  Period.  

             But this rigid self-righteousness blinded him to the possibilities and plans of divine mercy.    After Jean Valjean showed him what God’s righteousness in Jesus Christ can look like in this world, he could only sing “I am the law and the law is not mocked, I’ll spit his pity right back in face, there is nothing on earth that we share, it’s either Valjean or Javert.”     And that was his final word before he plunged to a tragic death.

            Yes, when it comes to the topic of righteousness, be very, very careful.   Do not slip or plunge into a steady stream of believing your way is the only way and do not assume it always accurately reflects God’s character.   To protect yourself from this plight, keep studying the righteousness of God as it is revealed in the Scriptures.

            God’s righteousness is what our ancient lesson from the fifteenth chapter of Genesis has to teach us on this second Sunday in the repentant season of Lent.    There is a hint of self-righteousness in this text.    It comes from the lips of Abram, who had yet to be named Abraham.    Did you hear it?

            Abram held fast to the belief that to rightly honor God, he absolutely had to have an heir.  It was a dark reality for he and his wife Sarai that this wasn’t so.   Understand, it wasn’t just that barrenness was considered a curse in their culture.   This understanding of righteous living was more significantly rooted in the promise God made to him at the time when he departed his country and kindred and headed for a new land.    We find this promise in Genesis 12:1 where we read of God saying, “I will make of you a great nation.” It’s also repeated in Genesis 13:15-16, “For all the land you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever.   I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted.”   

            By the time we pick up the story in chapter 15, this still hadn’t happened.   So we are told Abram had begun figuring out a way to live rightly without waiting on, without relying on God’s promise any longer.    That’s the hint of self-righteousness I’m talking about.   He confessed his cleanly mathematical solution to God by declaring that he’ll just make an enslaved child of his household his heir.   

            Then God spoke again.   Not to rebuke Abram for having doubts and for suggesting his own plan.   Instead, God renewed the promise.    Then God led Abram outside to take a deep breath and take in the view.    Whereas this promise of progeny was previously punctuated with the imagery of dust, this time it was symbolized by gazing at the greater stability and security of stars.    If you can count them, God said, so you shall know the number of your descendants.  

            What we must take to heart from the story of Abram is that God alone is always righteous.    We humans can never completely stay true to making morally upright decisions and actions.    We will have our moments of impatiently waiting on God’s promises, of suspecting they are not true or reliable, and of trying to supersede them with our own ideas of righteousness.  

            After such moments, we need to do as Abram did after being led by God to stare at the stars.   He listened to God’s word, gained a broader view of God’s righteous plan (a plan he was told would not avoid dark realities for his descendants and that he would not live long enough to fully see), turned away from his sin, and then turned back to God with a believing heart.   One Bible commentary I read this week states that Abram trusted “in the one who his faith clings,” that he fixed “his heart on God” and rested “back in the arms of the promise-giver.”[iii]    When we do the same, we do justice to the primary relationship in which we stand; we are faithful to our obligation to trust in God even through what we perceive to be delayed responses to God’s promised blessings.    This deep trust is what God reckons as righteousness.

            We all have our own very unique, deeply personal ways of coming to deeply trust in God.     My most Abram-like experiences initially happened nearly twenty-five years ago at Camp Johnsonburg --   especially early morning at the dock of Glover Pond, where there was, and still is, a great and powerful holy intimacy in listening to and observing God’s promise of life.    Do you have particular places where God’s righteousness is pointed out to you again and again?   Places where God re-focuses you and helps you shake off even the slightest hints of self-righteous thinking?

            Almighty God, of course, did fulfill the holy promise to Abram.   A great nation was born and blessed; a people whom God mercifully showed the morally upright way again and again despite their frequently stubborn, self-righteous ways.   And it was through the life, death and resurrection of Abram’s ancestor Jesus that God fully revealed the divine promise and path of salvation.

            None of this holy plan was ever dependent on human participation, nor is it as it continues unfolding today.  Yet how absolutely wonderful it is that our God always wants to be in loving, covenant relationship with us.    How inspiring to be called as partners, living righteously in full trust of our Lord’s promises!  God is our shield, none of us need ever be afraid to turn away from sin and receive this invitation again and again.   Let’s do so today, being sure to turn from stories of great loss and heartache to stories of grace and hope!   Amen.

           

             

           

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[i] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-garrett/dark-night-of-the-oscar-and-the-envelope-goes-to-stories-of-loss-and-hope_b_2720864.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

[ii] indebted to Morgan Guyton for an excellent explanation of this at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/morgan-guyton/two-christianities-of-les-miserables_b_2382291.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

[iii] New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary on Genesis 15:1-21

The ABC's of God's Love

The First Sunday in Lent 2013
Psalm 133; Ephesians 3:14-4:6

            How was your Valentine’s Day?    I hope it filled your hearts with good measures of gratitude, sentimentality and security, warm remembrance and hope.    It was such a beautiful snow-covered morning!   With the crystalline white winter landscape greeting us out our windows, our family shared a fun family exchange of colorful, wonderfully worded cards along with some chocolates and other special gifts.    It’s such a pure joy to celebrate the bonds of family love … especially in time-honored, traditional ways.   

            Thursday morning was also quite a contrast to the night before … when we were at Lower Valley Presbyterian sharing with others in an Ash Wednesday worship service.   This start to the Lenten season was deeply meditative and marked by darkness and dust.    In the moving words of the prayer litany we all shared in, it was a time to come face to face with “all we have failed to honor; every difference we refuse to celebrate; every fear-based judgment that drives us away from love; every certainty that lifts us above our brother, our sister, our neighbor, our enemy.”  

            After this back to back experiencing of both the somber reminders of sin and the bright bonds of family love, I then settled into deeper reflection on the meaning of baptism.    I realized again and afresh that these two realities come together at the font.     They completely converge in Jesus Christ.     The time-honored, traditional sacrament somberly reflects our fallen, finite human nature.   It reminds us that we are all unclean in the presence of our Creator, that we cannot remove the stains of sin from our souls.     It also brightly reflects the faithful family bond that we, in all of our diversity, are gifted with the redeeming grace of God.   The deep relevance of this gift in our lives was stated a few minutes ago and it was shared during the four funerals I conducted over the past few weeks – we are baptized into the life and the death of our Lord, so our baptisms are in fact not complete until we pass into resurrected glory.    

            To help us further understand the truly identifying significance of this sacred convergence here at the font, let’s review the ABC’s of baptism (which are truly the ABC’s of God’s eternal love.)    Let’s review our Adoption, our Belonging, and our Cleansing.

            Since we are reaffirming faith on this first Sunday in Lent, would you please repeat after me … “I am Adopted.”    When we reflect on how sin stains our relationship with God, on how it spurs us into shameful rebellions, we might be tempted to think of another “A” word.   We might come to believe that God has abandoned us.    I believe that time and time again we all come to understand that we are never good enough or faithful enough, that we all fall short of the righteousness the Bible calls us to live.    And just as when we feel or flat out know we’ve failed in our human relationships, we fear we’re not wanted or worthy.  We feel that forgiveness and fresh starts will never come.   

            But the blessed stories of Scripture reveal the amazing news that God never abandons us.  If ever in doubt, just re-read God’s relationship with the often stubborn ancient Israelites and review Jesus’ loving embrace of people who certainly felt and indeed were socially abandoned.    God is always calling us and receiving us and forgiving us into blessed new beginnings.    By divine providence, God never ceases being interested in and protective of our welfare.    This bond, this family bond, is unbreakable and it is irrevocable.   Thus, every time I administer the sacrament of baptism I make the sign of the cross and say the words “You have been signed and sealed as God’s own forever.”   I make the same mark, by the way, when I administer ashes.   So in moments when you are most tempted to believe that God is not present with you, loving you, rearing you in righteousness through all your life lessons … stop, pray and say, “Amen, I’m adopted.”

            Then go on to say the next part of our holy ABC’s – say, “Amen, I belong.”    Reaffirm that you belong to God in life, in death, in every moment in between.  Even more relevantly, reaffirm that you completely belong to and in Christ’s community. 

            In the chapter “The Who’s Who of Baptism,” one of my favorite books about baptism offers this bold declaration – “We can no more be baptized and avoid participation in the [church] community than water can be boiled without becoming steam.”[i]   Don’t forget this image!  Don’t forget the facts that when you boil water you always get steam, and that by being baptized you always get incorporated into the Church.    The belonging of our baptisms reminds each of us that in all our uniqueness, we are all always welcome.  Our Lord receives us with great joy the way the Father in the parable of the Prodigal Son acted.    It really should be called the Parable of the Prodigal Parent – for prodigal means lavishly abundant and profuse, which is exactly the amount of love given to the child at homecoming.  

            We are adopted, we belong, and, to complete this trinity for understanding God’s baptismal love, let us say, “Amen, we are cleansed!”    As the Apostle Paul proclaimed so wonderfully to the early Christians in Ephesus, Christ’s power at work within us is able to accomplish more than we could ever ask for or imagine.   

            Being a visual person who is always well fed by poetic metaphors, I picture pollution when I think about sin.    I don’t’ just mean human sin’s toxicity to the beautiful planet that God originally charged us to be good caretakers of.   I also mean pollution of the mind and spirit.    I mean the pollution of violent words and actions on our innocence and holy intuitions.  I mean the pollution of shame, staining our self-esteem and faithful understanding of our fully redeemable worth as children of God.  I mean the pollution of moral laxity that seeps into our personal lives and oozes up through social structures.    Baptism, praise God, symbolically reminds us that in Christ we are ultimately purified of sin’s pollution! 

            Now, this doesn’t mean we who are baptized no longer commit sin.  But it does remind us to repent (which rhymes with Lent!).  The sacramental water summons us to prayerfully ask for the grace to stop acting contrary to our true loyalty to Christ.    Our baptismal cleansing did not happen just once upon a time be it in our infancy or today – it’s a daily spiritual reality for us to live by.    The 16^th century church reformers were right – remember your baptism every single time you clean yourself!             

            I end today’s review of these ABC’s by sharing what the author of the book I mentioned a few minutes ago, a book titled “Baptism: Christ’s Act in the Church,” has to say at the end of his helpful writing.     He talks about how we are always on a journey to reexamine the Good News of Jesus Christ and to reassess our experiences of God’s grace.     This is particularly true of our intentional focus throughout the Lenten days and weeks to come.    He then punctuates his point by saying that this is a “pilgrimage we need not fear,” because each of us walks “in the land between the river of Eden and the river of the eternal city of God.”    By our baptisms, we are always headed in this right direction.    God, who made each of us a “promise in the past is faithful to the very end of the future and beyond,”[ii] so we can live out every day with confidence.    We can celebrate the proclamation of the Psalmist about “how very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity,” for our Lord has “ordained his blessing, life forevermore.”  Amen.   

           

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[i] Baptism: Christ’s Act in the Church, Laurence Hull Stookey, p. 45

[ii] ibid, p. 181