It All Rests on Grace but Depends on Faith | A Sermon on Trusting the One Who Loves You Best
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin for the people of St. George’s on the Second Sunday in Lent, February 28, 2021.
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38
During WWII, in addition to the Jewish people, other groups were persecuted by the Nazis including the Roma (referred to then as Gypsies).
The story is told of a Roma family who was part of a traveling circus in Poland. During one of their acts, the teenage daughter would jump from a high wire with no net below and her father would catch her.
One morning the father had gone out early and the young girl was alone in the apartment building where they were staying. A stranger came to the door and said that he had a message from her father. The message was that the Nazis had come into town and they had to escape. It was too dangerous for the father to return by daylight, but that at 2:00 in the morning he would stand at the northwest corner of the apartment building. His daughter should jump, and he would be there to catch her so that they could escape. The young girl was confused. She didn’t know the messenger. She wasn’t sure these were the words of her father. She wasn’t even sure which was the northwest corner of the building.
Alone and afraid, she waited as the day grew long.
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This morning, we encounter the living God. The God of Our Fathers and Mothers. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. With little interruption, our text from Genesis is the very Word of God, spoken to Abraham.
Our God has spoken. This is a monumental statement and yet one that is very true. God speaks to Abraham and speaks words of promise.
I am God Almighty; walk before me and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you and will make you exceedingly numerous (Gen. 17:1-2).
Saint Paul writes that Abraham was as good as dead (Rom. 4:19). Not very gentle, perhaps, but at almost one hundred and with Sarah, his wife, only ten years younger, a true statement –without a son, there is surely no future for them.
Into this reality, God speaks a promise: an heir. Into death, God breathes future life: a son will be born.
It is important to note where we meet Abraham and Sarah—we are invited by our text this morning into the center of their story. The Lord God comes here not as a messenger unknown but as one who has appeared to Abraham before.
In Genesis, chapter 12, the Lord said to him, Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing (12:1). And Abraham goes. After some time, again God speaks to Abraham: Do not be afraid. I am your shield; your reward shall be very great (15:1). Still childless, Abraham wonders aloud, O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless (15:2). And God again promises, look toward heaven and count the stars . . . so shall your descendants be. And Abraham believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness (15:5-6).
And yet, here we are again. There is still no child. Abraham and Sarah undoubtedly, and understandably, grow weary and doubtful. They find themselves in “that long, uncertain season before fulfillment, where faith in the promise wrestles with loss of confidence.”[1]
A despair-generating location to be sure.
It all rests on grace, according to Saint Paul. It all rests on grace but depends on faith.
Faith is no more, or no less, than trust in the living God. The God of Our Fathers and Mothers, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God of you. And the God of me.
It is trust that binds Abraham to God. Trust in the one who calls into existence things that do not exist (Rom. 4:17). God has promised an heir to Abraham and still more: God has promised descendants more numerous than the stars in the sky. Against all evidence to the contrary, God has promised a future where there is no future.
And Abraham trusts; has faith; believes the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.
The world would have us focus here on Abraham. On how he managed to trust at all; much less trust the right way. We may even ask, “What might have happened had he not believed?” The quandary we construct would place Abraham at the center, would hold him up as an icon of obedience and faith as works, one who held up his end of the bargain and thus merited God’s contractual fulfillment of His promise.
The world would have us focus here on Abraham, yet it is God at the heart of this story. For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith (Rom. 4:13).
And what is righteousness? Throughout the Bible, righteousness stands for relationship. Right relationship. Abraham trusts, has faith, believes the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as relationship. [2]
Trust, as it turns out, is not transactional, but relational; not contractual, but covenantal. Abraham’s trust, his faith, did not prompt God’s gift, and it certainly did not require it; but it did allow Abraham to faithfully receive it. It opened his heart, his mind, his future to God, a God already open to him, already waiting – arms outstretched. And Abraham became a father to all of us who believe.
It all rests on grace but depends on faith. It is the very nature of God to offer life and life abundant. All that is required is trust.
All that is needed is to let go; to give ourselves over to the often strange and always inexplicable power generated by trust. Trust in the One who made us, sustains us, and redeems us. It’s not easy, not in the face of a world that might tell us that to trust is foolishness. To relinquish control as good as death.
And yet, our Jesus tells us, for those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the safe of the Gospel, will save it (Mark 8:35).
Father Abraham trusted. Jumped into the arms of God. Took the plunge, if you will. And, in the words of Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann, isn’t that what we do when we fall in love? Risk ourselves into the power of bottomless love?
Abraham, in that instant of promise, fell in love with God. And so he reached into the future given by God. The long history of faith, with all the saints, is the story of walking into the future given by God. Lent is a time for sorting this out . . . [a time for] seeing how to take steps into God’s future so that we are no longer defined by what is past and no longer distracted by what we have treasured or feared about the present. [3]
And here’s the Good News, we’re not asked to trust all at once or to trust blindly; but by the grace of God, we are given practice and daily opportunities to enter relationship with the One who we can trust above all others, even with our life.
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Back in Poland, alone and afraid, the teenage girl waited.
But as the day went on, her father did not return, and she heard word that the Nazis had indeed come into the town. Having only the word of her father’s promise, she went to what she thought was the northwest corner of the building at the time she had been told and whispered into the darkness: “Father, are you there?”
There was no answer. She jumped.
And he caught her. [4]
Amen.
*Image is titled, “The Catch,” shot by photographer Fred Glasiers (1907).
[1] Walter Brueggemann, “Expository Articles: Genesis 17:1-22,” in Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology, Vol. 45:1 (Union Presbyterian Seminary, 1 Jan. 1991), 55.
[2] “Land and Descendants, or Belief and Relationship?” a sermon preached on February 21, 2016 at the Cathedral of St. Philip in Atlanta, Georgia: https://www.cathedralatl.org/sermons/land-and-descendants-or-belief-and-relationship.
[3] “The Future: Trust but Verify,” a sermon preached on March 4, 2012, at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, Illinois: https://www.fourthchurch.org/sermons/2012/030412.html.
[4] This story is included in Mary Catherine Hilkert’s Naming Grace: Preaching and the Sacramental Imagination (New York: Continuum, 1997), 89.
