June 1, 2008 – The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
Romans 4:13-25
The sermon text today is from our second lesson from the 4th chapter of Romans. It is a lesson that helps us, I believe, to understand how faith must grow in order to meet the needs of our modern-day lives.
The Apostle Paul gives us three examples to make his case.
The first example is Abraham and Sarah, two important people from the Old Testament. Abraham was about 100 years old, and, concerning having children, it was over.
Sarah was not much younger, and she was barren. And so they sat under their shawls in their tent and looked at each other and lamented the fact that they had no children.
And Abraham was out walking, sand coming through his sandals, and God said, “Abraham, count the grains of sand.” And he said, “My goodness, I can’t count the grains of sand.” And God said, “Neither will you be able to count your children.”
He went back to the tent and said, “Sarah, guess what?” And she laughed. And when the child was born, they named it “laughter,” which in the Hebrew language means “Isaac.”
Our God is a God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that do not exist: that’s the faith in our God that Paul wants us to understand.
The second example is Jesus. Jesus was dead on the cross. You ask the soldier who pierced his side with a spear, “Yes, he’s dead.” Ask the women who anointed his body in the tomb, “Oh, yes, he’s dead.” Ask his mother weeping at the foot of the cross, “Yes, he’s dead.”
Three days later they were running and scurrying about, going into their chambers and saying, “We saw him, we saw him. He is risen. He lives.”
Ask Peter, “I saw him.” Ask James and John, “We saw him.” Ask Mary Magdalene, “I saw him. He lives.”
Our God is a God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that do not exist: that’s the faith in our God that Paul wants us to understand.
The third example is you and I. You and I are dead to our trespasses and sins. But God has made us alive through Jesus Christ, “who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.”
Which is to say that we have been justified by faith through grace. We have been made right with God. That is the good news, the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Our God is a God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that do not exist: that is the faith that Paul want us to understand and to make our own.
Paul wants us to know that the goodness of God in our lives overflows with richness, if only we will see what has spilled over into our lives. Our faith will help us see how God is active in our lives.
Last Monday night at our Bible study someone asked a very important question. We were talking about this Romans passage and discussing the importance of faith for our lives. And then someone asked: “Why does faith need to grow?” I’ll try to answer that question for you as we go along.
You may know that old phrase sometimes attributed to Walt Disney, “Change is inevitable, but growth is optional.”
Perhaps this is a day when you and I might want to take a hard look at what kind of growth is happening or not happening in our spiritual lives and in our faith.
It may be a day to say to ourselves, I must no longer consider the growth of my faith and spiritual life to be optional.
It is, on the contrary, essential.
Our lesson today informs us that Abraham and Sarah trusted in the Lord; that is to say, they had a faith strong enough to move everything they owned, lock, stock, and barrel, to a country they did not know, simply because God called them to do that. They trusted God.
Our lesson today from Matthew’s Gospel, the calling of the tax collector Matthew to become a follower of Jesus, is another example of trusting faith. Jesus simply said to him, “Follow me!”, and Matthew got up from his table and became a disciple of Jesus.
The Bible elsewhere informs us that John the Baptist grew and became strong in Spirit.
Jesus we are told grew in stature and wisdom, and in favor with God.
And Paul wrote in his Ephesians letter, “You must no longer be infants, but grow up into him who is the head.”
What better day than today?
For faith is predicated on growth. Faith says that life is too short and God wants us to live as those who will commit themselves to growing and maturing our faith which will lead to an abundant life.
Catherine Marshall whose husband Peter was onetime chaplain in the U.S. Senate used to talk about the challenge of trying to find her way out of what she called “inherited Christianity.”
What she was looking for was a mature spiritual experience of her own, something more than hand-me-down religion.
But to borrow your faith from someone else is akin to wearing their clothes that don’t quite fit right for you but may pass for style if someone isn’t looking too closely.
I cannot tell you the number of times when I was a pastor serving in congregations that I met with young couples over the years preparing for marriage who commonly had an identical response to the same question I asked them.
When I asked them to offer up some words about their faith lives, they typically shared one of two responses: either they told me they went to Sunday school as a kid, and in what church or denomination it was; or they informed me of how devout their grandmother was in her faith.
But they went on to describe what is an absence of interest at all for faith in their present lives.
These are, in other words, mainly 25- or 26-year-olds, give or take a year or two, who no longer need the faith of the Christianity they knew at age 10, a faith they cannot even remember well.
They have not grown beyond that childish faith.
Everything else in their life, believe me, had gone gangbusters. Their bodies had taken on new shape, their income went from nothing to something, they had taken on sophisticated jobs that require great responsibility, they could figure out how to assemble a complicated entertainment center that they purchased at the local home improvement store, but they were absolutely stuck in a childish and immature faith.
It is no wonder that their faith is inadequate to meet the needs of their adult lives.
It is no surprise that Christianity holds little or no value to them.
For faith to become vital, it must grow, to be nurtured in the sense that it becomes their faith, not their grandmother’s faith, or the faith they possessed as a 3rd-grader, but their Adult Faith, to answer the important Monday night question of “Why does faith need to grow?”
It is essential that it does. Elsewhere in the Gospels Jesus tells us that even faith as small as a mustard seed can move mountains. That can be a reassuring word. However, a mustard seed does grow and it eventually produces a tree.
One day there was a woman who wanted peace in her heart and peace in the world. But every day when she opened the newspaper, the news simply lowered her spirits.
So she got in her car and she went shopping. And who should she see behind the counter of a store at the mall, but Jesus Christ. She knew it was Jesus. But just to make sure, she got up the nerve and asked him. “Excuse me,” she said, “are you Jesus?”
“I am”, he replied.
“Do you work here?”
“Actually,” he said, “I own the store.”
“Hmm,” she said, “What do you sell here?”
“Just about everything, ma’am. Feel free to walk the aisles, see what you want, make a list, and come back up here and we’ll see what we can do for you.”
The woman did just that. She walked the aisles of the store and came upon all sorts of goods: Peace on Earth, an End to Poverty and Hunger, Clean Air, No More Hatred or War, on and on.
She wrote furiously and compiled this huge list. Then she headed back to the check-out counter where Jesus skimmed the list.
“No problem,” he said, and he bent down behind the counter and began to pull out, and lay out, all these little packets, in front of the woman.
“What are these?” she asked.
“Seed packets,” he said. “This is a seed store.”
“You mean I don’t get the finished product?” the woman asked.
“No,” said Jesus behind the counter. “This is a place to grow faith, love, and hope. I give you the seeds, you plant them, you nurture them, and they grow.”
“Oh,” she said, and left the store without anything.
Faith requires work, tender nurture, constant growth, and the woman at the seed store wasn’t interested.
I find this little story being instructive. When we are confronted with the treasures of faith, do not be contented to say to ourselves, “Oh,” and walk out of the conversation, or out of Church, without any willingness to plant and grow the seeds.
Few things compare with the importance of spiritual growth – developing and tending to the faith that will make it possible for us to cope today with the world in which we live.
And even if our lives go in directions we had not planned – like Abraham and Sarah of old as they left their home behind, convinced that they would never have a family, sometimes living with a sense of disappointment or even apprehension about what might happen next – we may still be able, like they did, to trust and to sing praises to the Lord, even finding ourselves on occasion shouting our gratitude to the birds of the air!
Let us pray: Lord, let our hearts be open to the seed of your word, where our faith, love, and hope can grow, and peace is understood. Amen.
