(The text for this sermon is the second half of the fourth chapter of Romans. However, I am really using it as an opportunity to review the important argument that began in the middle of chapter three.)

I.

A few years ago I heard a story about the great Scottish theologian, Thomas Torrance. It seems he was walking down the street in Edinburgh and was accosted by an enthusiastic evangelical Christian who asked him, "Are you saved?" To which Torrance replied, "Yes!" This answer was apparently not sufficient for the questioner who then asked, "When were you saved?" That question betrayed a belief that to be saved necessarily meant having some kind of peak emotional/spiritual decision or experience that could be given a definite time and place. The man was asking Torrance when he had made this decision or had this experience, what was the exact day and hour that he gave himself to Christ and was thus at that moment "saved."

Torrance’s reply sums up the Reformed and orthodox Christian understanding of the matter. He is reported to have said, "I was saved on Calvary." He meant that he was saved when the world was saved: when the Lord gave his life for the sins of the world.

In other words, we are saved not because we do something or have some kind of experience. We are not saved — or as Paul says, justified — by anything we do. We are made right with God because of something God does. So, on one level, faith is not our action or decision. It is our participation in something that God accomplishes on our behalf.

This is the view of the apostle Paul. He has this tremendous, life-altering, transformational experience on the Damascus Road, complete with visions and voices and bright lights leaving him in physical blindness. Yet what he learns in that experience has to do with what God has already done for all people and all creation in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The important thing is not the experience itself, as dramatic and powerful as it was. Still less is it any response or reaction he had to this experience. The important thing is that to which his experience points, which is the fact that the whole world is now transformed and made new because of what God has done in Jesus Christ.

It is Christ’s faithfulness in perfect obedience to God, which he demonstrates by giving up his life and shedding his blood, and which God vindicates by raising him from the dead, that is of primary importance. Faith is always about what God does for us in Jesus Christ and how we participate in God’s action... how we participate in the new world God reveals to us in Christ.

II.

Believing in Christ is never just a matter of having a particular cognitive opinion about him. It is never limited to our giving our assent to certain historical facts. The stories of the Virgin Birth, the sacrificial death on the cross, the bodily resurrection and ascension... these are important but only as a first step. Faith can never be reduced to our admitting that these things happened in history. Too often Christians think evangelism is merely about getting people to agree with us and admit that these things actually happened.

The more important realization is not that they happened once, back then, but that they happened, as Hebrews tells us, "once for all." Because it happened back then, and because it was something that affected the whole creation, it also therefore happens to us as individuals and to all. The moment in which we are redeemed, saved, justified, and delivered from the powers of evil was the moment Jesus died for the sins of the world. The important thing and the primary thing is not our faith but the faithfulness of Jesus Christ in his perfect obedience of God which enabled this transformation to take place.

If you look in our new pew Bibles at Romans 3, you will notice footnotes connected to verses 22 and 26. These footnotes give alternate readings. Where the main text talks about having "faith in Christ," these footnotes tell us that there is another equally valid way of reading the Greek words here. That is to talk about the "faith of Christ." In my opinion and that of many scholars it is the footnote that gives us the better reading of what Paul had in mind here.

For we are not justified by anything we do, even by our having faith. We are justified, that is, we are reconciled to God, by something God does in Jesus Christ. It is the faithfulness of Jesus Christ that is primary here; we participate in his faithfulness in baptism, in the Lord’s Supper, and in the life of the gathered Church.

Paul talks a lot about Abraham here in chapter four. Abraham is important because it is through him and Sarah that God chooses to bring salvation into the world. As Jesus says, "Salvation is from the Jews." That is, the world is saved through the descendants of Abraham and Sarah. God chooses this one family to be the bearers of the Promise for all people. Now God is saving the whole world by sending the Son, one person, one particular descendant of Abraham, to be the fulfillment of this universal Promise.

What Abraham receives by trusting in God’s Promise, we receive by trusting in the realization and fulfillment of that Promise in Jesus Christ. Christ is the final fulfillment of the Promise made by God to Abraham. It is in Christ that Abraham finally gets to "inherit the world," and become "father of many nations." It is through Christ that we become adopted descendants of Abraham.

III.

Righteousness, therefore, is not something we achieve when we live according to some written law or moral standard; rather, righteousness happens when we live according to the redemption of the world which Abraham was promised and which is now realized in Jesus Christ. Righteousness is living in this world according to the values and lifestyle of God’s act of redemption.

This redemption is the breaking down of all barriers dividing people from one another: barriers of ethnicity, race, class, gender, or even religion. All are broken down and dissolved by the reconciling act of God in Christ. That’s what was happening on the cross. In Christ God was reconciling the world by the shedding of his blood and the giving up of his life.

What Paul is criticizing when he questions those of his contemporaries who would make the Jewish law central is not "works righteousness," but the way the law was misused to set up unnecessary and destructive distinctions between faith and works, soul and body, spirit and matter, Jew and Gentile, clean and unclean, heaven and earth, male and female....

In Christ God reveals that these are in truth not separate. They are all intimately connected like the way yellow and blue make green, or hydrogen and oxygen comprise water. Faith is in no way distinct from works. It is the integration of thought and action. Our faith is shown in our actions. It is when our thinking and our acting are in harmony with God’s revealed truth.

And this integrated approach to life, in which what we do and what we think are both an indication of what we know to be true in Christ, needs to be the center of our consciousness. Trusting in God's love at the heart of the universe, revealed and completed in the ultimate act of love: Jesus Christ on the cross, means that we refuse to sourly nurse the negatives, the fears, the angers, the hurts, the guilt in our life. We refuse to dwell on our defeats and our failures. We refuse to cling to our sin as if it were the thing that defines us. Instead, we rest in our awareness of God's blessing and triumph over all that would destroy or harm.

To trust in God means we don't see a world divided, where things and people are saved or unsaved, good or evil, matter or spirit, Earth or heaven, and we don't divide ourselves into body or mind, flesh or soul, faith or works. To trust in God means we don't treat anything like an "it," an object to be disposed of as we please. For we are all connected in the same field of being. We are all part of the same creation. God is with and within us and everything. It all belongs to God, as I say when I quote Psalm 24 before we receive the offering.

IV.

Our calling now as those who trust in God is to see that truth made real in our lives. In our acceptance and forgiveness of others, in our reverence and awe and care for creation, in our joy and our truthfulness, in our enthusiasm for finding the good in people and lifting that up and celebrating it, in our telling the story of God's love revealed in Jesus Christ and helping people to reframe and reimagine their own lives in terms of this good news... all of these are ways in which we show our faith trust in the living God, bringing our minds and bodies, thoughts and actions, soul and flesh together so that the truth of Jesus Christ, the Word becoming flesh to dwell among us, may be realized in each one of us.

The good news is the reconciliation of the world in Jesus Christ. It is that the powers of evil have now been conclusively defeated. It is that at the heart of everything that is, we find the awesome love of God, revealed on the cross of Jesus Christ. The good news is that we are freed from bondage to sin and death; now we may live according to the truth of God’s love. +++++++