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KEEPING FAITH

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SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT, FEBRUARY 23, 2021

Year B: Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22:22-30; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38

This morning’s epistle reading is taken from the middle of a long passage in Romans 4, where Paul is arguing that our relationship with God is fundamentally a relationship of faith. But what does he mean by “faith”? 

I think, when we hear the word “faith,” we almost always assume that it’s primarily a matter of believing. Some Christians have had a lot of battles among ourselves over exactly what you need to believe in order to be in right relationship with God. Sometimes we’ve even been willing to inflict harsh penalties on anyone we think has it wrong. Some of us still are. 

What’s more, “belief” doesn’t always produce anything holy or admirable in people.. We’re living right now in an age of belief—belief in bizarre conspiracy theories involving criminal behavior on the part of people we don’t like and offering us the chance to be one of the chosen few who are really in the know. I think the patron saint of our times ought to be the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland, who declares, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” 

Paul takes someone quite different as the patron saint of faith—Abraham. Definitely not a flighty individual, though he did take some big risks in his life: moving from Ur of the Chaldees to Haran and then again to the land of Canaan, where he became a nomadic herder of sheep and goats and cattle on the margins of the powerful Bronze Age cities there. But his whole story unfolded in the context of a relationship with God. A long-lasting conversation between the two of them shaped his life, gave it direction (and sometimes changed its direction), supported him, sustained him, encouraged him. And he trusted God.

Trust, in fact, is a principal aspect of faith. We have an expression for it in English. We talk about “keeping faith.” Abraham kept faith with God. And God kept faith with Abraham. I’m reminded of a witticism from many decades ago, at the time when faith in God was waning among educated Americans. Someone said, “I think that whether I believe in God may be less important than whether God believes in me.” Trust, if it is to survive and flourish, has to be something mutual. 

We read in Genesis about this trust between God and Abraham. God trusts Abraham enough to say, “I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations.” And Abraham trusts God enough to express his doubts. Just after the verses we just heard, we find a great example of that trust: “Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, ‘Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?'” And then he turns to God and says, in effect, “Look, I have a son, Ishmael. Admittedly, he’s the child of a secondary wife or concubine or slave or whatever some may want to call her, but he’s here and he’s mine. Isn’t that enough?” And God indeed promises that Ishmael will be blessed and will become the father of twelve princes and a great nation. But there will be more. There will also be the child Isaac, whose name, by the way, means “Someone laughed.” 

I love this part of the story because it helps us understand Abraham’s faith. This exchange sounds like a conversation among old friends who have come to know each other very well. God doesn’t get offended by Abraham’s doubts. Abraham doesn’t give up on God even if things haven’t all gone the way he hoped. The two are comfortable together; they know how to keep faith with each other.

Abraham does have a real problem here. In a big polygynous family like his, there would always be rivalries about who would lead the family after his death. And we know that Abraham had another wife, Keturah, who had six sons, though that information is just slipped into his death notice, almost as a footnote (25:1-6). And we’re told that he left some of his wealth to an unspecified number of sons of concubines and sent them away to live in the East. But he must have feared that the central core of the family would be torn apart if he had no heir by his principal wife. There would be a prolonged and quite possibly bloody competition for leadership after his death.

After a lifetime of creating this large community—not only his children, but also slaves, servants, hired-hands and the flocks they tended—Abraham must have feared it would all dissolve upon his death. He longed for a son by Sarah. God hadn’t delivered. “Hoping against hope,” as Paul put it, he kept faith anyway. And that faith enriched his whole life. It gave him inspiration, courage, patience, persistence, delight, and joy. It wasn’t easy. He experienced times of danger and uncertainty and disappointment. But his friendship with God held firm through it all, and by this time in his life it was what held everything else together for him.

Our friend Peter was in a different spot in the story we heard from Mark’s Gospel this morning. He was still young, still relatively new to this friendship with God. Yet, he had been drawn into it by Jesus. And he had just experienced what must have felt like a great and wonderful step forward for himself. Jesus had asked his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” And Peter had blurted out, “You are the Messiah.” And, while Jesus didn’t confirm it, he didn’t deny it either. 

But now Jesus starts talking about how he’s going to be rejected and suffer and be killed! Poor Peter! He had probably started daydreaming already about the glory attendant on being the Messiah’s lead disciple. And he can’t possibly make room in that dream for what Jesus is saying now. He protests. Of course! He would have to protest. And then he gets swatted down in the most appalling terms: “Get behind me, Satan!” 

It’s kind of astonishing, really, that he didn’t abandon the whole project right then. Yet, he stayed. He swallowed his pride. Somehow he sensed that this friendship, still so young, would be central to his life, and he kept faith. And Jesus, for his part, kept faith with Peter, even as he stumbled again and again. Deep friendships can somehow accommodate such tensions because of the bonds they create. And such friendship was the essence of Peter’s relationship with Jesus, even though it was still in its early years. It would grow and deepen with age until it could sustain Peter even to the end of his life, when he, too, had his cross.. 

What, then, is the faith that Paul wrote about in Romans? It is the trust that makes for a deep friendship. And it doesn’t begin with my believing in God so much as in God’s believing in me. It’s God who invites us into this friendship. God who offers to trust us so that we can learn to trust God, God who keeps faith with us so that we can learn to keep faith with God. 

Happily, we don’t have to figure this out, each of us, on our own. We learn it from the example of people like Abraham and Peter and from the people around us who we see are engaged in such a friendship. Those of us who had the privilege of knowing M. R. Ritley will certainly know what I mean. And, indeed, I think every one here is engaged in this friendship, whether we are particularly aware of it or not. And we all learn from one another.

It’s not primarily a matter of how good we are, though I think faithful living does encourage us toward lives of kindness and generosity.. And it’s not primarily a matter of how much of the creed we believe, though I think there’s value in it, too. It’s primarily a matter of accepting God’s invitation, which God extends to us in full knowledge of both our gifts and our weaknesses, our achievements and our failings—an invitation to a life of friendship and trust and keeping faith. 

And I believe there is no greater blessing in a human life.

PURITY HAS BEEN A CHRISTIAN PROBLEM FROM THE START

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As I wrote in my previous post, conservative Evangelicals are trying to create a “pure” space around themselves where they can avoid coming into contact with what they regard as impure—preferably at the expense of the people whom they want to keep at a distance. It is a widespread desire—active today across the religious spectrum and even among secularists when they seek an environment purged of religious references. Historically, it’s been a common cause of schism in Christian churches, with the “pure” showing a strong inclination to separate from those they see as unclean, either by evicting them or, if that fails, by leaving the existing community themselves.

This tendency has dogged the church from the beginning. Let me turn to one very early instance of it, described by the Apostle Paul in a somewhat neglected passage of his Letter to Romans. Imagine the meetings of that first-generation church: relatively small groups meet in the houses of the more prosperous members and eat a meal together. The meal begins with the blessing of bread, following the custom set by Jesus at the Last Supper, and concludes with the blessing of the cup. In between, is a full dinner. And that is exactly the problem.

The church gatherings included both people who believe that God wanted Christians to follow kashruth, the ancient Israelite rules of purity, and people who believed God had given grace freely to everyone without any such precondition. Purity in this context, I should note, was understood in an entirely physical sense. All early Christians agreed on what they called “purity of the heart,” which meant surrendering hatred, jealousy, and other evil and harmful motives. The purity that created the problems was the system regulating such physical issues as foodstuffs and food preparation, sexual intercourse, leprosy, and the handling of corpses.

At Rome, food was the problem. Since the life of the church centered at the dinner table, food purity quickly became a make-or-break challenge for it. Did non-kosher members of the community have to observe the rules of Jewish food purity when providing food? Could those who kept kashruth dare eat in gentile houses? The danger was that the church would wind up being split between two entities, one predominantly Jewish (with some gentiles who accepted the importance of purity) and one predominantly gentile (with some Jewish members who believed that God no longer required it).

Modern American Protestants may be inclined to think, “What’s the problem? Separation sounds like just the solution.” Paul was horrified at that prospect. He strongly believed that God, in the Gospel message, wanted to bring Jews and gentiles together in the same community of faith and that this unity was an important mark of Christian behavior.

For Paul, then, it was important to find a way for Christians to stay together without forcing either group to violate their understanding of the faith. But he couldn’t give directives to the Christians at Rome, since he hadn’t founded it. He could only try to talk them into a solution.

In a sense, the whole of Romans constitutes his argument, but he comes to the point in chapters 14-15. There, he describes the division in terms of two groups: “the weak in faith” and “the strong.” The “weak” are those who are pressing for observance of food purity. In modern parlance, we might speak of them rather as “strong” believers: insisting on a full, detailed observance of their religion. Paul calls them the “weak in faith” In the sense of “weak in trust.” To his mind, they lack trust in God. They have a detailed and explicit set of beliefs and practices to which they are committed, but they do not put their trust in God so much as in the practices themselves—exactly contrary to what Paul believed was central to the gospel, namely, justification by grace alone through trust alone.

Paul, in contrast, numbers himself among the “strong,” who trust God to save them without regard to their fulfillment of a specific set of religious duties. This didn’t mean that the strong were indifferent to ethics and morality—just that they emphasized God’s grace in redeeming all people through Christ, Jews and gentiles without distinction.

Paul urges both groups to develop mutual respect and affection. The weak, he says, are inclined to be judgmental. In doing so, they are getting above themselves, for judgment belongs to God, not to them. The strong, for their part, are inclined to be superior and dismissive of the weak, whom they see as just not “getting it.” They feel the weak would be better off giving up their traditional dietary and calendrical practices. Paul wants both groups to esteem one another as faithful fellow-members of the congregation. And he admonishes the strong that they must not put temptations in the path of the weak—in other words, don’t make it difficult for them to follow their own consciences in this regard.

This is surely the only long-term spiritual solution to the problem. If a Christianity that embraces a diversity of people (like Paul’s churches and our own) is to survive, it will always have to surmount the challenge of different basic assumptions among its members. What seemed normal to Greeks in his age did not always seem so to Jews—and vice versa. In order for the community to continue, the whole issue of purity had to be moved out of center place in people’s concerns, whether they were defending kashrut or wishing to be to rid of it.

The church also needed a practical, institutional solution, which it eventually found by separating the rites of bread and wine from the church supper and combining them into the Eucharistic rite that Christians still observe. The issue about the purity of other foodstuffs thus disappeared. Over time, the Jewish component of the church was swamped by increasing numbers of gentiles, to the point that the issue came to seem almost meaningless to Paul’s later readers.

The problem of purity, however, is as crucial today as it was in Paul’s own time, albeit with a changed focus. We are interested not in food purity so much as in sexual purity. Are women pure enough to be ordained? Are same-sex partners pure enough to be included in the sacrament of marriage? What is the status of transgendered people? As the search for institutional solutions to these issues continues, we also need to devote ourselves to the spiritual task immediately at hand: how do we love one another across the lines created by these disagreements? How do the weak stop judging the strong? How do the strong stop despising the weak? More reflections to come on this topic.

Those who would like a more detailed explanation of Paul’s argument in Romans can find it in my book Interpreting the Truth (full information in the column to your right).