That Ridiculous Faith Reckoned as Righteousness

by Will Harron, Lay Preacher

“That Ridiculous Faith Reckoned as Righteousness”
The poor shall eat and be satisfied,
and those who seek God shall praise God:
"May your heart live for ever!"

I’m currently involved in the world’s slowest bible study. There’s no record-checking to prove this claim, but it certainly feels true. For the past year or so, my friend Bird and I have been meeting on a voice call to read through the book of Genesis. It started out weekly, but we’ve both lost track of our schedules, and so are meeting much less regularly at the moment.
But the bible study was also slow because we were taking our time. Each time we met, we’d read through a chapter out loud, spend some time in silence, and then spend a half hour or so reflecting on the text. Genesis is 50 chapters long, so this is not a fast process – and Bird and I are nearly at the end. But this study has given me a certain familiarity with the text, a joyful connection to this story and its characters; its families; and its promises.
 
And so, reading through this morning’s lesson from Genesis, I was struck by some of what is included, and what is excluded from the portion. As the lesson shares, Abram is ninety-nine years old and the Lord appears to him and announces that God will make a covenant with Abram. Abram, in deference to God, falls on his face, and God continues: this covenant will make Abram the ancestor of a multitude of great nations, great in both the numerical sense and in the power exercised by those descendants. Abram will now be called Abraham, and his wife Sarai is now to be called Sarah, and she will be blessed by giving birth to a son.
The lesson skips over 8 verses that detail that the sign of this covenant is circumcision, and the mechanics of how that sign is carried out, which is fine, but it also ends at verse 16, which I find interesting. In verse 17, Abraham reacts to this pronunciation by once again falling on his face, but this time in laughter. “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?” There is a comedic resonance to Abram, falling down on his face before God both in awe and wonder as well as in the throes of hilarity.
That makes me wonder, why is our lesson structured this way? What were the framers of the lectionary up to?
 
Sometimes our lessons from the first testament flow in a continuous story, especially in the long stretches of Sundays after Pentecost. In Lent, in Year B of our cycle of readings, however, the first testament lessons serve to echo themes found in the later lesson or the Gospel reading. Today’s portion from the fourth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans gives the key to what this particular selection from Genesis is highlighting.
There is a pretty direct connection between the two. Paul is talking about faith – specifically about Abraham’s faith – being what connects us to God’s promises, rather than following laws. This is how he explains it:
Abraham lived before the covenant of laws that God made with Moses. Despite not having those laws to follow, he was worthy of God’s promise. Thus, Paul writes, following the law of the covenant isn’t the key thing to being worthy of God’s promise – instead, Paul writes to his audience of Jewish and Gentile followers of Christ in Rome, what is most important is faith.
Paul is being a little tricky, playing a little fast and loose with the story to make his point. This morning’s lesson is just one part of a complicated argument Paul is making about the unity of the emerging Christian community, and about the bonds of that unity.
He is trying to do something very challenging, to weave ties between the different and feuding communities of Christ-followers in Rome, trying to summon connections that can transcend the previous markers of community, and can also transcend previous grudges and bad feelings – the things that separated one body of believers from another.
This is challenging at the best of times, and he’s doing this from across the Mediterranean in a letter dictated to Tertius and read aloud in Rome by Phoebe. So we can perhaps forgive him for fudging some minor details in order to make a larger point – Abraham believed in God’s promises and it was reckoned to him as righteousness; therefore, according to Paul, we who believe in God’s actions in raising Christ from the dead are also connected to that faith which is righteousness.
 
That concept is a tough one to wrap my mind around. “Faith reckoned as righteousness.” What does that even mean, for faith to be reckoned the same as righteousness? My mind immediately resists the concept, thinking of contemporary examples of blind faith leading to catastrophic results. Was that righteousness?
How many pieces of our broken world, fragments of the nightmare made from God’s dream, are the result of faith in something death-dealing being treated as righteousness?
So, Paul, you’ve got me in a double bind. Because, thinking back to Abraham – and that verse which was omitted from our lectionary - Abraham immediately laughs at God’s promise. Abraham immediately treats it as ridiculous. He falls on his face laughing. “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old?”
What does it mean for us that in the text of Genesis, Abraham questions God’s promise, even as Paul makes the claim that “He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old).” Paul is no fool – even when we disagree with him, we must give him credit as a skilled interpreter of scripture. What, exactly, is Paul doing here?
 
Let’s carry that question with us to the Gospel lesson. Our Lenten gospel lessons, in one week, have hopped halfway through Mark. We’re now in chapter 8. Just before this passage, Jesus asked the disciples who they thought he was, and Peter confessed his belief, his faith, that Jesus was the Messiah, a promised, anointed deliverer of the people Israel from colonized oppression.
Nodding, Jesus tells them that he must undergo suffering, be rejected by the religious authorities, be killed, and to rise again three days later.
Peter, perhaps emboldened by the experience of confessing faith in his teacher’s divine status, steps forward again, takes Jesus aside, and rebukes him. That’s not what the Messiah means. Suffering, rejection, death – those aren’t the plot points of the saving of the world. Those are what Peter already sees around him. His faith demands more. Perhaps he doesn’t register Jesus rising on the third day – perhaps it is too ludicrous to consider, or the audacity of the claim underscores the need to get Jesus on message, to keep being the Messiah Peter believes in.
Jesus won’t have this. “Turning, and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’
Let’s pause here. This can land with a shock. Peter has just expressed two moments of tender vulnerability with Jesus – first confessing faith in him, then privately pushing back against claims he doesn’t think are fruitful. And Jesus rebukes him and calls him Satan in front of the other disciples.
But I believe it is fruitful to dig some more at this. For one, if you recall from last week’s Gospel lesson, Jesus has met Satan. Jesus has experienced being tempted, being accused, being asked to set aside who he truly is for what the world and society around him think the Son of God should act like:

• The Son of God should never feel pain or hunger.
• The Son of God should rule just as the petty kings and imperial princes who call themselves sons of God rule, with force and pomp and power and excess.
• The Son of God should not experience the indignity of suffering, the keen edge of rejection, or the baleful disgrace of death.

This, to Jesus, is Satan. And so, he rebukes Peter. This is not the way. This is not divine. This is not what Messiah means. And Jesus calls the crowd, speaking to and beyond his disciples – to follow him is to deny oneself, to take up their cross and follow him towards his death. Trying to save your life will fail, but letting go of that fear, stepping with Jesus across the chasm of pain, rejection, humiliation, and death – will bring life, will save life.
What good is gaining the whole world – the goal of princes and generals and conquerors and rulers throughout time – when you’re still going to die anyway? That isn’t the divine dream. That’s a human nightmare.
Jesus’s rebuke of Peter is a challenge to his friend, an invitation to broaden his faith beyond a narrow conception of what God-breathed liberation looks like and into the expansive faith that destroys death. It is a challenge to the disciples, and to all who hear it – that the Good News isn’t the pursuit of power or glory, but the denial of it, bringing freedom and overcoming death.
This is faith reckoned as righteousness – faith that, despite monuments of power, the chronicles of oppression, and the pursuit of death-dealing to stave off oblivion – the true divine thing in this world, the way to follow Jesus, is to give all of that up, give up life itself, to walk in love as God loves us.
This sort of faith, for Paul, despite its foolishness, is hope. This faith can bridge estranged communities and heal distrust, can make reparation and repair breaches. It doesn’t matter for Paul that Abraham laughs at the ridiculousness of God’s promise. It is a ridiculous promise, just as the promise of resurrection is ridiculous.   
But we can laugh at something even as it compels us to follow.
Amidst war and genocide;
amidst the seemingly irretrievable state of our political institutions, especially in light of unending gun violence;
amidst environmental catastrophe;
amidst the pervasive and persistent anti-Blackness, homophobia, racism, transphobia, misogyny, and hate within our society and amidst the death caused by such hate;
we still get up each new day,
we still dream of justice,
we still find hope in the love that surrounds us.
That is ridiculous, and yet it is true.
We may be as good as dead, as Paul quips of Abraham. We’re all going to die, and there’s no escaping it.
But the way of Love, the way of divine things, of denying death-dealing systems and embracing the hope that our faith offers, remains. God always offers this mercy, bringing us back again and again to that ridiculous faith which is reckoned as righteousness.
Amen.

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