Justification by Faith

Christ Church Cathedral

Second Sunday after Pentecost, June 2, 2002

Rom 1:16-17, 3:22b 31

A sermon by The Rev'd Patricia Drummond, Honourary Assistant

In the early 16^th century, the medieval church was in trouble and reform was in the air. One of the great preachers of the Middle Ages, Johann Geiler of Strasburg, made a prediction in his last sermon, preached before none other than the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian. "Since neither pope, nor emperor, kings nor bishops, will reform our life," he said, "God will send a man for the purpose. I hope to see that day . . . but I am too old. Many of you will see it."

Many did, for Geiler died in 1510 and just 7 years afterwards God's man for the job, Martin Luther, was nailing his 95 theses, or arguments, against the sale of indulgences to the door of Castle church in Wittenburg and causing a controversy which was the stimulus needed for matters to come to a head. Indulgences were pieces of paper, certificates if you like, which stated that the owner was assured that his sins had been forgiven thanks to the payment of a certain sum of money to the church, and they were great fund raisers! Not surprisingly, the church did not want to give them up, but Luther declared that salvation could not be bought, or even earned through the doing of "good works." It was possible only thorough the grace of God, bestowed on those who had faith.

Luther was a friar and Professor of Holy Scripture at the University of Wittenburg. He had wrestled for many years with the question of how human beings, and himself in particular, could find favour with God. He tried very hard indeed to follow the strict Rule of his order, but had been unable to find peace. His conscience was always nagging at him - "You fell short there," it would say, "You aren't sorry enough for what you have done," "You forgot to confess such and such a sin." He had begun to feel that God loved everyone but him and that he would never be saved from the consequences of sin. The Vicar-General of his order suggested a study of the writings of St Paul, and finally, in reading and re-reading Paul's letter to the Romans, Luther came to an understanding which brought the peace for which he longed. All his efforts and his constant striving towards perfection could not pay the price for his sins. Nothing that he could do could. His redemption was an amazing gift given by a God of love and paid for through the death of his beloved son, Jesus, on the cross.

St Paul himself had known what it was to be constantly striving to live a perfect life for God for he had been one of the most ardent of Pharisees. As he writes in the first chapter of his letter to the Galatians, "I was advancing in Judaism beyond many Jews of my own age and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers," that is to say, that he was very conscious of the many, many rules and regulations which should be kept by a good Jew, and constantly strove to keep them all. His dramatic encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus changed all that, for he began to live, as he writes in Galatians 2, " by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." And he continues, "I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, then Christ died for nothing!" Or as the paraphrase 'The Message' puts it, "If a living relationship with God could come by rule keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily."

We human beings have the most amazing number of ways in which we have tried to buy a right relationship with God: some of us might assume that our intellect is a good enough guarantee, some - like those who bought indulgences - that money would talk, some have hoped that family background might qualify them - in fact, the Jewish people often assumed that their special relationship with Gos assured them of preferential treatment, some have hoped that their charitable deeds would be rewarded and some that the quantity or quality of their worship would be what would get them into the Kingdom of God. Not so. The only qualifier is faith in Jesus Christ and what he did for us through his death on the cross. We are all guilty before the awesome righteousness of God - even the very best of us - (Paul would say we are dead in our sins) and the only thing that can save us is what God has done, and never what we might do. The Alpha course speaker, Nicky Gumbel, says that even though we may think we are not too bad compared with most other people, if we compare ourselves with someone like Mother Theresa, most of us would agree that we fall a long way short. But we need to compare ourselves, not with another human being, but with the righteousness of God, and we then see how very desperate our need for salvation is, and how awe-inspiring what he has done for us is.

I think many of us have trouble with this, because we feel we need somehow to earn our forgiveness. We have a rather Puritanical mind-set which tells us that nothing comes without cost, and the cost should be ours. Accepting something for nothing goes against the grain. This, however, is the way in which our awe-inspiring God has chosen to solve the dilemma of our sin - for a dilemma it was. You see, God is a God of infinite love and therefore wants to forgive us and receive us back into his arms as perfect as we were when he first formed us. But God is also perfectly just, and he hates sin. To treat sin with perfect justice, retribution was demanded. Therefore God chose to pay the necessary price himself in the person of His Son - a Son who had no sins of his own for which to atone and who, because of his perfection, could pay the terrible price for all of us, and save us from the death which would otherwise be our lot.

This tremendous work of God does, though, require a response from us, and I believe that this is where what we can do comes into the picture. Let me illustrate with a story:

In college a student was asked to prepare a lesson to teach a public speaking class. Students were to be graded on their creativity and ability to drive home a point in a memorable way. The title of his talk was, "The Law of the Pendulum." He spent

20 minutes carefully teaching it, that a swinging pendulum can never return to a point higher than the point from which it was released. Because of friction and gravity, when the pendulum returns, it will fall short of its original release point. Each time it swings it makes less and less of an arc, until finally it is at rest.

Then the student attached a 3-foot string to a child's toy top and secured it to the top of the blackboard with a thumbtack. He pulled the top to one side and made a mark on the blackboard where he had let it go. Each time it swung back he made a new mark. It took less than a minute for the top to complete its swinging and come to rest. When he had finished the demonstration, the markings on the blackboard proved his thesis. He then asked how many people in the room BELIEVED the law of the pendulum was true. All his classmates raised their hands, and so did the teacher who started to walk to the front of the room thinking the class was over. In reality it had just begun. Hanging from the steel ceiling beams in the middle of the room was a large, crude but functional pendulum (250 pounds of metal weights tied to four strands of 500-pound test parachute cord.). The student invited the instructor to climb up on a table and sit in a chair with the back of his head against a cement wall. Then he brought the 250 pounds of metal up to his nose. Holding the huge pendulum just a fraction of an inch from his face, he once again explained the law, "If the law of the pendulum is true, then when I release this mass of metal, it will swing across the room and return, but it will be further from your face when it returns than it is now. Your nose will be in no danger." Then he looked the professor in the eye and asked, "Sir, do you believe this law is true?" There was a long pause. Huge beads of sweat formed on the professor's face, and then he nodded weakly and whispered, "Yes." The pendulum was released. It made a swishing sound as it arced across the room. At the far end of its swing, it paused momentarily and started back. Never had a man moved so fast. The professor literally dived from the table. Deftly stepping around the still-swinging pendulum, the student asked the class, "Does he believe in the law of the pendulum?" The students unanimously answered, "NO!"

Now this may be a rather extreme example but I think it shows that our true beliefs are shown by how we act on them. Our response to God's amazing love for us, shown in his sending his son to die for our salvation, is surely seen in the ways in which we show our trust in God in our daily lives and in how far we try to be obedient to his teachings. This is where the "doing" comes in, or what is often called "works," and I think this is often where we get confused about salvation. The "works" are our response to the salvation already brought about by God's grace.

Those of us who have professed faith in God for many years have had time to do may things in his service. But God in his wisdom may show his grace to people who have arrived at the point of expressing faith in him, but who do not have the time or the opportunity to do great things in response to it - such as the thief on the cross, redeemed in the last minutes of his life. And if this seems unreasonable to our human sense of fair play, perhaps we should remember that life lived in the love and knowledge of God is infinitely richer than years lived without it. We may have had time to work longer and harder than the one who professes faith at the last minute but it has been a privilege to serve such a God, a wonderful journey and infinitely worth it. Amen.