We don’t make much of Abraham.  We might not even remember much about Abraham.  Not many name their son Abraham, anymore.  We may just recall that Abraham tried to kill his son—that’s crazy stuff, so we distance ourselves from Abraham.  We may even remember that it was God who told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, which may make us want to distance ourselves from God!  Who was Isaac?  The son born because God promised Abraham a son beyond Abraham and Sarah’s inability to conceive.  What they could not do, what had not happened despite their wanting and trying, God did.  God gave.  Then God was going to take away—though, at the last possible moment, God said that’s far enough: a test, a terrible test.  Even today, the thought makes us tremble.  We’re glad God has never asked us to sacrifice anything that mattered greatly to us, what we just couldn’t give up.

Even before that episode on Mount Moriah (historically associated with the Temple Mount in Jerusalem)—long before that terrible, blessed day, Abraham had fully entrusted himself to God.  A long, blessed life lived trusting God.  It hadn’t always been that way.  Abraham hadn’t always known God.  Long before, God had called to Abraham living as a pagan among pagans.  Who knows what gods Abraham as a youth had been taught to try to appease through sacrifice?  God was not his God; Abraham knew nothing of this God who called to him, saying, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you” (Gen 12:1).  Go.  Time to go.  Listen to Me.  Don’t stay.  Staying will get you nowhere.  In other words, leave behind the pagan ways of the pagan people in the pagan land—the old, familiar ways, routines, patterns, values—life as you had known it—and go as I direct you; walk according to My Word; learn My values.  I will show you the place.  Go to this place.

God was saying, Trust Me: trust that going as I direct you matters most and will be for your blessing.  Know that going contrary to My Word will bring no blessing.  Trust that where you will be going is better than where you are now.

Abraham had not known this one speaking to him.  Abraham knew about the pagan gods of the pagan place where he had been raised and educated.  He also knew about the pagan gods of the pagan place where he was living when God called him.  The place wasn’t pagan, to him, just how the people worshiped and what they worshiped.  This was what the people did, and I suppose Abraham did, too.  Quite early in Genesis, we are introduced to a man named Enoch.  All we know about for sure about his life was that “Enoch walked with God” (Gen 5:22, 24).  He didn’t walk away from God; he walked with God.  Not long after that, we’re told about Noah, who “found favor in the eyes of the LORD” (Gen 6:8); Noah, we are told “was a righteous man, blameless in his time; Noah walked with God” (6:9).  It isn’t that Noah was righteous, therefore he walked with God; he was righteous because he walked with God.  To walk with is righteousness.

We do not spend much time with those we do not trust.  Such a person invites us to take a walk; we decline.  Enoch and Noah walked with God.  They trusted Him.  God blessed them.  Blessed does not mean no trials, no temptations.  Blessed means not forgotten, not abandoned.  I mentioned a timely, wise thought, last Sunday; I share it again: “Do not assume comfort equals blessing or suffering equals abandonment.”[1]  Material comfort, creature comforts, can dull us to God’s call.  Sometimes, we grow closer to God—so much closer—when life is not going very well.

God calls.  He wants to talk; He wants to connect.  He has a purpose in view and wants us to be part of it.  Abraham left everything: people and places he knew, relationships, connections, the sense of safety and belonging that came with being among like-minded people who held similar values.  Why do that?  Why strike out into the unknown among unknown people in unknown places?  Abraham sensed that what this God calling to Abraham, speaking to him—in a special sense wanting Abraham—Abraham sensed that what this God was offering was vastly superior to anything on offer where Abraham was.  No other God had called to Abraham.  No other God had told him to go a certain direction in life: go the way I will show you.  The gods where Abraham had been born, and those where he had later relocated, may have sent rain, or hail, heat or cold, but the local gods did not call.  The local gods did not want to connect.  The local gods said feed us or we will harm you, like an invading army or a brutal warlord killing his way to the top.

Abraham had no reason to do as this God calling to him asked, except that Abraham sensed all would be well, all would be blessed.  And how did Abraham sense that?  Abraham had encountered a God who took an active and benevolent interest in him.  At the point when God calls him, Abraham had already done rather well for himself in life, built wealth: herds, flocks, servants.  He could well say, “I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing” (Rev 3:17).  What more did Abraham need?  Set for life!  Maybe he was thinking about tearing down his barns and building bigger.  Yet, for all his getting, Abraham wanted something he still hadn’t found; it wasn’t just a son, and it wasn’t exactly a future.

Long before Moses, Sinai, and the Ten Commandments, there is Abraham, so there was no law as such.  No rulebook to live by; no rules by keeping which one would have God’s blessings.  But, just as in the Garden, God does have an expectation: God wants Abraham to listen and follow through.  Listening and following through is the way to faith, and the way of faith.  God wants Abraham to have faith.  God is saying trust Me no matter what.  Is God strong enough, wise enough, good enough?  Faith is decisive.  Real faith really matters.

Paul takes us by the hand and points us to this faith in what he writes through this stretch of Romans.  He has told us, reminded us, that justification—being acceptable to God—is through faith.  Not by a perfect life but by perfect faith—faith that does what it is supposed to: trust the trustworthy one no matter what.  Paul has been building to the supreme importance of faith.  The Jews rightly claimed Abraham as their ancestor.  By Paul’s time, the argument was that God approved of Abraham because Abraham kept the commandments of God: circumcision, for example.  Keeping the commandments meant Abraham had faith, all the faith he needed in order to be good with God.  Keeping the commandments meant Abraham was righteous.  All Abraham’s descendants got a share in that righteousness, as though it were somehow genetic or inherited, transmitted.  Congenital righteousness—as though Abraham’s law-keeping had canceled Adam’s law-breaking.  But Adam, like Abraham, had no law, only God’s love.

And anyone not descended from Abraham—non-Jews, in other words—did not inherit this righteousness and therefore were not righteous but sinners, doomed sinners.  Sad, perhaps but . . . oh well.  The Judaism of Paul’s day was exclusive and exclusionary, and there was a time in his own life when Paul had known that it was perfectly right and perfectly just that only Jews had God’s love and promise and that everyone else was hell-bound.  And good riddance.

Salvation was in doing the law, in all its meticulous details.  The teachers of the law had spent generations working fleshing out the law.  Do the law and you were a good person.  The thinking stretched even further: salvation was in being a Jew.  To be a Jew was to be good, in God’s sight, even if that person didn’t always do good.  It was a legal sort of good—not guilty!—rather than an ethical, moral, consistent, relationship sort of good.  If I have no criminal record, then I am not a criminal, and if I am not a criminal, then I am good.  Good people are saved and safe.  Therefore, I am saved and safe.  Logic is great, like that.  It all follows, logically, in its way, and there are many people even today who say that’s good enough, good enough for me.  Kind people ought to be saved, yes?  But kind people aren’t always kind.  Good people aren’t always good.

“If, in fact, Abraham was justified by works, he had something to boast about—but not before God” (4:2).  God wants faith.  God gives what He wants given to Him.  God gives faith.  One person or another may have done much better, done a lot more good for a much greater number, than most of us, but this is not God’s measure.  I’m not precisely sure about the Catholic doctrine of penance, but maybe you know the joke about going to the confessional, making your good confession, and being told by Father Fernandez to say five Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers, as if, somehow, doing so will balance out the transgression, make up for it.  Good works need to balance out the transgressions; it’s difficult to keep up with those transgressions, though!  They move fast and multiply, cancerous.  Now, we Protestants may tell ourselves we know better: that no amount of good works can possibly even begin to clear our sins, as though the works were like soap for washing our dirty hands.  It isn’t our hands that are soiled, beloved.

My understanding is quite likely very incomplete, but I understand that Muslims, who are expected to perform the five pillars—profession of faith, prayer, charity, fasting, and that trek to Mecca—Muslims hold that one’s good deeds must outweigh one’s not good deeds, or condemnation is certain.  That’s a soft version of justification by works, works righteousness.  Works righteousness we understand: do this, get that.  Righteousness by faith is a mystery.  Justification by works certainly gives an impetus to doing good, but few of us have that sort of sustained, dedicated energy.  We don’t really know what our balance sheet really looks like, but we just know in our hearts that the good we’ve done surely outweighs the bad.  It’s just got to.

Paul asks us to imagine Abraham, with all his accomplishments and good references, coming before God, saying, “Good God, just look how holy I am!”  We can’t really imagine it; we just know God would not be impressed.  Who, in the presence of God, would boast of anything other than God?  These good deeds, what’s motivating such works?  Love, or fear?  God’s approval, the approval and praise of others, or self-approval?  And how can any of us really be sure?  In Revelation, Jesus addresses the church in the city of Ephesus, telling them they’ve reached a point when they’re just going through the motions, sort of on auto-pilot: oh, the performance was there, certainly—feeding the hungry, avoiding coarse language, being polite and nice to one another—but the initial, energizing, full-filling love had fizzled.  Making one’s quota wasn’t enough, wasn’t really the point.  We think of James as criticizing faith without works, as though he were telling us to get those works done, as if works saved.  That’s not what he is saying.  Works are no substitute, no stand-in for faith.  So we’re left not knowing what to do.  James is also criticizing any who would say works without faith are still good, just as good: in God’s sight one without the other is always already dead.  What’s dead does no one any good.  Seek life.  A living faith works.

Paul invites us to dig deeper, read attentively, think prayerfully: “What does Scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness’” (4:3).  Abraham, a child of Adam as are we all, was not righteous, could not make himself righteous, and among all his copious possessions and accomplishments, what he did not have was righteousness.  God credited it to Abraham: because Abraham believed, God opted to treat Abraham as if he truly did have righteousness.  So, Abraham still does some really questionable things, yet God will still regard Abraham as righteous, because it isn’t about Abraham but about God choosing to be gracious, according to His nature.  We get hung up upon ourselves; God would have us depend upon Him.

God is not looking first and foremost for good deeds.  First and always, God looks for faith; more, He gives the faith He seeks.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, among others, suggested that, if works lead to faith, that isn’t a bad thing.  The fake it ‘til you make it approach.  Even so, the goal remains faith, vital faith, vital relationship, transforming relationship.  Vital faith produces the fruit of vital faith.  God wants us to be in vital, transforming relationship with Him, being changed from glory into glory.  This is not an overnight process, as we know.  That relationship is righteousness; it is a gift of the Spirit.  We don’t labor and sacrifice our way to righteousness; we follow God who leads us into the righteousness He grants us, God who leads us in righteousness through Jesus by the Spirit.  No relationship, no righteousness; no real relationship, no real righteousness.

Abraham exercised his God-given faith.  Daily exercise.  God planted that seed of faith, watered it, blew His Spirit breath upon it, warmed it by His light: Arise, your light is come!  Arise—get up, move, go, live.  God looks for faith.  Faith isn’t exactly knowledge or even deep, strong conviction.  Faith is willingness, a will being renewed, restored: I’m willing to find out.  I’m willing to go.  I’m willing to try.  I’m willing to endure.  I’m willing to sacrifice.  I’m willing to see.  Faith doesn’t say later; faith says, Yes Lord.

We hear a lot these days about justice—well, injustice.  Justice seems to amount to who gets what.  Justice seems mainly to be about people getting what they deserve.  Justice is also about not getting what they do not deserve.  Paul speaks of the obligation of paying wages for work done (4:4).  Thank the Lord you don’t work for the intermittently shut down federal government!  How long would you keep working at your job, if you received no paycheck?  The bills don’t stop coming, do they?  There was a contract, an agreement: I do this work and you pay me for it.  What sort of arrangement do we have with God?  We know, ought to know, that we have no arrangement, no agreement with God: I do this and You, Lord, give me that.  We don’t live what we know—or, God help us—we live what we think we know, or what we want to believe because we don’t much care for what the Bible says; we aren’t really all that familiar with what the Bible says, but we do know what people around us think and say, and we do, too.

God is under no obligation to any of us.  We have rendered God no service that places Him under obligation to us.  He doesn’t owe any of us a thing, not a single breath.  The debt, rather, is all on our side.  We are all under obligation to God.  The obligation to trust Him, the obligation not to rely upon, to stand upon or proclaim our record, our good deeds—if we were to compare notes on that with God, we might find there are some discrepancies and differences, and not in our favor.  We are all under obligation to God.  How are we fulfilling that obligation?

Beloved, let us recommit to fulfill our obligation, our blessed, joyful obligation, by trusting “God who justifies the ungodly,” for such “faith is credited as righteousness” (4:5).  God justifies, making us acceptable to Him; God will make us godly, people after His own glorious heart.

[1] Farmer Girl, on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/erica.d.429).