Matthew 7:21-19
Theodore Parker Ferris was the rector of the famous Trinity Episcopal Church in Boston. He was one of the great preachers of his day, from 1942 until his death in 1972. I have probably read over 100 of his sermons. Ferris had a marvelous ability to present profound, sometimes difficult, ideas in very simple language that everybody could understand. And he was disarmingly honest. It was part of his style. He was not afraid to admit that he didn't have all the answers. That is hard for anybody to do, especially hard for a preacher to do, especially standing in a pulpit. But he would do that. He even suggested that the art of living is the ability to live with unanswered questions.
Reading Ferris’ sermons you get the impression that he knew you, he understood what you were struggling with in your own life. He helped me to see that faith is not so much a matter of the intellect, where study can leave you with no doubts, but faith is a matter of the heart, where you trust someone, and you go on in spite of the doubts.
During those days, also in Boston, Paul Tillich, the great theologian, was teaching at Harvard. He had written that the best interpretation of what the Bible means by "faith" is the English word, "courage." He said that it was significant that that word comes from the French word for "heart." Underscoring the fact that faith is not about the brain, it is not about knowledge, but is about the heart, it's about action, it's about how you live your life.
Rev. Ferris once wrote a prayer on the back of an American Airlines menu as he was flying back to Boston. It goes like this: Lord Jesus, I would like to be able to do myself the things I help others to do. I can give them a confidence I do not have. I can quiet their anxieties, but not my own. What do I lack? Or is it the way I am made? I want to be free to move from place to place without fear. And I want to face the things to be done without panic. You did it, and you made it possible for others to do it. You didn't count on drugs. You trusted God. You didn't turn away from life. Nor did you seek pain or death. You met each as it came. I would like to do the same, but by myself I can't. I like to think that you can be with me, and in me, and that with your help I can do better. This is what I ask and hope for.
All of us have to live with things we don’t really want to do, and all of us live with things we wish we hadn’t done. The Good News of Jesus Christ is spelled out in our second lesson from Romans more clearly than almost anywhere else in the Bible. From Romans: it says: The one who is righteous will live by faith.’ the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified (that is brought back into God’s embrace) by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.
Matthew writes not everyone who calls out "Lord, Lord" will enter the kingdom of heaven. In short, nothing we can ever do is enough – we can never do enough to earn God’s love. So we must have faith that Christ has done it for us. We struggle, we want to do better, want to be free of certain things, want to have peace in our lives, but striving for acceptance by a God of Laws will only crush us.
In the First Lesson Noah is given instructions by God, to build an Ark, then he is promised that God will destroy, but also renew the earth. It takes only the slightest imagination to see in that story a paradigm of all human life. All human life is leading to an unknown future, in which we can only trust God to renew the mistakes of humankind.
Your life and mine are a matter of moving from where we are now, to an unknown future. It may be a future we don't want. We don’t know. Through the loss of a loved one, or a job, or through something that causes us to leave where we are now. We may have to leave everything the way we want it. We've worked hard to get it this way. Then it happens. Life moves you on into an unknown future. When that happens, then we are all Noah, we can hunker down in fear and resentment that this has happened to us, that life isn't fair, or we can go forth in faith, trusting God.
In the letter to the Romans, Paul’s definition of faith is the same as it was in Genesis, "trust." That's what faith means. Paul interprets that understanding of faith as trust for his own life. He says faith is trusting in God's grace alone. To trust grace is to believe that you are forgiven, right now, and that God loves you the way you are, right now, even if you don't feel loveable. Faith means that you trust that God loves you, so you can stop trying to be somebody, stop trying to prove something, stop trying to impress people, and be who you are as a child of God. That is what it means to live by grace. It means to be free to be yourself, all of yourself.
In Paul's day, the good life was an achievable goal. It was called "righteousness." Righteousness was defined as being right with God. There was a simple path to righteousness. It was called the Law. It consisted of over 600 rules, guidance for your daily living, dealing with everything from how you worshipped, to how you dressed, to how you interacted with your neighbors, to what you ate. With a little effort on your part you could obey those rules. You could fulfill the Law, and consider yourself righteous, consider that you had achieved the fulfillment of your life. So Paul sought that. He sought righteousness by following the Law.
And I submit that we live exactly the same way. We believe the way Paul believed about life. Not many of us would say that we are trying to achieve righteousness in our life, but we would say something like, we are trying to achieve success, or the American Dream, or peace of mind, or find the good life.
And we would probably not try to find it by keeping the Law, although we do look for rules to follow. We look for steps that will take us to the goal that we want to achieve. We don't have a Holiness Code, as the Jews did in the Old Testament, telling us what is kosher and what is unclean. But we do have dietary laws, like the Jews. Jewish dietary laws were given to them by Moses. Our dietary laws are given to us by Oprah.
Look at the bookstores. My goodness, the ailes of self help. The latest books in the bookstores are, always the same thing. You see it everywhere. Steps to success. Rules to follow in order to be rich. Goals, dreams, which if we could only achieve them, then we would be happy. And every one of those has a list of things that you must do, rules to follow, which are what Paul called the Law.
Ken Olson is a psychologist, lives in Arizona. He wrote that he lived his life, he sees now, as if he were living under a Law. He had to achieve all the time. He couldn't fail. He had to always win. If he failed, it was a devastating experience to him, because it would mean the loss of his self-esteem.
It wasn't until adulthood that he realized that his problem was really a religious problem. He was one of those who believed that religion really was about rules. It is about what you can do, and mostly about what you can't do. It wasn't until later that he discovered that the essence of Christianity is not rules. The essence of Christianity is love.
He told this story about his boyhood. He was a senior in high school. He was playing football. His coach demanded 100% from all of his players. He expected them to work hard. If you sat down in practice, you were punished. You had to run laps. If you drank water in practice, or in a game, you had to run laps. If you made a error, or fumbled, you had to run laps.
Olson was a defensive back on that team. In one of the first games of the year, the other team's end got behind him, caught a pass for a touchdown. What made it worse was, it was the touchdown that won the game. Olson was humiliated. But that got worse, too. Because the next morning, on the front page of the sports section, was his picture, stretching to reach that pass, the ball going over his hands, into the hands of the receiver for a touchdown.
Now it is Monday morning. Olson goes to school. He hears the coach wants to see him. He enters the office. There is the picture from the newspaper on the desk. The coach says, "What do you have to say about this picture?" He said, "I'm sorry. I'll try harder." The coach said, "Look at the picture again. Look more closely. Look at your face. Look at your muscles, how tight they are. Can't you see, that's your problem. You are trying too hard. Why don't you just relax, have confidence in yourself, enjoy the game, and you'll be a great player."
That's Paul's problem, and its everyone's problem who lives under a law. You can't relax. In the New Testament that is called "the curse of the Law." You are always measuring yourself against some standard, your performance against other people's performances. You are afraid of what other people will think of you. Always trying to please someone, or something. That is what the Law is. The Law is some standard that is set above you, that judges you. Sometimes our parents set that standard for us. Sometimes we set it ourselves. Sometimes society sets it. Sometimes religion sets it. It doesn't really matter where it comes from, it doesn't matter what we call it, the Bible calls it the Law. It is that which, if we could only achieve it, promises happiness, and if we fail to achieve it, causes us misery.
Paul killed Christians, but they said "The Lord Jesus has sent us to you, and he loves you." He couldn't get over that. He was the enemy, and they loved the enemy. They loved, he said, the way God loves us, in spite of our sins, without deserving God's love. And that is when it hit him. That is why he wrote, "We are made righteous apart from the Law. We are saved not by our efforts, not by our works, but by our faith, our trust in God's grace."
I think that the grip of the Law is so tight on all of us that something often has to happen to us in order for us to let go, get us to relax, so that God can get a hold of us.
There is a wonderful old hymn written by John Greenleaf Whittier. It isn’t in the new hymnals but I am getting to that age where a lot of the hymns I knew when I was younger are no longer in print. In fact I am at the age where sometimes it feels as if my whole world is going out of print. Nevertheless I want to leave you with the words from the hymn that I can remember:
I know not what the future hath - Of marvel or surprise,
Assured alone that life and death - God's mercy underlies.
I know not where his islands lift - Their fronded palms in air;
I only know I cannot drift - Beyond his love and care. Amen.