March 16, 2014
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
When I was visiting our North Carolina grandkids one time, I gave my BlackBerry to Gavin our oldest grandson and the next thing I discovered is that he inadvertently bought a car racing game! It costs me $4.99! Now our youngest grandson, Canon would asks me, “Yeh Yeh, can I play the car racing game?” The “Speed Shift” game is addictive awarding you to the next level and with earned credits you can buy in virtual reality a speedier car to race again. It never ends.
Some of the biggest cities around the world have these huge Ferris wheels. Singapore has the Flyer, China has the Star of Nanchang; California Adventure has the Mickey Mouse; some of us have been on the London Eye. But now in Las Vegas, they are building the world’s largest, The High Roller, 100 feet taller than the London Eye outfitted with 1,500 LED lights by early next year. George Ferris who invented the Ferris wheel 100 years ago never would have imagine what we have now. But whether it’s a small one at a traveling amusement carnival or the new permanent one in Las Vegas, Ferris wheels all do the same thing—they go round and round.
The wheel is a terrific invention 7000 years ago by the Sumerians. Wheels are critical to the operation of almost any form of transportation—planes, trains, cars, and busses when we sing to our children, “The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round.” And if you ride a bicycle in San Francisco, you have two wheels that you depend on to get you to your destination.
By the way, do you know why unicyclists can always go longer than bicyclists?
Bicyclists are always two tired.
Round and Round Righteousness
Paul’s letter to the Romans is about how we want to travel on a highway of holiness. With our wheels on, we are driving on the right side of the road or if we are on a bicycle, according to the law we are wearing a helmet and riding on the bike lanes. We are living right as law-abiding people of the righteous commandments of God. As we know we should be. No problem here.
But Jesus comes into the picture and has a whole new idea. He doesn’t get rid of George Ferris’ wheel that goes round and round but Jesus gives us a whole new perspective on what it means to be living right.
For thousands of years, the term “righteousness” was associated with a list of things that people are supposed to do. Righteous people were men and women who did, or who tried to do, everything on the list. We see this in Psalm 119:142, “Your righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, and your law is truth.” Proverbs tells us that “the righteous hate falsehood (13:5), “the thoughts of the righteous are just” (123:5) and “the desire of the righteous ends only in good” (11:23).
Righteousness means doing the right things. When we behave in this way, promises Proverbs, everything “ends only in good.” No wonder we want to be righteous—to living right!
In other words, we are going round and round on the wheels of righteous living, on the wheels of law and order snapped to an axle of obedience…and the grind goes on and on: from the law to righteousness to the law to righteousness. It never stops and our lives just go round and round.
And the problem that we see first-hand is that we all experience an inner conflict between the law of God and the law of sin. Instead of doing good, we do evil. Instead of being righteous, we behave in ways that are unrighteous. Instead of driving on the right side of the road, we try to go down a “Do Not Enter” ramp.
In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul says, “There is no one who is righteous, not even one” (3:10). Looking inward, he confesses, “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (7:18-19).
Today we ask ourselves, is there a better way? And fortunately, the apostle Paul finds this way in the passage we read today.
Wheel of Faith
Paul asks, “What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about…” (vv.1-2). Paul is aware that many people saw the righteousness of Abraham in his works, in the things he did in obedience to God. We know that Abraham was justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar.
To be justified is to be declared righteous. And when looking at Abraham, you might think that his works are what justify him and make him a good guy. It’s like on our computer word programs where you can justify your writing by setting type in such a way that all full lines are of equal length and are flush both left and right; in other words to put the printed lines in the right relationship with the page they’re printed on and with each other. In the religious sense, being justified means being brought into right relationship with God.
But Paul takes this round and round wheel and says, “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” (v. 3). He sees that it was Abraham’s faith that made him righteous, not his works.
This may not sound shocking to you but in the first-century, this was as shocking as the invention of the wheel. After years of assuming that Abraham was “justified by works (v.2), Paul discovers that he was justified through the “righteousness of faith” (v. 13). Suddenly, righteousness can be gained by all who “share the faith of Abraham” (v. 16), even if they are not able to follow God’s law to the letter. Now, all of the rules and regulations being enforced by the Pharisees and scribes collapsed and righteousness is given to those whose lives have faith in Christ.
For Paul, this is not just wishful thinking. It is grounded in the solid foundation of Holy Scripture. “For the promise that Abraham would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or his descendants through the law,” he explains, “but through the righteousness of faith” (v. 13).
Abraham had faith, and so can we. His willingness to believe is what makes him right with God.
Faith is the reinvented wheel that we all need to be riding. When we put our faith in Jesus, we are declared righteous by God. As Paul says to the Romans, “We hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law” (3:28). This all is made possible by the God who has sent Jesus to make everything right in the world, beginning with our relationship with God.
God’s life-giving victory is a great ride, one that connects us to God, Jesus and the people around us in a network of right relationships. It’s a ride we take on the wheel called faith. No longer do these wheels of life just go round and round and life becomes an endless video game. But rather, we have right relationships with one another because our faith in Jesus, God has declared us to be righteous.
So what does life look like when we get off the bus with its wheels going round and round with no satisfying destination in sight? A life of faith rests in the arms of God, trusts today and accepts tomorrow because faith knows that whatever the day, God is in it.
Faith is not about purity, devotion and rigor. Instead, it’s a willingness to trust God and rest in God’s arms. It’s a decision to trust Jesus and walk behind him on the path of life. Faith is a willingness to lean on a power much greater than ourselves, and to trust that whatever lies ahead, “God is in it.”
As you know, while I have fits and starts on what I do, always trying to do the best I could, at the end of the day, I always realized that it’s all about God and so very little about me. All of the so-called achievements affixed to my name are not about me but all about God. My years of ministry with you has never been based on my abilities but only on God’s loving and patient strength to see me through every day. And it’s so true that when I see whatever lies ahead tomorrow or the next day or for all the years to come that “God is in it,” it’s the willingness to trust God and rest in God’s arms.
Trusting in God
Many of us were raised with the idea that in order to please God we have to try to be good and hope at the end, our good stuff outweighs the bad. Sound familiar? The trouble is, we’re never sure how “good” good really is. Is God just sitting up there waiting to really whack me at the end? How do I know God is pleased with me?
In this letter that we read, Paul tells us that Abraham put his trust in God. “He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead,” says Paul, “or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb” (4:19). Instead, Abraham trusted God to be the one “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (v. 17). And sure enough, God did what had been promised, and made Abraham “the father of many nations” (v. 17).
Abraham does not earn God’s promise of descendants. God grants this promise and Abraham receives it through trusting—having faith—that God will do what God promises.
When we have this kind of faith, we’re made right with God—both now and eternally. We trust God to work through us, even when our bodies begin to fail us. We trust Jesus to lead us, even when we wander through a traffic maze of moral choices at work or in our neighborhoods. We trust the Holy Spirit to uplift us, even when our careers disappoint us and our friends let us down.
Being righteous in these situations doesn’t come from moral perfection. Surely none of us here can say that we are morally perfect. Instead, it’s based on taking a ride on the wheel of faith in Jesus.
So what do our lives look like when we’re riding on this wheel of faith in Jesus? The Protestant reformer Martin Luther said that “good works do not make a good man, but a good man does good work.” Luther knew that only our faith in Jesus Christ could make us good in the eyes of God, but once we’re right with God then our job is to go out and do the right things.
Remember the scene at the end of Saving Private Ryan? This is a story of a captain sent out into the battlefield to make sure Private Ryan is not killed but comes home. When Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) is dying, he says to private Ryan to make it worth it. Earlier, he had said, “He better be worth it. He better go home and cure a disease, or invent a longer-lasting light bulb.”
When the Private Ryan is now an old man and stands before the grave of Miller, he asks his wife if he was a good man. “Tell me I have led a good life,” he says.
His wife responds: “What?”
“Tell me I’m a good man.”
“You are,” she says. Ryan, even in his old age, was not sure he had lived a life of meaning, a life that meant something—especially in light of the fact that someone had died so that he might live.
Jesus Christ died for us so that we might live too. Good Christians behave in ways that are compassionate, kind, humble, patient, loving and forgiving—they do this not because they are naturally such wonderful people, but because Jesus has already forgiven them. “Forgive each other,” says Paul to the Colossians; “just as the Lord has forgiven you” (3:13).
Compassion, kindness, humility, patience, love, forgiveness—all of these qualities begin with Jesus, and they become ours when we trust in him.
The wheels on the bus of life keep going round and round, round and round, but the wheel of faithful living has been turning since the time of Abraham, and it was reinvented by Paul when he discovered that we’re made righteous through faith. So let us trust God’s Son Jesus and drive or bike or ride a bus into the future knowing that we’re right with God and right with one another.
Let us pray.
Merciful God, thank you for the faith of Abraham whose faith in you was even more important than the works that he did. Thank you for the Apostle Paul whose understanding of Christ’s redemptive ministry for us was nothing that we earned or deserved but rather comes from your love for the whole world including each one of us. We pray that we would trust our lives in your hands and to believe in the promise of Good News and salvation. May we get off the endless wheel of going round and round and to be living in faith in you. In the name of Christ, we pray. Amen.