The Law of Faith and Love
Robert Francis

For me, the texts this week seemed to naturally cluster themselves into two groups – one group composed of the Old Testament reading, the Psalm, and the Gospel, and the other made up of just good ole Paul.  Collectively, I think this week’s texts cover some really fundamental Christian territory, not least of which is the nature of salvation.  They also raise some rather central Biblical binaries or odd couples – blessings and curses and faith and works.  I’d like to begin with Paul.

The Romans passage today is familiar territory for a recovering evangelical like me.  Have any of you heard of the Romans Road?  Growing up, one way we were taught to share the Gospel message as we understood it was to walk people down what we called the Romans Road, which is a series of verses – obviously all from Romans – that lay out how one “becomes a Christian.”  One important early stop along the Romans Road is in today’s reading – Romans 3:23 – which tells us that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  This verse – along with an earlier verse from the same chapter, Romans 3:10 (“there is no one righteous, not even one”) – establishes humanity’s shared sinfulness, and thus, its collective need of some sort of redemption. 

But never fear!  All is not lost!  Paul wastes no time in providing the solution to this lost and sinful state, telling his readers in 3:24-25 that “they are now justified by God’s 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.”  He drives it home even further with the plain talk of 3:28 – “For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.”  There might be no clearer statement in all of Scripture than Romans 3 of the concept of salvation by grace through faith and of the atoning nature of Christ’s death.

For the Lutherans in the room, we know that this passage had quite an impact on one Mr. Martin Luther.  Luther was overwhelmed by a sense of his own sinfulness and for years subjected himself to the most extreme forms of penance and yet still struggled to feel worthy enough to merit God’s grace.  As Walter Altmann, author of Luther and Liberation: A Latin American Perspective, succinctly asks on behalf of Luther: “If he ignored even his smallest offenses, how could he have done everything within his power to merit God’s grace?  And if he did not do everything within his power, how could he obtain grace?” 

Luther struggled with the central notions of righteousness and faith for years.  However, according to Martin Marty’s biography of Luther, Luther was jolted into his new understanding while reading Paul’s letter to the Romans… notably in the tower latrine above the sewer in his cloister’s tower-study.  (Yvette tells me that it is a recurring joke in Lutheran circles that the Reformation would not have occurred if not for Luther’s regularity issues!)  For Marty, this unseemly beginning was actually rather apropos, given what Luther would tirelessly emphasize from this point on, namely that the saving activity of God often happens in filthy places.  Luther found indescribable personal liberation in his new understanding, and he sought to then liberate others from the burden of practices that can never justify and that obscure the freedom of the Gospel. 

Paul’s – and subsequently Luther’s – emphasis on “by grace you are saved through faith” has been one-half of a two millennia-long debate about the exact theological relationship between faith and works, the fodder for church councils and late-night freshman year theological discussions.  It is really a question about righteousness, about salvation.  That leads us to the other group of passages.

Deuteronomy lays out a rather classic statement of blessings and curses theology.  The Israelites were an exiled people, facing threats to their identity and danger on all sides, including the threat that they’d lose the integrity of the unique monotheistic faith centered on Yahweh in the milieu of people groups and belief systems before them.  God knows their tendency to stray and forget, and so the people are reminded – in various ways – to remember God’s words, teach them to the kids, and just plain obey.  God sums this up in verses 26-28, basically saying that they’ll be blessed if they are obedient and not-so-blessed if they disobey.  You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.  The Psalmist seems to have internalized this blessings and curses mentality when he writes, for the Psalm that we read is a interweaving of compliments of God and pleas for support and protection, all with the underlying idea that God will see his sincere pleas and act because he’s on the right side.  Verse 23 illustrates this when it says, “The Lord preserves the faithful, but abundantly repays the one who acts haughtily.”  (This seems to fly in the face of the fact that we know bad things happen to good people, but that is a discussion for another day.)

The Gospel reading for today – the end of Matthew chapter 7 – concludes the three-chapter passage we all know as the Sermon on the Mount, perhaps Jesus’ most famous “sermon,” although I think we also all know that it is highly unlikely that Jesus gave these three chapters of wisdom in one chunk.  Matthew is the gospel most closely aligned with the Jewish tradition, so maybe it is not a surprise – keeping in mind the blessings/curses mentality we saw in the Old Testament passages – that the author envisions a world full of binary choices: the wide and narrow gates; good fruit and bad fruit; sheep and wolves; good soil and bad soil; wicked and just; wise and evil servants; the sheep and the goats; and today, the wise and foolish builders.  Like the Deuteronomy passage, there is a decided focus on what we do.  Lutheran pastor Brian Stoffregen points out that the verb “to act” – which is also translated “do” and “bear,” as in, “bear fruit” – appears eleven times in Matthew chapter 7, always in the present tense (except for verse 22, in which people come to Jesus, pleading their cases as they tout their past deeds).  The question is not “what do you believe?” or even “whose name do you claim?” but “what are you doing?”

So yeah, what are we doing… really?  In the Christian tradition in which I was raised, understanding and belief “saved” you, and right living confirmed that proper belief.  If you didn’t live enough like what was expected from a Christian, then one’s belief would be questioned.  In that more conservative world, that outer living had a lot to do with legalism and an outward respectability and propriety.  Good Christians didn’t drink, smoke, swear, have premarital sex or live with their boyfriends or girlfriends; they didn’t believe in evolution or lawful abortion; they didn’t listen to secular music or otherwise allow themselves to be polluted by the world.  If someone started walking down any of those paths, then their behavior was thought to undermine and bring into question whether they really believed this Jesus stuff.

While it’s easy to poke fun at an understanding of Christian faith and practice that seems so narrow and utterly different from that of our Community, I actually wonder if there’s a similar underlying tendency in our own peace and justice circles.  I wonder if we too often take a little too much comfort in the fact that we believe the right things, whether or not we actually live like we believe them.  With us, our screens are not evolution or drinking alcohol, but they are having certain views about injustice, empire, the Religious Right and others of their ilk, and our own peace and justice way of reading the Biblical text.  Are we too content to focus on believing the right things and not so concerned with living like we do?  I know that I’m really good at preaching to my conservative, Republican Mom about how my theology and politics are superior, but I also know that I tend to spend my non-work hours on myself while she serves her neighbors in very practical, concrete ways.  I talk about community, but she lives it, even if she doesn’t have a “peace and social justice approved” theology to back it up. 

I know some of the issues this community cares about are big, big, big: the war in Iraq, the need for comprehensive immigration reform, international trade policy, Israel and Palestine.  And I know many of us work on those issues in various ways.  But in thinking about this text and about my Mom, I was reminded of the motto of The Simply Way, Shane Claiborne’s intentional Christian community in North Philadelphia: “Small acts with great love.”

I love the peace and social justice lens of this community; that’s a big reason why I’m here.  So I’m not picking on that.  But I know, at least in my own life, it’s easy to be self-righteous and pat myself on the back for having “God’s politics” (to steal a phrase) but fail to pay much attention to the needs of the strangers I encounter each day, not to mention my neighbors, my coworkers, my friends, and even my own family.  And while it’s great to care about others “politically,” that can’t replace a visit to someone who’s lonely, a kind word instead of a harsh one, giving up a seat on the bus, and the thousands of other little and seemingly insignificant ways we can show love and grace.  Each day we’re in the world, we should ask ourselves if we are adding to or subtracting from the world’s sum total of love, kindness, patience, justice, and peace.  For structural injustice folks like us, maybe it’s sometimes hard to see much value in the little things, but I know those small acts with great love matter to those who receive them.

To conclude, I return to Luther and Martin Marty for a moment.  In Luther’s writings, he talks about a number of kinds of laws, but over and above these are what he calls the laws about faith and love.  For Luther, all other laws – including that Old Testament stuff – must and ought to be measured by the laws of faith and love.  So I ask us, are we too governed by the laws of faith and love?  Turning to Marty, in an old Christian Century article he says that “Lutheran churches often got things wrong by turning the cry ‘The Just shall live by Faith’ into the doctrine ‘Justification by Faith.’  This doctrine soon became a badge and a weapon. Wearers of the badge were justified because their church taught justification by faith; nonwearers were half-breed Christians at best.”  So what are the badges and weapons for us… for this Community?  What do we hold up as the things that make us better and more acceptable than others?

In both these thoughts – Luther’s and Marty’s – there is a sense that – as Matthew also tells us today – we ought to be about the business of living faith and love in the world, not sitting back and basking in the glow of our own “right-ness.”  Speaking for me, I know that I can be both self-righteous and self-serving, and when that’s the case, I am not being the wise builder, regardless of how “right” I think I am.  And I think of my Mom, who recently stayed up all night with a shut in who was afraid and grieving, just because it was the good and right thing to do.  Am I also serving in those unnoticed, practical ways?

So I ask, are we all – having been justified by grace through faith – now living under the law of faith and love?  Will Jesus know us by our fruits, or just by our politics or the periodicals we read?  Again, what are our badges and weapons that keep us from others and others from us? 

May we beat those weapons into plowshares and pruning hooks, and may we all – in big and small ways, every day – be agents of faith and love.  Let it be so.  Amen.