2 Sunday in Lent

I sat across from her hospital bed, and listened. That’s the most useful skill we’re encouraged to learn in Seminary – not just how to talk, not just how to speak in grand theological terms – but how to listen.

I listened as she told me her story. A perfect life: married 51 years, five children and numerous grandchildren, in her own words “a blessed life.” But then it all started to fall apart. Four of her children had divorced. The fifth had told his family he was gay and had been shunned since. A couple of her grandchildren – one in High School, one in Junior High – were pregnant and alone. A grandson was in a juvenile facility. Her husband had died of a massive heart attack a year ago and her own diagnosis of blood cancer followed shortly after.

“What did I do to make God angry?” she asked me. “I’ve lived a good life, that’s what matters. Why is God doing this to me?”

As I talked with her for longer, I realized that like many people she still considered God as a stern schoolteacher handing out grades – grace had no place in her life; for her, what she had done was what mattered most to God.

The word for that, in theological terms, is legalism. The idea that in our lives is a law to be fulfilled; we optimistically call it ‘God’s law’, but more often than not it conforms to our own cultural ideas of good behavior. This is the image of God as the terrible and frightening judge who crouches beside us, waiting to catch us doing something bad. So we try to be as good as we can.

But the truth of the matter – one of the truths revealed to us in the season of Lent – is that we can never be that good. We sin. It’s part of our own inherited human condition and we can’t help that. What complicates matters even more, though, is that we always seek the power in our own lives to make our own selves righteous.

Consider Peter. He, of them all, is portrayed as the most human of the disciples. Mark actually consistently makes Peter out to look like an idiot.

Immediately before our Gospel picks up today, Jesus asks the disciples the most loaded of questions: “who do you say that I am?” And Peter’s answer rings true for us today: “you are the Messiah.” Now, for Peter, the image of the Messiah is huge. The Messiah is a powerful figure, a great teacher blessed by God and revered by all humanity. This is the figure who is going to save the Hebrew people and defeat the Romans, bring peace and prosperity to the land, and enforce God’s law on earth. For Peter, the Messiah is power.

Peter is soon derailed. Then Jesus began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and on the third day rise again. This is not the image of the Messiah that the people want to hear. They want might and power, strength, and law.

So Peter takes Jesus aside and tells him to keep it quiet. “don’t say things like that!” we can imagine him saying, “the messiah is triumphant! What’s all this about death?” Peter wants to know who’s right, and who’s wrong. In Peter’s world, like ours, ‘good guys’ just don’t die. They get the prize at the final credits. They get the girl, and the glory. That’s why Peter’s confused.

It’s a legal formula: if you’re good, then God loves you, then God blesses you, then nothing bad ever happens to you. That’s why, in Peter’s culture, lepers were unclean. It had nothing to do with a contagious disease because the Israelites knew nothing about that. It had everything to do with the belief that if you were sick, or dying, then you had somehow angered God or not lived your live in a way God wanted. You were judged under God’s law.

So here is Jesus, whom Peter confessed as the Messiah, throwing a wrench into the works. He will suffer. He will be rejected by all those high authorities whom God loves. And he will die. This is not the way that God treats his favorites. Peter didn’t believe it.

Culturally, I don’t think we Christians in society believe it, either. All the successful people – the big spenders, the who’s who – if they go to Church or thank God as they accept their award we called the ‘blessed’. If we feel their wealth is unfairly acquired or that they don’t live what we think are ‘good’ lives, then we speak darkly of divine punishment and damnation. We set our minds not on divine things, but on human things. Law and punishment are things of our human world; they are not of our concern in the world to come.

But so many religious traditions base their organization on the ability to determine who is good and who is not. For some, the law – their legalism – is laid out book by book, brought to the people by their leaders, who in turn take their ideas usually from earlier writers. One of the common themes of is that ‘the church’ has gone astray from God’s law, and God has chosen a new group of people to restore it. Some of these are traditions that claim a ‘holiness code’ – that men and women can live perfect lives to the point where they have their salvation assured through what they do. While the grace of God is important, they acknowledge, what you do is more important. We Lutherans call this works-righteousness.

This is total and complete rejection of the cross of Jesus Christ.

For what does Christ call us to do? Take up your cross, he cries, and follow me, and lose your life. Because then you will find it. Take up the instrument of your own death, and follow Christ. Take up your sin, take up your sorrow, take up all the things that in your life destroy you and worry no longer if they are keeping you from grace. Instead of trying to be perfect in some imagined law until the day your eyes close, die to Jesus Christ. Because then you will find your true life. That is grace.

People struggle with works-righteousness. It’s part of what began the Reformation, when Martin Luther rejected the idea that humans could come to God through their own actions, through their own power. Luther taught that all the power in the relationship belongs to God – God gives grace, through our faith in Jesus Christ. That’s it. Legalism, while important to developing a moral compass, has nothing to do with justification.

I think that legalism has its place in spiritual development, as it does in child development. But perpetual legalism impedes growth and only encourages fear. That woman I talked to, so concerned about her family, was fearful of her final end because she felt she was judged as failing by the people who could see her life was falling apart. But, in the words of Paul, only our faith is reckoned to God as righteousness. Not what we do, not through our works.

To be certain, there is a place to say that our faith can be illustrated by our actions, by how we care for our neighbour. But those actions have nothing to do with our salvation; our salvation is through grace alone.

Paul makes the point that Abraham had more cause than most to boast of what he was doing. He was chosen of God to become the father of many nations – but instead of relying on what he did Abraham instead kept his faith that God would do marvelous things – make him a father again, when he was old and his wife far past the childbearing years.

Paul’s Epistle today reminds us that we are co-inheritors of the promise of Abraham through Abraham’s faith, not through his works or through his physical descendents. Because, Paul points out, if the promise comes through law – through being only the physical descendent of Abraham – then faith is not necessary, and the promise of the inheritance of the world only applies to a few.

The Law is not enough - because we all sin, and fall short of the glory of God. We can not attain the kingdom of God by anything we can do on this world. It all depends on grace, grace justified through faith in Jesus Christ.

This is what Peter occasionally had trouble understanding, what our own faulty humanity keeps throwing in our way. Our inability to understand, our selfishness – that blinds us to the biblical witness that in God’s eyes, we are all – at the same time – sinners and justified. God doesn’t make distinctions between kinds or types of sins. We have all sinned – in thought, word, and deed -- and that takes us away from God. Only through the grace of Jesus Christ are we just.

You can always tells a legalistic tradition by a couple of conjunctions: if, and, but, after, or then.

If you accept Jesus and live a good life, you are saved. But, if you sin, you aren’t any longer. After you sin, then you must ask forgiveness.

Our Lutheran heritage instead favors a few others: because, for, while.

While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Because of this, we are justified; we are saved.

No ifs, ands, or buts.

We all sin, and yet we are loved. This is the greatest message that we can share with the world, this is the message to bring to others – by grace alone we are made right with God -- because this is the faith that makes a claim on our lives.

Amen.