The Impossible Possibility

Romans 3.1-2, 10-20

Years ago, I was at a neighborhood coffee shop, sitting at a little round table and studying the scripture passage two parents had selected for their son’s funeral service. At the table to my left was a twenty-something guy with earbuds in and an iPad out and a man-purse slung across his shoulder. At the table to my right were two middle-aged women. They had a Bible and a couple of Christian bestsellers on the table between them. And a copy of the local newspaper, the Mt. Vernon Gazette.

The first thing I noticed though was their perfume. It was so strong I could taste it in my coffee. In my defense, I don’t think I could properly be accused of eavesdropping considering just how loud the two women were talking. Like they wanted to be heard. Their “Bible study” or whatever it had been was apparently over because the woman by the window closed the Bible and then commented out loud, “I really do need to get a new Bible. This one’s worn out completely. I’ve just read it so much.”

Not to be outdone, the woman across from her, parried, saying just as loudly,

“I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t spend time in the Word every day. I don’t know what people do without the Lord.”

“They do whatever they want,” her friend by the window said.

And I said— to myself— “Geez, I’ve sat next to two Flannery O’Connor characters.”

I assumed that since they were actually reading the Bible there was no way they attended a United Methodist church, but, just to make sure, I gave them a double-take to check they were not members of my flock.

They had perfectly layered hair flecked with frosted highlights. They had nails polished to a gleam, and they both wore diamonds bigger and more indulgent than a Venti mocha.

“Baptists,” I thought to myself.

The ladies continued chatting over their lattes as the woman by the window flipped through the Mt. Vernon Gazette. She stopped at a page and shook her head in disapproval.

Whether she actually said “Tsk, tsk, tsk” or I imagined it I can’t be sure.

The other woman looked down at the paper and said, “Oh, I heard about that. He was only twenty-three.”

“Did you hear it was an overdose?” the woman by the window said like a kid on Christmas morning.

And that’s when I knew about whom they were gossiping.

I knew because I was sitting next to them writing that young man’s funeral sermon.

“Did he know the Lord?” the woman asked.

“Probably not, considering the lifestyle,”  the woman by the window said without pause.

They went on gossiping from there.

They used words like “shameful.”

They did not, I noticed— I was waiting to count them— use words like sad or tragic or unfortunate.

It wasn’t long before the circumference of their conversation spun its way to encompass things like “the culture” and “what’s wrong with society today,” how parents need to pray their kids into the straight and narrow, and how “this is what happens when our country turns its back on God.”

After a while they came to a lull in their conversation and the woman opposite the window, the one with the gaudy bedazzled cross on her neck, gazed down at the Mt. Vernon Gazette and wondered out loud, “What do you say such a family? What do you say at such a funeral?”

And without even looking at them, and with a volume that surprised me, I said, “The same damn thing that’ll be said at your funeral.”

They didn’t even blush.

But they did look at me awkwardly.

“I hardly think so,” the woman by the window said, sizing me up and not looking very impressed with the sum of what she saw.

And so I laid my cards down, “Well, I probably won’t be preaching your funerals, but I will be preaching his funeral.”

And then I pointed at her theatrically worn Bible, the one resting on top of her copy of A Heart Like His by Beth Moore, and I said, If you actually took that seriously you’d shut up right now.”

---

“As it is written:
‘There is no one who is righteous, not even one;
there is no one who has understanding,
     there is no one who seeks God.
All have turned aside, together they have become worthless;
   there is no one who shows kindness,
     there is not even one.’
‘Their throats are opened graves;
   they use their tongues to deceive.’
‘The venom of vipers is under their lips.’
‘Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.’
‘Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery are in their paths,
and the way of peace they have not known.’
‘There is no fear of God before their eyes.’

Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God.”

Translation:

Don’t confuse your seat in church with a place in God’s favor.

Your butt may be in a pew but your ass is in a sling.

Luther summarizes the concluding portion of Paul’s diatribe with his characteristic candor, “You have not! You cannot! You must!.” When Paul arraigns this concatenation of Old Testament accusations against us— against all of us— a question logically follows. If all of God’s oughts only declare cannot, then why does the Lord issue the commandments at all? Why has God put righteousness so far beyond our grasp that instead we are all now under the power of sin? If the law cannot succeed in its purpose of making us righteous, then why did the Lord Jesus deliver it to his people Israel? For that matter, why does God elect a particular people at all?

What’s the advantage in being a Jew?

In his book, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising, Emotional Sense, the British novelist Francis Spufford attempts to explain the profoundly irreligious claim at the heart of Paul’s gospel.

He writes:

“There is a crucial point at which Christianity parts company with the other two monotheisms. Christianity isn’t interested in coming up with a set of sustainable rules for living. Jewish laws of behavior and Muslim laws of behavior may be demanding to keep at times, but they can be kept. That’s the point of them. In Judaism and Islam, you don’t have to be a saint to know that you are managing to be an adequately good woman, an adequately good man. This  produces a moralized landscape in which the good people can be told from the bad people. Christianity does something different. It makes frankly impossible demands (“Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.”). And that’s not all. Christianity also makes what you mean by your behavior all-important. You could pauperize yourself, care for lepers and laugh all day long in the face of futures markets, and it still wouldn’t count, if you did it for the wrong reasons.

But notice the consequence of having an ideal of behavior not sized for human lives: everyone fails. Really everyone. No one only means well, no one means well all the time. Looked at from this perspective, suddenly in its utter lack of realism Christianity becomes very realistic indeed, intelligently resigned to our vast array of imperfections, and much more interested in what we can do to live with them…Christianity maintains no register of clean and unclean…So of all things, Christianity isn’t supposed to be about gathering up the good people and excluding the bad people for the very simple reason that there aren’t any good people. Not that can be securely designated as such. What Christianity is supposed to be is an international league of the guilty. Not all guilty of the same things, or in the same way, or to the same degree, but enough for us to recognize each other.”

---

The woman by the coffeeshop window actually did shut her mouth for a moment, clearly trying to figure out how this had become a three person conversation.

And then the truth struck her, “Have you been eavesdropping on us?”

“Of course not,” I lied.

No one who is righteous, not even one.

“Why don’t you mind your own business,” she scolded me.

“But that’s just it,” I replied, justifying myself, “it is my business. I’m a preacher and so I couldn’t help but notice that I had two Pharisees sitting next to me.”

Bear in mind this was some time ago, back before life made me the wise, patient pastor I am today.

The woman narrowed her eyes at my dig and she lowered her voice, "Listen, young man. Don’t mock our faith. We just finished doing a Bible study before you sat down.”

“Apparently you didn’t retain very much,” I mumbled.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked with mustered outrage.

“It means you’re no better than that guy over there,” I argued, pointing to a homeless guy who was nursing his coffee and speaking passionately to an invisible friend.

“In fact,” I added, “you’re not good. Not at all. And neither am I. None of us is in a position to judge anyone else, and someone with a worn-out Bible should already know it. In fact, it’s not an obscure point. It’s part and parcel with the gospel. When Paul makes the point, he’s able to pile up passages from scripture.

I thought that I’d just played my trump card.

The end.

“Well, pastor, isn’t that exactly what you’re doing right now?” she asked like a district attorney leading a dim witness.

“Uh, what do you mean?” I pretended not to understand.

“Well, it sounds like you’ve been eavesdropping on us for the last fifteen  minutes and judging us this whole time.” 

I felt myself blush.

My scalp broke out in a sweat.

My voice cracked.

“I mean, not the WHOLE time,” I mumbled.

“And I bet you started judging us before you even heard a word we had spoken. I bet you decided to eavesdrop on us because you had already looked at the two of us and made judgments about us.”

“I did not.”

“Maybe you’re the one who should shut his mouth,” she said, “I can recognize a lie when I hear one.”

And then she paused, nodded her head ruefully, and confessed, “God knows I’ve told enough of them myself.”

I didn’t respond, unnerved by my resemblance I now saw in her.

A moment later she added, "I’m sorry I was gossiping about that boy who died in the car accident.”

“Me too,” her friend added, sipping her coffee.

“I apologize as well,” I stammered, “This funeral just has me— you know— feeling my feelings.”

They both nodded. Then she turned her chair towards me and she pushed their table so that it was touching mine, and then she opened her Bible.

“Rather than eavesdrop on us,” she said, “Why don’t you let us help you. We both have sons about that boy's age. As mothers, we know what sort of promises we’d want you to hand over.”

But such recognition cannot be all there is to it, can it? Surely, Christianity is meant to be more than simply the international league of the guilty. Otherwise, what’s the point of Christianity? If you are no better and no better off than an unbeliever, then why bother?

What advantage is there in being a Christian?

The opening and closing verses of Paul’s final indictment both register the same point; specifically, just as all are under the power of sin, none are righteous. Paul’s diatribe therefore ends having elicited the very same obvious question with which the passage begins, “Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision?”

The two questions are in fact a single question given how crucial circumcision was to the identity of Jewish men and women. Paul raises this question as the predictable response to his destabilization of Jewish identity in the preceding chapter. If their religious identity does not safeguard them from God’s wrath and judgment, then does the Jew not enjoy any privilege whatsoever?

To disturb the distinction between Jew and gentile, as Paul has done in chapter two, is to raise a question about God, who called Israel into being and made promises to her.

Is there any advantage in being a Jew?

The preceding logic as well as the conclusion of the diatribe would appear to compel a negative answer. What Paul has just said about the impartiality of God’s judgment and the permeability of Jew and Greek would seem to require the conclusion that there is no advantage to being religious whatsoever.

Nevertheless!

The answer Paul provides is emphatically positive. And it is not a response Paul’s readers would have anticipated based on the argument thus far. Paul answers with a phrase he does not use elsewhere, logia tou Theo.

The particular advantage for the Jew and, by extension, the particular advantage for the Christian is that they have been “entrusted with the sayings of God.”

• None are righteous, not one.

• But God’s people alone have been gifted God’s word.

The passive voice in verse two is not incidental to Paul’s point. God is the active agent. The scriptures are neither our possession to use as we like nor are they a gift we have earned; they are instead the commission God entrusts to us for the sake of the world. Just so, this advantage Paul highlights is but the positive side of the admonition he levies against the Corinthians, “Woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel!” That is, “being entrusted with Scripture is a distinctive advantage, and it is also a fearsome responsibility.” As Frederick Dale Bruner notes, the phrase logia tou Theo, the sayings of God, refers not simply to the Bible generally but specifically to the promises God speaks in the scriptures. In other words, we may not have any righteousness to boast of over and against an unbeliever, but we do have promises to hand over to a hurting world.

In 1916, the Swiss pastor Karl Barth watched the world descend into wars as unnecessary as they were unimaginably horrific. Sound familiar? Barth saw too how political institutions and its leaders failed to rise and meet the dangerous moment. Sound familiar? And Barth witnessed how western culture’s educated elites— those who had taught him— were acting as accomplices to lies rather than as advocates for the truth. Sound familiar?

So Barth determined to revisit Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. In his commentary on this passage, Barth writes:

“However ambiguous and questionable the position of [the believer], he or she, nevertheless, performs a distinct and necessary function as a symptom of the will and action of God. Set in the midst of human life, Christian believers bear witness to reliance upon God and to the advent of His Kingdom. By their recollection of the impossible (i.e., the incarnation) they are themselves the proof that God stands within the realm of possibility, not as one possibility among others, but as the impossible possibility. The sayings of God, of which they are the possessors and guardians, are the comprehensible signs of the incomprehensible truth that, though the world is incapable of redemption, yet there is a redemption for the world.”

We are are all under the power of sin— same as anyone else, yes.

But uniquely we are symptoms of the will and work of God for the world.

To ourselves we can credit no righteousness.

But we have been entrusted promises to speak.

There is yet a redemption for the world.

---

Last week for the Aspen Institute, the conservative columnist David Brooks delivered a talk entitled “World On Fire: The Root Causes of Populism, Authoritarianism and The Whole Global Mess.” Brooks began by diagnosing our present malady, saying:

"The Ipsos Organization, a British firm, asked people in twenty-eight countries about certain attitudes. And we [Americans] are now absolutely typical of the world. Our pessimism is typical. Fifty-nine percent of Americans say they believe our country is in decline compared to fifty-eight percent of people around the world. Sixty-six percent of Americans say the country needs a strong leader to take it back from the rich and the powerful compared to sixty-three percent worldwide. Forty percent of Americans say we need a strong leader who will break the rules compared to forty-one percent worldwide.

There are two things to take from this.

The first thing is we've gotten a lot sadder as a society.

Rising suicide rates, rising mental health problems. The number of people who say they have no close personal friends is up fourfold since 2000. The number of people not in a romantic relationship is up by a third since 2000.

When you get sadder, you get meaner.

I could give you all these mean statistics, gun violence, hate crimes but the one that gets to me, it used to be two-thirds of Americans give to charity. Now fewer than half of Americans give to charity.

We've become sadder and meaner.

And that's deep in the fabric of society.

And this negativity has a political valence.

On the right, it manifests as catastrophism, where the general theme you hear over and over is “this country is on the verge of total destruction.”

On the left, it shows up in the form of mental health problems and depression. Fifty-seven percent of progressive young people say they report feeling negative mental health.

And so my underlying point is that the global crisis of illiberalism is not just about politics. In fact, a lot of people are trying to use politics as a form of social therapy because we are undergoing a global spiritual recession.”

We are undergoing a global spiritual recession.

That is—

From a purely social science perspective, what the world desperately needs is a particular people who have been entrusted with promises only God can promise.

What the world needs is not a people who spout still more political talking points.

What the world needs is a people who so trust the promises with which they have been entrusted that— though are not themselves good—  they hand over the goods.

Promises like:

You are mine. I will never let you go.

Promises like:

You are fearfully and wonderfully made.

Promises like:

This world we’ve made in our image— God’s going to turn it upside down.

Promises like:

The Lord will judge lawless men and rectify every wrong.

Promises like:

A better world is on the way.

---

Adam was the dead son’s name.

A star athlete in high school, he had been using and drinking the night he wound his Dodge Charger around a tree.

The two mothers in the coffeeshop, after searching the concordance in the back of their Bibles, suggested that I preach from the first letter of John, “What we will be has not yet been made known. But when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”

The woman who had called me out, tapped her finger on the dog-eared page of the epistle and conferred it upon me.

“You take this promise here,” she charged me, “And you make sure his mother knows that this means her baby boy has more life ahead of him than she can even imagine.”

“What’s more,” her friend added, “if her son’s going to be like Jesus, then that means he’ll finally be free of the monkey on his back.”

About five hundred people gathered for Adam’s service of death and resurrection, including those two ladies.

We sang “Amazing Grace.”

We read from the sayings of God.

And I handed over the goods.

After the funeral, I was walking past the receiving line, which started at the altar and snaked its way to the other end of the building, when one of Adam’s friends grabbed my elbow and said to me, “All that stuff you said up there about the future— all those promises you made to us— where did you come up with all that?”

“I didn’t come up with it,” I said, “It was entrusted to me.”