Showing posts with label Romans 4. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Romans 4. Show all posts

Monday, May 04, 2020

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Infant Baptism

[This didn't make the final cut into tomorrow's sermon on Holy Baptism.]

The Augsburg Confession is emphatic in saying that it's Biblical and right to baptize infants.

We respectfully disagree with our Christian friends who say that because infants can’t understand Baptism, they shouldn’t be baptized.

Let’s be honest: No human being fully understands Baptism.

And understanding Baptism is beside the point anyway. I don’t understand why my wife loves me. But I don’t question it. I gratefully receive her love for me.

God’s adoption of human beings, made possible through Christ, can’t be explained, only received.

If, in Baptism, God makes a covenant to be our God, why would the Church dare to stand in His way? Jesus told Nicodemus that we must all be born anew of water and the Spirit. He also said that the wind (using the same word translated as Spirit), blows where it will and we have no control over it. For Lutherans, obstructing the ministry of the Holy Spirit to create faith in Christ by denying Holy Baptism to infants, is not an option.

In Romans 4, the apostle Paul compares Holy Baptism to circumcision, the ceremony in ancient days that every Jewish boy underwent at eight days of age. Through circumcision, God claimed children as part of His people.

Today, Baptism is the port of entry for God into the life of a child and for a child into the Kingdom of God.

The child, of course, will one day either reject Christ or receive Him by faith. There are two parts to the covenant of Holy Baptism, God's and ours. God's part is to impute the blessings of Christ's death and resurrection. Our part is to repent and believe in Jesus Christ as the way, and the truth, and the life, the only means by which we receive eternal life with God (John 14:6).

But when the power of God is unleashed in a life through Holy Baptism, God can help children and adults follow Christ, even when the old sinful self, the devil, and the world are pulling them (all of us) in other directions.

Adults who were never baptized come to faith in Christ by the power of God’s Holy Spirit, of course. Thank God for that miracle!

I love it every time God gives me the privilege of presiding over the Baptism of an adult who, through the proclamation of God's Word about Jesus by friends, family, and others, has come to faith in Christ and wants to submit to the crucifixion of the old self and the rising of the new self that happens in Holy Baptism.

But I also love it every time I'm able to participate in the Baptism of an infant. That's because every child who is baptized has a "leg up" on the life God wants to give all of us as the Holy Spirit is unleashed in a life, God claims a child as His, and works for their good, here and in eternity.

The Church is commissioned to baptize. We must not withhold this gift from anyone!

Friday, November 04, 2011

The One People of God

Christians who are called supersessionists believe that the Gentile believers of Jesus in the Church have superseded the Jews as the people of God.

But that's not what the New Testament teaches.

It says that all--Jew and Gentile--are called to repent and believe in God's ultimate self-disclosure, the Messiah, Jesus and all be part of God's one people. Joseph L. Mangina gets at this in his very fine commentary on Revelation 7:
It is the unanimous witness of the New Testament that the church is Israel (e.g., Galatians 6:16; 1 Corinthians 10; Ephesians 2:12, 19; 3:6; 1 Peter 2:9-10), the same elected and beloved people of God who were delivered from Egypt, though now under the conditions of the messianic age and with the addition of the Gentiles to Abraham's children after the flesh.
Read all the linked passages above to see the basis of Mangina's argument.

As Paul, a Jew who believed in Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of God's plans for the humanity, as the Messiah, and as God-enfleshed writes, that beginning with Israel's patriarch-founder Abraham, righteousness--that is, a right relationship with God--has always been a matter of faith and not of ethnicity, lineage, or the performance of religious duties:
For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise void...For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who the faith of Abraham...in the presence of the God in Whom he believed, Who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist... (Romans 4:13-17)
Revelation 7:9-17 is one of the Biblical texts for All Saints' Sunday, coming up this weekend.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Second Pass at This Sunday's Bible Lesson (February 17, 2008)

[The first pass, which also explains what these "passes" are about, can be found here.]

(General Comments, continued)
5. Psalm 121: This is among the Songs of Ascent or pilgrim psalms that were used by the ancient Israelites as they climbed the holy mount, Mount Zion in Jerusalem, site of the temple. These psalms comprise a whole "book" of the Psalms, which includes Psalms 120 to 134.

6. This is a frequently quoted passage of Scripture. As Artur Weiser notes in his fantastic commentary on the Psalms:
This psalm produces by the simplicity of its language and piety a deep impression...It does not show us the bold soaring of a man's [sic] faith to the high places where storms rage; it does not portray man's struggles and inner tensions--but with the calm and comforting assurance of an unshaken trust it takes its course in a peaceful and straightforward manner. In this inward stability lies its strength...
In other words, this psalm shows us another face of the same theme running through the other lessons for this coming Sunday: faith, trust in God.

7. But faith is not about us. It's always about God. God creates trust within us and He nurtures it. It is the Lord Who helps, the Lord Who keeps, and the Lord Who protects. Faith is not some grit-your-teeth-convince-yourself-to-believe phenomenon. It's the response of those who, like Abraham have done nothing to earn God's regard but have the desire to trust in God. God turns that desire and turns it into faith. Faith is the gift of a gracious God to those who put down their dukes of resistance, acknowledging God's greatness and the legitimacy of His judgment on our sin, and allow God to manufacture faith within them.

8. Romans 4:1-5, 13-17: Romans was Paul's magnum opus as a theologian and evangelist. He wrote it as he prepared to visit Rome, where he intended to minister to the young church there and then move on to Spain to present Christ and establish new churches.

In the first three chapters of the letter to the Roman church, Paul said that adherence to "the law," by which he meant the laws presented by Moses, could not save a person from sin and death, couldn't give a person everlasting fellowship wth God. One function of the law is to show us our sinfulness and, because death is the consequence of sin, our tragic distance from God. As Martin Luther said, the first function of the law is to drive us to despair. It's a mirror that shows us that, as we Lutherans often say on Sunday mornings, "we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves, [that] we have not loved [God] with our whole heart, we have not love our neighbors as ourselves..."

But God doesn't want to leave us in despair. His desire is for us to turn to Him and find in Him forgiveness and the power to turn around (repent), to walk again with God. A passage in the New Testament, also used frequently in our Lutheran liturgy, tells us:
If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (First John 1:9)

2. In our lesson, Paul then shows that even Abraham, the great patriarch of God's people, the Israelites, the first recipients of God's laws, salvation and reconciliation with God never was a matter of obedience to the law. It was always a matter of faith in God and in God's promises. Even Abraham, he asserts, was not saved by his works--the good works of obedience to the law--but by faith. Look at some of the way that Eugene Peterson, Presbyterian Bible scholar, pastor, and poet renders Paul's words in his masterful rendering of the Bible called The Message:
If Abraham, by what he did for God, got God to approve him, he could certainly have taken credit for it. But the story we're given is a God-story, not an Abraham-story. What we read in Scripture is, "Abraham entered into what God was doing for him, and that was the turning point. He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own."

If you're a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don't call your wages a gift. But if you see that the job is too big for you, that it's something only God can do, and you trust him to do it—you could never do it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked—well, that trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set right with God, by God. Sheer gift.
The path to faith in God is comprised in part of recognizing that we cannot live on our own. Before God can set us free from sin, God must first crush us with the awareness that on our own, we can do nothing. (But with the God we meet in Jesus Christ, we can do all things.) We need God.

Nor can we ever hope to be good enough to merit eternal life with God. We turn to God for our salvation. God gives life and God gives the new life to those who trustingly turn to Him. We all need new life from God because we are all sinners doomed to death without God's grace.

This is a crushing blow for our egos. But once we've come to terms with the realities about the people we see in the mirror, it comes finally, not as a crushing blow, but as comfort and power, hope and joy, and life with God that lasts forever!

God is the implacable foe of our sin. God is the resolute lover of our souls. Both statements are true.

God stands ready to give us forgiveness and life. The question always is: Will we let Him? Abraham (formerly Abram) believed in God and God's promises and God counted Abram's trust as righteousness. We are saved from our unlawfulness not by obeying a law we can never obey completely, but by throwing ourselves into the arms of the God Who loves us completely and lived it out (and died it out) on the cross.

This leads us to that greatest of all Biblical passages, one that will appear in this Sunday's Gospel lesson:
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. (John 3:16)
[More later, I hope.]

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

First Pass at This Sunday's Bible Lessons (February 17, 2008)

[Each week, in anticipation of worship on the following Sunday, I present these "passes," looks at the Bible lessons appointed for the week. I write these pieces to help the people who worship with us at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, to prepare for worship. But I hope that, because we use the lessons appointed for the Church Year, that others will get some benefit from them as well.]

The Bible Lessons:
Genesis 12:1-4a (through "as the Lord had told him")
Psalm 121
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17

The Prayer of the Day:
O God, our leader and guide, in the waters of baptism you bring us to new birth to live as your children. Strengthen our faith in your promises, that by your Spirit we may lift up your life to all the world through your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

General Comments:
1. Last Sunday's lesson from Genesis told us that humanity fell into sin by its failure to obey God or resist temptation. This Sunday's lesson from Genesis moves us to the beginning of God's project of restoring fallen humanity to a relationship with Him. In the Gospel lesson for this Sunday, John 3:1-17, the culmination of God's salvation "project," Jesus Christ tells Nicodemus and us that freedom from sin and its chief consequence, death, belong to those who believe (literally trust) Jesus Christ.

2. The great theme of the texts from Genesis, Romans, and John for this Sunday is FAITH. We are saved from sin and death not because of what we do, but because we trust the God Who first gave the promise of salvation to Abram (later renamed Abram) some four-thousand years ago. We believe in the God Who, in Christ, has done everything necessary for us to be acceptable to God.

3. This Sunday marks the first of four consecutive weeks in this Lenten season in which our Gospel lessons will be from the Gospel of John.

4. Genesis 12:1-4a: This marks the beginning of the second of two great sections of Genesis.

The first section, chapters 1 to 11 provided an account of the beginnings of the entire human race, its fall into sin, and its inability to break free of its bondage to sin.

In this second section, comprised of chapters 12 to 50, we read how God began the project of saving the whole human race through one family, starting with Abram and Sarai (later Abraham and Sarah), moving through their descendants. Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and his wives are the patriarchs and matriarchs of God's people, Israel. That people, meant to be a light to all the nations of the world, will, in turn become the cradle of the Savior "from above": Jesus.

Verse-by-Verse Comments on Genesis 12:1-4a
1Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.
(1) This section of Genesis, as was true of Genesis 1:1, begins with God speaking. Abram, the nomadic son of Terah, is told by God to leave his nomadic ways and settle in a place that God will show him.

(2) Could Abram have ignored this instruction from God. Of course. But his "yes" to God's command is an act of faith. Faith, in the Biblical sense, entails more than mere intellectual assent. As we saw from the Genesis and Matthew lessons of last week, even the serpent/devil, agrees that God exists. (James says that even the demons believe in God's existence and His essence.) But, do we trust God?

In last Sunday's two temptation accounts, first Adam and Eve and then Jesus, were challenged to trust God even when it would be easier not to, even when the tempter twisted God's words to make it seem that an act of self-willed non-trust would be an act of trust.

Here, Abram, a man who could have comfortably stayed with his extended family and the life he'd always known, trusted God.

We can't really take any credit for our faith and neither could Abram. Faith is a gift from God which only belongs to those who let God into their wills. In a sense, faith is putting our dukes down and letting God be God. It's ceasing to pretend that we are in control or know best. And, as a reading of Abram's life story presented in Genesis demonstrates, to trust in God through all the ups and downs of life is a struggle. God's gifts are free. But, as Abram, who left his comfortable past behind, shows us, it will, in many ways, cost us our lives.

2I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.
(1) God is making a covenant with Abram. In ancient Near Eastern cultures, it was common for a conquering king to make covenants with conquered peoples or other kings. "I will provide you protection," they might say, "In return, you will provide me with tax monies, soldiers, agricultural goods."

Here, God is declaring Himself to be Abram's Deity. But notice that unlike the covenants of earthly kings, God provides blessings. He promises that Abram, who, along with is wife Sarai, is childless, will become "a great nation" and that he "will be a blessing," which, through Jesus he clearly is. God exacts no price from Abram. God's blessings are free gifts that cannot be earned. All Abram needs to do is trust in God and God's promises.

3I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
(1) The third segment of this verse seems to parallel the last promise of the preceding verse. Abraham is, above all, to be a blessing to others. The same is true of we Christians. In his first letter, the apostle Peter writes:
...you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. (1 Peter 2:9)
God saves us because He loves us. But He doesn't save us just for us. He also saves us so that we can throw out the lifeline--faith in Jesus Christ--to others.

4aSo Abram went, as the Lord had told him...
(1) It's difficult to imagine a simpler, more matter-of-fact way of describing what was a momentous move, momentous for Abram and his wife and momentous for the history of the world. Think of it; Salvation's story began when God told one man to go and that one man, along with his wife, trusted in God enough to move. Every great movement of God begins when one person trusts God when God beckons her or him to move out of their comfort zones.

[More tomorrow, I hope.]