Grace, Response, Promise: The Fifth Sunday after Trinity (July 9, 2023)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

You know what constantly amazes me? The fact that God would save us. God doesn’t need anything outside himself. He doesn’t have to save us at all. But he does anyways simply because he loves us. Salvation is a mystery. In fact, this mystery (the Latin word is a sacramentum) Is so profound that, at times, it feels like there are tensions in the Scripture regarding our salvation. In Ephesians 2:8-9, St. Paul says, “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.” In James 2:24, St. James says, “Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.” Are these verses in contradiction? If so, who is right, St. Paul or St. James? The answer, of course, is that they are both correct because they are both God’s word. St. Paul and St. James are both picking up on different facets of the mystery of salvation and our participation in it. What is the goal of our salvation? Last week, we talked about how our salvation is not just to be saved from. Salvation is not just about fire insurance, it’s not just about avoiding hell. Salvation is also not about nostalgia, it’s not about going back to the way things used to be. We’re not going back to Eden. Rather, salvation is about our wholeness, it’s about becoming who we are supposed to be, it’s about living lives that are perpetual acts of worship to God. To that end, our Old Testament reading this morning is from Genesis 17 where God reaffirms the promise he made to Abram in our reading from last week. And when we look at this reading, we find out a lot about salvation, namely we see three important movements: grace, response, and promise.

The first movement is grace. Grace is a word that we use a lot, but it means unmerited favor. It is, as Thomas Aquinas defines it, a free gift of God that perfects our human nature. We need grace because we are stuck in a spiral away from God towards our own destruction. Grace is the only thing that keeps us from that destruction. And we see this in the story of Abraham: did Abram come to the realization that he needed to leave on his own? No, it required God to speak to him and tell him to. Could Abram create life in his wife Sarai where no life was able to grow? No, it required God’s intervention. Today’s reading emphasizes that God makes the first move on us; anything good we do, any movement toward God we make is always in response to him. And so when God moves towards us, we know he has the power to accomplish what we cannot. How does God introduce himself to Abram at the beginning of their encounter? He calls himself El Shaddai, it probably literally means something like “God of the mountains” but we often translate it as “God Almighty.” Only God was powerful enough to save Noah from the flood, only God could pull Abram out of the chaos after Babel. The human situation isn’t something we can solve without God. In this way, Paul is right in emphasizing the need for salvation through grace and not works. It’s important to remember that Paul was writing to a church that was racially divided, with Jews on one side and gentiles on the other. When Paul argues against salvation by works, he’s referring to works of the Law, those Jewish identity markers like circumcision, dietary restrictions, and the sacrificial system. Being Jewish can’t save someone; what saves us is the faithfulness of Jesus, the object of our faith. So, Abram’s story reminds us that El Shaddai always makes the first move towards us, not because of what we’ve done, but because of his love for us.

But this leads us to the second movement in salvation: our human response. Salvation by faith is not an excuse not to do. Quite the opposite. This is one of the first things that God tells Abram: “Walk before me, and be thou perfect.” Interestingly, the Abraham story is exactly what St. James appeals to to support his vision of the active Christian life: James 2:21-22 “Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar? Seest thou how faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith made perfect?” Here, the term “perfect” possesses a positive “wholeness.” When we’re baptized, the seeds of faith, hope, and love are planted in us by God’s grace. But they grow when we water them and cultivate them by what we do. And so salvation requires a response, which is the facet St. James focuses on.

The third and final movement in salvation is promise. This passage from Genesis 17 contains the reaffirmation of the promise God made to Abram in Genesis 12 that we read last week: God promises Abram a great nation and land. But there are a few things God adds to the original promise. For example, he gives Abram a new name: Abraham. Abram meant “exalted father”; “Abraham” is “father of many nations.” God has given Abraham a new identity. Further, God adds a promise that “kings shall come out of thee.” This connects Abraham to King David and the covenant God makes with David in 2 Samuel 7. But more importantly, it connects Abraham to Jesus, the true King. Finally, God informs Abraham of the eternality of this covenant Genesis 17:7: “And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant.” This means that God’s actions bookend human action—God moves, we respond, and God urges us forward by reminding us of his promises.

In 1 Corinthians 13, St. Paul lists three virtues that we call the theological virtues: “now abideth faith, hope, charity.” These virtues distill the essence of salvation. Faith is the trust that we have in God when he makes the move towards us. Love is what motivates us to respond to God’s command with our obedience. And we have hope as we anticipate God delivering on those promises that he gives us. Salvation is a mystery that we’ll never fully be able to wrap our minds around. That God saves us at all because of his great love for us is a mind-boggling realization. But in the face of this great mystery, Abraham gives us a blueprint: when God gives you a promise, like the one he made you at your baptism, it’s best to believe him and cling to that promise in faith. Even more, you should live your life in light of that promise: “We love him because he first loved us.” It’s important to remember that Jesus says, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” As we progress, we watch and we wait for God to be faithful to his promises, just like he was faithful to Abraham.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.