Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 12, 2006

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

There is an assumption among us, I think, about human nature and human behavior that colors the way we think about our relationship with God. We, that is, our mainstream American culture, assume that people are naturally inclined to behave badly. We assume that people will steal, cheat, hurt, and even kill other people unless they face quite certain punishment for bad behavior and, less importantly, reward for good behavior. Or at least we think that’s true of everyone else even if we don’t think it’s true of us. This is, for example, one primary assumption behind our system of criminal law--I won’t call it a criminal justice system. The function of the criminal law is to provide a punishment for people who transgress what society has decided are the minimum required standards of social behavior. We may call the people who run that big institution on the hill down Main Street the Department of Corrections, but they are for the most part really the department of punishments. That’s how we assume people function, on the basis of punishment and reward. It’s also the way we train dogs.

This way of understanding human behavior--the human as dog theory we could call it--has affected the way Christians have seen God and the relationship of humans to God throughout most of Christian history. We tend to see God as the great dispenser of rewards and punishments. Behave yourself, which usually means something like obey the Ten Commandments, and God will reward you by letting you into heaven when you die. Misbehave, as by breaking one of those Commandments, and God will punish you by sending you to hell when you die. There’s also a popular variation on that theme particularly in Protestant circles that goes: Believe the right things about Jesus and God will reward you by letting you into heaven when you die. Don’t believe the right things about Jesus and God will punish you by sending you to hell when you die. Either way, the assumption is that people just aren’t going to do the right thing apart from a system of cosmic rewards and punishments. Remove the threat in particular and we’ll become wild dogs, tearing at each other’s throats.

I’ve said here before, and I’ll say again now, that Christianity properly understood has a better way. That better way is called grace, and it functions very differently from systems of reward and punishment. Just how it works we see in this morning’s passage from Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians. There, in a famous passage that is one of the Biblical bases of the Protestant Reformation, Paul uses the story of Abraham, part of which we heard in our reading this morning from Genesis, to make his foundational point that we are saved by grace through faith and not through the works of the law. To get at what Paul is talking about, let’s look first at our passage about Abraham.

There, as we heard, God appeared to Abraham, then called Abram, and made a covenant with him. Abram was to walk before God and be blameless--we don’t need to worry here too much about what that meant--and God would make him the ancestor of a multitude of nations. Then God changed Abram’s name to Abraham and his wife Serai’s name to Sarah. It’s important too to look at what the lectionary selection that we heard leaves out between God’s promise of an everlasting covenant with the change of Abram’s name and the change of Serai’s name, which comes several verses later. In those omitted verses, among other things, God gives the command that all the males of Abraham’s household were to be circumcised as a sign in the flesh of the new covenant with God.

Paul makes a great deal out of sequence of these events. His point is that God’s grace came to Abraham, that is, God entered into a covenant with Abraham, before he had given any commandments of the law. Abraham received God’s grace without obeying the law, because at the time Abraham received God’s grace the law did not yet exist. God’s promise to Abraham to make him the father of multitudes comes before God has given Abraham any laws to obey or to break. Paul’s point is that Abraham did not receive God’s grace because he obeyed the law. Rather, he obeyed the law, which came later, because he had first received God’s grace, because he had already trusted God and God’s promises. Grace comes first. Our obedience comes second, not as precondition to grace but as a consequence of that grace. That’s the lesson Paul draws out of the story of Abraham. And that is indeed how God’s grace works. It’s hard for us to grasp, perhaps, but God’s system of grace is not a system of rewards and punishments. Grace is God’s free gift to us in and through Jesus Christ. We can’t do anything to earn it. The great good news is that we don’t have to. God offers it to us quite apart from our behavior, without regard to whether or not we have earned it. Our acting as God wants us to act comes as our response to grace, not as a desperate and futile attempt to earn it.

Let me try to illustrate the difference between God’s system of grace and human systems of reward and punishment by looking at the relationship between a parent and a child. All of us, or at least all of us who are parents, think it is a good thing for a child to obey her parents; but let me suggest that there are--in theory at least--two ways in which a child can obey his parents. The first way is out of a combination of fear and calculated self-interest. The child thinks, even if wholly or in part subconsciously: I have to do what Mommy and Daddy--or whatever parent or parents the child has--want because if I don’t he, she, or they will punish me. They might even hurt me. I’m afraid of that, so I’ll try to behave the way they want. And if I do, maybe they won’t punish me, and if I’m really good maybe they’ll buy me that toy I want, or even take me on a vacation to Disneyland. That’s a reward and punishment system, and it is grounded in fear and selfishness.

There is, again at least in theory, another way the child can obey the parents. The other way is out of love. The child thinks, again perhaps only subconsciously: Mommy and Daddy--or whoever the parental unit or units are--love me. They take care of me. They get me everything I need, and sometimes they buy me toys and even take me on a vacation to Disneyland. They love me (even when sometimes I mess up and disappoint them or make them mad), and I love them. What can I do to show them that I know they love me and that I love them? I know. They’re always telling me and showing me the right way to behave. I’ll listen to them. I’ll try to behave the way they want me to. Maybe I’ll draw them a picture to put on the refrigerator, but mostly I’ll try to be the kind of person they want me to be, because I love them. Or maybe it’s more subtle than that. Maybe it’s more like this: My parents teach me and show me what’s right, so I want to do it just because I know it’s right. This is how a system of grace works. It is grounded in love..

Now, I’ll grant you that real live children probably can’t live entirely according to my second option, the grace option. Maybe some fear of losing the parent’s love or of punishment and some selfish manipulation are unavoidable for real human children. And indeed, we parents know how easy it is to resort to punishment and reward as a way to get the behavior we want from our children--not that it always works. But the important point is that we have these two options in our relationship with God too. We can see God as the manipulator of a cosmic punishment and reward system, or we can see God as the dispenser of unconditional grace. We can relate to God out of fear and calculated self-interest, or we can respond to God’s grace in love.

Some degree of reward and punishment may be unavoidable for children, but what’s moral about relating to God out of fear and self-interest? And why do we want to relate to God as children, at least in this sense? That same Apostle Paul whose discussion of grace got us into all this knew that God doesn’t want us to relate to God in that way. In the great Chapter 13 of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians he wrote: "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish things." 1 Cor. 13:11.

Friends, thinking that God’s grace is something we have to earn because otherwise we have no incentive to avoid sinful behavior is thinking and reasoning like a child, and that’s not how God wants us to relate to God. God wants us to "put away childish things" is this regard, to quote the familiar King James Version of that last phrase of 1 Corinthians 13:11. Reward and punishment is not how God relates to us; and God wants us to be emotional and spiritual, not merely physical, adults. God wants our relationship with God to be grounded in love and not in fear or cynical self-interest. God’s relationship with us is grounded in love. Our tradition even says God is love. 1 John 4:8 and 16. Jesus lived for us, taught us, died for us, and rose again for us all to teach us and show us God’s love.

That’s the most important thing. God loves us. In love God extends to us the free, unmerited, unconditional gift of grace, of mercy, compassion, and forgiveness. We don’t have to earn it, which is a very good thing, since we couldn’t if we tried. God gives grace freely to all. So let’s not be childish about it. Let us not respond to God as though God ran a cosmic punishment and reward system for children in faith. Let our relationship to God be what God’s relationship to us is--grounded in love. Amen.