I love the Indiana Jones movies. I think my all-time favorite will always be the first one, Raiders of the Lost Ark, but the third one, Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade, is almost as good. How many of you have seen it? Sean Connery (who played Indy’s father) was almost as gorgeous as Harrison Ford. I just saw it again a few weeks ago, and as usual watched it in a sort of schizophrenic state of mind, part of me just purely enjoying the story and the suspense, and the other part critically analyzing the theology of this retelling of the Holy Grail myth. Remember that the myth of the grail centers around the idea that there is a chalice, a cup, which caught Jesus’ blood at the crucifixion, will give eternal life to whomever finds it. Well, of course Jesus’ blood does give eternal life... but let’s leave the theology aside for just now. And we’ll also skip over all the witty exchanges between Connery & Ford, and wind up at the climax, heroes and villains and all, in a thousand year-old temple, with the Grail guarded by the usual booby-traps. The bad guys send minion after minion up the passageway but they all come rolling back down, headless. Somewhere in the melee Sean Connery gets mortally wounded, and the only way Indy can save him is by daring the gauntlet himself. Being virtuous as well as smart, he deciphers the clues and gets to the last obstacle, which is a bottomless chasm too wide to jump. The Grail is in a cave on the other side. The clue is something like “take the step of faith to receive the gift of life.”
And seeing nothing at all in front of him, and his father dying behind him, and the promise of life in front of him, Indy takes a step and finds something solid beneath his foot, and takes another, and lo and behold, it was all an optical illusion and there really was a solid rock bridge over the abyss.
That’s a pretty good illustration of what stepping out in faith is all about. There really was a bridge; it’s just that Indy couldn’t see it from where he was standing. And the clue was quite clear. And he’d already discovered that if he followed the clues he’d get where he was supposed to go.
And that’s kind of what Abram did, didn’t he, when he went down into Canaan chasing a rainbow promise that neither he nor anyone else could see - but Abram knew it must be out there because God had said so. So he went, and Paul tells us that this faith was reckoned to Abram as righteousness. That doesn’t mean, by the way, that Abram actually became righteous by believing God, it means that a credit was made to Abram’s celestial account just as if he really were righteous.
Most 20th century Americans think they’ll get to heaven because they’re nice people, law abiding, generous, honest, kind. (Or maybe just because they haven’t been convicted of any major felonies - the standards have been dropping lately.) And first century Jews thought they’d get to heaven because they were members of God’s covenant people and kept the rules he’d laid down for them in Moses’ time.
But Paul says not. Paul says the promise he made to Abraham - which was by this time understood to be salvation - was never, ever, earned. It was always a gift. No one - not even the most faithful and devout Jew - could ever demand it as a right.
At this point most of those same devout Jews in Paul’s audience would have been frothing at the mouth. Here they had been doing all the right things for all these years, just as God told them to, and how dare Paul suggest that it was all for nothing? They had done their part; was he suggesting that God wasn’t going to keep his side of the bargain?
Paul is saying, “It wasn’t a bargain. It was a promise.” God didn’t say to Abram, “Be good and I’ll reward you.” He just said, “I have something special for you down in Canaan.” And Abram believed him, and went to get it. Remember, Abram wasn’t righteous, certainly not by the standards of Paul’s day and not even by the somewhat more lenient ones of our own time. Abram lied to Pharaoh’s men, telling them that Sarah was his sister, not his wife, so that they wouldn’t kill him to get Sarah for Pharaoh’s harem. And no doubt Abram didn’t keep kosher and he certainly didn’t have a mezuzah on his tent-pole and to top it all off he wasn’t even circumcised! At least not until chapter 17.
So what did Abram do to deserve being made the father of many nations? He believed God’s promise, and acted on it. That was all. And that was - in God’s eyes - as good as “being righteous.”
Well, OK, I hear you say, but what about all those devout people who had carefully followed every little detail of the Mosaic law because that’s what they thought God wanted? Didn’t that count for anything? Maybe Abram’s faith was “reckoned to him” as righteousness, but why couldn’t their careful following of the law be reckoned to them as righteousness as well? And anyway, weren’t they righteous on their own account because they had been obedient?
Martin Luther answers that question in a letter introducing his commentary on the book of Romans:
"You must not understand the word law here in human fashion, i.e., a regulation about what sort of works must be done or must not be done. That’s the way it is with human laws: you satisfy the demands of the law with works, whether your heart is in it or not. God judges what is in the depths of the heart. Therefore his law also makes demands on the depths of the heart and doesn’t let the heart rest content in works; rather it punishes as hypocrisy and lies all works done apart from the depths of the heart."
He goes on further to say,
"The works of the law are every thing that a person does or can do of his own free will and by his own powers to obey the law. But because in doing such works the heart abhors the law and yet is forced to obey it the works are a total loss and are completely useless... But to fulfill the law means to do its work eagerly, lovingly and freely, without the constraint of the law; it means to live well and in a manner pleasing to God, as though there were no law or punishment. It is the Holy Spirit, however, who puts such eagerness of unconstrained love into the heart. "
And yet even with the Holy Spirit, can any of us say that we always fulfill every bit of God’s law automatically, just because it’s what we naturally want to do in our hearts? Of course not! This total inability of ours to keep the law is why the Psalmist can say in Psalm 14, “The LORD looks down from heaven on humankind to see if there are any who are wise, who seek after God. They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one.” [v.2-3]
And that is why we, like, Abram, rely on God’s promise, rather than on our own virtues. Let’s go back to v. 21:
“No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. Therefore his faith 'was reckoned to him as righteousness.' Now the words, 'it was reckoned to him,' were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.”
We are called to the same faith that Abram had. Just as Abram trusted God’s promise that he would make him a great nation, even though he was pushing the century mark before Sarah finally conceived, believing not only against all conventional wisdom but in the face of his wife’s doubts as well, so we are to believe that God’s promises of peace and purpose in this life and eternal happiness in the next can also be relied upon. And then we have to act on it.
We don’t earn the gift, mind you - but we have to go where God has told us to find it. That step out into the unknown, sometimes over what looks like a bottomless canyon, is what the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard called “the leap of faith.” It’s not a blind step, or a foolish one, but a leap made out of confidence and trust - somewhat as a trapeze artist leaps from her bar into the air, trusting her partner to catch her at the end of the swing because she is confident both in his ability and his trustworthiness.
Martin Luther’s great insight back in the late 15th century that it is “faith alone” that leads to salvation revolutionized the Christian church. It was what the Reformation was all about. It is the core of what we believe today. And yet I’m going to disagree...
Because it’s not faith alone that leads us to take that step out into thin air. It’s faith - plus love.
Because you not only have to believe in God’s promises, you also have to want them. You have to want them more than what you leave behind when you begin that long journey into the unknown. You have to want God, to love God, more than you want or love the things of the world. There’s an old song that goes, “I’d rather have Jesus than silver or gold.” And that’s the attitude that’s underneath every “leap” of faith.
Nowadays you need that attitude even to make small steps of faith. Because if you don’t want what God promises, it’s much easier to ignore the evidence and refuse to believe. And society makes it easy for people to do that nowadays, doesn’t it. It used to be that in order to be accepted you had to at least pay lip service to Christian principles. But not any more. Now there’s a little more risk.
Most of us here believe in Jesus, don’t we. At least we all say the creeds together, and sing the hymns, and say the prayers. We talk the talk, and most of us even walk the walk. But - ask yourself this question: how much are you willing to risk for God? Do you love enough to leap?
