Romans 4:13-25
I'm going for brevity today. No bold promises, though. I bet I talk about abortion though. It's all over Romans this week.
So, Paul talks about this 'reckoned as righteousness' business. Do people actually use either of those words? 'Reckon'? They use that one in the southwest, as in: "It'll rain, I reckon." It has a more pecuniary background, though, usually meaning something to do with counting coins. Maybe too we yell at our sneaky siblings when they take our candy: "There will come a day of reckoning for this!" But probably not--that seems pretty dorky, even for me, and you, and all of us.
Or righteousness--how often do I use that word in conversation? I can't remember the last time. Probably when I used its adjective form back when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was in and proclaimed with Michelangelo: Righteous, dude!
So, in short, part of me questions this translation--it uses words that are, even for a geek, a bit of a stretch. They're not all bad, I suppose, but we should all try to remember that English requires its own English translation. The money connotations help make the whole thing work in translation. If we exchanged 'trust' for 'faith', we might see the thesis of Paul's argument and exegesis of Genesis running like this:
Abraham's trust in God counted as right-living.
What a whacky thing. Imagine if I cheated on my taxes--oh, let's say by not paying a hundred thousand because of a personal driver. Everyone has that problem, right? Anyway. So, I don't pay my taxes. The IRS comes to me and says: you owe us money. And I say: but I trust in you, IRS. I'll show you--I'll give you a hug! And I've been paying my tax since then! And they say: 'ah, that's alright--next time, try to pay your taxes. Don't worry about it--in fact, you'll be receiving a huge refund this year in addition to your stimulus check.' "Faith reckoned as righteousness" is exactly that weird.
In other words, the trust that we place in God--which is the strength of that relationship--is what counts as right-living us, and for everyone, according to Paul. The strength of our relationship with God is not the same thing as right-living, but that relationship God is willing to reckon as right-living. Not the same, but God's willing to take it.
That's like saying that my wife is willing to give me the consequences for trusting her, in lieu of the consequences of having an affair. "Oh honey," she says, "Don't worry about it--do better next time. And we're still going on vacation to Italy. And I'll do the dishes."
Paul spends much of his air time in Scripture defending the weirdness of this proposition--the 'all is lawful discussion' in 1 Corinthians, for example, deals with the moral ramifications of this statement. So for now, I don't want to defend it--if you want a longer defense, Romans deals mostly with this idea. Instead, I want to say a few things about what it means.
Let's start somewhere mild for our anxiety levels. Consider a traditional Lenten theme--forgiveness. So often, we let 12 step groups and TV evangelists steal our best lines. They often talk about how God forgives us of anything--12 step groups then have a method for living into that forgiveness, and TV evangelists forgo methods to ask for money. But if we take Paul seriously, not only does God forgive us--no matter how truly self-centered or evil we've been--not only does God give this forgiveness, but also God is willing to count trust in God as right-living from that point onward. Wherever we are this Lent--sick of constant self-obsession, bored with our families, hating the way we look in the mirror, greedy for yet another few bucks to spend, God is willing to start counting us as righteous people if we're willing to start trust God rather than attempting to make ourselves the center of the universe's gravity. I would add this second thought along this line: we're quick to talk about God's forgiveness for rather dramatic sins, but what about the less dramatic ones?
And second, let's talk about something more anxiety producing. I think this thesis, this trust in God being reckoned as right-living, is damned dangerous. Let me give an example. It would suggest that our cultural stances on abortion, whether we think it permissible but unfortunate or entirely illicit, are exactly wrong. Hauerwas (a perfectly delightful Christian ethicist), in his lovely little article on abortion--wish I had a link to it--, would be right. The question is not about moral legality--instead, we should trust God enough to welcome the stranger and foreigner. It's like we're being diagnosed as a sick patient. Rather than trust God, we would rather trust ourselves to mastering the truth about the personhood of dividing cells. We'd rather be masters than trusting, dependent.
If Paul's thesis is right, abortion is neither right nor wrong in itself--or more accurately, what matters to God when it concerns us is not the righteousness of a thing, which we're not good at, but our trusting of God. Whether abortion is part of righteous life is beside the point, according to Paul's thesis. It is only one possible indicator of whether we are trusting God. Individually, this makes making a choice about abortion no simpler--it seems entirely possible to me that someone might trust in God and have an abortion, and that for another person that trust and an abortion would be impossible to hold together.
But for all the rest of us, not facing this choice but trying to understand our society and its rules, Paul's thesis condemns us pretty soundly.
If Christ has called us to welcome the stranger as an example of our trust in God; if children are the truly perfect strangers; and if having children has become a thing that is easily feared in our society; then the sickness will never be solved by debating one way of alleviating the symptom (abortion). Abortion is not a moral problem--it's a symptom of our fearfulness of strangers, of someone who might make demands on me that I can't control. Instead, we must confront the sickness--we must face our shared complicity in a culture that ostracizes single parents (it's popular to lament their situation, but it's not popular to be one), so enmeshes sex in shame that people fear to speak of it, keeps a permanent lower class stripped of economic possibility and plain old hope, and ultimately, we must face a culture that is so afraid of the stranger that we'd rather either kill the stranger before they're born, or permanently punish the parents of the stranger by strapping them with obligations our society conspires to prevent them achieving. If Paul is right, and God reckons our trust in God as righteousness, then our debate about abortion, while well-intentioned, has missed the point. Abortion is a symptom of a wider problem, made worse when we deny the existence of any kind of corporate sin or responsibility. God has asked us to follow in trust, welcoming the stranger, caring for the widow and orphan, sharing what we have even when it looks like it's not enough. Funny how we'd rather still debate righteousness.
Our trust in God reckoned as right-living? Probably the most radical words in Scripture.
