Sermon for Sunday, February 25, 2024 || Lent 2B || Romans 4:13-25

(Content warning: childhood trauma in the fourth paragraph.)

One of the most common conversations I have with people in my role as a pastor has to do with their fear over their perceived unworthiness. They don’t think they’re good enough. They don’t think they’ve done enough to earn God’s grace. They believe God has weighed and measured them and found them wanting. The prayer we’re going to pray right before communion called “The Prayer for Humble Access” seems to reinforce this. I’m going to spend our entire sermon time this morning talking about this perception of unworthiness, but I want to start by skipping to the end and saying this: God blesses us with grace, and this blessing is independent of our worthiness. Stick with me while we talk this through and we’ll get back to this good news at the end.

We’re going to examine this perception of unworthiness, and then we’ll summarize our fairly labyrinthine reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans. So, I am using the term “perceived unworthiness” on purpose today because I want to make sure we don’t fall into a trap. The trap is this: it’s true that we’re inherently unworthy of God’s grace, but not for the reasons we think we are. We fall for the trap when we buy into these wrong reasons. The wrong reasons sort into generally three buckets.

The first bucket involves the way our culture sells us stuff. One of the most effective advertising strategies targets our self esteem and sense of worthiness, purposefully attacks them, and then offers a remedy for the things it just attacked. Perhaps you’re an 8th-grader who just wants to fit in, so how about the same $150 pair of sneakers that everyone else is buying? Perhaps you’re a mid-40s guy and life hasn’t gone the way you hoped it would, so how about a $70,000 dual-cab truck with the HEMI and the towing package and the luxury trim? Perhaps you’re nearing retirement and the wrinkles on your face are growing more pronounced, so how about this new anti-aging cream that a twenty-two year model with flawless air-brushed skin recommends? Every day, ads like these chip away at our sense of worth, and we hardly notice the damage they’re doing.

While advertising hits everyone, the second bucket of perceived unworthiness affects those with deep-seated childhood trauma. Whether you’re uncovering this trauma through therapy or it remains hidden within, the scars are there. Perhaps you tried to be perfect for an alcoholic father, but nothing you did was ever good enough. Perhaps you wondered why your mother was emotionally distant and didn’t start to understand until you, yourself, endured postpartum depression. The scared or sad or bewildered child remains inside you, echoing the messages from your youth  that you’ve always been unworthy of love. And you think this perceived unworthiness transfers all the way to your relationship with God.

The third bucket takes this relationship and interposes a middleman between you and God. The middleman, in this case, is the Church, an institution that has, sadly, caused so much hardship over the course of history. Perhaps the Church taught you the image of a vengeful God who needs to be appeased. You walked around on eggshells, counting your sins, and hoping against hope that you could put just enough points in the “win” column to escape the fires of hell. If you could just say enough prayers or do enough acts of contrition or save enough other souls, then your own soul would be safe. But it was never enough.

These three reasons for perceived unworthiness – advertising, childhood trauma, and destructive doctrine – trick us into thinking our unworthiness is (a) our fault and (b) something we can, somehow, fix. While we might be able to address the underlying causes of these perceptions, especially with professional help, we can also sidestep the trap they present by understanding our true unworthiness. Our true unworthiness has nothing to do with us individually. Only God is worthy of God’s love. Since we’re not God, we are inherently unworthy. That’s the whole story. The thing is, God does not base God’s love for us on our worth. It’s not part of the equation at all.

And that’s what Paul is getting at in this tough passage from the Letter to the Romans. He’s speaking to a group of people who are Gentiles, that is, not Jewish and therefore not circumcised. During Paul’s day, the early Church was debating whether or not Gentiles needed to become circumcised in order to join the Church. Paul firmly stated “No, they don’t.” Eventually Peter backed him up, and their view became the Church’s view. In our passage, Paul’s main point is that God blessed Abraham and Sarah long before there was a set of rules to govern who deserves to receive God’s blessing. They predated the Ten Commandments, the law of Moses, and the rules in the book of Leviticus. Abraham and Sarah believed God’s grace showered them with blessings, and so they lived their lives as blessed people, becoming the ancestors of many nations. Jesus’ death and resurrection, Paul argues, allows all people to live lives of faith in God’s promises.

So, if God does not base God’s love for us on our own perceived unworthiness, then what does God base it on? That’s above my pay grade, but I’ll venture a guess. God bases God’s love on the reality that God created all things using the blueprint of God’s own overflowing love, and therefore God sustains all of creation by loving it, no matter what. God’s grace is the gift of God’s abundant love that we can participate in, and our participation is NOT limited by our worthiness.

When we decide we need to be worthy in order to earn God’s love and grace, we wrongly place ourselves at the center of God’s story. That’s what that Prayer of Humble Access that we’ll pray later reminds us not to do. But when we rightly place God at the center, when we center our reality on the grace of God, we recognize the truth of God’s good news. Paul sums up this good news later in his letter to the Romans, saying, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). This “anything else” includes our perceived unworthiness. But again, worthiness is not part of the equation of God’s love.

God created us to be vessels of that love. When society or trauma or doctrine convinces us we aren’t worthy of God’s love, God pours Grace out because we can’t accept God’s love any other way. And that grace rains upon us just like it did for Abraham and Sarah, showering us with blessings, so that we might become blessings in this world that God loves so much.

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I cut the following paragraph about the heresy of donatism from the sermon, but I still like it, so here it is:

During the sporadic persecutions of Christians in the first few centuries of the Church, a particular situation arrived that got faithful Christians really worried. When priests were arrested and threatened with execution, some of them renounced their faith. The people these priests baptized were concerned that their baptisms were no longer valid because of the priests’ renunciation. St. Augustine of Hippo (the same St. Augustine I talked about a few weeks ago when I shared my story of my call to priesthood)…well, St. Augustine recognized the heretical principle underlying these folks’ worry – that the virtue, or lack thereof, demonstrated by the priest had anything to do at all with the efficacy of the sacraments. St. Augustine argued that God was the only one who mattered where the sacraments were concerned, not the life of the priest. Therefore, people didn’t have to worry about their connection with God, because God remained faithful, even if the priest didn’t.