March 8, 2009 Sermon

Getting on Base
Romans 4:16-25

Once again we hear the sweetest words known to humanity: “Pitchers and catchers have reported for spring training.” Baseball has begun. Here is an easy question: How many outs in an inning? No, three outs complete a half inning. A whole inning includes both teams' at-bats. An inning has six outs.

For twelve years Billy Beane has served as the General Manager of the Oakland A's, a major league baseball team. Beane brought revolutionary thinking into one of the most tradition-bound of all professions. Baseball management has always gone by “The Book”, an unwritten set of beliefs and superstitions. The Book has never been empirically tested; it exists only in the hearts and minds of men who have lived baseball their entire lives. But Beane thought The Book was bunk. His team, the A's, had just a fraction of the money that the rich teams in big cities had, teams like the New York Yankees or the Chicago Cubs. In order for his shoestring-budget A's to compete, Beane felt, they needed to throw out The Book. They needed new ideas, new data. Beane hired Ivy League-educated computer geeks and ordered them to crunch the numbers to find a way for the A's to beat teams with ten times their budget.

Fortunately, baseball treasures numbers like no other sport. Beane’s computer weenies decided one number mattered more than any other: on-base percentage. If our team gets only three outs in our at-bat, they reasoned, then the most valuable players will be men who don't make outs. This may seem obvious, but to baseball's establishment it seemed ridiculous. They paid attention to the traditional hitting numbers: batting average, stolen bases, runs batted in and—above all else in power-mad America—home runs. Beane decided to ignore those numbers. He signed players who did not make outs. He hired guys who got on base. Within two years, his low-budget A's were one of the best teams in baseball. Now his approach has received the ultimate baseball recognition: it has become a part of The Book. Teams with more money than his A's have started using his ideas and winning.

This getting on base approach works not just in baseball, but in life. Indeed, the Bible tells us it works even unto eternal life. But we get on base in a way that does not at first compute in our limited, human minds. We enter into the Kingdom of God not by earning our way, but by believing in Jesus Christ as the crucified and risen Savior. Our Book tells us that we do not deserve salvation, yet when we believe in Jesus we have it. Our passage from Romans explains how this works. In these early chapters the Apostle Paul explains the Gospel. He calls it the power of God to save those who believe. Then he addresses a thorny issue for that time and place: the question of Judaism and Christianity. This issue no longer holds much interest for us, yet the theology Paul uses to make his argument matters a great deal.

Romans 4:16 tells us, “For this reason (salvation) depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace...” Our relationship with Jesus Christ relies on his grace. Abraham, according to Genesis the father of the Jewish nation, believed God's promises. Faith made him acceptable in God's eyes. And faith is a gift from our gracious God. Nothing about Abraham seems to compute. He came from comfortable circumstances. Yet when the Lord told him to leave his family and land, Abraham went. The Lord promised that he would be rewarded with riches and inumerable descendants, but first he had to forfeit all he had ever known. Abraham believed the Lord and struck out across one of the harshest deserts on the face of the planet for a land he had never seen. Abraham believed. And, as Paul tells it, God's promises come true for those who “share the faith of Abraham”.

We cannot earn God's favor. Abraham’s Jewish descendants would live under the Law. They would try to earn God's blessings by obeying the Holy Law as given to Moses at Mt. Sinai and developed through the generations by prophets and scholars. They lived under the covenant (what Paul calls the promise), in which the Lord pledged, “I will be your God if you will be my people”. Being God's people meant obeying God's Law. But the Jews could not obey that Law. Neither can we. Only by the grace of God can we become acceptable in God's eyes. Our salvation depends on faith, Paul tells us, in order that the promise may rest on grace.

The Lord promised Abraham land, riches and children. But when they received this promise he and his wife Sarai had aged well beyond their child-bearing years. In fact, Sarai laughed when she heard this news. Yet Paul tells us Abraham “did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead.” And, “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.” Abraham believed God, no matter how impossible His promises seemed. Because he did, Paul can add the clincher: “Therefore his faith was reckoned to him as righteousness.”

Righteousness. We need it. We cannot produce it. Yet God pretends we can when we believe in the crucified and risen Christ. Righteousness is pure, perfect holiness. In the Jewish thought in which Paul had been educated, righteousness meant total obedience to God's law. The Old Testament refers to the Covenants God made with the children of Israel. Each covenant demanded righteousness on the part of the people. Each covenant demanded obedience to the law. God promised to bless the Chosen People if they could be righteous. They could not. We cannot. But does this not seem to compute, either. Why would God, a God of love, give us such an impossible deal? It is precisely because ours if a God of love that we get this deal.

What would happen if we got what we earned, what we deserve? Distance runners are among the most gifted, most dedicated athletes on the planet. Scott Miller told me that after watching an elite marathon on television he tried an experiment. He calculated that the leaders were running at about a 4.67 minutes-per-mile pace. He warmed up on his treadmill and then set it at 4.67 minutes per mile.  He could not run fast enough to keep from falling off the back of the treadmill. But those elite runners maintained that pace for more than 26 miles. Runners cannot fool the clock. Either you can keep pace or you cannot. It's the same way with sin. Either we obey God's law in its entirety or we do not. Either we are righteous or we are not. And let's face it: we're not. Every one of us deserves to get spit off the back of the treadmill.

Yet God loves us so much He sent His only Son to die for us.

Faith is a gift. When we receive the gift of faith from the Holy Spirit, God accepts us as righteous. We are saved. Receive the gift of faith. Pray for faith in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. Pray for stronger faith if you already believe. Believe. Enter the Kingdom of God. Receive. Believe. Accept that you have become acceptable and rejoice in your salvation!