This is the sermon I prepared for Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Beatrice, Neb., for the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Oct. 3, 2010.

+ + +

Readings

Habakkuk 1:1–4; 2:1–4
Psalm 37:1–9
2 Timothy 1:1–14
Luke 17:5–10

+ + +

Prayer

Almighty Father, by your Holy Spirit you bless us with faith in your Son, Jesus Christ. Help us to trust in you in all ways and for all things. Amen.

+ + +

Message

Faith is one of those words we all use.
It’s easy to slip it into our conversations,
and believe that we all mean the same thing
when we say it.

But I’m not sure that is true.
Sometimes we make statements like this:
“It doesn’t really matter what you believe,
just so long as you have faith in something.”

Well, it does matter.
Because if we believe in other gods,
valuing self or possessions
more than the Lord God of Israel and the Church,
then we have placed our trust in an idol.
That runs us aground on the first Commandment.

That’s half of the problem with our conversations,
when statements like that come up.

The other half is the soft and comfortable idea
afloat in so many conversations in our culture today
that what really matters
is not that we have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ
and his Father and their Holy Spirit,
but rather that we just having faith in something.

When we say that,
then we trim faith down to make it fit
into our little box of nice things,
like good manners and diligent personal hygiene
and a well-kept and weed-free yard.

Faith becomes just a soft and vaguely admirable virtue,
a quality that nice people display,
a trait we admire—in moderation—in others.

But in truth, that’s not at all what faith is.

Lutherans are famous for a saying,
one that has become almost a slogan.
We proclaim that Christians
are “justified by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.”
This is not a saying that we can find verbatim in the Bible,
but it’s one that helps to summarize
what the Church teaches and preaches,
based upon the Scriptures.

And like many things,
this gets a little more complicated
before it becomes clear.
So it helps to look at the terms in the saying.

Justification means to be put right with God.
It’s not something we can do.
Rather, God does it to us.
It’s his work, not ours.

Grace is the gift the Father gives
to make us right with him
for the sake of Jesus Christ
through the power of their Spirit.

Faith then is our trust
that we are in fact made right
through that gift.
Basically faith is clinging to God our Father,
holding on to him for dear life.

We can never do this by our own strength,
under our own power,
by any act of our own wills.

Instead, by that gift of grace,
given through the Holy Spirit,
God our Father joins us
to the faith of his Son, Jesus Christ,
so that our clinging is his work and not ours.

This is why our Small Catechism,
when it looks at the Third Article of the Apostles’ Creed—
the one about the Holy Spirit—
begins by asking, “What does this mean?”
Then it offers the answer,
“I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength
believe in Jesus Christ my Lord, or come to Him;
but the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel,
enlightened me by His gifts,
and sanctified and preserved me in the true faith….” (Small Catechism, Part II, Third Article)

These words by Martin Luther echo what the apostle writes in Ephesians 2:
“For by grace you have been saved through faith,
and this is not your own doing;
it is the gift of God—not the result of works,
so that no one may boast.” (Ephesians 2:8–9, NRSV)

And, as St. Paul writes in Romans 3:
“For there is no distinction,
since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
they are now justified by his grace as a gift,
through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,
whom God put forward
as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood,
effective through faith. “ (Romans 3:22b–25a, NRSV)

So, what does this mean?
What does this mean for us
as we get up each morning
and face responsibilities and demands
that seem to pile up higher
with each passing week,
no matter how hard we work?

First of all,
the good news is that living by faith
is not just one more chore or task
on the long lists we keep for ourselves.
We do not conjure up faith from within.
We don’t whip it up like enthusiasm or community pride.

Faith is God’s gift to us,
it comes by the Father’s grace poured out by the Holy Spirit
through his Son, our Lord.

He gave us faith when we were baptized.
That’s why we speak of baptism as adoption into his family.
We cannot choose to make God our Father;
he chooses to make us his sons and daughters,
siblings of our Lord and Savior.
As his children, we live by faith;
we trust that he will keep us and protect us.

Second, because we live by faith,
we can put those long lists into their proper order.
We can look at life’s threats with a new perspective.
Since we receive faith as a gift,
our destiny does not depend upon our hard work.
It does not match up with our successes.
It cannot be thwarted by our setbacks.

Our future rests securely in God our Father,
so that by the faith he gives us,
we can trust that we will live eternally
with his Son, Jesus Christ, and worship them
in the community of their Holy Spirit.

This is no cause to fill us with pride,
because our faith is God’s gift, not a our work.
That’s why we can trust
the divine promise the prophet Habakkuk shares:
“Look at the proud!
Their spirit is not right in them,
but the righteous live by their faith.” Amen. (Habakkuk 2:4, NRSV)