March 1, 2026 - Romans 4:13-17 - 2nd Sunday in Lent

There are probably a number of comparisons one could make between pastoral ministry and active military service. Sometimes you pick it enthusiastically. Sometimes you get picked, despite all of your efforts to go nowhere near it. Whether you’re involved in physical warfare or the warfare you deal with is a more spiritual sort, the military mindset is present in both. Even in relative peacetime, there is never the sense that there’s nothing to do. There is always an active readiness. War may not be going on right this moment, but it could and we need to be ready to engage with whatever we have to offer.

Those are analogies and comparisons that I could talk about at some length all on their own. Instead of those, there’s another comparison that isn’t quite as obvious: a willingness to move. As an active serviceman, the government puts you where it needs you. That could be here in the states or at some base abroad. Depending on how long you’re in the service, you might end up moving quite a lot. There’s no such thing as a serviceman who won’t move. If you won’t go where the need is, then what’s the point of having you at all? You might have some leeway, some say in where you go and what sort of position you have, but a willingness to go where the need is is just built into military service.

It isn’t much different for pastors in that regard. It’s pretty rare for a pastor to end up retiring at the first parish he ever served. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with it. It’s just a very distant exception and not the rule. More often than not, pastors end up serving a couple of different congregations throughout their career for varying lengths of time.

There’s a debate going on in our church body regarding seminary education. A group of people is arguing that seminary education should be lightened a bit and that more provisions should be made for allowing people to study remotely. The seminaries have always been pretty insistent on the need to actually be there on campus to learn. There’s more to seminary than just the classes. There’s more to pastoral formation than just book learning and languages. Beyond that, if moving to campus is going to be too big of a hardship for you, then it’s a pretty strong indication that pastoral ministry isn’t for you. It isn’t an insult or a condemnation. It’s simply the reality. God sends pastors where he needs them and he sends them at the time of his choosing. Refusing to heed the call carries its own kind of consequences, just as it does in military service.

That said, Abraham is in a slightly different position here in our reading for today. He hasn’t really signed up for military service, nor is he in pastoral ministry. Nevertheless, God has called him. He has orders to move. It’s not a small operation either. He’s going to have to move a long way and he has a lot of things that will have to go. This isn’t a matter of packing up the house, loading the wife and kids in the van and heading over to the new base or the new call. Abraham is a very successful man with an abundance of employees, servants, animals, and goods of all sorts. None of it gets left behind. Not only that, but he’s going to a foreign country and will have to make a life there. This will be his new home, where he’ll stay the rest of his life.

In this case there’s a bit of a difference. Not just that he has to move all of his family and everything else that represents his livelihood, it’s also what he’s told about where he’s going. He’s given very concrete promises about what will happen when he gets there. In some sense, he’ll be able to see whether God keeps his word firsthand. If Abraham ends up without an heir, then clearly God didn’t mean it. Not just an heir, but generations after that as well.

What would have to happen for you to go along with this same kind of thing? What kind of circumstances would have to be there for you to even consider doing this? You’d have to pack up everything you own, or at least everything you want to keep. You’d have to haul it all to a foreign country, one that probably spoke a different language and where the culture was unfamiliar. You’d have what you needed to make the trip, but no specific place there to call home. You’d sort of just have to find it and hope everything goes well when you do.

These days, moving doesn’t usually work like that. You’ve probably been to the area already. You’ve probably looked at some houses or apartments. You selected the one you thought suited you the best, given all of the circumstances. You’ve probably signed all of the paperwork that says it’s yours. You still have to do the actual moving, but there’s a lot less uncertainty. You have a place to call your own. You have the paperwork. You have all of the contractual agreements to assure you that when you get there, you’ll be home. That doesn’t mitigate all of the stress, but it surely makes things a little easier to cope with.

Our reading from Romans backs up a bit from the passage we had from last week. St. Paul is dealing with a couple of different problems throughout the letter. He wants to make sure his readers understand the nature of sin. There is no avoiding sin. There is no getting around sin. Not only is sin unavoidable, but it also brings death. That means death is also unavoidable. Last week, in Romans 5, St. Paul addresses how Christ deals with the problem of sin. While we need to understand how God deals with sin, we also need to understand how we come to be connected to God’s work.

When you see death looming in the distance in your life, what assurance do you have that you’ll make it through? What guarantee do you have that there’s actually a place waiting for you on the other side? Do you have some signed documentation? Do you have a contractual agreement you can show that proves ownership?

You could claim the Bible says all of that, but there’s still a pretty big difference. If something goes wrong in the process of taking ownership of your new home, like the previous owner hasn’t actually moved out yet, you have legal recourse. You have a higher authority to turn to that can deal with the problem and ensure you receive what’s legally yours. That doesn’t work here. There’s no higher authority. There’s no one to appeal to. There’s no one who can force God to do anything for any reason. You can make all of the demands you want, but he is under no obligation to listen to any of them.

It’s much the same situation that Abraham was in. At the time God told Abraham to go, God hadn’t even given him an heir yet, nothing that served as definitive proof that God would do what he said.

We want proof. We want assurances. We want guarantees. We want something we can wave in God’s face. We want it to be a thing we can hold on to and sometimes we treat it exactly like that. We treat faith as a thing. If I can claim I have faith, then I’m good. I may not be able to say what that faith means, what I have faith in, or how I come to have it, but as long as I think I have it, then the rest doesn’t matter. That’s all fine, right up until it fails me. If I think I should be getting something, if I think there’s something I’m due and I’m not getting, then maybe that’s a sign that I don’t have quite enough of this faith stuff, or maybe this faith thing is worthless after all. Since there’s no higher authority to appeal to, at some point I’m going to give up on this faith thing altogether.

St. Paul shows us what drove Abraham to embark on his long trek to the land of Canaan. He shows us what led Abraham to wait, more or less patiently, for many years for an heir. It wasn’t because he had some thing in his hands that guaranteed it. What he had was a promise. Abraham had nothing that forced God’s hand. There was nothing in him that God had to respond to. There was nothing he had done that deserved anything good, nor did Abraham think he could somehow go over God’s head. All Abraham could do was trust God’s promise, and so he did. He set out on his journey with nothing more than this promise. In the world today, few people would do something so momentous, so drastic, on nothing more than a promise from someone else. Other people make mistakes. Other people fail to live up to their promise or find themselves unable to follow through. That’s why we have contracts and a legal system to uphold them, to make people do what they said they would. I don’t have to trust anything, because the legal system will back me up. It takes away the doubt and the uncertainty.

This faith is different. Abraham’s faith is different. It’s a faith based not in earthly assurances and guarantees, but in the reputation and work of the one who makes the promise. This is the kind of faith that we must reflect on as we continue through the season of Lent. Jesus goes to the cross. Jesus assures us that he is dying for the sins of the world, dying for your sins. You know your own death is out there. It may be decades away. It may be right around the corner. You may have some general idea of when it will arrive, or you may have no clue at all. It doesn’t matter, because you know it’s there. What will you find when you get there, when the final moment arrives?

The kind of faith that refuses to budge unless it has something in its hands that it can use to demand action is a weak faith, one that will be quickly disappointed. You can try to bludgeon God with your contractual agreements, but it won’t get you anywhere. It does sound very much like stepping out on a limb for Abraham here, but God backs up his promises in a different way. He establishes his track record. When has God ever failed to do what he promised? God doesn’t ask you to trust him because you have something you can hold over him. He asks you to trust him because he stakes everything about who he is on his willingness and ability to do what he said.

Abraham may not have as much to look back on as we do. Arriving, as he does, in Genesis 12, there isn’t as much recorded Biblical history for him as we have today. Still, both the Flood and the Tower of Babel are in the past for him. God casts down the proud and lifts up the humble man who trusts him. Even in the creation account, God casts out pride, but has mercy on the repentant sinner. Abraham wasn’t blindly walking off into the darkness and hoping there would be something there to catch him. He knew God’s character and his reputation. If God said there was a place for him to live in peace, then it would be there.

Here in the season of Lent, Jesus has his eyes fixed on the distant hill he will soon be climbing. He will be beaten and bloody. He’ll be exhausted and trembling with each step as he walks up to his death. Before his death, he tells his followers that he goes to prepare a place for them, an eternal dwelling where they may live in peace with him. Will it be there when you arrive? You don’t have any pictures of it. You don’t have any notarized documents to wave at him, claiming ownership. There’s nothing you have and nothing you can do that will guarantee it is there. Instead, your guarantee is a man walking up a hill as blood run from dozens of gashes on his back. Your guarantee is a man who hangs in agony as massive iron nails fix his hands and feet to rough wood. Your guarantee is a man who says he does this for you. He does it because he has a place, and you don’t. He opens the way for you. He is your assurance. He demonstrates what he will do to stand by his promise. He’ll die for it.

God asks you to trust him regarding sin and regarding death. Regarding sin, that his death paid your debts and you stand before him free. Regarding death, that his resurrection assures your place with him in eternity. This is his gracious act and his gracious promise to you. Do not fear following God wherever he leads you and directs you. No one who has followed him has ever found him to fail in his promise.