Sermon: The Second Sunday after Pentecost- June 7, 2026

Genesis 12:1-9

The Rev'd Cecil Patrick Perkins, The Rector 

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Abraham believed God, and God reckoned it to him as righteousness. I speak to you in the name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated. This morning I'd like to have the opportunity to talk to you all a little bit about faith, which in the Greek is the same word as belief. It can be the same word as trust. So when you're looking through Scripture, you have this convergence of terms that may seem different in the English, but are exactly the same word in the Greek. It's the word pistuo. If you've ever heard the word epistemic, it comes from the same idea of faith, belief, and trust. But what you find in the church today is when we talk about faith, people, depending upon what sort of Christian you are, have some very different ideas about what faith is. Charismatic conservatives, for instance, when they hear the word faith, they tend to believe that faith is the ability to believe that God is going to do the impossible, and not only hypothetically, but for you today. Then you have, on the other hand, progressives who tend to look at faith as knowing all the possibilities that have come from Scripture. It's an idea not of a trust that anything will happen, but knowing the sorts of things that did happen. And it kind of plays out like this. The best way to illustrate it, of course, is with an illustration. The first is the conservative kind of charismatic. He was a good old Southern Baptist of the ilk that I grew up in. And he just found that it was flooding and one of the dams had broken, so he had gotten on the porch of his house, and everybody was saying, now, Cloyd, get out of here. It's, you know, the dams broke. You're going to be underwater before long. And he said, I have faith that the Lord is going to take care of me. And then as the water got higher and higher and higher, they finally sent somebody in a John boat after him and says, Cloyd, you're going to have to get in this boat. We've got to get you out of here. That other dam's got to break and it's going to be bad. And he said, I have faith that the Lord is going to take care of me. Well, then about an hour, he had gone out on his upstairs porch and the water was still rising. Guy came by in a big old, sure enough, uh police boat and said, Jump down in this boat. Let us get you out of here. That second dam has burst. You've got to get out of here. And he said, I have faith that my Lord is going to take care of me. And then finally he climbed up to the top of his roof. He was sitting there on the crown of his roof when a helicopter came over. And one of the guys he knew said, Chloe, last chance, you either get on this helicopter or you're dead. And he said, Don't worry about me, brother. I have faith in the Lord. The Lord's going to take care of me. And of course, he died. He got to the pearly gates and he was as peeved as he could be. He looked at the Lord and he said, I want to ask you a question. I've served you all my life. How the hell in a situation like this could you have made it after I had proclaimed my faith in you that I died the way that I did? And God said, You jackass, I sent you two boats and a helicopter. That's the one hand. The other hand is the progressive. And I like to poke at the progressives too. I always poke at both sides. This progressive was a runner. She had just been down to get avocado toast and was going out for a little run, and she had on her hot hokas and was having a good old time. But she got to this side of a cliff and her feet slipped. She didn't know where she was going and she fell off and she grabbed onto the one root and it was starting to get slippery. And she looked and said, Can I kick my way up there? How far is it down? She measured everything she could before she brought God into it. And then once she brought God into it, she said, Lord, if you're up there, please save me. And the Lord said, This is Jesus. All you have to do is let go. And she said, Wait, wait a minute. This is Jesus? Are we talking the Jesus of faith or the Jesus of the Jesus of the Bible or the Jesus of history? I want to know who I'm talking to. And she said, you know, Jesus said, Oh, you've been to EFM, haven't you? And after that happened, she said, Do you have anybody can help me understand what it means to have this kind of faith? Is, you know, is one of our leaders up there, can I speak to Dom Crosson or someone else? They're indisposed at the moment. I can't help you. You've got to decide, are you going to let go or are you going to hang on? And she finally said, unless I can hear from someone up there, I'm not going to know what to do. She said, So is there anybody else up there? That's the story. Faith gets muddled around like that constantly. And we use the word so much that we forget that really the word faith in the New Testament has a very technical sort of meaning. It is not believing that God will do everything that is possible. It is not simply having a knowledge of the potential facts of the situation, but actually it's a very technical term that I think we find this morning in our Roman story quite beautifully. Earlier in our service today, we read the story about Abraham. This is a good introduction for us as we look at the Romans text. We think about Abraham living in Ur of the Chaldees, being 75 years old, and then getting a call from God who says, I want you to leave your country and your family, go to a place that you've never been, and when I get you there, I'm going to make of you a great people. I am going to bless those who bless you, curse those who curse you, and in your seed all the nations and people groups of the world shall be blessed. And for some reason, Abraham was willing to do that. For some reason, and the text doesn't tell us, we don't know what kind of access that Abraham had already had to God, whether he knew something about this God or something, but something made Abraham set off on a journey that really kind of defied belief in a way. And as life went on and 25 years happened, Abraham still kept believing. Then God came back to him again after a while and said, Abraham, I really meant what I said that I'm going to raise up for your family a seed in whom all the peoples of the world would be blessed. And Abraham looked at it and said, God, I'm a hundred years old. I am as good as dead. And as for my wife Sarah, Sarah is 90 years old. She hasn't been breeding stock for the last 20 years. Let's kind of keep that idea down. That's not going to happen. He told Sarah what God said, and it says, Sarah just laughed at it. Any of you who are 75-year-olds understand why there was a laugh at that. But God said, All right, we'll see you this time next year. And then what happened? Sarah had this child, Isaac, which incidentally means God gets the last laugh. What happened? Somehow or the other in that story, even when it was hard to believe, Abraham believed God. And what we find in the text is God reckoned that to him for righteousness. Now, this line, believing God and reckoning it to him for righteousness, is one of the important lines that Martin Luther and Protestant reformers really worked out to help us understand what salvation was all about. And I want us to get that here today. One thing it didn't say is that Abraham believed in God. We usually think faith is believing in God. That's not what the text is. Now, of course, Abraham had to believe in God for this to work. He had to know something of who he was and that he was trustworthy. But the text said Abraham believed God, and God reckoned that belief to him as being right, as being right with God, as being righteous, as being saved to use the sort of term that some of our Protestant brothers and sisters would say. What does it mean that he believed God? What did he believe? Well, as you trace it through the story, what becomes clear is he believed in the promise that God had given him. God had said to him, Abraham, I'm going to give you a promise that includes this, that, or the other. I will bring this to pass to you by my own grace, by my own might, by my own strength. And all I ask you to do is believe. And Abraham did believe, and God did bring it to pass. And what we find in this text is Abraham's ability to believe the promise of God that was given to him was what God looked at and said, That's enough. I'm sorry for doing that. I should have reckoned that lower. It was good enough for God to look at it and say, that is as good as being righteous to me, the fact that he believes my promise. Now I want us to think about what that means for us. We tend to have different understandings of how faith and things like salvation work together. Our friends from the conservative reformed kind of view believe that having faith is just getting all the answers right, knowing everything that you should know about God. If you know everything that you should know about God and your theology is all good, God's going to look at you and say, you're righteous. Then you have others of a more liberal persuasion will say, well, it has to do with how you behave. You believe God when you behave like God and do the things that God has told us to do as we love our neighbor as ourselves. And so they would think that this faith is doing good acts. Well, I want to tell you, my friend, it's actually neither, though both are important. We are increased in our faith in God when we learn more about Him through studying His Word and studying theology. We come closer to God as we try to follow God, doing the things that we know that God would have us do, doing what Jesus would do. We grow, but that growth is not what makes us right with God. The thing that Paul tells us makes us right with God is believing in God's promises, even when we don't have all the information, and even if we're not practically perfect in every way. I want to illustrate this, if I may, by telling you a little story about a young lady that I worked with years ago. She was in her late 50s, early 60s. She was the sort of person that always, every time you saw her, looked to be carrying a heavy load. She had a heavy heart. She cried at every service. Something was going on, and it touched her spiritually in such a way that every time she went to church, she felt it looked like she was carrying this heavy load. And then one lent, when we were doing Lenten confessions, at the very end of the time, this young lady walked up and said, Father, I would like to make a confession. And I said, Come on, and we went to the space. Someone often asked me, How do you know an Episcopalian is serious when he or she comes to confess him? If they come, trust me, they're serious. And she was absolutely serious. Her heart was breaking. And she told me this story. She said, I've been married for over 40 years. But when I was in my early 20s, early in our marriage, I stepped out on my husband and had an affair. Now he forgave me and has never had another thing to say about it. And our marriage has continued. But I have carried this burden in my soul for so long, and it just won't let go. Father, tell me what to do. Tell me how best to have faith to ask forgiveness for this sin. And I was able to tell this woman, you don't lack faith in the idea of forgiveness of sin. You believe in forgiveness of sin. The problem that you have is you don't think it applies to you. When you read the words of Scripture that said, if you confess your sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us of those sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. You believe that, but you don't believe that applies in your situation. So I'm here to tell you God forgave you for that sin years ago. The only sin that you have now is a faith sin of unbelief because you don't believe that applies to you. You don't believe that the promises of God come directly to you. And in that moment, the chains fell off, her heart was free, and when she got up from that prayer, her sins sade down. She actually asked me, What penance did I need to do for the sin? And I said, You've been doing double penance for 20 years. I don't have anything else to give you. You've you've put enough time for penance in, you need to go and rejoice because you've discovered this to be true. Here's the point. If you want to understand what faith truly is, what faith truly is about, it's the ability to believe that the promises of God declared to us in his word through Jesus Christ apply to you. And this is extremely hard. I have an extremely hard time with that. I have no problem believing in them hypothetically or universally, but it's a lot harder when I have to look at something that God has promised and sit in it and trust it and know that it is for me. Friends, I want you to walk away from this place today with a different definition of faith than you ever had. Faith is not what you know. Faith is not what you do. Faith is simply believing yourself to be who God said you were through his promises in his word. And the minute you can dare to begin doing that, life and everything around it will change. Now, this morning, I don't know what you bring into this place. I don't know where you have troubles with faith, whether you have theological troubles or ethical troubles or something. But what Paul is saying, don't get so stuck on that. Trust in the promises of God. The promise that God will never leave you nor forsake you. The promise that he's going to be to you as a God and you are to be to him as one of his people, that he will forgive your sins and cleanse you from all unrighteousness. If you can dare to believe those simple truths about God, you have a faith that is more remarkable than 10 theology degrees or even a Nobel Peace Prize. What you have out of that is a faith that St. Paul tells us is like Abraham's, that is reckoned to you as a righteousness. That means when God looks at the faith that you're willing to dare to believe in his promise, God looks at you and says, This person is right with me. That doesn't mean that you're perfect. Doesn't mean that you never sin, but it means that you get something that is more important than any of it. That our righteousness is not based upon our own performance, our own good, our own knowledge, our own ethics, but nothing but the graciousness of a God who has made promises to us that he desperately not only wants to keep for himself, but wants us to embrace as ours. So on this day, as you leave this place, I ask you, where is your faith? Is your faith in the promises of a God that loves you and simply wants you to rest on the promises that He has for you? If that is the case, as the old hymn says, the chains will fall off, your heart will be free, you will rise, move forth, and you will follow thee. Amen.