Romans 5:1-5
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
June 15, 2025
A hospital chaplain visited a patient who’d just been told his cancer was incurable and his death, imminent. The patient told the chaplain, “I have long pushed spiritual concerns aside, but now I want to know how to get right with God and have His heaven.”
The chaplain, being a playful and perhaps sneaky encourager of faith, replied, “Here’s how it works. You need a hundred points to get all that. So tell me the good things you’ve done, and I’ll tell you how many points you’ve earned for each The more good there is in an action, the more points you earn. When you get to hundred points, you get it all.”
“OK,” the man answered. “First, I was a good husband for 50 years who supported my wife and helped her find happiness and fulfillment.” “That’s wonderful!” the chaplain responded. “That’s worth three points.” “Three points?” the patient said incredulously. “Well, I also was generous with my money, and financed several charities to feed the hungry and house the homeless.” “Terrific!” said the chaplain. “That’s good for three points too.” “Just three points!” the patient exclaimed, his eyes starting to widen in a bit of panic. “Well, how about this: I volunteered a huge amount of my time collecting wheelchairs for the disabled in Third World countries and making sure those poor souls got what they needed.” “Fantastic!” said the chaplain. “That gets you three more points.” “Three points again!” cried the man in desperation. “At this rate the only way I get to heaven is by the grace of God.” “Now, you’ve got it!” exulted the chaplain. “You get it all if you just trust in His grace!”
Today’s scripture addresses those who’ve been “justified by faith” in God’s grace – that is, those who’ve abandoned the quest to deserve God’s favor and put their entire hope in God’s unearned kindness. By that means they’ve gained “peace with God” – that is, the end of enmity and alienation between God and them and the start of friendship and collaboration with God. That happy reconciliation brings them all the benefits of God’s gratuitous extravagant generosity: positive character development, hope, love and the power of the Holy Spirit. That is “the grace in which [they] stand”; it is what’s behind their “boasting” – boasting, not in the sense of praising themselves, but in the sense of exulting in God’s unwarranted and thus unbound goodness – so wildly out of proportion to their own goodness.
What distinguishes the Christian faith from all others? It’s not the incarnation. Other religions speak of gods taking human form. It’s not the resurrection. Other religions tell of returns from death. It is the centrality of grace. It’s the foundational conviction that God’s offer of unlimited generosity to every human being, regardless of their achievements, is unearned and hence available to anyone daring enough to believe the offer is for real and humble enough to acknowledge it’s their only hope. The Buddhist eight-fold path, the Hindu doctrine of karma, the Jewish covenant and the Muslim code of law all involve some earning of the blessing. In Christianity the blessing has no conditions on its reception save the recipient’s admitting it’s unjustified by any quality of character or conduct in them.
The litmus test of whether you stand in such grace is what you do when you fail morally or spiritually. Do you turn away from God until you’ve repaired and improved yourself enough to come back to Him? If you insist on returning to Him only on such terms, you are refusing to stand in grace; you are trying to merit what is there for the taking independent of merit. But if you return to God, not on the basis of what you have done and who you’ve become, but on the basis of what He has done and who He always is, you are living by grace – and you will live to show that grace to others.
In his book Generous Grace Tim Keller tells how one day theologian Miroslav Volf visited a friend who pastored a church in Sandtown, a desperately poor and dangerous Baltimore neighborhood. As the friend explained the struggles of inner-city life, he mentioned a possibility of renewal from an old but largely untapped source: the doctrine of justification by grace. Volf was shocked by the idea because, as a professor of theology at Yale, he knew that many had abandoned the doctrine, and even those who defended it rarely applied it to social problems like poverty and violence. As Volf walked around with his friend, he thought, How could these dead streets receive life from a dead doctrine? But after thinking about it a while, he later reflected:
Imagine you have no job or money, you live cut off from the rest of society in a world ruled by poverty and violence and you have no hope of any change. Around you is a culture governed by the iron clad law of achievement. Media constantly flaunts its gilded goods before your eyes, and in a thousand ways it tells you every day you’re a worthless failure because you have no achievement. Your dignity is shattered and your soul is entombed in the darkness of despair. But grace tells you are not defined by such falsehoods. It tells you that you count, and are loved unconditionally and infinitely, irrespective of your level of achievement.
Imagine then that this message of grace is not just proclaimed but embodied in a community – a community that is itself justified by grace and that seeks to “justify” by grace those declared ‘unjust’ by the culture of achievement. Imagine further that this community is determined to infuse the whole culture, including its political and economic systems, with the message it means to proclaim and embody: we all can stand in God’s grace!”
At a men’s retreat, a group of 30 or so men of all ages were honestly sharing joys and heart aches. A young man named Jason sat in a chair sobbing, his face buried in his hand, his head rising only occasionally to grab a gulp of air. “Why,” he cried out, “didn’t my dad want me? What’s wrong with me that he couldn’t value me?” The men took Jason’s pain to heart and respectfully let him talk it out – until Phil, an older man, rose from his seat, walked over to Jason, dropped to his knees, threw his arms around him and announced with a loud voice, “Jason, I will be your dad, and you will be my son!”
From that day on, Phil was involved in Jason’s life as a surrogate father, with their relationship only deepening over the passing years. Phil was always there for Jason, to listen to him, to pray with him, to feed him and to share his life wisdom with him. Phil embodied God’s unjustified grace for someone who felt unwanted and unworthy, and Jason stood up in that grace and became a healed, strong and productive man.
The business of the church is, this Fathers’ Day and every day, to proclaim and embody the grace in which everyone can stand – and thrive!
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