I preached from this sermon manuscript for the Universalist National Memorial Church on June 7, 2026 using lesson from the Revised Common Lectionary from Romans 4:13-25 and Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26.
Thanks to Pastor Gatton for inviting me to the pulpit this morning, and my thanks to you for welcoming me this morning. It’s been a while and I’m glad to be back.
We have two readings to consider today, one from the Gospel of Matthew and the other from Paul’s letter to the early Christian community in Rome. Both of them tell us something about our faith; both of them say something about how we live in the world. And I hope that by looking at these texts both ways, you gain something today to heal your heart and soul. Because to be the best hour of the week means something more than simple enjoyment. This service should leave you better off than you were before: inspired, taught, challenged or healed in some way. But especially healed. Because in the best of times there is a streak of sadness and uncertainly in this world — and these are not the best of times. Sometimes it feels like we are being slowly poisoned, invisibly bruised, quietly broken from powers seen and unseen. And there is truth in these passages that may heal you. The gospel is not one of four books of the Bible, but is the God’s response to sadness and wrongness in the world, and how God heals us. It’s a way to live. So a quick review of each reading is in order.
Our passage from Matthew today comes within a larger narrative of Jesus’ healings, a part of his miracle ministry, and is tightly packed with three memorable episodes,that are thematically related. There is movement of the characters from place to place; healing to be restored is the theme in each case. Jesus calls to the subject of healing in each. First, Jesus calls the tax collector to have dinner with him “and other sinners.” Then Jesus is called away to raise a girl who had died. On the way, a women, having suffered a religiously- and socially-isolating hemorrhage for twelve years is healed from her condition by touching the hem of Jesus’ garment. In each case, a reversal of exclusion. And in each case, the action of healing or inclusion came from a response to Jesus’ call. His invitation, his reputation, his order to rise, and live. There was no doctoring, no potions, no incantations, no sacrifices, no prayers and no sermons. Nothing which could be called worship, then or now. It makes you wonder what did Jesus do other than just be. Indeed, what did the tax collector, the woman or the girl do other than follow, reach and arise. If we were to hear this for the first time – and perhaps some of your are in fact hearing this passage for the first time – you’d have to ask, “what just happened here?” And could it happen again?
The gospel of Matthew has many episodes in common with the gospels of Mark and Luke, and the three are collectively called the Synoptic Gospels, from the Greek work for an overview. A well-regarded theory is that there is the common outline of the narrative of Jesus’ life, much like our current gospel of Mark, and a sayings’ source that fills in Matthew and Luke. But the three are not the same – and John is quite different – and if we can read where they overlap and diverge without trying to explain away the differences, we can understand more that trying to make a pleasingly homogeneous version as we would be tempted to do. Mark and Luke each have healings much like what we have in Matthew. But Mark and Luke’s versions of the same passage have more detail. The tax collector is named Levi instead of Matthew and the dinner is at his house, not one that Matthew just follows Jesus to. You also get a sense that Levi’s break with his past was more definitive than Matthew’s. In Mark and Luke, the girl had not yet died at first, and we learn details, like the name of her father. There’s an emphasis about keeping the healing a secret – Luke loves a secret – and giving the risen girl something to eat, perhaps to demonstrate she was not an phantom. We also learn she was 12 years old, perhaps a parallel of the 12 years of disease that the woman had. And in other versions we learned that the woman had sought out to treatment and that when she touched him Jesus felt the power go out of him, but still it was her faith that healed her. In other words, lots of details. Perhaps too many details.
In Matthew, Jesus is clearly the central actor in the story, but it feels like he goes out of his way to deflect attention. Because the tax collector, the girl and the woman are barely sketched out, it easier to imagine that what Jesus said to them, he might say to you. “Come and follow me.” “Have faith faith in me.” “Rise and live.” That’s important. For the gospel is not something done to a group of other people, or earned by a group of other people. A gospel for other people, which does not include you, is no gospel at all. And a gospel which only includes you, and has no room for other people, is even smaller still. Matthew’s version gives us a place at the table; Mark’s and Luke’s then can let us explore other meanings. But the lesson I hear in Matthew is that there’s a place for you to hear and understand. That’s Matthew.
Paul’s letter to the Romans is something else, being somewhere between a broadly general work of theology and a practical letter to a particular Christian community – or set of communities – that he would later visit. It’s been the go-to document when Christians discuss justification, or how we become right before God, and equally the point where splits and reconciliations happen. On a personal note, it’s where I go when something seems very wrong in the world, and I need a bit of encouragement. More on that later. There’s enough internal evidence to date this work to about 56 or 57 AD, but parts of it may have been added later. Unlike some other letters attributed to Paul, Roman’s is generally believed to be authentic and one of the earlier works in the New Testament. Put another way, it’s about as far from Jesus’ ministry as we are from 9/11, which to some of us here feels like yesterday. On the other hand, Matthew would be like us looking back as far as the Vietnam War or the Civil Rights movement: within the lifetime of many, but fewer than Romans. While we tend to think of the gospels as a window to the earliest days of Jesus’ life and ministry, Romans, a more theological work, is older. It also addresses questions not spelled out in Matthew: what is faith?
At the beginning of our lesson from Romans today, he hear “For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith.” Or flipped around, it was Abraham’s faith and not his actions that led God to bless him. So, we need one more bit of information: a review of Abraham.
Abraham is a figure in the book of Genesis, almost certainly legendary, from whom the Abrahamic religions – the large ones being Judaism, Christianity and Islam – spring. In a theme repeated across scripture, Abraham was not a heroic figure, ideally destined to the the recipient of God’s blessing and the father of many nations. Abraham, at the start, wasn’t even Abraham but Abram, and his wife Sarai, later Sarah.
God called him and made him a promise:
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12: 1-3, NRSV)
(Universalists would continually quote that last part.) And by the word of this promise, Abraham continued in faith, and became an exemplar of faithfulness.
So, what the deal about Abraham in Romans? In a passage (ch. 3) just before ours, we hear that we are justified – made right before God – by having faith in Jesus Christ, a faith like Abraham had, and not by what Abraham did. But that can be read faith in Jesus Christ or the faith of Jesus Christ – namely, the faith that was in him, that we might also have. (This isn’t revolutionary; I first ran across this as an undergrad in the religion department of the University of Georgia in the 80s.) So, is justification having a faith like Jesus, or having a faith about him, which has always struck me as the kind of activity Paul is warning about here. And as American Christianity becomes increasingly weaponized and clannish, something to be possessed and dispensed, the more careful we have to be not be co-opted into this way of thinking. It betrays ourselves, our neighbors and our God.
There are other options. In preparation today, I was doing a little survey of different views of justification and noted that the Eastern churches tended be less obsessed with justification in this form, and include it as a part of the arc towards becoming more like God as we develop in faith. I would imagine that a lot of Universalists would have felt the same, who took progress seriously, and were more likely to look at Isaac of Syria as an ancestor than Augustine. We can exhibit this same faith that was within Jesus Christ – there are additional options – as a function of our living. Do we get tied up with unjustified expectations imposed upon us? Do we value personality over appearance? Do we make room for the unlovely and unloved? Do we include others in experiences that we value and treasure? Do you value and make a life which is good and good for one another? And likewise, do you confront or reject those forces – even the subtle, appealing ideas, too quiet even to be called power – that see you or others as a object to be manipulated or used or invoiced? Very often, this means saying “no” to options or ideas that present themselves as opportunities or necessities, but which crushes hope, limits life and betrays our neighbor as ourself.
To our aid, we have the defense of the gospel. We have that same faith in a God who is absolutely free and yet was committed, through love, to be a Creator. And we have a savior empowered to reconcile the whole. We are justified, set free of any penalty before God, and eligible for our salvation by the nature of our being. And for more secular persons, including friends who may be smothered under pressures of the day and need encouraging — the possibility that there is a door to some other world still open to us. Open, should we perceive it. Be free of the impositions made upon us by forces that have no concern for our welfare. That there is freedom in the love that made all things and freedom from the indifference which only seeks to use us.
So who are we in the passage from gospel of Matthew? We are the ones to whom the invitation has been given: come and follow, have faith and be healed, rise and live.
So let’s go forward by looking forward into Romans 5:[1-5, NRSV]
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
The path of our lives leads us through good times and hard times. How we respond depends deeply on how we see ourselves within the story we recount about ourselves. In hope against hope, which story will you choose? I ask you take the gentle path where, step by step, the light of a creative, loving, living God glows brighter in you, so bright that others may see it. Have the same faith that was in Christ Jesus.
And may the grace of God keep us, now and forever. Amen.
