Who Dares Wins

The scriptures referred to are Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Romans 4:13-25 and Mark 8:31-38.

Life is full of risks. And yet for some people that's not enough. So they gamble. They buy lottery tickets, bet on sports or go to a casino. They forget that the odds are always in favor of the House. More people lose money than win money. That's because of statistical probability. There are fewer winning combinations of lottery numbers or numbers on the slot machine or cards or place on the roulette wheel than there are losing combinations. And to keep you losing, casinos give you loyalty cards with incentives to use them. It allows the casino's computers to track your gambling. After a while they learn how much you are willing to lose before you stop. When the computer sees you are approaching your “pain threshold” it alerts the casino. They radio someone on the floor to approach you, and offer you a free drink coupon or a free meal at the restaurant or free tickets to the show with a big name entertainer. They want you to keep playing longer than you ordinarily would, so you will lose more money than you ordinarily would. And casinos are ruthless towards folks who seek to change the odds, whether they are cheaters or simply people who are good enough at doing the math in the heads that they can count cards and bet smartly. Even honest professional gamblers will get banned from casinos if they are too successful. The bottom line is that if the casino likes you, it's because you are a loser. Your losses are their profits.

Unfortunately, we have now based our economy on gambling. It wasn't supposed to work that way. Originally Wall Street was literally a market where entrepreneurs and investors met. If you had a good business idea, backed up by good talent and a willingingness to do good work, you could get financial backing. If your business prospered so did your investors. There was risk but it was reasonable. But people learned to game the system. And now as one financial reporter pointed out, investors treat the stock market as a casino. Investors move their money around like gamblers at roulette putting their chips on red this turn and on black for the next. Nobody is interested in a sound business strategy that's sustainable if it doesn't pay off big and regularly. They just want a huge return on the next quarterly report. That's how we got the Great Recession of 2008. There was a huge amount of money in the US housing market. Subprime mortgages were invented. Banks were giving loans to anyone with a pulse regardless of their ability to pay the loans back. Then it all came crashing down. It even hurt people who hadn't been investing. And suddenly nobody could get a loan. The Federal Reserve Bank had to figure out a way to get banks and businesses to take reasonable and necessary risks.

Even without the artificial risks of gambling, life entails taking risks, whether you are aware of them or not. The fact that you are here on a Sunday morning means you did so despite the fact that the risk of having a heart attack is 40% higher between the hours of 6 am and noon. And, no, this isn't an excuse to skip church. The risk is higher for the first 3 hours you are awake, no matter what time or day it is. It's just that most people wake up in the morning so, statistically, that's the most common time for heart attacks overall.

Most of us drive to church or work or school or the store even though the majority of car accidents occur within 25 miles of home. Living in the sunny Florida Keys gives you a higher risk of skin cancer. And so on. We don't usually change our lives drastically despite these risks. Otherwise we would just stay in bed all the time. Which would increase your risk of poverty, loss of the ability to care for yourself and bedsores. Nothing is totally safe, not even doing nothing.

You have to take some chances just to live. And without risk takers, society stagnates. This country would not exist had not a group of people decided it was worth the risk of breaking away from the biggest, wealthiest superpower of that day to try governing themselves. That's something that had never been done on that scale before. We would not have had a black president had Lincoln not decided it was worth the risk of a civil war to end the near universal institution of slavery. We would not have civil rights for people of color and women had not people like Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony and others risked imprisonment and in some cases their lives to win freedom.

Today's lectionary texts are all about how vital risk taking is to our faith. The subject of our Old and New Testament readings is Abraham. At an age when most people would retire he took the risk of relocating from Ur in Mesopotamia, the heart of civilization, to the largely rural land of Canaan. Granted, he did it because God asked him, but would you? Would you leave home to go to an undeveloped country simply because God asked you? We'd like to think so but most of us secretly would like God to tell us to just stay put and don't change anything. But Abraham shows the true meaning of having faith in God by totally turning his life upside down. Why? Immortality, basically.

As we go through the Bible and get more of God's revelation, the picture of the afterlife gets clearer. While in the New Testament we hear of both heaven (paradise) and hell (exile from God), in the Old Testament, the fate of the dead isn't that clearly delineated. All the dead, righteous or wicked, seem to be consigned to the shadowy realm called Sheol. And in the earliest parts of the Bible, people simply hope to live on through their descendants and the remembrance of their name. To Abraham, this last avenue to immortality seems closed as well because he and his wife are too old to have kids. God, however, promises them lots of descendants and changes his name from Abram to Abraham which means “father of multitudes.” Sarai becomes Sarah which means “princess.” Though both of them find the idea of parenthood at this time of life laughable, Abraham comes to trust God's promise. And in a passage 2 chapters before today's reading we are told that God counts this trust in him as righteousness on Abraham's part. (Genesis 15:6)

The fact that Abraham's trust puts him right with God is at the heart of our passage from Romans. The apostle Paul had been a zealous Pharisee, who was devoted to a meticulous observance of the Jewish law. This included not just the 613 commandments found in the Torah, the five books of Moses, but also literally thousands of interpretations and applications of these laws. These could get extremely technical and legalistic. For instance, rabbis argued about whether you could eat an egg laid on the Sabbath or would that be supporting a form of work on the Sabbath. But after he encountered the risen Jesus, Paul came to see that all these legalities got people sidetracked from the essence of what following God should be. Paul realizes that the great ancestor of the faith, Abraham, had a righteous relationship with God hundreds of years before the existence of the Law. His relationship was based on trust. Trust allowed a person to be radically obedient to God and to do things that otherwise seemed unacceptibly risky.

Today's gospel comes immediately after Peter tells Jesus that the disciples think Jesus is the Messiah. Jesus begins to teach the twelve that he must suffer and die. This is so totally contrary to the popular conception of the Messiah that Peter takes it upon himself to correct God's anointed King. He sees no contradiction between saying to Jesus “You're God's chosen one” and “You are wrong about what God wants you to do.” So Jesus makes the contrast between what people expect of their leader and what God expects of his disciples as stark as he can. “If you're going to follow me, you must disown all rights to yourself, shoulder the instrument of your own torture and death and then follow my lead.”

That's crazy, right? Who would respond to such a recruiting speech? Who would take such risks? No one at first. John's gospel tells us that due to another difficult speech of his a great number of Jesus' followers turned away from him. (John 6:66) The twelve desert him at his arrest. (Mark 14:50) They go into hiding and even contemplate returning to fishing. But then the risen Jesus appears to them. He meets with them and eats with them and teaches them how all this was prophesied in scripture. And that changes things. They may have thought Jesus was God's Messiah before. Now they knew he was. That made the risks of following Jesus different. Yes, they might suffer. They might even die as Jesus did. But now they knew that death is not the end, not for those who trust God.

Today we in the West need not worry very much about physical martyrdom. But Jesus' final words in our gospel are prophetic. Are we ashamed of Jesus and his words? Do we fear, not dying for our faith, but living for it in this cynical, “your truth is not my truth” world? Are we willing to stand up against popular opinion when it's wrong? Are we willing to refuse to buy into the entire platform of any political party, left or right, because none of them totally line up with God's standards? Are we willing to both love and disagree with people when certain moral issues call for it? Can we manage to be both righteous and humble?

Returning to our illustration about the risks of investing, historian Niall Ferguson points out that money is based on trust, and financial crises are all about lack of trust. After 2008, nobody believed that anyone was worth what they said they were or that anyone could keep the promises they made. So nobody was giving anybody any credit for anything. It stayed that way until someone started taking the risk of trusting others. And only then was recovery on its way.

The same thing is true of Christianity. People don't trust Christians to be what they say they are: people following in the footsteps of the Jesus that we see in the gospels. And they don't trust us to fulfill the promises Jesus made about how his followers would act: with love and mercy and healing and help. Instead they see a church that plays it safe, a church unwilling to take the risks Jesus did: to reach out to the despised and the discouraged and the diseased and the despairing and to stand up for them against the powerful. People don't expect much from the church these days except disappointment. And in so far as we have not boldly lived out the words of Jesus, we are responsible for that.

The only way to get that trust back is for us to take the risk that Jesus is who he said he was and that his way of demonstrating self-sacrificial love for others is the right one. It means approaching moral questions not as a conservative or as a progressive but as a Christian. It means upholding both holiness and social justice. It means both comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. It means being willing to disown ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow Jesus.

That would be a terrible gamble if the world really were a casino, if it set the odds, if it could really control all the factors so that the House wins and everyone else was a loser. But Jesus changed the odds. Now everyone can win but only if we refuse to play the world's game. Only if we dare to follow Jesus' rules for living. Only if we dare to love God with all we are and all we have. Only if we dare to love each other as Jesus loves us. Only if we dare to trust him. Only if we dare.

Originally preached on March 8, 2009. There has been some updating.