Smith's Sermons: Recent Episodes
Smith Lilley
“So numerous shall your descendants be,” God said to Abraham. Let’s begin today with a little exercise. As many of you know and somewhat fewer of you appreciate, I love a gimmick.
We’re going to practice counting. I want you all together, in unison, to count to ten. I’m not going to do it with you. I’m sure you can handle it. I’m just going to say, “On your mark, get set, go.” And then you count to ten. Do please help. This entire illustration counts on congregational participation. On your mark, get set, go.
[People start counting to ten. They inevitably start with one. I start interrupting around five.]
Now, wait just a minute. I’m not saying you’ve done this wrong, but you’ve done something interesting, if expected. At least, I expected it. I notice that you’ve started at one.
But as you all know, numbers do not start at one. You’ve all heard of zero. Why didn’t you start at zero? Or, for that matter, -7. Or start at 20 and count down. The possibilities are—literally—infinite.
It seems that we don’t know how to count. Or the counting that we render is only one very particular measurement of counting. It would be impossible for us to account for all the ways to count to ten. But we have to count! We need some way of making sense of our world. We have to start somewhere, so we start at one.
You may be saying to yourself at this point, “I’m glad this guy is leaving.” Or maybe you’re saying, “You know, sermons are usually less mathematical.” What’s this about? Well, in short, since this is my last sermon to you in my present capacity, I want it to count.
Much more importantly—if we are to enumerate Abraham’s descendants, or account for Jesus’s healings, or calculate what would make Matthew leave his tax booth—and if we are to reckon with our own faith—we’d better learn to count. So today we will talk about counting—what counts, and how we can figure our faith.
How do we account for faith? In one sense it’s unclear where faith starts. What makes Abraham go from his kindred and his father’s house to the land which God shows him? What makes Matthew leave his post? What enables you and I to believe? We’re told—called—to believe. But if I don’t believe, how can I just start believing? Do I pretend? Belief, in this way, seems impossible to measure.
And so sometimes we have anxiety about our beliefs. If faith is calculated and rewarded—”take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well”—then why haven’t I experienced the healing, spiritual or physical, that I need? Have I believed enough? Or believed in the right way? Where do you even start counting to know?
Being finite humans, we seem utterly incapable of accounting for such things. We can’t even measure our own lives. Having been here for seven and a half years—2,765 days, to be exact—with this church, I’ve been filled with memories and experiences. I will hold them, count on them, enumerate them for years. But of course there are many things I’ve forgotten to do or failed to account for. And innumerable things that I simply cannot know about. I—and we—cannot make a full numbering of our lives.
Some of you musical theater types now have “Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes” in your head. How do we measure a year? My apologies.
If we can’t truly and fully know ourselves, how can we say anything concrete about faith?
An answer comes from one of my favorite Bible words: “reckon.”
Reckon is still a Southernism, I reckon, but it has fallen into disuse in everyday language. I’m trying to give it a comeback. I’ll slip it into conversation every now and then. I reckon I’m trying to do the same thing with “oblige.” I like to sign off emails with a “much obliged. Some of you will say to me, “Stop trying to make ‘reckon’ happen. It’s not going to happen.” (If you didn’t get that reference, don’t worry about it.)
“Reckon” is a beautiful English word because of how layered its meanings are. It’s a counting term, first of all. We reckon something by calculating it. Thus, you see the abacus on your bulletin. (I had an abacus in my office, but apparently I’ve lost it. I have yet again failed to account for everything.) Because reckon is a counting term it’s also a cognitive term—thus we might say “I reckon” I’ll do this or that. It’s also a navigational term (so appropriate for our example of Abraham). To navigate by “dead reckoning” is to figure out where you are based on your speed and direction rather than observing the stars or your GPS. It’s also a term of judgment. “There will be a reckoning”: an accounting of and punishment for wrongdoing is coming.
Though that’s our English word “reckon,” but it’s not at all far from Paul’s meaning (the Greek has similar layers) when he tells us in Romans that Abraham’s faith was “was reckoned to him as righteousness.” There is a reckoning not just for Abraham but for us as well. Paul goes on to say, “the words, ‘it was reckoned to him’, were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead,who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.”
Faith is a reckoning. But not something that we reckon, but something “reckoned to us as righteousness.” In this way faith is a response. It points to a reality outside us. We don’t have faith in faith, belief in believing. Our faith responds to a promise, a guarantee, not of our own creation.
We (usually) start counting from one. But the God who calls Abraham and later Matthew starts counting at zero and reckons infinitely. Who is the God in whom Abraham believes? The one who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. The one able to do what he had promised. Abraham has a hundred years. But Abraham’s God—our God—cannot be counted but can be counted on as the one who counts all things. “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth,” says Psalm 33. “He gathered the waters of the sea as in a bottle; he put the deeps in storehouses.” God counts everything, and God counts from zero. “For he spoke, and it came to be. He commanded, and it stood firm.”
Faith does not begin with us. Faith looks to the promise of God, a grace that we cannot calculate. Faith is a reckoning.
Consider Matthew. His job is to count. We sit with him at his tax booth. Jesus comes to him—comes to him, and comes to us—and says, “Follow me.” And Matthew leaves his counting behind.
Or consider the leader of the synagogue. He comes to Jesus, but he comes and kneels. Back home people think they know how to enumerate death, but he rightly sees that Jesus is the one who calls into existence the things that are not. Jesus will take his daughter by the hand—with little fingers that could count to five—and raise her up.
Or consider the woman suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. Twelve years. She has probably counted every day. But now she only needs to count to one, because she goes to the one who accounts for all. “If only I touch his cloak”—that one thing—“I will be made well.” And she was.
Or consider the tax collectors and sinners. Jesus takes an accounting of them when others would write them off.
What is faith? Faith comes from God. It is the work of God in us. Faith is always a response to the being and action of God toward us, and faith looks forward to God making a reckoning with all things in our world so that all things may be made new.
So when you take an account of your faith, consider this. St. Augustine writes, “If it is God who produces our faith, acting in a wondrous manner in our hearts so that we believe, surely we should not fear that he cannot do the entire work.” Faith begins and ends with the work of God.
Is this Methodist? You might say to me, I thought Methodists were supposed to believe in free will and in personal and social holiness. Doesn’t that involve us, you know, doing things? It does, and we do! But never forget that faith and holiness come from grace, which is the power of God. We believe in a God who can do more than we can ask or imagine. And that means God can meet us at any point—with Abraham in Haran or with Matthew in the tax booth or in the midst of death and illness, physical and spiritual—and also carry us to the very end, perfection in God’s own love.
Friends, the promise of the gospel is that there is a reckoning—a reckoning of a God who counts from one, who accounts for all, who numbers us as Abraham’s children. The promise comes through the righteousness of faith and rests on grace given to us. That’s a promise you can count on.
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This was my final sermon at First UMC Tupelo before taking an appointment as the pastor of a new United Methodist church in Fulton, Mississippi. I will also serve as the pastor of Verona UMC and as a member of the Tupelo district staff, where my focus will be shepherding people who wish to remain in the United Methodist Church after their congregation has disaffiliated.