© 2026 Evan D. Garner
Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.
If you and I were leaving the church after a meeting and you suddenly remembered that you hadn’t turned off the light when we left the room, but I told you that I had turned it off, would you believe me? If we were driving to Little Rock for diocesan convention and my gas light came on, but I assured you that we had enough in the tank to make it to Trinity Cathedral, would you worry about it? What if the “miles until empty” went to zero, but I still insisted we would be fine, could you put it out of your mind? If you and I were going skydiving, and I handed you a parachute and told you not to worry because I packed it myself, would you jump out of the plane without checking it first?
Our willingness to take someone’s word depends on a number of factors. First and foremost, it depends upon the trustworthiness of the individual making the promise to us. To be honest, I have never packed a parachute in my life, and I wouldn’t know where to start. Please, for both our sakes, don’t take my word for it. But I do know my car pretty well, so, if I tell you we’re going to make it to Little Rock, you can count on it.
That leads me to the second factor, which is how consequential the outcome would be if the person were wrong. If the lights get left on in the Library, it won’t be a big deal. If we end up stranded on the side of the interstate, it would be a considerable inconvenience but not nearly as bad as if your parachute didn’t open.
The third factor is how difficult it would be for you to verify my claim. It wouldn’t take you very long to run back into the church to make sure the light was off, but it might not be worth it because leaving the light on isn’t a big deal. Unpacking and repacking a parachute would take a lot of effort, but, given the consequences of getting it wrong, I’d say it’s worth it to be sure. You’d have a hard time figuring out how many miles beyond zero my car will run before it’s completely out of gas. I supposed you could call Elizabeth and ask her how often I’ve been stranded on the side of the road because I neglected to refill my tank, but you might just have to take my word for it.
The big insight that the apostle Paul provides us in his letters is that, in the cross of Christ, God has packed your salvation parachute, and, as long as you don’t try to repack it, when you jump out of the airplane, everything is going to be okay. That’s what Paul means when he tells us that we are justified by faith. In the death and resurrection of Jesus, God, who is trustworthy and true, has demonstrated his beyond all doubt that God’s will for us and promise to us is new and unending life. Taking God at God’s word is the faith by which we are justified. That’s the faith that Paul’s talking about—our willingness to fling ourselves out life’s airplane door with all the confidence we need to go hurdling toward our demise simply because God is the one who has packed our chute—because God is the one who has promised us that his love will get us to the ground safely.
That kind of faith is not the same thing as believing every word of the Bible or the Nicene Creed with enough conviction to pass a lie detector test. If the faith by which we are made righteous—by which we are made right with God—were the sort of faith that could be measured or quantified on a Likert scale, that faith would simply become another kind of work—something we have to achieve on our own before God will save us. And that’s precisely the opposite of what Paul has in mind, and it’s the exact opposite of what God shows us in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Bible and the creeds and the teachings of the church do not provide litmus tests for verifying a level of faith worthy of salvation. Instead, they are the very things that teach us how to trust in God with all our hearts. They are tools, not tests.
For most of his life, Paul didn’t think about salvation that way. Like most human beings, he assumed that good things happen to good people—that salvation is closer to those who say their prayers and go to temple—that God is more fully manifest in the lives of saints than sinners. In fact, as a zealot for the faith of God’s people, Paul believed that so fully that he was willing to do anything and everything in his power to keep people from messing that up. That’s why he persecuted the church and cast his lot among those who condemned Christians to death—because their radical ways of celebrating God’s love for outcasts and criminals was, to his mind, a threat to the nearness of God’s reign. If he could stomp out anyone and everyone who followed Jesus, he could help God’s promised deliverance of God’s people become a reality on the earth.
But it turns out that, despite his best efforts, Paul was working against the reign of God and against his own participation in it. That’s why Jesus appeared to him on the Road to Damascus and said, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It hurts you to kick against the goads.” We call that moment the moment of Paul’s conversion, but Paul wasn’t converted from Judaism to Christianity. He was converted from the belief that it was his job to make God’s salvation come to the belief that the only thing he could do about God’s salvation was to accept it. He had spent his whole life believing that faithful people were supposed to faithfully pack their own parachutes and that God would bless those who packed them well by keeping them alive. But, that day on the Damascus Road, Paul discovered that, in Christ, God had already packed it for him and that God had done the same for every outcast and sinner who already knew that they couldn’t pack it for themselves.
In the years following his conversion, as Paul reflected on that moment and how all his attempts at being faithful had been misguided, Paul wrote passages like this one from Romans 5. Justification by faith became for Paul more than an understanding of how salvation works. It became his way of making sense of the whole world. “Since we are justified by faith…,” he wrote, “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.”
Paul’s faith in what Jesus had accomplished on the cross led him to turn his whole life over to God—even to give his body to the chains of imprisonment, his back to the scourge of torture, and ultimately his life to the executioner’s sword. That’s because Paul knew that his salvation was not up to him—that God’s promise to rescue him did not depend on his participation in that rescue plan but only on his willingness to accept it. That is justification by faith. And the peace with God that had come to him through that faith in Jesus Christ gave Paul the peace to accept that whatever hardship and adversity he faced were not signs of his failure but the means by which God’s victory would become manifest in him.
We boast in our suffering, Paul wrote simultaneously with absurdist language and complete conviction, because suffering provides an opportunity for endurance, and endurance is what proves our character within us, and character wrought through persistence in the face of hardship always gives way to hope, and hope is the future tense of faith (see Michael Gorman on 1 Corinthians)—the confident expectation of the fulfillment of God’s promises that sustains us here and now. Paul had experienced the virtuous cycle of justification by faith and the peace that came from it, and he wanted us to know that peace as well.
So did Jesus. Why else would he send out his disciples woefully underprepared—like sheep in the midst of wolves—except to teach them that their success was not a product of their own doing but God’s gift to them and through them? God always works through our emptiness, through our weakness, and through our failure—not through our résumé or our accomplishments. When we trust in our own good and faithful work, we leave no room for God. We must learn to believe in the one who knocks us off our high horse and instead meets us down in the dirt.
We will know peace with God and peace in this life when we know that God’s love is the only thing that can save us and that it already has. Our confidence in that love is the faith by which we are justified. With Paul, we boast not in what we have achieved but in what God has achieved on our behalf. And, because of that, we join him and boast even in our suffering because suffering in this life is nothing more than a place where God’s saving love is sure to show up.
You can’t pack that parachute for yourself no matter how hard you try. In fact, the harder you try, the more you’ll mess it up. But don’t take my word for it. Ask God to help you learn how to receive the gift of salvation as a gift—how to trust that what God has done for you is more than you could ask or imagine. God will hear and answer your prayer. Then, all that’s left for you is to jump.