What is Faith?
By Charles Rush
January 10, 2010
Matthew 6: 25-33 and Mk. 9: 20-24
[ Audio
(mp3, 7.0Mb) ]
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I would like to
thank my colleague Rev. Julie Yarborough for calling to my attention the book
“The Heart of Christianity”
by Marcus Borg.[i]
A women's book group at the church
had been reading it and she thought the chapter “Faith: The Way of the Heart”
made some thoughtful distinctions. Indeed, this sermon takes Borg's outline and
simply illustrates his ideas differently.
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met one of my new neighbors
recently, up at the farm,
who heard me working close to his fence. He wanted a phone number in case he needed to contact me, so I handed him a card from my wallet. He looks down, sees Reverend, and says, “Oh, so you're a believer”. I said ‘yes' even as I noted to myself that I probably wouldn't live up to his expectations of what that should mean.
And I understand what he means and so
do you if you grew up in a Catholic school or you grew up in our countries
heartland and went to Sunday School. He is talking about faith as assensus, from which we get the word
assent. He is referring to the Creeds.
I've printed two in the Bulletin -- one Catholic, one Protestant. The Apostle's Creed, for
example
I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
the Maker of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
born of the virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried;
He descended into hell.
The third day He arose again from the dead;
He ascended into heaven,
and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost;
the holy catholic church;
the communion of saints;
the forgiveness of sins;
the resurrection of the body;
and the life everlasting. Amen.
If you grew up,
like I did, going to St. Anthony's school in kindergarten, the Nuns had us
repeat the Nicene Creed in chapel every morning. So, you would be forgiven for
thinking that this is what it means to believe, to assent to this creed, but it
is actually only one dimension of the meaning of the word faith, and frankly that
dimension is the least important and subject to the most debate.
And this
dimension usually poses most of the intellectual problems for people in the
Church because we go to college and learn about the Enlightenment, we learn the
scientific method, we drink deeply from the secular ethos of the college
campus. So, what does this Creed mean, living in our modern secular world? What
do I do with it? It is a conundrum. I'm not answering it this morning.
But as I explained to our confirmands recently, you
do not get the option of turning your brain off and you will have to be
intellectually honest with yourself. Intellectually, you will learn how to
doubt and sometimes you will disbelieve and that is all part of the process of
maturity. There are certain questions which arise for us, not so much to
answer, as to struggle with all of our lives. And meaning in theology is one of
them.
That is why at Christ Church we say,
we have more questions than answers.
That is why at Christ Church we say, we focus more on what binds us together
today than what separated us in the past. As Saint Augustine once said:
| In necessariis unitas, |
In essentials unity, |
| In dubiis libertas, |
In debatable things liberty, |
| In omnibus autem caritas. |
But in all things charity (love). |
The very best of the Christian
tradition has encouraged freedom of thought and critical reflection and our
very worst moments in the past have suppressed dissent and killed heresy. But, faith
as assensus is not enough. Your life
is not about believing the right things, it is about living a deeper, fuller
dimension of existence. The Creeds, the Bible, they are just guides but if you
don't actualize love, it doesn't matter much what you believe, your actual life won't come out quite right,
and you won't be someone that people want to be around.
Faith is more
than assent. Jesus used to say, “Your
faith will make you whole”. It will make you rich, full, healed, healthy,
strong and vibrant.
Jesus taught us
that faith is fiducia, to use the Latin phrase. To have faith is to ‘trust', ‘to have confidence in', as in
I have confidence enough in you to appoint you legal guardian of my children in
case something happens to me. I trust you enough to make you my medical
guardian when I go in for surgery and can't make decisions for myself. And it is related to making a commitment or
making a pledge. It is an act and that
is a whole different level of faith.
I used to teach
repelling to psychiatric patients and we used repelling on a retreat. I'd meet
with my patients every day for a week. They'd put on the harness, set up the
rope, check all of their equipment, and we'd practice leaning back and holding
themselves steady, all about 2 ft. off the ground. Everyone loved it and
everyone loved me.
And then, I'd
drive them over to the Delaware Water Gap. We would hike up a lovely trail, eat
a lovely lunch, harness up, and I'd lead them over to a 500 foot drop. We'd go
through the same practice drill over two feet of ground, so they knew
everything worked. And then, we would walk over near the edge of the cliff
and this is what I got… “No thank you, I'm walking back down the way I came up and I
hate this stuff and I hate you.”
It took me hours to get them to all to
lean back over 500 ft., take in all of God's beautiful creation and ease
themselves back down to the ground. And you know what happened? They all said
it was the best thing they'd ever done in their life. And we found that it
regularly allowed for a breakthrough moment for some of them because???? They
had really trusted. They became
committed. They pledged themselves and they did it.
If you can do pledge
yourself in one area of your life, you can become confident enough to make a
real commitment, to really pledge yourself, in other parts of your life. In those moments,
you become stronger. Jesus taught us that if you internalize this dimension of
faith in your life, if you actualize, sometimes in your life it will seem that
you can move mountains. Big stuff can happen.
One important dimension
of faith as trust is remembering that the Force of the Universe, as Obi-Wan Kenobi
used to call it, is much bigger than you are. You are but a channel. I saw this
kid interviewed in West Texas, an all-Star football quarterback. The host asked
him why he wore the number 3 on his uniform. He quoted Brian Piccolo, a Wake
Forest graduate, I'm proud to say. The kid said; “My God is first, my country
and my family are second; I am third”. That is the perspective. He is right about
that. These things are much bigger than
you are.
You will have to remember this from
time to time. You will find yourself at several points in your life when you
will have occasion to repeat that silently to yourself, usually in these
moments when death and tragedy are near, and you have to step out…. In trust.
And remember that the God force, the life force is much bigger than you.
Jesus taught us
not to worry, not to be anxious. That is
one of the benefits of genuine trust. He said “Consider the lilies of the
field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, not even
Solomon in all of his glory is arrayed as one of these. But if God so clothes
the grass of the field, will God not much more clothe you? Seek God's kingdom
first, and God's righteousness, and all these other things will be added unto
you.”
That is not
something that happens easily, not any more easily that leaning off a 500ft.
cliff. You have to come back to this and back to it in your life. You grow
stronger and stronger in trust because you've lived it, you've actualized it.
You have people with whom you share trust.
And the third
meaning of faith is fidelitas from
which we get the word fidelity or faithfulness. It means that you are loyal. It
means that you are committed. You've given your allegiance. People can count on
you. This isn't just from the head. It is from the heart.
A couple years
ago, I was listening to Tim Russert before he died, talking about his father,
Big Russ. They were talking about the differences in the generations in thinking
about what makes for a good life. The guys in my generation had so many
expectations that had to be met before we think we are doing okay- money,
leisure time, power. All these things…
They turned and
asked this guy that was like 75 what made for a good life. He thought about it
for a while and he said, ‘being able to sleep with your conscience at night'.
Nobody spoke for a moment. Everyone knew that this man was reliving some
internal tape, probably in the South Pacific during World War 2. He was remembering
when he had to lead his men into battle, with not enough information to really
know what was coming next, and not really knowing what the enemy was doing. He
was remembering the faces of men that counted on him.
These faces of
the people that depend on you come back to you at the oddest times (whether
they are soldiers or family or friends). And if you are lucky enough to live to
be an old man, this issue of integrity becomes more and more important the
older you are. The truth is, you will
fail others; you will fail yourself; you will fail your God. It is
possible to be a creep and ignore this but it doesn't work well. You have to
live with yourself. At the end of the day, we all have some moment in our lives
like Private Ryan in the movie when he was an old man. He is reflecting on all
the guys he knew that didn't make it through and he turns to his wife and he
says to her, ‘tell me I'm a good man.' Tell me I've lived a good life, a life
of honor. Tell me my life was worth living.
It is
important. And as I'm discovering, it becomes more and more important in your
marriage. It is very important that your spouse respects you. I think I was
surprised to watch marriages hit a shoal and founder on the issue of integrity.
For one reason or another, a spouse loses respect for their mate and they just
can't get by that. It takes quite a while for marriages without respect to
unravel but unravel they do.
Jesus taught us
to love our God (fidelitas) with all heart, and all our mind and all our
strength… The deepest way is the
committed way. And you have to figure this out in your life what you will
commit yourself to. We can't answer that for you.
And love your
neighbor as your self. You want to love God, love God's people, love God's
world. Become responsible to yourself, to your God, to your people. Live with
integrity. Become someone that people can count on.
You will know
pain if you live this way, there is no question about it. There is nothing as
tough as the loss of someone that you've had a profound love relationship with.
It is a bad hurt. But you'll be glad to pay that price of pain for the
privilege of love. I can assure you of that. And you will only access that
deeper stream of love when you commit yourself. It is the only path to the
fullness and it will gradually, steadily demand more and more of your core
being, of opening yourself in strength and honesty with your spouse, with your
friends. You will grow. They will grow. This part never gets any easier but
there is not any other way for your to live a richer, fuller, more meaningful
life.
As a friend of
mine used to say, “Vivo del Corazon”,
live from the heart.
Finally, faith
in it's broadest, deepest meaning is Visio. It is a vision. It is a way
of seeing reality from a spiritual dimension. I'm talking about a fundamental
stance, a fundamental way of looking at the world.
As we go
through our lives, we learn many different ways of seeing and developing
meaning. We spend a lot of our lives as student and workers looking at the
world as competitors, winning and losing, getting and giving, being aggressive,
making sure our needs are getting met, making sure we have enough, fending off
threats. Sometimes this seems to occupy most of our lives and when it doesn't,
it is often because we are simply entertaining ourselves, diverting our
attention with the latest technological gadget game.
But we get to
these junctures in our lives where we can access a different dimension. There
will come a morning in your life when you are filled wide awake with gratitude
that the world is such an incredible place and it is so wonderful to be alive.
It is what
washes over you at the birth of your own child. There is this sacred dimension
to new life that you tap into. You have the immediate, palpable sense that you
are participating in something much bigger than just you and your spouse. At
the same time, you get a jolt of humility as you personalize responsibility for
caring for this vulnerable infant. A window to the future flashes open for a
moment and you feel the current pulling you forward in time from the ‘not yet'
so to speak.
The prophet
Joel used to say, of the moments like this in your life, when the essential
goodness and wonder of life is just very concentrated, “Your young men shall
dream dreams, and your young women shall see visions”. The future vision opens
up, and though you don't have the details, it pulls you into a new chapter.
Jesus taught
us, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God”… Have a vision of a better world. Have a
vision of what you are going to participate in creating. Imagine your legacy.
Let a vision of the future guide you and keep you on track.
At different
phases of our lives, we keep asking ourselves, are the people around us finding
fulfillment? Are we moving towards becoming more authentic or real? What are we
doing to make the world a better place? What is our role in the immediate
future?
Hopefully, you
will get to see this in action. There is something spiritually moving about
people who have found a noble cause that they can commit themselves to in love.
When it is enacted humanely and compassionately, that vision of faith can
become something not only worth living for but something worth dying for, a
richer transcendence still.
I would share
with you such a moment from my generation. Towards the end of the Civil Rights
era, there were many threats on the life of Martin Luther King. You had a sense
that a huge corner was about to be turned in our country and it was being
turned. These threats seemed like the last gasp of the old order that did not
want to change. The press kept asking Dr. King and the other leaders around him
what he thought about these threats, would they affect the way he led marches
in the future, etc...
He was in
Memphis to support the garbage workers in a strike and at the end of his
speech, he addressed those concerns about fear. Of course, he was afraid to die
but he got past them because he had such a powerful vision of the future that
guided him and kept him going. He was caught up in something much bigger than
himself and he was privileged to be part of it. And this turned out to be the
last speech of his
life [ii]…
… We've got some difficult days
ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the
mountaintop.
And I don't mind.
Like anybody, I would like to live a
long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I
just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And
I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with
you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the
promised land!
And so I'm happy, tonight.
I'm not worried about anything.
I'm not fearing any man!
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the
coming of the Lord!!
[ YouTube ]
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May you be
privileged to be near to people that embody a nobility of purpose in their
lives. May you find a future you can commit yourself to follow. May you embody
integrity and become authentically who God would want you to become. May you
see a better world and inspire those around you to birth it in the next
generation. Amen.
[i]
The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith by Marcus J. Borg
[ii] This
is the last minute or so of Dr. King's speech that night in Memphis, April 4, 1968. You can read the entire speech here:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkivebeentothemountaintop.htm. You can watch and hear the final portion
here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APElEqI6ahw,
and you can watch and hear a longer excerpt along with some introductory commentary here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6yZ2YrKPlI
© 2010
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved.
