Sermon: What is Faith?

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What is Faith?

By Charles Rush

July 8, 2012

[ Audio (mp3, 4.9Mb) ]

I would like to thank my colleague Rev. Julie Yarborough for calling to my attention the book “The Heart of Christianity” by Marcus Borg. 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.

met one of my neighbors recently, 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, I guess it is good to be living next door to a believer”. I thought to myself, ‘is it? Really? I'm going to be a disappointment, I'm sure.”

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- 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, I've always appreciated the Spirit of Christ Church. Here 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 a chaplain to psychiatric patients when I was in graduate school. Each year we had a retreat where they all learned to repel. 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, on the weekend of the retreat, we'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 through our drills, two feet off the ground. Everyone loved it and everyone loved me.

Then, we'd walk over to a 500 foot drop. 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 when they finally made it back to the ground? 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 exercised their faith. 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 this is the Force that courses through the Universe, as Obi Wan used to call it. 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.

It is true in different ways in every generation and I suppose that this the beautiful thing about Abraham and Sarah. They start out together on an unknown journey, pledging themselves to God and each other come what may. And that is the beauty and the romance of our lives, that you can look back on so many changes, look back to the very beginning after all you've become- you remember how young, naïve you were, how little the two of you actually had, and say to each other, ‘what were we thinking?'

My grandparents certainly grew up in a world so different than mine that they didn't have a lot of advice to pass on to me verbally. They were in college in the 20's, young adults through the depression, raised their family with both working equal jobs pretty much, World War 2, two rural kids that made a life in Memphis. They were married 60 years.

I'd only been married a couple years, just right out of college (like Heather and Eric Valosin), when we went to visit them. My grandmother was in a nursing home with advanced dementia and we went to see her, had dinner, and went home with my grandfather.

We get a call at midnight. It is the nursing home. My grandmother has been crying and pleading for the last couple hours. The nurses and orderlies can't get her to stop. My grandfather asked me to drive him over, so I did.

As soon as we get there, you can hear my grandmother yelping, confused by her own imagination, such a horrible, unnecessary fear. My grandfather walks in the room and speaks to her, calls her by name, holds her hand and brushes her cheek. And just like that she stops. It was something about his voice, something so deep about their life together that, in his presence, she just relaxes. I sit there watching my grandfather soothe his girlfriend until she falls asleep.

He gets up at one point to leave the room for a moment. My grandmother says to me, “who is that man?” I smile.

I could not have known then what I know now, reflecting back on that night, that I got to miss all the difficult growth times that made it possible: I got to miss how they misunderstood each other and learned to make up, how they argued over priorities for their family, I got to miss how much they had to change, and grow and become something so different that, even without the dementia, you might be forgiven for not entirely recognizing this loving man for the young boy that stood next to you at the altar, fifty something years ago.

He didn't tell me a lot rationally. But from the heart, he showed me what it looks like when you show up for each other, year after year. When you can be trusted and you can really trust, anxiety begins to dissolve, even in the midst of overwhelming stress.

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 each one of 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 yourself. 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 you to live a richer, fuller, more meaningful life.

As a friend of mine used to say, “Viva del Corazon”, live from the heart. People once asked Jesus how to increase their faith and he told them, “if you only have the faith of a mustard seed, you could say to the tree, ‘uproot yourself' and it would be uprooted". Amazing things will happen, once you find people and a purpose to commit your life to, things you can't imagine, things that will make you one day look back and remember how young and naïve and vulnerable you all were when you started and out, so that you'll say, ‘what were we thinking?' May you be so blessed to lead from the heart and live by faith. Amen.