Sermon for Sunday, January 16, 2005 

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY FAITH?

2^nd in a series on The Heart of Christianity - What is the Christian life all about?

By

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Scripture: Hebrews 11:1-2; 8-12  

¹ To have faith is to be sure of the things we hope for, to be certain of the things we cannot see. ² It was by their faith that people of ancient times won God's approval.

⁸ It was faith that made Abraham obey when God called him to go out to a country which God had promised to give him. He left his own country without knowing where he was going. ⁹ By faith he lived as a foreigner in the country that God had promised him. He lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who received the same promise from God.

¹⁰ For Abraham was waiting for the city which God has designed and built, the city with permanent foundations. ¹¹ It was faith that made Abraham able to become a father, even though he was too old and Sarah herself could not have children. He trusted God to keep his promise. ¹² Though Abraham was practically dead, from this one man came as many descendants as there are stars in the sky, as many as the numberless grains of sand on the seashore.

There is a term we use a lot in our spiritual talk, a term that has been used and misused but one that is so rich and multi-layered that we could not do without it-not only in our spiritual lives but in our relational lives also. The term of course is “faith” and I want to give some examples of how important it is.

An aging mother of a church member is experiencing memory problems and is facing the need to move from one level of care to another level and when her son and daughter try to explain all the possibilities to her, she simply says that she trusts them, she has faith in them, she knows that they will decide on what is best for her even when she is unable to understand all of it. She has faith in her family.

Several church members over the past couple of years have left their places of employment and gone on their own, started their own businesses and we have characterized this as we have talked together as a step of faith, a matter of trusting that when they do their best and give their best efforts and offer their prayers, that God will work for good and for the best possible result. They have taken risky and uncertain steps of faith.

What they have done is like what Abraham did 1700 years before Jesus when he left what was familiar and went to a new land and to be the father of a new people. His action is characterized in one of the most important chapters of the Bible, Hebrews 11, as an act of faith.

A church member is going through a long process of healing from breast cancer surgery and is doing all the right things and is trusting in her doctors as well as using all of her spiritual and physical and relational resources to get well and to thrive even through the chemotherapy. She is on a journey of faith.

Jesus is in a boat asleep during a storm on the Sea of Galilee and his disciples are just terrified that they will be drowned. They wake him up, he calms the storm, and then he says to them, “Why are you afraid? Where is your faith?”  John Wesley, the first Methodist, experienced the same thing when he was crossing from England to America in a storm at sea and he saw the calm of the Moravian Christians around him and wanted the faith, the trust, the confidence he saw in them.

There are some questionable uses of “faith”, uses that have not been helpful. Sometimes church leaders have asked people to just accept things that do not make sense and have said that even though it does not make sense, you just have to accept it on faith, as though being Christian means that you can’t also think at the same time. Anglican Bishop John Robinson criticized this shallow notion many years ago when he said that Christians have been asked to do what the queen did in Alice in Wonderland – to believe six unbelievable things before breakfast.

We are looking at the misuses of this key word “faith”. And sometimes ministers have blamed people for the illness or death of a loved one by saying that if you just have enough faith and pray hard enough, this person will be OK, and when something bad happens, they can say, “Well, it was your fault because you did not have enough faith.”

The shaky basis for that approach is in a Bible story in Mark 9 where a man comes to Jesus asking for Jesus’ help in healing his son who has epilepsy. Jesus agrees to do it and tells him that anything is possible if we have faith. The man is like us – he is a mixture of faith and unfaith, a mixture of doubt and fear and trust, and his answer would be like our answer also. Do you remember what he says? The best translation is something like this: “I have faith, but help me where my faith falls short.” Can anyone else here identify with that man?

Faith can also mean faithfulness, loyalty to a person or a group. When I meet with couples to talk about marriage – another adventure which requires faith and trust as people commit themselves through all the challenges of life, an adventure like father Abraham’s adventure where he did not know quite where he was going but he did set out – to keep faith with each other in a relationship is a matter of loyalty, of faithfulness to each other. Faith can also mean faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, and allegiance to a person or in spiritual matters, to God.

The point of all this discussion of this rich word in our spiritual vocabulary is that faith is not about believing some propositions about God and Jesus. Faith first involves trust and risk – putting ourselves on the line. There is an old chestnut of a story about a circus performer who around the beginning of the twentieth century had obtained permission to string a tightrope across a portion of Niagara Falls – the river right before it drops – and was going to walk across the rope over the falls. A huge crowd gathered the morning he was to do this and cheered as he was successful in his death-defying feat. At the end of his feat he made a surprise announcement that the next day he was going to do something even more daring: the next day he was not only going to walk across again but that he would also push a wheelbarrow with someone in it.

The crowd was wildly enthusiastic and that night there was a big social event with the performer. A man who had seen him that morning came up to him and was just gushing in his enthusiasm and his joy about what he had seen. The audience member told the performer what a great man he was and how he just knew that the performer would be so successful in this next stunt with the wheelbarrow.

The performer said to the man, “I am really happy to meet you and to hear about your faith in my stunt because I have been looking for someone with that kind of confidence and faith in me. I would like for you to ride in the wheelbarrow!”

Well, believing in our head that something is possible is one thing, but putting our body in the wheelbarrow is something else. That is an act of faith – and trust and risk and courage.

It is faith in that sense of trust and risk that Dr. Borg is lifting up in his chapter in this book that I just learned we have ordered 600 copies of now over the past 18 months in this church. Faith is not believing some propositions about Jesus. Faith is not about what we think in our heads. Faith in the Biblical sense always involves risk and some commitment to what God is passionate about.

The church members I grew up with in my hometown in the 1950’s and 1960’s in North Texas all had the correct beliefs about Jesus. They could all recite the Apostles Creed very glibly. They were decent, law-abiding persons who were also deeply racist and were blind to that racism in their schools and community and church. And they resisted anyone trying to connect their Sunday morning “faith” with the ways they were failing to follow the teaching of Jesus on Monday and Tuesday and other days of the week.

That is one reason that Dr. Martin King became so disappointed in the white churches during his leadership of the social movement for equality that has mostly prevailed. He saw people failing to live by what they said was their faith. Faith is not just some propositions; it means living by those beliefs, giving my heart and life to Christ and following his path. Dr. Borg relates a conversation with a woman who has been disillusioned with Christianity because she sees it as a matter of assenting to some doctrines, and she is intrigued with Buddhism and Sufism because they are about following a path.

Christianity is about walking a path also, a path of compassion and justice, and if our “beliefs” do not lead us to walking in the way of Christ and living with loyalty to him and not being anxious but living confidently, then we are not really people of faith. Polls tell us that 90% of Americans believe in a supreme being. Dr. Borg would say, “So what?” He would ask us what difference that is making in our lives.

The people who began this exceptional congregation named after the disciple Andrew 44 years ago took a step of faith. They believed there was a need for a Methodist church in south Denver and they not only thought that, they offered their time and their energy and money to help that happen. And you and I, then, seven years ago when we saw the need for more room, took another step of faith and began to look for a new place to be, to start a new chapter of our lives, so that this congregation could still be faithful to the instructions of Jesus that we are to go into the world and invite more people to follow him.

The decision to relocate was controversial and we saw people who could not make that movement and we may still see people unable to make the new movement in three weeks when we start the next chapter of our life in a new location, a chapter that many would say is a matter of being faithful to God and to God’s vision for us.

This building has been a place to instill faith in children and youth and adults, to instruct people in faith and to help people see life through the eyes of Christ because as this chapter says, faith is also a way of seeing life, and way of envisioning life.

When Martin King was battling the evils of bigotry and discrimination his life was in danger many times, his wife and children were in danger, and he wondered at times if he could go on. The story about one crisis is in the printed sermon on the foyer table titled “FACE THE WORST, BELIEVE THE BEST, DO THE MOST YOU CAN AND LEAVE THE REST TO GOD”. Dr King learned in that crisis that he could trust God and that God would be with him on the path of justice and freedom and equality if he continued to move ahead in faith.

Faith is an outlook on life as that four part formula states. Dr. Borg calls this part of faith visio in Latin-a way of seeing life.  It is a confidence that when I do face the worst and believe the best and do the absolute most I can and leave the rest to God that God will be faithful also and will give me what I need not only to survive but to thrive. It is a basic perspective, an outlook that sees life not as hostile, not as indifferent, but as gracious. It is the faith perspective of the apostle Paul in Romans 8 that in all things God is able to work for good with those who love God. It does not say that God sends all things to us – that is the difference in the predestination theology we looked at last week in both fundamentalist Islam and Christianity. Paul says that whatever bad things may happen that God is big enough to work for good and to bring light and hope to us when we trust God.

That is what the central image of our Christian tradition represents-this cross. There is an interesting thing going on in some new contemporary church buildings. There is a tendency to downplay the cross, to sort of hide this important symbol of the cross. We can see this in many “community churches” where if there is a cross in the sanctuary at all, it is very small and almost unnoticeable. I will be interested to see what the new congregation that has bought our building does about putting a cross in a visible or almost invisible place. 

In our new building the cross will be again the center of our worship life and it will be a bigger cross than we have now because the scale of the building is different. The cross will be free standing. It is a bronze sculpture that is nine feet tall. It is a rugged looking cross. It has not been prettified because it represents a means of torture and death. It was like the electric chair in first century Rome – it was a common means of death for the worst offenders, people Rome wanted to make an example of. The Roman authorities would be shocked to see us worshipping around a cross. But the message of the cross is that God was able to take this most horrible tragedy, the death of God’s innocent son, and bring something hopeful and life affirming out of that. And if God can do that, then God can do amazing things in our life also through the presence of this risen Christ.

Our new cross will send that message as well. It is a rugged sculpture that is very evocative because it also has some places where the light behind it will shine through those jagged holes. It is a profound symbol that when we live in faith, when we risk ourselves and give our hearts to God and trust God to use our lives and our feeble efforts, that God will work through whatever happens to bring hope and goodness and even through something so evil as the cross was seen to be, God’s amazing light. Thanks be to God!

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