A Living Faith

What does it mean to have faith?

This is the question I asked myself, whether explicitly or not, over a period of many years. This is a very difficult question to answer, and one which I have taken some time to answer. You’ll have to stick with this ridiculously long blog post to get all my feelings on the issue.

From an early age, I was brought up in a church family which was my home away from home, as I imagine might be the case of many of you. In this extended family of sorts, I learned my personal sense of right and wrong, a sense of commitment, of community, and above all of acceptance – something I did not learn in school, believe me. As much as my experiences in the life of my church, in the Boy Scouts (you know it) and with my family cultivated my relationship with God, I was never completely comfortable with my faith.

I suspect I was one of many who conceptualize God in universal terms. I always liked to think of God as the unity of all things, as our creator, as the inspiration of all good things. When I would go hiking in the Blue Ridge and look out at the beauty of God’s creation that was the only proof I needed of his presence. Never did I feel closer to God than when I attended a church conference each summer in the mountains of North Carolina.

Yet over the years I developed a series of persistent questions which challenged my absolute faith in God. By faith in this sense, I mean belief in generally accepted Christine doctrine, to the letter. Of course, since there are so many variations of this “doctrine,” I’ll clarify by saying the set of beliefs commonly held by Protestant Christians in America. I’ll call these challenges my “barriers to faith,” which I will begin writing about today and will continue over the next several weeks. A few that I will address include the fate of non-Christians, Biblical inerrancy, and why God lets bad things happen to good people. Of course, I can only share how I addressed these questions and became satisfied in my own faith.

So, to return to my original question, I always wondered if my faith was as strong as it should be, given that I had questions about certain aspects of Christianity. This worry of sorts was compounded many times when I realized last year that I felt called to public ministry in the church. If my faith wasn’t totally rock solid, how was I supposed to bolster the faith of others?!?!

Although many of my “questions” were answered in one form or another, as I will develop in subsequent posts, one can always raise new questions. The breakthrough for me was not to eliminate every possible doubt, but to redefine “faith” in my mind.

One Sunday last summer I went to my church as usual, having been praying for a stronger faith. I opened the bulletin and glanced down at the hymn of the day. I froze when my eyes discovered its title, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” one of my favorite hymns and one with a particularly relevant message. The Scripture for the day came from the letter to the Hebrews, chapter 11, which begins as follows:

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval.”

It continues by describing some of those ancestors, a list of Biblical greats that our pastor dubbed “God’s All-Star Team,” including the likes of Abraham, Noah, Moses and Ruth. His sermon for the day revolved around these people who are unified by their total trust in God and his role in their life. Let me summarize some of their accomplishments in faith.

Abraham had so much faith in God that he trusted God’s promise that he would be “the father of many nations” even though he and his wife were in old age and childless. He followed God’s commands for his life and soon his wife Sarah conceived a child. Noah trusted God’s call to build a huge boat because the entire world would be flooded, and I think we’re all glad he did. Moses trusted God that he would lead his people out of slavery in Egypt, even through the Red Sea and through 40 years in the wilderness. Ruth, a daughter-in-law whose husband had died, laid down all hopes for herself in total devotion to her mother-in-law (who had lost a husband and two sons), saying to her:

“Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die – there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!”

Can you imagine being so devoted to someone that you would leave your country and your people, your hope of future marriage and any financial security (these certainly were linked in Ruth’s day), to embrace the life of a poor outcast with a wandering widow, with only the assurance of God to guide your steps?

To those in the congregation who had ever doubted some aspect of their “faith,” our pastor said that day that faith is not adherence to a list of beliefs, nor is it repeating a canned phrase. I believe that faith is active in our lives - it is a trust that God will provide what we need, a submission to his will and his role in our lives and the confidence which comes from such submission.

One person has been glaringly missing from my treatment of this issue so far, without whom it would be meaningless. Of course, I’m talking about Jesus Christ. As our pastor explained to us and as the writer of Hebrews exclaims, Christ is faith, He is the Way, He is our assurance of things hoped for.

All of the above-described greats of Hebrew scripture lived in faith that God would take care of them and that he would deliver on the covenant with his people Israel. Israel did not really uphold its end of the bargain, but did God ever deliver on his promises in Christ!

To oversimplify an extremely complex theological debate which has raged for centuries, in Christ we are “saved” by our “faith” in him, as most of us understand. We are no longer held to the law, the Torah, in order to be justified. This misses the point, if I may say so, in that it focuses on being “let off the hook.” The significance of acknowledging that we are justified by God’s amazing grace (Jesus’ death on the cross to deal with sin once and for all) is to underscore that it is God, not us, taking care of everything. The law was and is great and it points out how to live a good life, but through it we cannot save ourselves. We tried (some of us didn’t). We failed.

Instead, we have been saved by Christ’s death and resurrection. This is made active in our lives through, you got it, faith. Does this mean that if you say the Apostles’ Creed you are going to heaven, and if you don’t, you aren’t?

I just don’t think so. This point of view, once again, places ourselves at the center of the issue. Can we really nullify Christ’s sacrifice for us by turning away from him or even by being confused about our religion? Might that discount the saving power of Jesus Christ? If Christ took care of sin, how can anything we do remove the justification that he has provided us? It is a gift that cannot be returned. [Disclaimer: I didn’t come up with this line of thought, it was also planted in my head by the pastors of my church, but it has been stewing in my brain ever since. I do not presume to say that they would agree with everything I am writing in this entry, as it is my own personal statement of faith.]

I plunge into the issue of salvation because I think it speak volumes as to the nature of faith, which was my original question. Faith is more than what Protestants do in order to get into heaven. It is a gift which has been given to us in creation, in our baptism into the family of God, through the Bible and through the Holy Spirit which is active in our lives each day. Faith is living in not just the knowledge, but the assurance, that we are children of God who have been justified by Christ and are guided each day by the Holy Spirit. Martin Luther, who first proposed the idea that we are justified by faith and not by works, still urged his followers that faith must “be made active in love.”

Imagine a place full of people who are assured that God has provided and will provide everything they need in their lives, who are as completely confident in this as they are that the sun will rise each day. No one needs to horde wealth or live selfishly, because the end of life is eternal communion with God and with each other, not to achieve wealth, power or fame on our own terms. No one needs to draw lines between people who “believe” as they do and those who “believe” differently, because everyone has an absolute trust that God holds everyone in the palm of his hand and that Christ died for the sins of all.

Does this place sound like heaven? Why does that place have to be distant, attainable only if you “have faith” as one church says you should? Such distance only gives us space and time “to believe” and go on living a life reflecting only disbelief that God has provided everything for us, as we seek to justify ourselves through acquisition.

Through faith we are saved, through faith in Christ we are granted eternal life in heaven.

I think if we all lived with the faith of Abraham, with the faith of Noah and Moses, with the faith of Ruth, our world can be a lot like heaven. We will always fall short, we will always be sinful, but we don’t have to worry about that. Imagine what could happen if we were willing to follow God’s call to build an ark which will house all God’s creation. If we were willing to drop everything we cling to in our lives to care for someone in need. First we must be willing to stop talking and start listening to what God is saying to us. This acknowledgement is one of the most “faithful” things we can do.

One of the only things the Bible says we can do to achieve “righteousness,” as I understand it, is to be baptized, as Christ was at the beginning of his ministry and as we celebrated this past Sunday. In baptism we are claimed by God as one of his own and we enter into the community of believers. We are eternally members of the family of God, belonging to him and to one another. People have said to me that if you wake up on days when it is hard to believe in anything, believe in the power of your own baptism. When you feel like you don’t belong, when you have been rejected, downtrodden, or maybe that you have done this yourself, remember that God has you. You can try to run away and we all do, but, you know, you’re still a child of God.

We can doubt, we can be scared, we can run and hide, but God has us, he is with us, and he is reaching out to us always. Faith is not the absence of doubt nor is it our ticket into eternity. Faith is the Way of living in the assurance of God so as to bring the eternal into our temporal lives.