BACK TO BASICS: FAITH

      What is faith? Today is the final in the series on Back to Basics. We have talked about God as the creator of heaven and earth, the ground of all being, about prayer as the way the game of continuing creation is played, about Jesus Christ as the one whom we follow to make sense of life, about service as the only way to follow, about the Holy Spirit as the one who is moving creation toward the time when all know that they are God’s children, and today….faith as the gift of the Spirit.

      Paul wrote to the Galatians (when he was being angry and blunt with them) and the Romans (when he was making nice because he was coming to visit), and he used the same story: Abraham lived before the law was given to Moses on Mt. Sinai, so he had no legal claim to live a righteous life. But he trusted God and that was reckoned to him as righteousness. If you want to know how came the Protestant Reformation, there is the text. Take that text out of the Bible and there is no Reformation. If there is ever a formal reconciliation of Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church, it will form around a common understanding of that text.

About 400 years before the Apostle Paul wrote about the importance of faith, the philosopher Plato wrote about faith, with his mentor Socrates as his spokesperson. For Plato faith was just an inferior kind of knowledge, only slightly better than the erroneous information you get through sense perception. The real knowledge, Plato said, came through reasoning about the transcendent universal ideas that you can uncover in the mind.

      Plato and Paul used the same Greek word, p?st???, meaning “I believe.” And whether you approach faith as an inferior kind of knowledge (Plato) or the natural road to a holistic world view(Paul) makes all the difference.

      From time to time at parties somebody discovers that I am a pastor and they approach me by saying: “I believe in the existence of God,” as if they expect to be congratulated. Their next line is utterly predictable: “but I don’t go to church,” to be followed by various excuses, so I don’t let it get that far. There are few things more boring than being trapped in conversation at a party listening to someone who holds a positive opinion about the existence of something called God but who seems to do nothing about it. Well, a toothache is worse. A broken bone. Those may be worse.

      So when someone walks up to me and says that they believe in the existence of God, I take it that they mean God like they mean sunset or gravity or chewing gum (something in the universe) and I respond: “I don’t,” because I don’t believe that God is a thing in the universe. And follow it up with: “but I try to have faith.”

      Faith is not an opinion; is a passion. When Paul wrote at the end of I Corinthians 13 “that faith, hope and love abide,” he was ranking faith among the passions. When Soren Kierkegaard wrote analytical attacks on the rationalism of the placid Danish church and followed them up with scandalous love stories, he was trying to provoke people into realizing that faith is not a pleasant mind game. It’s commitment and joy and risk and pain. The result of faith is not satisfaction; it’s triumph.

      We live in an age when people are trying to find something about which to be passionate. We’ve become hobbyists of the spirit. My golf game. My baseball team. My butterfly collection.

      In the past we’ve been passionate about our nation or our denominations. Hard to be passionate when there is so much muddling going on by our leaders. So we settle on hobbies.

      There is a group of people called the Rainbow Nation that follows the concert itinerary of the Grateful Dead. Even after Jerry Garcia stopped being grateful and started being dead, they still follow. Probably in form this group is the closest thing going to the Galilee events of the Gospels. Not necessarily in substance.

      In part that is because the churches have worked so hard to convince people that there is nothing about which to be passionate in here. So get a hobby.

      Of late Willard Robinson has been sharing some experiences that moved him so much 40 years ago that he has been living off the energy of them ever since. It’s about The Ecumenical Institute, and its founder Joe Matthews, working in the 60s to get the church out of its self centered lethargy. During that time, the Robinsons and I were living about 10 miles apart but didn’t know each other.

      But I will always remember my encounter with Joe Matthews, when I heard him say that God had spoken to him: “Joe, be the church. Be the church, be the church. Be the Church. If nobody else in the whole world will be the church, you be the church.” I wondered at the time if he was a saint or a nut case. But I knew in my heart, that if he was a saint, he was God’s saint. And if he was a nut case, he was God’s nut case. He was not a hobbyist. He had found a passion of transcendent importance.

      Over the years I have known a number of people who had faith, not as an opinion about God but faith as a passion stirred up by the Holy Spirit within them to respond to God. I have known an usher who cold barely stand even with a walker, but every Sunday that he could stand, he stood in the doorway of the house of God to greet people. I have known a woman who moved heaven and earth and occasionally the pastor to make sure that kids had a quality confirmation experience.

      Another woman who single-handedly held a church school together through decline and rebirth. A man who just loves to take on people who discriminate against the poor---cities, corporations, lazy churches are all fair game. A group of teens who would drag themselves out of bed on Sunday morning even when they were sick in order to stand up and rock the church.

      Be the church, be the church, be the church. If nobody else in the whole world will greet the visitor and teach the children and rock the congregation, you be the church.

      Faith in God is more than a hobby. It is more than an opinion. It is a passionate trust in the promise of a faithful God. Faith becomes an action because it can’t be otherwise. It can’t help itself.

      I collect these stories about faith-full people because I want to get next to them. I want to get more of what they’ve got. I know I can’t make myself have faith; faith is a gift of the Spirit. But I can get close to people who’ve got it and hope I get infected.

      So I want to ask you why you come to church. Is it so that your holy opinions may be more affirmed? Or is it so that you can hear about what ultimately matters in the world and know why you matter? Is it to be with nice, well-meaning neighbors? Or is it to catch a passion that will make you a neighbor to those in need? Is it to get a witness so that you can be a witness?

If the response to the divine Creator is prayer, and the response to Jesus Christ is a life style of service, the response to the Holy Spirit is faith, that passion in the core with hope and love. It is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. And its truth will be known, not as an idea, but as an action.