Faith isn’t a mechanical formula. Our faith in God can’t be reduced to a set of rules. There’s no creed, no Book of Discipline, no authoritative commentary on the Bible that can simplify faith to a matter of following the right rules. There are never enough rules to account for the variety of human experiences. I remember once trying to teach a game to a junior high youth group. It was a simple game of passing a Frisbee from teammate to teammate. The game was really mostly just an excuse to be outside one sunny Sunday afternoon in the spring. The game was just a framework for the kids to interact, play, build community, and enjoy the gifts of God’s beautiful creation outdoors. But before they had a chance to start playing, these junior higher began arguing about the rules. I had to spend a half an hour going through the rules, and answering infinite questions of “what if?” The group was so hung up on the rules, that we didn’t have much time left for playing. We got stuck on the rules for so long, we almost missed the point of the whole game. Christians are susceptible to getting bogged down in the details of religion. We get stuck obsessing about the rules of faith, and we run the risk of missing the whole point. I lived in a town in the South where there was the First Baptist Church, the Second Baptist Church, the Third Baptist Church, and the Fourth Baptist Church. Each of these congregations sprang from the preceding one, each of them breaking away over arguments about how they did things. Some explosive disagreement would divide the church. The people who stayed as members of the First Baptist Church were those who won the vote, and the people who left in a huff to start the Second Baptist Church were those who lost the vote. And subsequently another disagreement arose, and another church split, and then another. Sometimes we get stuck arguing over the details, and we forget the point of what we’re doing. We find ourselves entrenched behind opposing ideas, and suddenly we deify those ideas. We begin to worship the details, and we forget the point of it all. I saw a television news report last night that predicted that church worship services would give mixed messages this morning about the war. A newspaper article in the P-I earlier this week said the same sort of thing. Mainline Christian communities are seen as riding the fence, speaking out of both sides of our mouths, as we call for the support of our troops and as we pray for peace. The implication is that we must stand for nothing if we try to stand both for peace and for support of our troops who are fighting this war. Apparently people must fall into two categories: those who drape themselves in the American flag and blindly support the policies of our government, and those who engage in civil disobedience in protest against the government and all who do its bidding. We must be either for the United States or for Saddam Hussein. Those are our two options, it would seem. I observed a bitter argument about the war between two United Methodist pastors this week. One United Methodist pastor is a well-known peace activist and social critic of our consumer-obsessed economy. The other United Methodist pastor is appointed to serve as a Coast Guard chaplain. These two argued with each other about the war in Iraq. They both engaged in similar tactics of angry words, accusations, mischaracterizations and exaggeration of the other person’s point of view. They accused each other of a lack of intelligence, and they both implied that the other person was standing on the side of organized evil. To look around at our nation during this time of war, it’d be easy to conclude that there are two sides, and we must line up behind one or the other. To fail to be a caricature of a bloodthirsty, hawkish, blindly loyal patriot or a criminal, counter-culture anarchist protestor is to be uncounted. To pray for peace and for the safety and well-being of our family and friends in the military is perceived as wishy-washy, stand-for-nothing ambivalence. Today we’re defined by our relationship to war. The point of it all, the peace that we all hope for, seems forgotten in the details of current events.

But faith is organic and relational. Faith is interpersonal. Far from some voting machine where we pull the lever for or against, our faith is a dynamic relationship between our creator and us, and between each of us and each other. Classical theologians tried to prove the existence of God like a mathematical formula. St. Anselm composed a classical formula for proof of God’s existence. Anselm proposed that God’s existence was undeniable and logically provable based on the idea that God is “that which nothing greater can be conceived.” Anselm charted a fairly elaborate proof of assertions and corollaries that, in the end, he declared was rhetorical proof for God. But such proofs for God’s existence look like math more than faith. They aren’t convincing, and they seem lifeless and mechanistic. Faith is something more than a formula where we plug in the variables to add up to some concrete conclusion. Faith is vital and organic. Dorothee Solle is a theologian who describes the presence of God as relational. Solle writes that our only way of perceiving God is in relationship. God’s active wherever there’s relationship between two creatures of God’s making. To understand God, to interact with God, to grow closer to God requires us to be in relationship with others and with the world around us. God isn’t some physics problem to be solved. Our faith in God can’t be summed up in some sort of formula or equation. Expressing our sincere faith in God isn’t simply taking the right side of the argument, but seeking the embodied grace of God as we live in relationship with one another. The prophet Micah criticized Temple worship a lot like Jesus did when he threw out the money changers and drove out the animals. Several hundred years before Jesus cleansed the Temple, Micah wrote about what distinguishes righteous faith:

“With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

Micah concluded that none of these institutional expressions of religiosity would please God. It wasn’t our offerings that God wanted, Micah explained.

“What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

The offerings, the incantations, the ritual words and acts are hollow if a living, vital relationship isn’t at the foundation of our faith. Like Micah, Jesus condemned institutional religion that grows only to perpetuate itself rather than to nurture faith. What God requires isn’t that we sing the right hymns or recite the right creeds or follow the right rule book. God doesn’t demand that we vote Republican or Democrat, that we have the right picket signs in our front yards, or that we attend the right rallies. God asks of us something more personal, something less defined, something more intimate and vulnerable-making. God asks us to enter into relationship, to show kindness to others, to humbly seek companionship with our divine Partner, to engage our lives in the constant work of growing, learning, and journeying alongside of God

Legalists like to tell us that the world’s black and white. They argue that you’re for us or against us. But we’re in danger of missing the point if we decide that we have to pray either for the well-being of our troops or the well-being of the Iraqis. We’re in danger of missing the point if we can only see two sides of any debate. We’re in danger of missing the point, if we get so caught up in the details of who’s right and who’s wrong, that we can’t hold the peace and reconciliation of all people in our prayers at the same time. Regardless of any disagreement of national foreign policy or political debate, ours is a God of peace and reconciliation, of healing and wholeness for all God’s children of every nation. For Muslims and Jews, for Christians and Hindus, God’s will for us all is a peace-filled world where we celebrate and share the abundance of God’s love. That’s the point, let’s remember. Amen.