ARE YOU READY TO LIVE BY FAITH?
(Preached on Sunday, August 8, 2004)
By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out not knowing where he was going.
-Hebrews 11:8
“Life is truly a ride,” says comedian Jerry Seinfeld. “We’re all strapped in and no one can stop it. As you make each passage from youth to adulthood to maturity, sometimes you put your arms up and scream, sometimes you just hang on to that bar in front of you. But the ride is the thing. I think the most you can hope for at the end of life is that your hair’s messed up, you’re out of breath, and you didn’t throw up.”
That is not a bad description of the life of faith.
I’m not so sure that we have communicated this well in the church, or from the church to the society around us.
I read a story about an Episcopal priest who was shopping for a Harley Davidson motorcycle.
The salesman talked about speed, acceleration, risk, the women that like to ride on them.
Then the salesman found out the guy he was selling to was a minister.
Immediately his language and tone of voice changed.
He spoke quietly about good mileage, visibility, and how practical it was. The minister wrote this:
“Have we told the world that being a Christian is more like riding a lawn mower than a motorcycle? Is the life of faith more safe and sound or dangerous and exciting?... The common image of the church is pure lawnmower — slow, deliberate, plodding. Our task is to take the church out on the open road, give it the gas, and see what the old baby will do?”
As a culture, we are big believers in stable security.
We believe in home ownership and steadily rising property values. We believe in broad-based investment portfolios that have returns only slightly higher than the market generally. We believe in managing our careers so that we maximize our options and position ourselves to achieve our financial goals. And we have demonstrated that we are willing to believe almost anything our government tells us in the hope that they will protect us from the big, bad terrorist who is plotting night and day to destroy us.
Unfortunately, the message of the biblical story is that those values lead not to life, but to death; they lead not to security but to slavery.
These are the values of Egypt under the Pharoahs; of Rome under the Caesars; of Israel under the Kings.
They are the values of any system of empire and domination that is built on the backs of the poor and the masses for the good of the few, the elite, the privileged and chosen.
They are values built on a social vision and politics of holiness and purity, of ins and outs, of haves and have nots which legitimate the social order.
They do not require faith, but passivity and conformity.
To achieve that they define faith as belief, as doctrine, as creeds, as allegiance to a particular world-view.
That is not the definition of faith in the biblical story.
Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Faith is not a noun but a verb.
Faith is not acceptance of certain propositions or doctrines or dogma or creeds or world-view; faith is a relationship.
Faith is a commitment to the God of hope.
Faith is actively trusting God’s future and doing something about it.
It is saying “Yes!” by our actions, seeking to fulfil the vision God gives us, what Marcus Borg calls “the dream of God.”
It is a willingness to live each day to its potential, utilizing bits and pieces that fit the contours of the future.
It is like reaching one’s hand into the future, plucking a bit of it, and planting it here and now.
Such faith is activity, not passivity.
Faith is not a barbiturate to calm people down and make them docile.
Faith is a trust in God which thrusts people into the kaleidoscope jumble of life.
Faith places us in a position of holy tension; puts us at odds with the folly and sin around us.
Faith is not an escape but a new, profound, re-creative involvement.
That is why Abraham and Sarah are great models of faith.
Faith meant leaving behind all the security they had known, the comfortable existence of home, kindred and country, and setting out on a journey where the destination was cloudy: “he set out not knowing where he was going.”
It meant a long, and at times risky, adventure.
There were to be joys and hardships, nasty twists in events, frustration and danger, on their journey of faith.
Why did they go?
Because they had the notion that God told them to go; they had the idea that somehow God would bless them and make a great nation out of them.
They are old when they set out; beyond child-bearing years.
The plan is a long-shot.
Whole pages in this business plan are simply blank, but they start out anyway.
Faith is like that.
Faith is taking the teachings of the prophets and Jesus seriously.
Teachings such as we remembered last week from Hosea: “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice...”; from Isaiah: “cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”
Or this from Micah: “and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
Or this from Jesus: “Love your enemies, and do good to those who hate you.... Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.... sell your possessions and give to the poor....”
Faith is taking such teachings seriously, not because we see them becoming reality around us, but because we trust that they are the underlying reality, they are the future, and one day those teachings will be the values of the world.
Faith is not just believing these teachings to be good; it is not just acknowledging them to be God’s way; it is not just giving lip service to them.
Faith is doing all we can to live them out — it is how we treat others, how we spend our money, how we vote.
Acts of faith are a step into the great unknown future, not because they are easy to do, or because we see that future becoming true around us, but because we trust that God is bringing them into being and we trust that they are the ways that lead to life.
Such acts of faith are never easy to do.
They are always all or nothing.
God calls for our complete trust.
Such acts of faith are just like bungee jumping.
Ever tried it? I haven’t. But I have seen people do it on the only reality TV show I watch, The Amazing Race.
When you bungee jump, you leave the safety of solid ground. You leave the safety of everything familiar and solid, everything that you have relied on for safety since the day you were born. You leave it. You step off of a platform high in the air and you depend completely and totally on the elastic rope which is tied to your feet. You can’t go halfway in bungee jumping. You can’t keep one foot on the platform “just in case.” It’s all or nothing. You either trust the cord and jump, or you don’t go bungee jumping.
It is extremely frightening.
It is also extremely enlivening.
Living a life of faith, trusting in God’s care and guidance, trusting that God’s way is truly the way to full and abundant life for all people, is exactly like that.
There are no guarantees; only promises.
There is no surety, no collateral; only the experience of others, who never fully realized the promises in their lifetime either.
But such actions make all the difference in our lives; such actions make all the difference between life and death.
Paul Tournier tells about Bishop Wurm in one of this books, one of the leaders in the Confessing Church, who so heroically stood up to Hitler in Nazi Germany.
“Shortly after the war, when I was asking him about that tragic era, he told me how hard it had been, at the beginning of Hitler’s reign, to know what attitude the church should take. There was a tremendous, popular movement whipping up the enthusiasm of the masses for new hope. Should the church step in line, in spite of the movement’s obvious flaws, in the hope of influencing the new regime and of directing it toward a true national renewal? Or must the church fight the regime, thus losing all contact with the masses?
“Resist or surrender: Which should they do? Bishop Wurm discussed this often with a close friend, a fellow bishop, who was equally hesitant. Then one night Bishop Wurm suddenly felt called by God to break with the regime. He immediately obeyed the divine call. Happily so, for he was but a hair breadth from becoming inextricably involved, through compromise upon compromise, to the point where he never could have stopped. Thus, these two close friends, having long hesitated together, became the leaders of the two factions in the church which became irreconcilably opposed to each other, one in resistance and the other in subjection.”
The life of faith is never easy.
The life of faith is rarely secure.
The life of faith rarely embraces the values of the world around us.
For the God we are invited to follow and serve most often enters our lives like a roaring lion, a tornado rampaging across the prairie, who calls us to strive for more — more compassion, more sharing, more love.
The life of faith is an amazing adventure that leads to life.
Are you ready to live that adventure?