2018-01-18
Brooke Strong
Scripture: John 1:43-51; Faith Formation
In the last church I served, a woman new to church began coming to worship by herself. So one day I asked her what had brought her there. To my surprise, she said to me, “I realized that if I were to die soon, I’d have nobody to bury me. I need to be part of a larger community.”
You and I have come here today for all sorts of reasons. Maybe it’s habit—you’ve just always come, and it wouldn’t be Sunday if you didn’t. Maybe it matters to you that your children be connected to faith. You may have had a hard week, and need somewhere to go for comfort and peace. You may have had a great week, and need somewhere to go to give thanks. You may be aware of the tendency many of us have to focus almost exclusively on ourselves, and need to be reminded to care about a world larger than yourself.
There are all sorts of reasons you and I come to this place. And whether we would frame it this way or not, what we’re all essentially doing is coming here to be formed in Christian faith. It’s tempting to think we’re already formed in faith. After all, many of us have been part of churches our whole lives. Don’t we know the basics? Isn’t it kind of like being part of a family—you just show up? Why do we need to be formed in this thing that we already are?
Worship is one of the main ways we’re formed in the faith, and we’ll engage that facet of Christian life in two weeks. Today, though, as part of our series on the four pillars of the church, we’re going to reflect on this whole notion of being formed in the faith. Faith formation.
When I was a little child, I have distinct memories of going to church every Sunday with my mother and my brother. As I often tell our Inquirers Classes, my first memory of going to church was of getting a taxi on Sunday morning. The three of us—my father was often a guest minister at other churches, so he didn’t usually go with us—would get in the taxi with our across-the-street neighbor, Merle Cook. And Mrs. Cook would reach into her purse, pull out a roll of Lifesavers, and hand one to my brother and me. And whether I knew it or not, with the gift of each Lifesaver, I was being formed in the faith. Faith was about giving and bringing joy and sharing. And for me, it was good, very good!
I have clear memories of being in Sunday School, as well, and my fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Southard, standing in front of us with a three-piece wool suit on, teaching us about the faith. I remember the fun of youth group and how much it felt like a cocoon of love. I also, to my chagrin, remember the only week I spent at an overnight camp, a church camp, when I was in middle school. I have vivid memories of two cute girls asking me to dance with them at the end-of-week dance, and my being so confused by all these budding feelings that I declined both invitations and went off to stand in the corner and cry. It was all too much for me! And in all of these things, I was being formed in the faith.
As I got older, I took religion courses in college. And after I had graduated from college, as a layperson in a Boston church, I served on the Mission Committee. Later I went to seminary and read and studied intensively. As a student pastor, I led a youth group and Bible study. I helped lead worship. I visited people in homes and hospitals. I remember making a hospital visit to the son of a family friend having major surgery to correct some internal organ issues, and being so undone by his parents’ vivid account of the surgery that I almost passed out and had to go into the hall to get some water. And in all of these things, I was being formed in the faith.
All of you have your own tales about how you’ve been shaped as a Christian. No two journeys are alike, of course. What they all have in common, though, is some degree of being shaped as a disciple of Christ. We’ve been molded by hymns and scripture, by conversations and study, by fun and games, by action and reflection. And in the course of it all, we have learned something of what it is to be a follower of Jesus.
Striking in all this, though, is that that formation never really stops. A woman who was somewhat on the periphery in my last church, and who was then in her late 80s, said to me one day, as a way of explaining why she was never in worship, “I’ve heard probably 3000 sermons in my life. I don’t think I need to hear any more.” And maybe it really was true that she didn’t need to hear any more. My own sense of the faith, though, is that that faith formation never stops. I find I forget the most obvious things and need to be reminded: keep praying; give thanks always; remember that God delights in you; serving others is richer than serving yourself. As much as I know these things, it’s astounding how easily I can get sucked into what we might call a “worldly” approach to life, seeking our own comfort, succumbing to cynicism or bitterness, failing to remember that there is no need to fear, because a divine mystery accompanies us.
And if you’re like me, because we so easily forget the heart of faith, there’s a hunger that keeps drawing us back. Something about life just doesn’t feel complete without that odd, unquantifiable, beautiful, bracing mystery that undergirds us and seeks us and wants nothing more than for us to make a home there in that mystery and grace. There is in every heart, as Pascal once said, a God-sized hole that only God can fill. In that incomprehensibly loving heart—that’s where we are home. “Our hearts are restless,” O God, said Augustine, “until they find their rest in you.”
And we find our way into that rest, into that home, as we keep seeking, keep growing, keep finding. It’s not as though we’re only lost once, after all; it’s not as though we’re only scared once; it’s not as though we’re only selfish once. These are everyday occurrences in our lives. Faith formation is an intentional engagement with the One who wants nothing more than for us to find Her. It’s a willingness to dance with the One who wants nothing more than for us to be His partner on the dance floor of life.
In the gospel of John, we hear a story about early disciples finding their way to Jesus. First Simon and Andrew are called into the family of Jesus. Then along comes Philip, to whom Jesus says, “Follow me” (John 1:43). As soon as Philip joins the party, he tells his friend Nathanael that they’ve found the one for whom they’ve been looking. Nathanael is extremely skeptical and says so to Philip—‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth? I mean, come on!’ Jesus, though, looks at Nathanael, and sees into his heart, and declares him to be a man without deceit. Nathanael is totally dumbfounded by Jesus’ eerie perceptiveness, and hauntingly asks Jesus, “Where did you get to know me?” (1:48).
You can hear the plaintive undertone in his question. ‘No one has ever really known me,’ we can hear him thinking. ‘Nobody has really gotten me. And you get me.’ All faith formation is, essentially, a recognition that this holy Christ is the one who gets you, the one who knows you, the one who calls you to follow. We may think of faith formation as Bible studies or book studies. We may think of it as adopting disciplines of centering prayer or mission projects or justice advocacy. We may think of it as reflection and conversation about the substance of our faith. And it is indeed all that. At its root, though, faith formation is about that most vital of all relationships: how does Jesus know us, and how can we come to know Jesus more fully?
An out-of-town friend of mine, a layperson, told me about a situation he found himself in at work this week. A member of his staff—we’ll call the man “Tom”—asked my friend if they could talk. My friend said, “Of course.” Then Tom told my friend that, much to their shock, his wife had just been diagnosed with cancer in her leg, that it was Stage 4, and that her leg would have to be amputated this week. And what I was struck by was what my friend said then about how he handled this conversation. “I’ve been going to church for years,” he said, “and as Tom talked, I found myself wanting to give him advice. But all my years in church made me say to myself, ‘Don’t you dare give this man advice. He didn’t come to you for advice. He came to you because he wanted someone to talk to. He came to you because he craved companionship. He came to you because he was terrified and just needed to know that someone cared.’”
My friend went on to say, “Several times during that conversation, people came to the door to ask me things. Each time I said to them, ‘I can’t talk now.’ I knew where I had to focus,” he said. And when, an hour and a half later, the conversation with Tom had finished, my friend went on to a previously scheduled work meeting, which he was to run, and for which he was now late. And while Tom hadn’t yet wanted to divulge his wife’s struggles to his work colleagues, my friend was able to say to his gathered staff, “I’m sorry I’m late. But as much as I value punctuality and the work we do, sometimes things come up that are more important than our meetings. I just had one of those occasions.”
Pay attention. Don’t give advice. Be present. Walk with the person who needs you to walk with them. My friend was able to do this, he said, because of his grounding in a faith that had taught him, that had shaped him to be a “companion,” literally “one who shares bread with another.” He had been formed as a disciple of Jesus, as a man who knew that being present with one who was suffering was the most important thing.
We too easily forget how counter-cultural are the ways of Jesus. The culture is telling us, all the time, that work tasks are paramount, that being thin and beautiful is what’s important, that we should do everything we can to hide our aging, that success on the career ladder is what matters, that accumulating wealth is the heart of life. It tells us that we should obey our fears and keep people who scare us out of this country and label their nations with tawdry expletives. It tells us that there’s only so much to go around and that we should hoard it. It puts an extremely low premium on gratitude and makes stunningly fertile ground for complaining and finding fault. Much as the culture has to offer—and most of us would likely not want to live anywhere else—it can shape us in some mean and ugly and callous ways.
Jesus puts up a big fat stop sign on such small-minded and harmful ways of being. Faith formation is allowing ourselves to be reshaped by the Jesus who wants something odd, but deeply filling, for us. Faith formation is a process of heeding the Jesus who speaks that compelling, but sometimes strangely discomfiting, word. With faith formation, we recognize that life isn’t about getting back at someone who has hurt us, or accumulating a larger and larger portfolio, or walling ourself off from the pain of the world. We say instead, “There is nothing at all to fear.” We say instead, “I am grounded in the God who delights in me.” We say instead, “My life is richest and fullest when I am generous financially and when I give myself away in love.” This is what it is to be formed in Christian faith.
Tomorrow is the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On the day before he was assassinated, he eerily talked about his own eventual death. “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And [God has] allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any[one]. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
We need not be worried. We will reach the Promised Land. We have a cause larger than any of us. No matter what the lesser forces of the world may say to us, we have a light that shines in a different and dazzling way. And we say all this because the One who is most real is the One whose voice we need to heed. If we ask, with Nathanael, “Where did you get to know me?” the answer is simply that the God who gave us life spends eternity holding us close. Faith formation is the simple, but endlessly varied, process of listening to that great and wonderful voice telling us that life is so much more, and so much more wonderful, than anything we could have come up with on our own. Life is beauty and grace and freedom. Life is justice and mercy and love. This is the faith in which we are formed. What a blessing! What a gift!