2017-10-16
Brooke Strong
Scripture: Philippians 4:1-9
Reformation Series: Sola Fide
Faith: along with hope and love, it’s one of what the historic church has called the three “heavenly graces. And while, as the apostle Paul says, love may be the greatest of these, hope and faith are no slouches! I suspect, though, that despite its elevated status, faith may be the most difficult of all the central qualities of the Christian life to define, or even to talk about. Martin Luther, who gave the Reformation its real impetus and focus, said we are saved only by faith. Which may make us wonder whether we have faith, and, if so, what sort of faith we have, and how we could get more of it. What manner of faith has such decisive power?
Faith is a vital theme in the Bible, and especially the New Testament. Let’s talk first about some of the things faith isn’t, or some of the ways we get misled when that term is used. The word “faith” occurs 257 times in the New Testament. That’s a lot. But there’s more. In addition to all those uses of the word “faith,” the word “believe” occurs 149 times, for a total of 406 occurrences. Why, you might ask, are we counting the word “believe” in this list of uses of the word “faith”? They’re clearly different words. We include both, though, because, in Greek, “faith” and “belief” are variations of the same word.
So here’s the first thing we’ll say about faith: in English, faith is only a noun, but in Greek it is both a noun and a verb. In English, we can say you “have faith,” but we can’t say you “faith” anything. The biblical way of talking about faith is far more helpful than the English way, because it reminds us that we have an active role in this relationship with God. Faith is something we do, as well as something we have.
So in English, to try to get at this more active sense of faith, and because we don’t have a verb form of that word, we tend to use the word “believe.” And while it’s helpful, in one sense, to have that verb form—believe—it also turns out to be something of a problem. And here’s the problem: when we use the word “believe,” it suggests that faith is all about what you can affirm with your mind. If I ask you about what you believe, you might tell me you believe in God, or you believe in some article of the Apostle’s Creed: “I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord . . . I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” These are wonderful ways to understand something of the mystery of God. They put words and concepts to faith.
It’s fair to say, though, that affirming any of those things with your mind and your mouth is not the same as what Martin Luther meant when he declared that we are saved by faith. To assent intellectually to any of those things is not the heart of faith. No, the heart of faith is much more an experience than a thought. It has something much more to do with being grasped by a power greater than ourselves. It has to do with absorbing love, and living out of grace, and being filled by a relationship with the Holy One.
Think of it this way. In my marriage, I can believe that Mary is a good person, that she is a fantastic cook, that she is possessed of enormous integrity. I can describe her features. I can affirm her stellar qualities. I can believe in her remarkable gifts. And none of that is the same as my loving her. They’re not unrelated—I love her partly because of those qualities. But being able to articulate those qualities is not the same as being in love.
When we talk about our relationship to God, the real issue isn’t whether we can name all of God’s magnificent qualities. The real issue is: are we animated by God’s Spirit; are we filled with God’s love; are we strengthened by that Spirit and that love to be able to do things we didn’t think were possible? Faith is about relationship and nourishment and transcendence. It’s about hope and passion and commitment. Faith is first of all an experience, not a belief.
Let’s be clear here: I love the life of the mind. You who know me know that. I love the intellectual constructs, the ways we have of framing our understanding of the things of God. They have been immensely enriching to me as I have sought to “get” God. I need words and thoughts to give shape to the life of the Spirit.
In organizational development, there’s a helpful mantra that goes like this: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” As important as words and beliefs are, they’re not the main thing. The main thing is that we sense, in some way, the fabulous richness of the presence of God in our common life. It’s the experience, not the words, that grabs us. It’s faith—the experience of God’s transforming presence—rather than belief—those descriptive words—that is central.
And what is the substance of that faith? We too often think of Christianity and teach our children that it’s this: if you act morally and do the right things, God will reward you and accept you. I can’t tell you the number of times in my ministry I have heard some variation of this: a person who has just been shattered by catastrophe wonders what they did wrong and why God is punishing them. They assume that they must have failed in some terrible way, and that God is hammering them for it. At some level they believe that goodness is rewarded, sin is punished. God is keeping tabs on us and making sure we do the right things.
Martin Luther insisted that this is backwards. For Luther, grace is always primary. It is offered to us all, no matter what we have thought or done or failed to do. Obeying the law, or the rules, as a way to gain favor with God, is to totally miss who God is. Luther once put it this way: “It is a marvelous thing and unknown to the world to teach Christians to ignore the law . . . If you do not direct your thoughts to grace as if there were no law but as though there was nothing but grace, you cannot be saved” (Christian Century, October 11, 2017, p. 34).
One of the shorthand ways Luther’s thought is sometimes conveyed is to say that we are saved by grace, through faith. It is God’s love that saves us, in other words, not our being good little boys and girls, and all we are invited to do, the only thing we can do, in truth, is to receive that love: saved by grace, through faith.
To return to my own marriage, it’s like this: rather than enumerate Mary’s gifts, I am to receive her love. And she is to receive mine. The marriage parallel falls apart a little bit because marriage is a relationship of equals, and the relationship of God to us is one of incomprehensibly unequal partners. But in another sense, that parallel works, because the key to my marriage is not my understanding Mary, or my rational grasp of who she is. It’s only my reception of her love—and hers of mine—that really matters.
So, you might well be wondering, how in the world am I to “faith,” to incorporate this love of God? What can I do to imbibe it, to inhale it, to fill myself with it? One way to experience faith has to do with how we imagine what happens in prayer. When I pray, I usually assume that it’s I who’s doing the praying. Not an unreasonable assumption. I carry on a conversation with God as though the two of us are different creatures engaging in a back-and-forth repartee: I speak; God may or may not respond. We tend to think of God and us as two different beings.
Imagine this, though. What if whatever you’re praying isn’t so much you praying to someone different. What if it’s not you and another being having a conversation. What if your prayer is instead really God, or Christ, praying through you? Here’s what most of us do: we take our concerns to God. We say, “I’m feeling down today; can you give me a boost?” Or, “My friend has cancer; can you heal her, or at least comfort her?” Or, “Thank you for this job; it brightens my life.” We address our joys and concerns to this stupendous Other, as if we’re two beings talking across a chasm.
What if, instead, we imagine that the conversation is much more a dovetailing of Christ and us? The apostle Paul puts it this way in one of his letters: “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). It’s not I who lives, but Christ in me? It sounds almost like total nonsense. But what if every word that comes out of our mouths, and every yearning that we hardly have words for, and every action that we live out is really God moving through us?
A number of years ago, on a Colorado Kids trip, Marty Culbertson invited each participant to find objects in the natural world that represented God in some way. People used sticks and rocks and anything they could find to illustrate God’s presence. When it came time to show what they had done, one of the teens led the group to a stream where he had placed a flower in the flowing water. “The flower,” he said, “is us. And the river is God, flowing in us and around us and over us and under us, and carrying us.” This boy would have known exactly what Paul was talking about: “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”
So when we pray, it may be helpful to picture God, or Jesus, praying through us. Thomas Keating, a great spiritual teacher who went to high school where I did, though many years earlier, once said “The Spirit prays in us, and we consent.” The Spirit prays; we go along for the ride.
We’re hardy, self-sufficient Americans, though, aren’t we. We tend to think that everything significant that happens happens because we made it happen. And of course we are wildly important in the dance of life, and in accomplishing so much that needs accomplishing. At the same time, though, there’s a sense in which we are each living out God’s story in our own unique way. Part of God’s biography are the chapters lived in and through you and me. To really live in faith is to know that God is speaking our words and making our gestures and expressing something unique and delightful in each of us.
One of the apostle Paul’s core convictions is that we are saved by “faith in Christ.” An oddity of the Greek language is that that word “in” does not appear in that Greek formulation. In Greek, that expression can mean our faith in Christ. But it can just as easily mean the “faith of Christ” in us. So whose faith is it that saves—ours or Christ’s? And while it of course means both, I dare say that Paul’s primary focus is the faith of Christ. What’s being celebrated is the Christ who is valuing us and living in us and standing with us and living out a fantastic mission through us. It’s Christ’s faith, more than our own, that saves us.
And all of this happens as we live in Christ. Christ is our home. Four times in today’s reading, Paul reminds his hearers that, like the flower in the stream, they live in Christ (4:1, 2, 4, 7). Teresa of Avila echoes this. Teresa was a Spanish mystic of nearly 500 years ago. In the Roman Catholic Church, in fact, today is her Feast Day. She used a striking image when talking about her relationship with God. Faith, she wrote, is like dwelling in an interior castle. Her prayer life was an inhabiting of that castle. For her, this interior space was a jeweled royal home, like a diamond or the most sparkling crystal. It’s that special.
For us, of course, it might be a different space in which we imagine ourselves dwelling in and with God. So to help embody this, I’m going to invite you to join me in a prayer exercise. Close your eyes if you’d like. Now picture your castle, a place or a space in which you feel completely at home. Maybe it’s a beach or a mountain or a forest. Maybe it’s a room in a childhood home or a museum or a concert hall. Maybe it’s a Twelve-Step meeting or a counselor’s office or the arms of your beloved. Just call it to mind and imagine yourself in that space . . . Here you’re comfortable . . . Here in this interior castle you’re at peace . . . Your breathing eases, your muscles relax . . . Your worries fall away . . . Here in this space Christ is with you . . . Know, in this space, that, as you recline in Christ’s arms, in the words of Julian of Norwich, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
You may open your eyes. Yesterday morning, I heard an inspiring, challenging young Christian leader named Shane Claiborne speak at Pilgrim UCC Church on Cleveland’s near West side. Someone asked Shane how not to get beaten down by the so-often-ugly political and social climate in which we live. He said he knew a Roman Catholic priest who deals with it this way: “Every morning I curl up in a little ball and I listen to Jesus tell me how much he loves me.”
Years ago, when Kristi Horner was Moderator of Federated, she gave out little metal pieces with a word or phrase on it. Mine said “Faith.” I still carry it with me every single day. It’s always in my pocket. I want it to remind me every single day that the faith of Jesus lives in me. And I want you to remember the same thing. This very day, you dwell in an astoundingly lovely interior castle. This very day, Jesus is living life through you. This very day, even if you’re curled up in a little ball, Jesus is telling you he loves you. And out of all that, this very day, Jesus is inviting you and me to live an active faith in the way of Christ, loving and serving and blessing each other with shimmering joy and undying grace. This very day, trust that the faith of Christ is ours. Thanks be to God.