“Faith:  What Do You Mean, My Relationship With God?”

First Congregational United Church of Christ

May 15, 2011

The Rev. Sharyl B. Peterson

 

Scripture Readings:  Embedded in sermon

 

Last week, we began a new sermon-series on what do we mean by “faith”?  And last week, we considered the commonest meaning that “faith” has come to have in our contemporary culture:  the idea that “faith” is a set of beliefs or ideas that we agree are true, which have something to do with religion as we understand it.

            We also considered the fact that that current common understanding is fairly new in human history … that it has only become “the” understanding of faith in the last few hundred years.  And we considered the fact that until fairly recently, most people of faith understood faith as having four dimensions, meanings, components, and not just one … and that the other three dimensions, meanings, components of faith were even more important than the notion of faith as just the ideas we have about God.  Today, we are going to consider two of those other three dimensions, and next week, we’ll consider the last dimension, and how all four of these are interrelated.

            Like last Sunday, we’re going to begin with a quiz, although this one will be an oral quiz, rather than a written one, since it’s a lot longer than last week’s, and would take a much longer time to write down all your answers.  It’s a quiz that comes from a colleague of mine on the national LCM Board, Ted Huffman, who is a local church pastor in Rapid City, South Dakota.  It’s not a trick quiz in any way … it’s just some basic questions to see how much of our faith-story we remember.  I’ll ask a question … give you a few seconds to think about it … then ask you to shout out your answers.

            For those of you reading this at home, here are a few of the quiz questions: 

Do you remember when there was no world and no light and only chaos?  Do you remember what God did?  Do you remember when God’s people suffered as slaves in the land of bondage?  Do you remember what God did?  Do you remember the story of Jesus’ birth?  Do you remember what God did?  Do you remember when they brought people who suffered from many different diseases and illnesses to Jesus?  Do you remember what Jesus did?  Do you remember how in the days after his death, Jesus’ disciples met a stranger and walked toward Emmaus with him, and when they had visited, he took bread and broke it?  Do you remember what happened?

            I hope you were listening to each other’s answers.  Because when we look to our faith story, as it’s told through both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, we can’t help but be struck by the primary characteristic – or quality – or trait – of the God we worship.  And that primary characteristic or quality is this:  our God is a God who is always in relationship with God’s creation.

            Ours is a God who brings things, trees, birds, planetary systems, people into being

(however we understand that to have happened), and who continues to care about the world God has created.  Ours is a God who acts in that world.  Whether we understand the stories of the Bible to be literally true, or to be mythically true, our faith witness is that God has acted in the past, is acting today, and will continue to act in the future.  (Yes, UCC, we believe and experience that “God is still speaking.”)

            Ours is a God who invites us – implores us – welcomes us – to be in relationship with Godself through our loving relationships with one another.  Ours is a God who can be – and should be – trusted.  Even when (or perhaps particularly when) our personal world, or the wider world, seems to be going to pieces around us.  And these so-prominent qualities of God are what lead us into the two dimensions of faith we’re going to consider today.

            The first of them is that dimension of faith that involves having a radical trust in God.  The Latin word for it, which I mentioned last week, is fiducia.  The closest equivalent word in English is “fiduciary.”  Which, if you check your friendly dictionary, means “of or relating to a holding of something in trust for another.”  Or, more simply, “held in trust.”

            With respect to faith, it means that we trust that God holds us.  To draw on Marcus Borg’s thought in his book The Heart of Christianity[1], “faith as trust is like floating in a deep ocean.  (The metaphor comes originally from) Soren Kierkegaard, one of the philosopher giants of the 19^th century, who said faith is like floating in 70,000 fathoms of water.  If you struggle, if you tense up and thrash about, you will eventually sink.  But if you relax and trust, you will float.  It’s like Matthew’s story of Peter walking on the water with Jesus (in Matt. 14) – (Peter was doing just fine when Jesus called him and Peter trusted and stepped out of the boat… but) when Peter began to be afraid, he began to sink.”

            My guess is, any of you who know how to swim – or who have ever tried to teach a child how to swim – knows exactly what I’m talking about.  If you’re going to float in water, you absolutely must relax and trust that it’s going to hold you up.  Borg says, “Faith as trust is trusting in the buoyancy of God.  Faith is trusting in the sea of being in which we live and move and have our being.”

            Or, to use a range of other Biblical metaphors, it is trusting that “God is our rock and fortress… the one on whom we rely, as our support and foundation and ground[2].”  It’s trusting that Christ is “living water,” that can refresh us and renew us and give us life when nothing else can and in a way that nothing else can.  It’s saying “the Lord is my shepherd” and meaning it.  It’s believing Jesus when he promises to send the Holy Spirit to be with us, to give us wisdom, even to pray for us when we are unable to pray for ourselves.

            And this leads us to the second dimension of faith that we’re going to think about today.  Because if we do trust God – if we do have a “relationship” with God (however we understand that), we are called – as people have been called throughout our faith history – to be faithful to that relationship.

Number one on the list of what we call the “Ten Commandments” is:  “you shall have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20:3).  Time after time in the stories of the Hebrew Bible, when the people forget this relationship – when they turn to other gods – they may get punished, but ultimately God always forgives them, always takes them back, because God loves God’s people.  In the Gospels, as Jesus begins his ministry, and is being tempted by Satan in the wilderness, being offered all the power and kingdoms of the world, Jesus’ response to Satan’s temptation is this:  “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him’” (Lk. 4:8).  And when the people begin to follow Jesus seriously, and to worship him (Jesus), he tells them to stop it, saying:  “There is only one who is good.  If you wish to enter into life, keep God’s commandments” (Mt. 19:17).

            In terms of human relationships, we talk about this kind of relationship as “fidelity.”  And going back to the dictionary, that means “loyalty, truthfulness, constancy, commitment, faithfulness” (to the one with whom we are in relationship).  In terms of our relationship with God, the Latin name is fidelitas – but it means exactly the same thing. 

            If you are in a committed relationship with someone else, you probably took a vow of fidelity – you made a promise to be faithful to – that other person.  We promised to be loyal to them; to be truthful with them; to be committed to them and their well-being.

            And that fidelity, that faithfulness may look a lot of different ways in different relationships, but at its core, it means we at least take that other person into consideration – perhaps that we put that other person first – when we’re trying to figure things out, and when we’re making decisions about things.  It means if we have to choose between being loyal to our significant other or to someone or something else, we choose our significant other.  It means that this person to whom we have pledged our fidelity – to whom we have promised to be faithful – spends a lot of time at the forefront of our thinking, and of our feeling, and of our doing, and of our living.

            Now, while we may live that out pretty well in our personal relationships with other people, for most of us, it’s often “not so much” the case when it comes to our relationship with God.  I’ve preached about this before, and will again, but in our real, day-to-day lives, there are a whole lot of other little-g “gods” that we are lot more loyal (have fidelity) to than big-G “God.”  There are a whole lot of other little-g “gods” that we put before our big-G “God.”

            Instead of putting God first when we make decisions about things, we tend to put us – what we want – first instead.  For example, the New Testament makes it absolutely and utterly clear that Jesus calls us to help the poor and the marginalized.  It also makes it absolutely and utterly clear that when we do for others, we are doing that for Jesus himself; we are doing that for our God.

            So, if we really put God first in our lives, the next time we have an unexpected $5 (or more) show up in our lives – and it does happen – we would choose to buy food for the Homeless Shelter (remember Jesus’ command to feed the hungry?); or we would choose to buy undies for homeless veterans in our community(remember Jesus’ command to clothe the naked?); or to donate to the Tornado Recovery program sponsored by the UCC; (remember Jesus’ command to shelter the homeless?); or to support the Salvation Army, or the Lions, or Altrusa, or any of the other organizations in our community that help people in need.  But instead, many of us are more inclined to buy something that will make us personally a lot happier – like a triple-chocolate non-fat decaff latte, or the newest issue of our favorite magazine, or a new set of golf-clubs or a new computer or who knows what, but whatever it is, its purpose is to make us happy and to serve us, not to make God happy and to serve God.

And instead of putting God at the forefront of our thinking, and of our feeling, and of our living most of the time, we put a thousand other things – and people – at the forefront.  Will they like me better if I dress in the latest styles?  No matter that I could shop at the thrift store, wear slightly older styles, and in doing so, help love God’s creation by using less resources.  Will I advance my career faster if I trade in my current spouse for one who is more attractive?  Never mind the holy marriage vows I made – before God – to my current spouse; what about me and my needs?  What will the neighbors think if I turn part of my yard into a garden so I can raise veggies for the local food bank?  They’ll probably report me for violating the housing covenants; never mind that we have hundreds of hungry people in our community.

            (As a very real-life example of this, almost 20 years ago when I told my academic colleagues that I was leaving academia in order to go into ministry – that I really felt God was calling me to use my education and experience in a new way – every one of them asked, outraged and appalled, “are you out of your mind?  do you know what this is going to do to your career?  to your earnings?”)

            Friends, we show fidelity – faithfulness – commitment in our relationship with God in the same ways we do in our relationships with other people.  We put God first.  We treat God as most important.  We look to or listen to God before anything else.

            Now I’m guessing that at least a few folks here this morning are pretty uncomfortable theologically right about now.  I’m guessing that while you’re fine with the notion of faith as assensus – as being a matter of the intellect, of believing in certain statements that are faith-related – you’re probably a whole lot less comfortable with the idea that we can – and do – and should – have a personal relationship with God.  In fact, I may have lost you ten minutes ago, not long after our quiz, when I said that specifically:  faith is not just about beliefs, but about our lived relationship with God.

If we are uncomfortable with this suggestion, part of that discomfort may come from our stereotypes about more conservative Christians whose discourse frequently refers to their personal relationships with God.  It’s possible that we think of ourselves as being more intellectual, or more sophisticated, or more thoughtful than “they” are – after all, many of us think we’ve gotten past any kind of anthropomorphic – human-like – image of God; and if we no longer image God as human-like, it’s hard to imagine how one might have a relationship with whatever/however it is that we do image God.  And yet, there are any number of highly intelligent, deeply thoughtful theologians and scholars today who do reject human-like images of God (e.g., they do not believe that God is an old white man with a beard), and at the same time are very clear about how utterly essential it is for us to have a lived relationship with God.

            There’s a second place our discomfort may come from as well.  And that is the fact that if being faithful means needing to have a relationship with God, that means we really need to take God seriously in our lives.  Because you cannot have a relationship with someone or something that is simply a “good idea.”  We can only have a relationship with someone, or something that actually exists in reality, with someone or something that we are willing to open ourselves to, to be vulnerable with, to be intimate with.  And we can’t do any of those things with God if God is nothing more than a good idea that we “believe in.”

            Anyone can say, “I believe in God.”  The really hard part is living into our relationship with this God in which we believe (or want to believe).  The really, really hard part is living out of our relationship with this God in whom we believe (or want to believe).  And that leads us to the fourth dimension of faith, to which we’ll turn in next week’s sermon.

For this week, I invite you to do some serious reflecting – and praying – about what sense, if any, the three dimensions of faith we’ve considered so far make in your life.  Faith as a set of ideas about God.  Faith as radical trust in God.  Faith as utter fidelity to the God with whom we are in relationship.

            Are there places you find yourself feeling resistant?  If one of those places is about this business of having a relationship with God, where might that resistance be coming from?  things you’ve been taught?  Other people?  Fear?  Anxiety?  (Remember when Peter was walking on the water and started to sink?)

            And, are there places where some of these ideas seem to be “clicking” for you?  To make sense to you, not just intellectually, but in your spirit?  That offer you joy in the possibility of whole new ways of being faithful?

            My prayer for all of us as we continue this series, is this:  May this be a fruitful week.  And a reflective one.  And a joyful one.  Amen.