What is Faith (Not (Just) Belief)?”

First Congregational United Church of Christ

May 8, 2011

The Rev. Sharyl B. Peterson

                                                                                              

Scripture Readings:  Matthew 5: 1-16; John 3:16-21

Before you relax, and prepare to settle in for a nice sermon-break-nap, I invite you to first find a pew-pencil or –pen, and turn to the space in your bulletin on the top inside back cover where it says “Sermon Quiz.”  Yes, I know I haven’t preached the sermon yet, and that a quiz is usually at the end, but I thought today we’d begin with one instead.  (For those of you reading this at home, find a piece of paper and pencil, so you can do this too.)

Okay, now I invite you to imagine that this afternoon, as you are eating your lunch, and looking out the window, you see a giant alien spacecraft land on the front lawn, and a door in the side of the craft opens, and an extraterrestrial being walks out the door.  The E.T. then walks over to the door of your residence and knocks (or comes in the door of the restaurant) … and when you greet him or her (it’s hard to tell), the E.T. explains – amazingly, in perfect English – that it has come to our planet to gather some intelligence about our species.  And it has chosen to interview you specifically because the data-registry on its home planet indicates that you are a member or frequent visitor at FCCUCC, and if anyone can answer the question most important to their people, it is you!

            I’m going to assume that you’re willing to help the E.T., so the first question is:  “so what, exactly, do your people mean by ‘faith’?  We’re having a hard time understanding this back on my home-planet.”  Please take a moment to write your answer.  And the E.T.’s second question is:  “And please tell me, if you will, what does it mean in your personal experience and life to ‘have faith’?”  Again, please write down your answer.

            As we shared our answers during worship, we found that there was a lot of agreement among people’s answers.  And that’s not too surprising, because we are all children of the postmodern period, of the 21^st century, and among us, there is a fair amount of agreement about what this concept means.  Most of us have the sense that “faith” means, either in part or in whole, that we hold some particular set of religious beliefs.

            The very ancient Latin term to describe this form of faith is “assensus,” or assent, to a set of propositions or ideas that have something to do with religion as we embrace it.  For example, “Do you have faith?”  “Of course … I believe in God.”  The very question, “are you a believer?” has come to mean, in many places, “are you a person who adheres to the Christian faith?”  And in fact, this definition of faith may seem so obvious that you’re wondering why I even posed the question.  Everyone knows what “faith” is.

            But the fact is, this particular understanding of faith has only come to the fore in the last couple of hundred years.  Historically speaking, that’s almost brand-spanking-new!  The fact is, until very recently in history, people understood “faith” as having not just one, but four different and interrelated meanings.  We’ll come back to assensus in a minute, and talk more about that, but I want to take a minute to preview for you the three other meanings of faith, to which we’ll be returning over the next couple of weeks.

            One of those other three meanings of faith is fiducia – radical trust in God.  “Significantly, it does not mean trusting in the truth of a set of statements about God; that would simply be assensus under another name[1].”  For example, if we said, “I trust that God is a man with a long white beard who sits up in Heaven and keeps track of what we think and do,”

that would still be assensus about ideas rather than fiducia (radical trust) in our relationship with God.  Fiducia has to do with our lived relationship with God – with whether or not “(we) trust in the sea of being in which we live and move and have our being[2].”

Another meaning of faith – which also has to do with our relationship with God – is fidelitas.  That is, fidelity in our relationship with God.  Again, it is not about fidelity to particular statements about God (that’s assensus again), but to fidelity in our relationship with God the same way we do or don’t show fidelity in our relationships with other people.  If I asked you whether you were faithful – whether you demonstrate fidelity – in your relationship with your significant other, you could easily answer that.  When we consider faith as fidelitas, we are talking about exactly the same thing, except regarding our relationship with the Holy.

            And the fourth meaning of faith is visio – which, just like the word “vision,” has to do with how we see the world.  With how we see and understand reality, including other people and other living beings, and with how our particular way of seeing – our “vision” – affects the way we actually live our lives.

            But don’t worry too much about those right now.  As I said, we’ll come back to them again in the next couple of weeks.  For now, what I’d like to point out is that until very recently, most people (and interestingly, this includes folks from faith traditions other than Christianity too) understood these deeper, richer meanings of faith.  In fact, until very recently, most people understood that the latter three dimensions of faith were considerably more important than the understanding of faith simply as assensus.

            With respect to Christianity – they understood that for some very Biblical reasons … by looking to Jesus himself, and to what he taught, and how he lived.  If you go home this afternoon after lunch, and pick up your Bibles, and re-read the Sermon on the Mount (which we heard a few minutes ago), one of the things you will notice is that nowhere in this sermon does Jesus talk about what we are supposed to believe.  Instead, he talks over and over about how we are to live.

We are to “hunger and thirst for righteousness.”  We are to “be merciful.”  We are to “be peacemakers.”  Jesus doesn’t ask us to believe in righteousness as a good idea.  Or to believe in mercy as an important concept.  Or to believe in the idea of peace.  Jesus calls us to create them.  To do them.  To make them.  To be and to live them in this world.

            And if you want to try an even more interesting exercise, see if you can dig up one of those old “red-letter Bibles” (hint:  you can do this on-line, if you wish) in which everything Jesus is supposed to have said is set off in red type on the page.  Read through all four gospels – out loud, reading just the things in red, attributed to Jesus.  And what you’re going to notice is that 90% of the time, what Jesus is talking about is what we are supposed to do, how we are supposed to act, how we are supposed to treat other people, not what we are supposed to believe.

            For example, the first words out of Jesus’ mouth in Matthew’s Gospel (in the KJV) are these:  “thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.”  Or in the more contemporary language of The Message, “"Do it.  God's work.”  Followed (just in Matthew’s Gospel) by these words of Jesus:  “Don’t tempt the Lord thy God.”  “Thou shalt worship thy God.”  “Repent.”   “…love the Lord your God with all your heart, and soul, and mind…”  “Follow me.”  It is only in John’s Gospel that we find Jesus occasionally saying things about beliefs, like the famous “I am” statements (found only in John):  “I am the bread of life.”  Or “I came down from Heaven.”

            Even in what is arguably the best-known passage from the entire New Testament, that reading you heard a few minutes ago from John’s Gospel, what most of us selectively remember is the first verse of the passage, while ignoring all the rest of it.  Many of us can remember learning John 3:16 in Sunday School.  And since most of us learned it in the language of the King James Bible, I invite us to say it together in those words:  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

            Well, yeah, you may be thinking … doesn’t that contradict what Pastor Sharyl was just talking about?  “Whosoever believeth in Him…”  that sounds like faith as assensus to me.  And if the passage ended there, it would be one place where assensus is affirmed as a (or the) key form of faith.  But it doesn’t end there.  It goes on to the part that almost no-one ever memorizes, much less remembers, ^“And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.  For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.  But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen their deeds have been done in God.”

            Or, in the more comprehensible words of The Message (because I do want you to comprehend this):  "This is how much God loved the world:  He gave his Son, his one and only Son.  And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life.  God didn't go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was.  He came to help, to put the world right again … "This is the crisis we're in: God-light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness.  They went for the darkness because they were not really interested in pleasing God.  Everyone who makes a practice of doing evil, addicted to denial and illusion, hates God-light and won't come near it, fearing a painful exposure.  But anyone working and living in truth and reality welcomes God-light so the work can be seen for the God-work it is."  In other words, the key to faith is not simply a matter of what we think, not just a matter of what we agree to believe intellectually, it is how we act … what we do, where and with whom we place our love, trust, and loyalty.

            I hope that you are wondering by now:  given Jesus’ clarity about this, and in fact the clarity of the Old Testament about this as well, how and why on earth did we make the shift from a focus on faith as a way of living to a focus on faith as a way of believing?  The first part of the answer is, “we – we church-folks – did it to ourselves.”  Some of us may remember a little event in the history of the Christian church called the Protestant Reformation.  That was that period of time back in the 16^th century (it began in 1517) when “reformers” like Martin Luther and John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli began to question long-held beliefs and practices of the “Church.”  Began to question things like the sale of indulgences, to help souls out of purgatory.  Things like how Communion should be celebrated – who should be allowed to receive the elements, and under what conditions, and which elements should they be allowed to receive?

            The outcome of this struggle was the development of not just one new denomination – the Protestants – but of many new denominations, each one distinguishing itself from the others by their particular doctrines or confessions of faith – by what they “believed.´  Lutherans believed this, Presbyterians believed that, Baptists believed something else, and so on.  And Roman Catholics followed suit, distinguishing themselves by what they believed compared with what Protestants believed.  Ultimately, each particular branch of the Christian faith became a matter of having the “right” beliefs and not having the “wrong” beliefs[3].  And each believed that they held the “right” beliefs, and everyone else held the “wrong” ones.

            A second factor in shifting people’s understanding of “faith” from the four-dimensional understanding to the one-dimensional (faith as belief) understanding came from the wider culture – namely, from the birth of modern science and scientific ways of knowing in the Enlightenment period that began in the century after the Reformation (17^th century).  Before the Enlightenment, most people were comfortable with the concept of “mystery.”  They were fine with the idea that “God” is beyond human understanding.  They were perfectly happy with the notion that not everything can, in fact, be rationally explained or understood.

But the Enlightenment turned that perspective on its head.  In contrast to those earlier ways of understanding, and of deciding what is “true” or “real,” the Enlightenment equated truth with factuality.  That is, what is “true” is only that which can be verified as factually existing in the world as we know it.  As they used to put it in my doctoral program, which was heavily scientific, “if you can’t count it, or can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.”

            And, using those new criteria, the Enlightenment began to call into question the “truth” – i.e., factuality – of many parts of the Bible, and of many traditional Christian teachings.  People began to ask questions that had never been asked before.  Like, “how could the story of Jonah possibly be true?  A human being cannot be swallowed by a whale, live inside that animal for several days, and survive.”  Or like, “how could the Red Sea possibly have divided so that Moses and the Israelites could cross it?  Science shows us that bodies of water just don’t work that way.”  Or like, “how could Jesus possibly be born to a woman who was literally a virgin, in the sense that we understand that word today?”  And many, many more. 

            Marcus Borg, in his wonderful book The Heart of Christianity – Rediscovering a Life of Faith, puts it like this:  “for many modern people, faith as assensus has become primary precisely because the central claims of Christianity have become questionable.  For many today, faith means believing in spite of difficulties, believing even when you have reasons to think otherwise.  It means believing “iffy” things to be true[4].”

            And I think there is a third reason that the meaning of faith has become more and more narrowly defined – and that is that understanding “faith” as nothing more than the ideas we hold is easier.  It is far easier to “believe” (something) than to “do” (something).  It is far easier to say we believe in the Gospel, than to try to live it out.  It is far easier to “believe” in Jesus, than to “follow” him.

            In one more book that I commend to you that considers this issue, Robin Meyers’ new Saving Jesus from the Church,” Meyers says:  “In the end, to say that one “believes” something like the virgin birth as biological fact or the miracle stories as literal suspensions of natural law requires nothing in the way of a changed heart or a self-sacrificing spirit.  For that matter, neither does saying that one does not believe in these things.  Whether one assents to the implausible as a sign of faith, or refuses to do so as a sign of the capacity to think critically, the world does not change.  No one even breaks a sweat, much less takes up a cross to follow[5].”

            Friends, you and I are faced with a choice, right here and now, right here in River City.  We can decide whether we’re content enough – or lazy enough – that we’re willing to let our “faith” be merely a matter of our intellectual understandings… or whether we will embrace it and live it more fully.  We can decide whether we we’re going to let our “faith” make a difference in our lives and in the world … or remain nothing more than a few-word answer that you wrote on the bulletin Sermon Quiz a few minutes ago.  An interesting idea … but not much more than that.  We can decide whether we want to be believers in Jesus … or followers of Jesus.

            My hope is that over these next several weeks, all of us will reconsider our understandings of what it means for each of us to be a “person of faith.”  And my hope is that that will transform our lives, and begin to transform our world.  Amen.