What is Faith?
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
August 11, 2013
First Presbyterian Church,
Sterling IL
Christina Berry
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
1 Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction
of things not seen. 2 Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. 3 By
faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that
what is seen was made from things that are not visible.
8 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. 9 By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been
promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who
were heirs with him of the same promise. 10 For he looked forward to the city
that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. 11 By faith he
received power of procreation, even though he was too old—and Sarah herself was
barren—because he considered him faithful who had promised. 12 Therefore from
one person, and this one as good as dead, descendants were born, "as many
as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the
seashore." 13 All of these died in faith without having received the
promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that
they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, 14 for people who speak in
this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. 15 If they had been
thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity
to return. 16 But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly
one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has
prepared a city for them.
Sometimes the news headlines
cooperate so beautifully with sermon preparation that it seems like God must be
laughing uproariously. On Thursday, while I was writing this sermon, I heard an
odd little headline on the radio. Here’s the story from the St. Paul,
Minnesota, Tribune:
The St. Paul Saints plan to
change their name for a game sponsored by atheist groups. The American
Association minor league club will call itself the "Mr. Paul Aints"
when they host the Amarillo Sox on Aug. 10. The Minnesota Atheists and American
Atheists suggested the promotion to tie in with a regional atheist conference
in town that weekend. The game's billing is "a night of unbelievable
fun." The letter "s" will be covered up on Saints signs in the
ballpark. Player jerseys will be auctioned for charity. Saints executive Derek
Sharrer says the club has "no intention of mocking or making fun of
anyone's faith." He says several faith-based organizations have sponsored
games before and that the Saints felt it would be "hypocritical" to tell
the atheists no.[1]
Not the Saints, but the Aints. Because, I guess, they ain’t
got no faith. If you had to define faith, what would you say? You might say,
like the writer of Hebrews, that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the
conviction of things not seen. When you ask an atheist for a definition of
faith, you are likely to get the same answer, though it might be in a different
tone. Or you could get an answer more like this: “Gnostic means knowing,
agnostic means not knowing, faith means ignorance.”[2]
It is very easy to find this sort of answer on the Internet,
where some people surf websites in order to ridicule what others write. These
folks, and there are many varieties of them, are called trolls. The general
feeling is that trolls may disguise themselves as earnest conversation
partners, but that ultimately their goal is to bait others into anger or
insults, thereby justifying their own uncivil remarks and insults. My
experience with trolls is mostly limited to the anti-religious types, those who
seem to believe it is their duty to attack every remark that sounds even
vaguely Christian, usually with some very nasty assumptions often based on
their own bad experiences with religion or Christians. Sometimes those comments
are justified. Sometimes, those comments are downright cruel.
When someone posts on a Christian Facebook page a request
for prayer, and then posts a follow-up about the answer to that prayer, there
always seems to be an atheist troll who will comment something like: “You are
stupid and ignorant and you might as well believe in unicorns.” Or – “faith is
believing in baby-murdering book myth gods.” And those are the generous comments.
At bottom, the atheist troll isn’t interested in dialogue, but ridicule. Their
goal is not to understand, but to verbally demolish. This is not true of every
atheist – just the trolls.
Sadly, too many Christians rise to the bait, and they do it
poorly, without knowledge or awareness of the long historic trajectory of
philosophical and theological arguments. In other words, when it comes to
faith, many Christians don’t seem to know what they are talking about. So we
pass on stories of public school classrooms, where some clever child trounces a
Godless teacher:
The teacher says the Bible can’t be true, because it is
physically impossible for a whale to swallow a human. The little girl says that
Jonah was swallowed by a whale. The irritated teacher repeats that this is
impossible. The little girl answers, “When I get to heaven I will ask Jonah.” The teacher sneers, “What if Jonah went to
hell?”
The little girl answers, “Then you can ask him.”
We find that funny – the unbeliever finds it stupid.
Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction
of things not seen.
But there must be more to it than that.
Let’s talk first about doubt, which many people believe to
be the opposite of faith. The equation is that faith equals belief, and doubt
equals unbelief, or a lack of faith. In fact, the opposite of faith is
certainty – the absolute conviction that you are absolutely right, in
possession of the absolute Truth with a capital T, based on a rational argument
that has absolute intellectual integrity.
Some Christians think that certainty is necessary, and get tangled
up in apologetics, defending their certainty to someone who is equally certain
of the opposing point of view.
It is almost guaranteed that such conversation will devolve
into mud-slinging, and trading insults, with no end in sight. A wiser woman
than me has said: “Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes
noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until
some light returns.”[3] And, I would add, faith is
also believing that even amid the mess, the light is there, and it will return.
Pretty much every person now
regarded as an example of faith has at one point or another experienced serious
doubt. The scripture mentions Abraham and Sarah, and their son Isaac, and his
son Jacob. Moses struggled with faith and doubt. Even Jesus had moments of
uncertainty – not doubt, I think, in the
way we would doubt, but uncertainty nonetheless. All the disciples, not just
Thomas, and St. Paul himself – struggled with faith and doubt and uncertainty. Martin
Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa – every one of them
had times in which they questioned their own faith.
And therein lies the crux of the
text – we all struggle with our own ideas, our own thoughts, our own beliefs,
our own reasoning. We catch these brief and fleeting glimpses of the
transcendent, and we wave them away with rational explanations or by simply
forgetting about them. We often do the same with our doubts, trying to push
them aside, or pretend they don’t exist. Sometimes we get angry about them, and
start saying things like “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” But
that still makes the whole business of faith all about us.
Hebrews 11 tells the story
differently. This text reminds us that faith is a gift from God, and that
through faith, we see that which we might not otherwise believe. Rarely do
people come to belief through a reasoned and intellectual argument. Most of the
time we know faith through a whole confluence of experiences, of stories, of
actions and conversations; in short, we come to know faith through the living
of it. We begin to live in faith through our relationships. That’s why baptism,
and worship, and participation are so important.
You can’t whomp up faith by
reading about it, and you can’t truly experience faith in isolation, and you
can’t create love by just concentrating on it. We learn faith through the love
and nurture of our faith communities. And in the times when we cannot believe, when
we have doubts, or our jury is out, the community believes for us, has faith on
our behalf.
We Presbyterians don’t have a
list of doctrines in which we all must have faith. We say we believe in the
“essential tenets of the Reformed Tradition” but if we ever made a list of
those essential tenets, we wouldn’t really be Presbyterian and reformed!
So we, like Sarah and Abraham, live
and walk and trust in faith, the faith that comes from God. And we trace that
faith to the journey that began before time, in eternity, when God began to
prepare a homeland for us, a place where we can rest, and trust in goodness and
grace and mercy, and not in our own understanding. God began calling people
away from certainty, from all that they knew as undeniably true. God called
them to a new country,
to a place that God would show
them.
And then God took on human form and
came to live among us so that our experience of faith would be more than our
intellects could encompass. God did the irrational, the illogical, and moved
into our lives in ways that even now we have not entirely understood.
In Christ, God broke into the
world and turned upside down our philosophies and our reasoning, and invited us
to a new way of living, a way that transcends our petty arguments and invites
us to a better country, to the kingdom of God where justice restores the
broken, where the hungry are fed and the needy are cared for, where our best
thoughts are God’s thoughts, and our hearts, which were restless with disputes
and yearnings, can rest in the one who gives us faith that our lives mean
something, and that whatever our final home,
we are standing on the shoulders
of the giants of faith, and their faith is not based on logic or reason or
argumentation but on love and trust and grace – the love of God, trust in God’s
benevolence, and the grace we know in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ.
God’s grace does not depend on
our faith, but our faith depends on God’s grace.
That’s what makes us Saints, and
not Ain’ts.
Amen.
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