Keep
the Faith
Sermon preached by the Reverend Patricia Farris
August 28, 2005
Scripture:
Hebrews 11:1-3 and John 14:1-6a
This
is the last of the summer sermons created in response to some of your
requests. Not that we’ve covered all the topics—others
will be sprinkled throughout the coming year. Today we are looking
at a question that surely comes from the heart: how do we have faith?
And once we have it, how do we keep it?
I
suppose it’s something of a well-kept secret that all Christians,
all faithful Christians, move in and out of degrees of faith over
the course of a lifetime. I bet many of us have walked into this sanctuary
on a Sunday morning and looked around and assumed that surely everyone
else in these pews has more faith or stronger faith or better faith
than I. Perhaps, then, it comes as a relief to know that most everyone
experiences doubt from time to time, that faith and doubt go hand
in hand on the Christian journey. The great theologian, Paul Tillich
said that, “doubt is not the opposite of faith, but an element
of faith.”
The
early church knew this and actually acted it out in its worship. They
did a liturgical dance called the Tripudium, something of a big line
dance that people did together. It consisted of three steps forward,
one step back. Three steps forward, one step back. “I believe,
O God,” said St. Augustine. “Help my unbelief.”
Three steps forward, one step back is the dance of faith and doubt.
It is very normal, very healthy and certainly to be expected along
life’s journey. As the Presbyterian writer, Frederick Buechner
says, “Faith is much more of a verb than a noun, more of process
than a possession.”
John
Wesley also knew this well, and so when he would gather his preachers
together in annual conference, he would first ask them: “How
is it with your soul?” Before they could report to him on how
many baptisms they’d performed or how many sermons they’d
preached or how many miles they’d traveled across the connexion,
--and don’t mistake me here, he wanted to know those things,
too. He was a task master and he did have high standards for them
and for himself first of all!
But,
first, before they recounted their work and their achievements, first
they had to give an account of the state of their souls. They had
to be honest before God and one another about that which was deepest
inside, about their relationship with God, about the ways they felt
close to God and distant from God, about the
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"Keep
the Faith" by Rev. Patricia Farris, August 28, 2005
ways they’d failed themselves and God, about how they had hurt
others and God. How is it with your soul? Wesley wisely knew how important
it is to freely tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about
our journey of faith, with its high points and mountain top experiences
of the presence and power of God as well as with its moments of doubt
and times of despair when God seems so very far away.
Faith
is a life-long journey, in a living give-and-take relationship with
God, who is in a living relationship with us. You see, Jesus wanted
us to know him not so much as the answer as the Way. “I am the
Way, the truth and life,” he told us. The early church called
itself “the people of the Way,” people in a relationship
with the living God. I think it’s safe to say, based on our own
experiences, that relationships—even the best ones—are not
100% bliss. It’s work. It’s give and take. It’s up
and down. As the writer of Hebrews put it: “Faith is the assurance
of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.”
That’s
a perfect description of the covenantal relationship God established
with his people after the Flood: the assurance of things hoped for,
the conviction of things not seen. Remember the rainbow God put in the
sky, for Noah and Mrs. Noah and all the animals to see? The rainbow
was a sign of the covenant God was making with us, a covenant held in
trust beyond our sight. We are in a living covenant relationship with
our God. The Bible talks about it in terms of a marriage vow.
Jonathan
Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of Britain, says: “I know of no more revolutionary
description of faith than that as the covenant of love between God and
the human race.” He reminds us that the Greeks defined faith in
terms of cognito, knowledge, what we know, the beliefs we think our
way into. But instead, the Hebrew people—and this is what Jesus
carries forward, you see—understood faith as covenant, as relationship,
growing out of God’s love for us. “Faith”, says Rabbi
Sacks, “is where the loneliness of God meets the loneliness of
the human individual and is redeemed in a covenant of love.”
God
creates us for relationship with God. God puts a kind of longing in
our hearts, a longing for God. “My heart is restless until it
finds its rest in Thee,” St. Augustine said. Saints and philosophers
have long said that we’re all born a “God-shaped hole”
inside us, a God-shaped hole in each and every soul that can be filled
only by the love and grace of God. This is not a hole that will ever
show up on any CT scan or MRI. No surgeon or doctor will be able to
find it on an x-ray-- although the truly wise healers will recognize
its presence. But being creatures of God’s own making, God has
placed within us this empty space so that God may fill it first with
yearning and longing for completeness.
Our
problem is that far too often we feel something missing inside but we
rush about trying to fill it up with everything but the one thing we
most need, don’t we? We try and fill the God-shaped hole with
food and things and relationships and busy-ness. We try to fill it with
our achievements and our hobbies and our performances and the beauty
of our homes. We try to fill it with our learning and
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"Keep
the Faith" by Rev. Patricia Farris, August 28, 2005
our
cleverness and our proficiencies…we try to fill it with everything
except what we most need. And so we are still not satisfied. There’s
always one more thing to buy, to get, to try.
For
so many of us, there remains a deep sadness inside, fear that we will
never measure up, that no matter how much we have or achieve, it will
never be enough. We long for faith, but we chase after the wrong things.
Our beloved Creator God is yearning for us to come home, yearning
for us to know that we are the beloved children of God’s heart.
For the fact is, as St. Augustine said long ago: “God loves
us as if there were only one of us.”
Because,
you see, the truth is, just as our hearts long for God, so God longs
for us. Inside the heart of God, there is a “person-shaped hole”
waiting for each of us, a person-shaped hole with our name on it.
God aches for us to remember the rainbow and the covenant of love.
I’m
going to close this morning with a story that one of you also submitted
for a sermon. It’s a great story about how we understand faith
as a living relationship with a living God, who knows us by name and
indeed loves us as if there is only one of us and longs to be in relationship
with us, the relationship we call “faith.”
This
is a true story about a couple traveling in Ireland, beautiful Ireland,
the Emerald Isle. They had rented a car and were enjoying rambling
along the small, narrow winding roads of the Irish countryside. But
because maps there can be rather sketchy and confusing, one day they
found themselves lost. They stopped at one of the many small, typical
little spots that dot the countryside, something of a combination
gas station and general store and the man went in to get directions.
There sitting inside was owner, wearing one of those beautiful big,
heavy hand-knit sweaters, smoking his curved pipe and reading. “Good
morning,” our lost tourist said. “Aye, lad, it is a beautiful
morning and we t’ank God for that.”
“I’m
afraid I might be lost,” our traveler said. “Oh, lad,”
came the reply, “you’re not lost.” “Well”,
said our driver, “how can you be so sure?” Pause…
“Oh,
you can’t be lost,” the shop owner said, “because
I know where we are.”
He
told me later that walking back to the care, it hit him: “that’s
what it’s all about, our relationship with God.” “You’re
not lost”, God assures us through all those times when we lose
our way, when we sense that we’re losing faith. “You’re
not lost,” our covenant God says, “because I know where
we are.”
Faith
is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not
seen. Faith is a relationship, a life-long evolving, changing relationship
of covenant with the living God. And like every relationship, it first
requires that we show up, that we bring all of who we are to the table.
And that we talk often and long and that we listen more than we talk.
That we
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"Keep
the Faith" by Rev. Patricia Farris, August 28, 2005
say ‘thank you” more frequently than we’re inclined
to do. That we’re gentle with ourselves and with our beloved
through the times when things don’t go so well. That sometimes
we stop talking and dance: three steps forward, one step back. Three
steps forward, one step back. Over time we learn to trust that nothing
in life or in death can separate us from the great love of God in
Christ Jesus.
For
the Lord our God is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding
in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the
thousandth generation.
Amen.
©Patricia
Farris , 2005. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution.
All other rights reserved. |
