I attended a middle school that sits at the base of a small New England mountain. We had a ropes course up on the mountain, and every year, before classes began, each grade took a few hours to do some team-building exercises up on the ropes course. My least favorite part of these events was something called the trust fall. This entailed a single middle schooler clambering up to a platform, attached to a tree about four feet off the ground, crossing his arms across his chest, and – once the appropriate code words had been said – tipping backward, eyes closed, into what he hoped to God would be the waiting arms of his classmates.
Those of you who have read the August installment of the Parish News will know – that in order to stave off potential monotony on these late summer Sundays – I plan to preach a series of three sermons on what are called the three theological virtues: Faith, Hope, and Charity. We hear these words a lot in church, but what these virtues offer us is frequently taken for granted, and over the next few Sundays, we will explore them together, beginning today with Faith.
In their 2005 book, Soul Searching, sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton described the religion of contemporary American teenagers as “moralistic therapeutic deism.” In that worldview, there is a God somewhere (that’s why it’s described as somehow “deist”), who wants us to be nice (that’s the “moralistic” part) and who can help when we have need, and who, in their words, “provide[s] therapeutic benefits to [the] adherent,” which means feeling good.[1] “In short,” they write, “God is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he is always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process.”[2]
It's too easy, however, to use this kind of analysis as part of some narrative of decline from a supposed pristine past, when everyone robustly accepted the full platter of Christian orthodoxy, now ruined by the teenagers and the millennials. It was 80 years ago when the theologian Richard Niebuhr performed a similar diagnosis, famously describing belief in “a God without wrath (who) brought [people] without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”[3] The issue is not about young people - it is about people.
The difficultly with these rather milquetoast stand-ins for authentic Christian faith in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is that they lack the gravity to transform our lives day-to-day, and more especially when we are most in need of the consolations of real, solid faith.
Now faith, we heard in our first lesson this morning, is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
It is a common error, when speaking on this topic, to assume that what we mean by “faith” is synonymous with what we mean by “belief.” To have “faith” in God is not to assent in a set of propositions about the existence and nature of God, although doing so can be helpful. When we say that we have faith in a friend, we do not mean that we believe that our friend exists. What we mean is that we trust that our friend is as good as her word. Up on that trust fall platform, I knew that my classmates were down there… the matter of faith was whether they would catch me.
The author of Hebrews speaks of the assurance of things hoped for, and the Greek word for “assurance” [hypostasis] implies solidity, the quality of being well-founded, of having actual substance. 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, but (we may assume) sure that God would lead him to that place.
It is not incidental that the author of Hebrews should present Abraham as an exemplar of faith. This is not because of what sounds like Abraham’s blind following of orders, setting out without a clue as to where he was going. Abraham and his wife, Sarah, as our author puts it, were “as good as dead.” They were old, utterly without human potential for reproduction, so much so that when God’s messengers promise that Sarah will bear a son, her response is to laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing.[4] And yet these two – Abraham and Sarah – became the progenitors of many nations, not because of any inherent quality that they possessed, nor because of anything that they themselves did, but because God was as good as his word.
The ground of our faith is this, the faithfulness of God to humanity, down through the generations. God’s faithfulness, God’s being as good as his Word is seen most especially, most powerfully, in the life, death, and resurrection of the Word made flesh, who is Jesus Christ. In Bethlehem of Judea, Christ took on human flesh, and lived as we do, with all of the perils and joys of human life. On the Cross, Christ suffered the worst thing that this world knew how to do to him, and he died a human death, and was buried in a human tomb. And what happened next? God raised him from the dead. God has kicked in the door of the prison that are death and corruption. That’s the power of God to make a way out of no way, to give “life to the dead and calls into being the things that do not exist.”[5]
Those are the things hoped for, quite literally the things not seen. Christian faith for those of us in this room is the assurance that there is more at work in God’s economy than the randomness and the good luck and bad luck which seems to govern the world. Faith in God doesn’t imply that every cloud has a silver lining, because we know that’s not true. What we know instead – by faith – is that the sum total of your worth, and my worth, before God is not dependent the chances of luck and circumstance that circumscribe the limits of this mortal life.
If I’m being honest, I must admit that it’s much easier to just get a quick moral fix, a little hit of feeling good because I went to church on a Sunday. That’s much safer than the adventure of Christian faith.
But when we allow ourselves to step out of the safe boundaries of what we know of this world, we are filled and transformed by the Holy Spirit. That is why the Christian who is alive in the faith, confident that her worth in this world is conferred on her not by achievement, or position, or possessions, but by her stature as a redeemed child of God… why such a person is marked by the peace of God, which passes all understanding.
Kierkegaard described the life of faith as one requiring a leap.[6] There’s only so far that our own reasoning and rationalizing will take us into the life God wants for us, the freedom that God wants for you and for me. At the end of the day, we Christians are engaged in a trust fall, standing up on that platform, wondering whether to tip back. Will you take the leap?
AMEN.
[1] Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2009), 163.
[2] Ibid., 165.
[3] Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1959 [1937]), 193.
[4] Gen 18:12
[5] Rom 4:17
[6] See particularly Concluding Unscientific Postscript.