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A Few Things About FaithAugust 12, 2007 Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost This morning I want to share with you a few things about faith, and it is only a few things. Let me just say right up front, I don’t have all the answers. We gather week after week to try to sort it out and try to make some sense of it all. But thanks be to God, we recognize that faith is more than we can comprehend or explain. We learn to value searching more than finding. And if we are really lucky, we come away having found a few nuggets that give us the courage to live more fully into the life that we have been given. The search for faith is a continuous and often complicated one. What is faith really? And what does it mean to be faithful? Is it a possession one has? She has great faith! Or is it something one does? He is faithful or walks by faith? One thing I know for sure: we are right to call it a journey. We enter the dance at birth. It is inherent in our nature and, long before we understand anything about God, there is something within us, within the human experience, that enables us to try again, to trust again, and to love again. Notice an infant learning to walk. She falls down but gets back up. She may cry and become frustrated and even sit in her tears for a while. But eventually she grabs hold of a hand or a chair and gets back up and tries again. She just knows to do that and she keeps on doing it until finally she discovers the freedom of walking; then running; and then she is on to discover the wonder of something else new and wonderful. We experience that instinct all the time: I’m going for it. I’m going to try it. There is something in us that says keep moving, even when we are walking in the dark, to keep going even when we don’t know where or how. It is what gets us out of the bed in the morning. It gets us to the interview one more time. It gets us to seek professional assistance or to sit down with a friend. It opens us to the possibility that somehow life can be different. And I think the moment we make the decision – not when or if we see a result, but the very moment we recognize and embrace new possibilities regardless of how dire – faith happens. Faith happens. In the church, we wrap faith around a belief system. We call it belief in God and God’s vision. We seek to love God above all things. And loving God means embracing God’s vision of loving neighbor. That becomes our true life’s work. We may not know how to name God, Him or Her, Father or Mother. We may not know how to explain Him or Her. We may not know how to recognize or nurture a relationship with Him or Her, but we set out on a journey of discovery. And early on, sometimes to our surprise, we learn that faith allows us to live in the real world. It is not about some superficial, romanticized experience where we bargain with God to get what we want. We learn that sometimes things don’t work out according to our demands or wishes or expectations. Sometimes the cancer does not go away. The child does not return home. The marriage is not reconciled. The job goes to a far less qualified candidate. Faith allows us to walk in that spiritual transcendence that creates a new reality and allows us to step into it and live into it even though we cannot see. The writer to the Hebrews says "now faith is the substance of things hoped for the evidence of things not seen.” The writer writes to a community in the early church who faced strong trials, so its very purpose is to call believers to remain steadfast and to take courage. Faith expresses itself. It is active, dynamic. It does something. Abraham shaped his life by a vision of reality not visible to the eye. In him we see that sometimes faith is leaving behind the familiar; the comfort and security of what we have known and moving out into the unknown. At other times, it consists of staying put and patiently waiting, watching, and working when nothing seems to be happening. His story helps us to understand that there is more to life than what we see. God comes to us from the future with a promise that calls us to act on good news. There is always something new in the world – always. Just because we cannot see it does not mean that it is not there lurking about in time and eternity. The current reality is not the only reality. Its name is resurrection. The chapter ends by acknowledging that all of these people, in spite of their faith, did not receive what was promised. While they received great blessing they did not receive the ultimate promise. Now I need to tell you that I am a daughter of the church. My parents practiced faith, and my grandparents before them, and their parents before them. They gave us the gift of imagination. They never stifled our dreams, never tarnished our creativity, never allowed us to think for one moment – no matter how bizarre, or how unlikely the odds – that anything was out of the realm of possibility. Some of that is still in me today. I’m not talking about daydreaming and fantasizing – I’m talking about catching a vision for your own life and the world around you in such a way that it catapults you into action and you decide that you want to do something about it. Some of you have heard me tell this story about my first encounter with Stephen. I was sitting in my church in North Carolina when the telephone rang. I said, “Good morning, this is Reverend Gilliard.” The person on the other end asked, “Cathy Gilliard?” I said yes. He said, “I am Stephen Bauman and I’m the senior minister at Christ Church and I am looking to expand my staff. And the dean at Duke Divinity School said, I need to talk to you.” When he was finished I hung up the phone and called my girlfriend and I said, “You will never believe what just happened.” I was flattered but I remember thinking to myself, this guy must be crazy. But over the next weeks and months, Stephen and I entered into a dance of sorts. And the more he shared the more inspired I became. I realized that Stephen had also been living in faith, patiently working for God’s vision to come true; the vision of a vital healthy church where God was central and the people were making a difference among themselves and in the world. It arrested my attention, and in the end I realized that it was my vision too. For the first time in my career, I had to wrestle with the fact that God had not called me to the Black church, or to the Baptist Church. Or to a church in North Carolina. God had called, and I had to decide if I really believed what I had been preaching all those years. A few weeks after I had tendered my resignation, someone asked why in the world I would want to leave, to walk away from everything I had known and go all the way to New York alone – to a different culture, a different denomination, a different lifestyle? And I said, “Well, you know, I want to grow. I want to reach my potential. I want to stretch and be the best minister I can be.” And he said, “Well, have you ever considered that maybe you have grown as much as you can grow?” I said: “No, never.” It never entered my mind. The fear of coming was not nearly as great as the fear of not living my life fully. And so, here I am, and I’m so glad I came. Thanks be to God! I have been at this a long time now. It just seems the only logical recourse is to stay with it, and run on and see what the end will be. Previous sermon: Then What? • Next sermon: Disturbing the Peace All past sermons |
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