Some weeks it’s tough to know what
to say up here. I mean, I am pretty much saying the same thing week after week,
and, as the author Bill Bryson once wrote about writing a weekly column, the
thing about a weekly sermon is that it comes up weekly. Bryson writes, “Now
this may seem a self-evident fact, but in two years there never came a week
when it did not strike me as both profound and startling. Another column?
Already? But I just did one.”
That’s pretty much how I feel about
sermons. But, then I read about Paul, preaching the known God in a midst of a
world in Athens that is worshiping the “unknown God” and I reminded of the
necessity of sharing with the God we can know; the God who is specific, whose
name Paul knows, whose name we know. Paul goes on to suggest that God created
us this way—to search for him, to yearn for him, even, as Paul says, to grope
for him, as if stumbling in the dark. There’s this God-shaped hole inside of us
and we will spend our lives, one way or another, trying to fit various things
inside of it, when only one fits. I don’t think we can talk enough about the
one thing that fits.
What
matters to Paul is the specificity—it is this God, whom he knows in Jesus
Christ, who is the one true God. Of all the questions I get as a pastor, one of
the top few after “Can you get married?” (Yes, not Catholic), and “Why?” (Much
more complicated) is “How do you know that your God is the one, true God?” I
get this question on one level, because it comes from some kind of objective
place where a person looks at the world and says, “I see thousands of gods
worshipped by billions of people. How can any of them reconcile any of this
business?” I get that. But where the people asking the question lose me is
where they jump to the conclusion that, therefore, all these religions are
bogus. Instead, I look at it like this: I can only preach the God I know. I can
only share the faith that is in me. I can only tell you about the specific
qualities of this God that I worship: That Jesus Christ has conquered sin and
death and, through dying, he gives us eternal life. That’s all I can say, and I
don’t say that having compared our God to a thousand other gods; I just share
it because it is the faith that is in me.
That also doesn’t
mean I have to think other people are wrong—I don’t know their experience—and it
doesn’t mean I have to spend my life doing the divine math on whether
Christians and Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and whomever else is
worshiping the same God or not. It’s not that I don’t care; I just don’t need
to, because I can only testify to the God I know. Then, I can certainly listen
to others talk about the God they know and ask myself in what ways they are
filling in my blind spots and in what ways perhaps I disagree, but all of that
is secondary. I can only testify to what I know.
This last
week was our final Big Q&A opportunity in Confirmation. This year I think
the biggest question of all was raised—probably the most important, and,
therefore, really, really difficult question to answer, and it was raised by an
eighth-grader and I’m going to raise it myself now, because it ties in directly
with Paul and the Athenians. This question was, simply: “What is faith?”
Now, I can
give you a dictionary definition, or I can read to you from Hebrews 11 and say,
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not
seen,” but I don’t think that’s what this young person was getting at. The
question was really, “How do we get faith if we want it?” And: “What does it
mean when we feel we have no faith?” Put another way, in light of this story of
Paul, “How can we have a specific faith in Jesus Christ over against the
unknown god?” Because the unknown god is easy, right? You don’t have to name it—you
can just worship it however you feel. I think a lot of us worship the unknown
god more than we worship the triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—until
something goes wrong and that vague sense of comfort is lifted. The problem
with the unknown god is that it can be whatever you want. Perhaps it wants you
to be wealthy; surely it wants you to be happy; it’s definitely a good god,
perhaps limited in some ways since this planet can be so terrible sometimes,
but it is an adaptable god to my situation. In light of the unknown god, the
question that eighth-grader was raising might really be: how on earth do we
have faith in something as specific as Jesus Christ?
Well, I
stumbled through my answer to this question last Wednesday, because I know—in my
head—how I define faith. But I realized something when I was answering the
question: I had never put myself in the shoes of somebody who wanted to believe
but couldn’t. I had never considered one of the Athenians who believed in the
unknown God but couldn’t make the leap to the specifics of faith in Jesus. So I
didn’t answer as well as I could have.
Now, having
some time to think about this I think I have a better answer and it is this: If
you are asking the question, then the seed of faith you need is already in you,
and I’m not just saying that to say something profound. I think we too often
imagine that the evidence of faith is a declarative statement; a moment where
you stand up in front of everybody and say, “I believe!” And it certainly can
be that! But faith is equally a profound hope that something might be true; it
is tied to wonder and mystery; and the stronger you ask the question, “What is
faith?” with a heart to find the answer, the surer you will find that faith is
the foundation of that hope you have that you will find it.
Faith might
begin as hope in an unknown God, but just as surely as God sends Paul to the
Athenians so he will send parents and friends and preachers and teachers and
whomever else God pleases to share the good news of Jesus Christ specifically,
because—if it goes for any of you as it has for me—then you come to know that
it is through the lens of grace and the love of God, made known to us in Jesus,
that we can see the world as it is, and the world becomes clearer and in so
many ways more beautiful because of that.
So, what is
faith? Sometimes it’s asking the question; it begins with hope; it’s the
unknown-God-starting-to-be-made-known. It’s a journey, and, if you’re still
living and breathing, then it’s only just begun.
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