Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 8, 2004
Scripture:
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
We come here every Sunday morning--well, I come here most every Sunday morning and some of you come here some Sunday mornings, because we are people of faith. Together we are a community of faith, part of the ecumenical Christian community of faith that is itself part of the larger community of people of all faiths. As Protestant Christians we are part of a tradition that teaches that it is in faith (well, really by grace through faith) that we are put right with God. Faith is very big with us, but if someone who was outside of that faith--any faith--asked you what the word faith means, what would you say? I’m not talking about the doctrines and dogmas of the church, the specific content of the Christian faith. I’m talking about the definition of the word faith itself. When you have faith, what is it that you have?
Our reading from Hebrews this morning gives us a famous answer: "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen." You’ve probably heard that line before, or some variant of it from another translation. It’s rather famous. Yet despite its fame, I find it rather obscure. It sounds great, but what does it mean?
Well, it can mean a lot of things, and I’m going to talk a bit this morning about one thing that I think it means; but let me start by telling what it most certainly does not mean. In our post-Enlightenment world today, for people both inside the church and for people outside it, faith usually means taking as factually true propositions, or facts, for which there is little or no evidence. We say about matters of faith "we can’t prove them, so we just have to take them on faith, that is, we just have to believe them anyway." Faith becomes belief, and belief becomes taking as true things we can’t prove are true. If you don’t believe that, just ask some of your non-religious friends why they don’t believe, and they will very probably give you some version of: "I don’t believe because you can’t prove it, and I’m not about to believe anything you can’t prove."
That, I can assure you, is not what the author of Hebrews meant by faith. He did not mean that faith is taking as true facts for which there is little or no evidence. No one could understand his statement that way until the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries reduced truth to facts and knowledge to scientific proof. It never would have occurred to anyone in the ancient world to make our modern distinction between knowledge and belief, or to take as true only that which could be scientifically demonstrated to be factually true.
So, if faith is not taking as true facts for which there is little or no evidence, what is it? Theologians have suggested several different meanings. Marcus Borg, for example, in his book The Heart of Christianity, suggests four complimentary, overlapping meanings of faith, namely, faith as assent, faith as trust, faith as fidelity or faithfulness, and faith as vision. We spent some time with those four meanings of faith in the Sunday morning Christian education group not long ago, and I won’t bore you with a description of each of them here. Just note that one of Borg’s meanings is faith as trust. For me it is the most helpful of them, and it is the one I want to focus on this morning.
Borg says of faith as trust that it is not trust in the truth of a set of statements about God. That would be just another way of saying faith is taking as true facts for which there is little or no evidence. Rather, Borg says faith as trust is "radical trust in God." Faith as trust is like relaxing in deep water and trusting that you will float. If you trust that you will float, you will, If you fight it, if you tense up and struggle, you’ll sink. Faith, Borg says, "is trusting in the sea of being in which we live and move and have our being."
Borg talks about the power of faith as trust in the abstract. He says that you can see the truth of faith as trust by looking at its opposite. Its opposite isn’t doubt or disbelief. Doubt means you aren’t sure something is true, and disbelief means you’re sure it isn’t; but faith as trust isn’t about, or at least isn’t primarily about, things being true or not true. So its opposite isn’t doubt or disbelief. Faith as trust is about relaxing into the buoyancy of God. It is about being at peace, and so its opposite is not being at peace. As Borg puts it, the opposite of faith as trust is anxiety or worry, i.e., not being at peace. We can, he says, "measure our degree of faith as trust by the amount of anxiety in our lives." Now understand. We’re not talking here about people with anxiety disorder. That’s a medical condition not a spiritual one, and it needs to be treated by a physician not a pastor. For most of us, however, the presence of much anxiety in our lives does suggest a spiritual disorder, namely, a lack of faith understood as trust.
That’s the scholar’s way of saying it, but I can tell you from personal experience that understanding faith as trust in God, having faith that has nothing to do with believing facts you can’t prove but that has everything to do with trusting your life, and your death, to God is the most powerful thing you can have in your life. I want to tell you a story about faith as trust. I’ve told it here before, so if you remember it, please bear with me. It won’t hurt to hear it again.
In June, 2002, my late wife Francie was suffering through her last hospitalization with terminal breast cancer. She was miserable, not so much from the cancer as from the side-effects of the drugs she’d been given and from the side-effects of drugs she’d been give to treat the side-effects of the drugs she’d been given. For the most part the hospital staff did what they could to make her comfortable; but one day, when I couldn’t be with her for most of the day because of work commitments, she was having a particularly rough time of it. The doctors had ordered some procedure or other, probably unnecessary; and the technicians were botching it and making it far worse than it had to be. It was probably the worse day she had in all of her battle with cancer. It was then, when things were at their worst, that she had the vision. She had a vision of herself, and me with her, being held in the palm of God’s hand and being safe there. That vision stayed with her, and with me, for the remaining seven weeks or so of her life. It gave her the strength to face the end of her life, coming at far too young an age, in relative peace. It gave me the strength to walk that road with her to the end and to tell her at the end that it was all right for her to go. Francie’s vision was so powerful for her and so meaningful to me that I had carved on her grave marker the words "Safe in God’s Hands." Those words still give me comfort and strength every time I visit her grave.
That, my friends, is faith as trust. Knowing that no matter what, in all our living and even in our dying, we are safe in God’s hands is what it means to have faith as trust. It isn’t about believing propositions about who Jesus was and is. It isn’t about propositions about the significance of his life or his death, about how he saves us, or what being saved might mean. Rather, it is about letting go of our fear, our anxiety about life and even about death and trusting that no matter what we are safe with God. Not even death can take that safety from us.
Now, I can hear you saying: OK, but I haven’t had a vision of being held safe in God’s hands, so how do I know that it’s true? Let me suggest that the way you know it is by experiencing it. When you stop to think about it, all knowledge is really just experience. I won’t bore you with the philosophical basis for that statement here, but just try it on and see if it fits. Knowledge is grounded in experience; and you can experience faith as trust if you’ll just let yourself. Countless people have. I’ll mention just one here, Jesus of Nazareth. Where did he find the courage to go to the cross rather than renounce the God of compassion that he knew as Abba, Father? He found it in faith not as knowledge of facts about God but in faith grounded in his experience of God as utterly trustworthy no matter what might happen to him. It wasn’t easy, as at least most of the Gospels make clear; but throughout his life he had trusted in God and gone back again and again to that ultimate source of courage and peace in prayer and meditation. He lived in the constant presence of God, and he knew because he had experienced it that he could trust God with his life and with his fate beyond life.
You can know it too, that is, you can experience it too. Try it. Try letting go of your anxiety, your fear--whatever fear you carry with you this morning--and trusting God. Trust that with God you are safe. Try it right now. Close your eyes. imagine yourself held in the palm of God’s hand. You’re safe there. Nothing can really harm you because no matter what happens, even though you die, God holds you, loves you, and will not let you go. Can you feel it? Can you feel the safety? Can you feel the love? If you can feel it you can trust it. you can’t prove it, but you can have the assurance that it is real. You can’t see it, but you can have the conviction of things unseen. You may be sure that it is true.
That’s what the author of Hebrews was talking about. That’s what faith is. That’s the faith that changes lives, that changes the world. Knowing theological propositions won’t bring you strength and peace. Being able to explain the Trinity and the Incarnation won’t bring you hope and joy. Trust God. Trust your life to God. Trust your soul to God. Trust the world to God. That is true faith, and no power on earth can overcome it. Amen.