Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 13, 2010

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 are Protestant Christians, right? And the issue that more than any other originally distinguished Protestant Christianity from Roman Catholic Christianity, and to some extent still does, was the Protestant conviction that we are justified, or saved, by grace through faith rather than by our doing the works of the law, rather, that is, than by how we live. The Protestant confession that we are saved by grace through faith often gets contracted to we are saved by faith. Either way, the concept “faith” is central to Protestant Christianity. So to understand this central distinguishing confession of our type of Christianity, we have to understand what “faith” means. And the sad truth is that that central word is often badly misunderstood today. It is usually taken to mean believing in certain propositions about Jesus, and it simply doesn’t mean that. So this morning I want to talk about what faith means when we say that we are justified or saved by faith.

But first I have to give you one clarification. Being saved by faith, or by grace through faith, doesn’t mean that faith—whatever faith means—is something that is required for our salvation as far as God is concerned. As far as God is concerned, we are saved. Period. All of us. Everyone. That’s what grace means. If we have to have faith—whatever faith means—in order to be saved, then we are not saved by grace, not saved by God’s gracious action, but we are saved by something we do; and then we’re right back in the works idea of salvation that Protestantism originally rejected. So I may use the phrase “saved by faith,” but what I mean by that phrase is that faith—whatever faith may mean—is how we make the salvation that is already ours through God’s grace real in our lives, not faith is something we must have or do in order to receive God’s grace. With that clarification, let’s dive in and see if we can figure out what faith means when we say that we are saved by faith.

The Protestant confession that we are saved by faith is grounded in the New Testament. Specifically, it is grounded in the writings of St. Paul like the one we heard this morning from Galatians where Paul says “a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.” Justified here means basically saved. Perhaps the most significant verse about it for Protestant Christians is Romans 5:1-2, where Paul wrote: “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.” That’s the one that grabbed Martin Luther and started the Protestant Reformation. Both passages use the word faith. Actually, since Paul wrote in first century Greek and not in twenty-first century English, both passages use the word “pistis”. Pistis, in one form or another, is the word in the New Testament that usually gets translated as faith; so in order to understand what it means to say that we are saved by faith we need to know what pistis meant to the New Testament authors.

Now, I know you didn’t come here this morning for a lesson in New Testament Greek, or at least I assume you didn’t. Even if you did, I’m not qualified to give it to you. But I have learned a good deal lately about this word pistis. I’ve learned it from Karen Armstrong, whose book The Case for God several of us are reading. Armstrong says that the word often gets translated as “belief;” and I suspect that many of you, when you hear the claim that we are saved by faith, understand faith to mean belief. The most common popular understanding today of what Christianity is all about is that in order to be saved you must believe in Jesus. For decades there has been a billboard on I-5 south of Kelso that reads: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved,” quoting Acts 16:31. The root of the Greek work used there is, you guessed it, pistis. Faith and belief get equated. Faith becomes belief, and in the minds of many belief becomes little more than an intellectual exercise. Believing in Jesus gets reduced to giving intellectual assent to certain propositions about Jesus—that he is the Word of God Incarnate, that he died for the forgiveness of our sin, and that salvation is available only through believing in him.

Yet Armstrong insists that that is absolutely not what pistis meant to the New Testament authors. Pistis, faith, is not giving intellectual assent to dubious and obscure theological propositions. Rather, Armstrong insists that pistis as it is used in the New Testament means trust, loyalty, engagement, and commitment. She says that when Jesus demanded faith—pistis—from people, he was not demanding that they believe in him. Rather, she says:

He was asking for commitment. He wanted disciples who would engage in his mission, give all they had to the poor, feed the hungry, refuse to be hampered by family ties, abandon their pride, lay aside their self-importance and sense of entitlement, live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and trust in God who was their father. The Case for God, p. 87

Pistis means commitment and trust. In the New Testament, except perhaps for the Gospel and Epistles of John, having faith means much less believing in Jesus than it means putting your trust in him and living a life committed to embodying what he taught and demonstrated in his own life. Pistis, faith, is not believing propositions. It is trusting in and being committed to God. Now let’s see what this understanding of faith, of pistis, means for our understanding of some the Bible passages that use the word.

With this understanding our passage this morning from Galatians reads not “we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ” as in the NRSV translation we use, but “we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law, but through trust in and commitment to Jesus Christ.” All of a sudden what we believe in our minds loses most of its importance. All of a sudden appropriating God’s grace into our lives isn’t about what we think, it’s about what we do. It’s not about what we think, it’s about how we live. Jesus’ words to the sinful woman in the story from Luke that we heard become not “Your faith has saved you; go in peace,” as in the NRSV translation that we use, but “Your trust in and commitment to the God who forgives you has saved you; go in peace,” This woman knows God’s grace in her life not because she believes something about Jesus but because she trusts in the divine forgiveness that she experiences in him and commits herself to living into and out of that forgiveness.

Friends, I am convinced that there is really good news in this reimagining of what it means to say that we have faith in Jesus. Some of you know that I’ve been accused all of my ministerial career, with good reason I admit, of living too much in my head. Some of you—Sue—have accused me of that yourselves. I admit that theology is important to me. Indeed, this sermon is an exercise in theology. Not many pastors are foolish enough to discuss New Testament Greek in a sermon, and I’d probably flunk a seminary preaching course for doing it. But this theology, this exploration of New Testament Greek, leads to a conclusion that speaks less to the head than to the heart. Faith as belief, with belief understood as intellectual assent to theological propositions, is rationalistic and cold. It happens in the head, in the mind. It doesn’t really involve the rest of our humanity. Faith understood as trust in and commitment to the God we know in and through Jesus Christ grasps our entire personality, our entire being. Faith comes to be about not what we think but how we live. Faith understood as trust and commitment transforms not only our thinking but also all of our living. Trust in and commitment to the God we know in and through Jesus Christ grasp our entire being, heart, mind, and body, in a transformative dance with the One Who forgives us and loves us unconditionally. We don’t confess belief with our mouths, we confess trust and commitment with our lives. God touches not our minds only—although God of course touches our minds too—but God touches the marrow of our bones and the depths of our souls. God comes alive not in our thoughts only but in everything we say, everything we do, every loving action we take, every harmful action we forego. We don’t have to pretend to believe obscure theological doctrines that we don’t understand. We are free to respond to love with love, to grace with grace.

So let us be people of faith, people of pistis. Not people who merely say we believe in something but people who are transformed in thought and deed by our trust in and commitment to the God of love and grace that we know in Jesus Christ our Lord. This faith is not easy. It places great challenges before us. But that God of love and grace to whom we respond in love and grace is always there to help us, always there to guide us, always there to inspire us, always there to comfort us and to forgive us when we fail. Your trust in and commitment to the God who forgives you has saved you; go in peace. Amen.