Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 8, 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.

When you spend as much time immersed in the Christian faith as I do, what with me being a professional Christian and all, there are certain issues that keep cropping up. Sometimes when they do you groan. Not you again! But the reason they keep cropping up over and over again is because they are vitally important to the life of faith, but they don’t have easy, clear cut, indisputable answers. Science is the realm of certainty—or at least that’s how science is popularly understood. It gives clear answers. It’s answers may change over time, but until they have been displaced by better answers scientific answers are quite certain. Not so with theological answers. Theology, which is thinking about God and about the faith, is not the realm of certainty. It is the realm of wonder, of struggle, of doing the best we can while knowing that our ultimate questions ultimately have no ultimate answers, at least no ultimate answers that are accessible to us mortals here on earth.

One of those questions that keeps coming up over and over again is the question of the meaning of the word faith. It’s a central question for us. We claim to be people of faith, so pretty clearly we need to know what we mean when we say faith. Most people in our culture today have a fairly clear idea of what they mean by faith. For most people in our culture today faith means taking as fact something that you can’t prove. Some things we can prove, the things of science for example. Some things we know to be real because we have lived them or seen them for ourselves. Those things we say we know. Other things we can’t prove but we believe, or want, them to be real, to be factual. Those things we say we “take on faith.” We take them to be true even though we can’t prove them. I can’t prove something, but I will assume it is true, I will act on the assumption that it is true. I will give intellectual assent to it even though I can’t prove it, I can’t really know it.

That’s what most people mean today when they say they have faith in God. We can’t prove the reality of God. We can’t demonstrate it like we can demonstrate natural phenomena. I don’t have to “take it on faith” that if you drop too much sodium into a beaker of water it will explode and burn the ceiling of your brand new junior high school. I saw that happen. I could show you that that’s what happens if you insisted and if I could figure where to get the sodium. I can’t demonstrate God to you like that. So people say they have faith in God, meaning they believe that God is real even though they can’t prove it.

Well, I suppose that is one possible meaning of faith, but today in our New Testament readings we have two passages that actually give a very different meaning of faith. The first is that famous line from Hebrews: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. “ It may sound to you like that line is defining faith that same way I just said most people today define it. “The conviction of things not seen” sounds like taking as true things you can’t prove because you haven’t seen them, but I don’t think that’s actually what this passage means. To see what it does mean look at what the author of Hebrews gives as an example of faith as the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. He gives us Abraham. He says: “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.” He doesn’t say “by faith Abraham believed that God was real even though he couldn’t prove it.” The story of Abraham is this: Yahweh, a god he didn’t know, told him that if he would go to a land that Yahweh would show him “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” Genesis 12:2 Abraham never doubted that this Yahweh god was real, but he didn’t know that Yahweh would fulfill his promise. Still, he trusted that this god was faithful; and he went to the land Yahweh showed him.

The example of Abraham shows that Hebrews isn’t talking about taking as true facts we can’t prove when it calls faith the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. Rather Hebrews is talking about trust. The author of Hebrews understands faith not as believing in the truth of unproven facts. Rather, that author understands faith as trust. In Hebrews having faith in God doesn’t mean believing in the reality of God even though you can’t prove it. In the world of the New Testament everyone simply took the reality of God for granted. Atheism just wasn’t an option. So the reality of God isn’t what Hebrews is about. Rather, Hebrews here is about putting one’s trust in God. Faith is trusting that God is faithful. Faith is trusting that God will be true to God’s promises. Faith is trusting God to be our God, our God of grace and mercy. Hebrews here defines faith not as giving intellectual assent to the truth of unproven propositions but as trusting God.

Our other passage we heard this morning is less obviously about the nature of faith, but there is a way of understanding that passage as being about faith too. In our passage from Luke Jesus utters these lines that have become famous over the centuries: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” To see how this line is about what faith is, recall the definition of faith advanced by the great twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich. Tillich defined faith as “the state of being ultimately concerned.” We have faith, he said, in that which is our ultimate concern, that which is more important to us than anything else, that for which we will give up everything else. That’s what Luke’s Jesus is talking about here. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. In that world “heart” was a metaphor for a person’s deepest self, a person’s essence, the core of her being. When Luke has Jesus say where your treasure is there your heart will be also he is saying that we give our whole selves to that which we most treasure. It’s a first century way of saying what Tillich said nearly two millennia later. We give ourselves to that which we most treasure or, we have faith in that which is our ultimate concern.

So OK. That’s a lot of theologian talk about what faith means, but does all that theologian talk really mean anything to us here today? I think that it does, and I think that it has a great deal of meaning for the future of American Christianity generally. The notion that faith is about believing as factually true things that are asserted as fact but which can’t be proved is shared both by most American Christians and by most Americans who reject Christianity, or any other faith. That understanding of faith functions, I am convinced, as a major barrier to faith for a great many people today. That understanding of faith requires people to do something in the sphere of religion that they would never do in any other aspect of their life, namely, take as factually true something that cannot be proven to be factually true. A great many people simply won’t do that, so Christianity, or any other faith tradition, isn’t an option for them because they have no other understanding of the meaning of faith.

That’s why we need a different, and a better, understanding of the meaning of faith. In my book I advance an understanding of faith as a decision and commitment to live one’s spiritual life within a particular religion that is,, finding one’s connection with God in and through the myths and symbols of a particular religious tradition. This morning I want to suggest a meaning of faith that is consistent with that understanding but that puts it a bit differently. Our texts this morning are telling us, it seems to me, to think of faith as ultimate trust. In this understanding to have faith is to trust like Abraham, and it is to put our trust in that which is truly ultimate, that is, in the God who is truly God and not in some lesser, finite person or thing. For Christians then, faith isn’t believing in the reality of God and of Jesus, it is putting our ultimate trust in the God we know in and through Jesus. Faith understood this way is committing out lives to living in trust that God’s promises, made to us in and through Jesus, are trustworthy. That they can be counted on. That they will not fail us, just as Abraham so long ago trusted that Yahweh would keep his promise to make Abraham a great nation. The promises are different from the one Yahweh made to Abraham to be sure. They are the promise of forgiveness, the promise of grace, the promise, that see most of all in the cross of Christ, that God is present with us, holding us and loving us, in everything that happens to us in this life and beyond this life. Faith is living in ultimate trust of these promises of our God, the truly ultimate.

And the thing is, when we make that decision and that commitment to live in trust with God, we quickly come to experience our faith as true. We come to know, not in the way science knows but in the way the heart knows, that God is indeed trustworthy, that God’s promises indeed will not fail us, not in this life, not beyond this life. And when we live in that trust of God we can’t possibly imagine going back to living without it. The God with whom we live in trust truly becomes our ultimate concern, the most important reality in our lives, and we live in peace, hope, and confidence that we are right with God and God is right with us come what may. That is a faith that heals and transforms. That is a faith that doesn’t require us to believe facts we can’t prove but that opens us up to that which is truly ultimate, that which is truly God, a God we come to know as certain and as truly true. That is a faith worth living for. That is a faith worth sharing. That is a faith that can save us—and the world. Amen.