July 15, 2012
Beginning with Belief and Leaping to Faith
- Genesis 12:1-8
- Rev Ruth Chadwick Moore
Today is the second Sunday I am using parts of David Johnson’s book for my sermon. As I mentioned last week, David has written a book entitled: Learning from My Father, Lessons on Life and Faith. Today I am sharing what David learned from his father, Presbyterian minister Gerry Johnson, about belief and faith.
Most of us want to believe in something. As David suggests – “belief in its purest sense is a natural, human yearning, and a magnet for our most basis intellectual and emotional energies. That is why, I think, we come to our first beliefs through those we love, or respect, or both in our earliest days. Belief in virtually anything, even matters far smaller than the existence of God or the resurrection of Christ, remains a mere construct, without warmth or resonance – unless imparted to us by someone we know and trust.”
I think about how I learned about God. I learned from parents and my grandparents and my Sunday School teachers – people I loved, admired and trusted. When I would spend the night at my grandmother’s house she would tuck me into bed, scratch my back with her long fingernails – something I loved! – and read to me from her devotional books.
Gerry makes this point to David in one of his letters.
We find a person (or a group of persons) in whom we can believe – someone whose life is full, whose human relationships are rich, who seems to have mastered the secret of authentic humanity. A person, in other words, who is an authority. Emotion is not the key to this kind of personal authority. And intellect or erudition is not the secret either. You don’t look for an authority in a person who is, as John Milton says, “deeply vers’d in books and shallow in himself.” It must be someone whose own life shows that he knows what life is all about. Now we don’t know that that person’s beliefs are true for us. But we test what he tells us is true against reality to see if it works. And most importantly, we test those beliefs seriously, desperately and with commitment.
Then Gerry goes on to describe a time in David’s childhood.
Do you remember how we went to the lake every summer when you were little? And everyone went swimming – your cousins, your aunts and uncles, your brother Jerry and Mother and I – everyone that is, but you. You sat on a rock in about two inches of water, and you cried every time a wave got you a bit wet. You wanted to swim, but you were afraid. I used to say to you, “Dave, anyone can swim. All you have to do is to get out into the water and move your arms and legs the way I show you, and the water will hold you up.” You said you believed me; but you didn’t really believe me because you did not try to swim. Then one morning toward the end of the summer you announced at the breakfast table, “Today I’m going to swim.” I don’t think your mother and Jerry and I really believed you. But when breakfast was over, you marched resolutely down to the dock, right out to the very end of it, and jumped off into the water. I remember I came running after you to pull you out; but you managed all by yourself. You struggled and splashed around and you made it to the shore. And that day you did learn to swim. It was then you really believed that the water would hold you up. The authority was a help. But it wasn’t until you took him seriously and tried it that you really learned to swim. This is what Danish scholar Soren Kierkegaard means when he calls faith a “leap.” You took a real Kierkegaardian leap that day. And your faith became knowledge – you knew and you could swim. You were willing to try it because I told you that you could do it. There was this deeply personal angle involved, a loving and concerned authority that seemed to make the whole thing possible and reasonable.
If you describe yourself as a religious believer, and most of us here this morning would probably identify ourselves that way – did you come to your convictions because of someone you had a relationship with? Was it a parent or a grandparent like me, or a spouse or a friend? For most of us there has been someone who has simply been believable and thus made belief seem to make sense – to make it feel real and right.
But that belief also has to continue to make a difference somehow in our lives. Belief has to be something that we stay with and build upon because it is somehow useful. As David says, “ In my case, reliance upon the image of a created, compassionate universe, where individuals and individual actions might actually matter, continued to make sense even as I got older and the choices got harder. Such belief (and he is talking about his Christian beliefs here) helped me to make decisions when I needed that help. It provided me with a basic safety net for figuring out where I was, and what I should be doing next.”
For David, his faith really came into being when he lost a political election. He is quite candid in the book about how hard the defeat was for him personally and he drifted for weeks feeling like he had failed his family and friends. He came close to despair when he tried to consider what to do next with the rest of his life. That is when his father’s words about God’s love and God knowing and caring about us as individuals – in others words what David believed – really hit home. This is what Gerry said.
We just don’t believe in a God who hides behind the ramparts of heaven. This is not a casual God who enquires from time to time, in an offhand manner, about how we are getting along. I think it’s a God who is one with us, all the way. This is a God willing to share our common human lot; one who understands fully our sin and sorrow and suffering. He knows the hopes, the ideals, the victories, the defeats; the trials and triumphs, the tears and tribulations of his human children. In a word, he understands. Understanding is what makes for a good marriage, a noble friendship, a fine relationship between doctor and patient, or pastor and people. In a time of crisis or need, it is understanding we seek – someone who knows and understands what we are going through. That’s how God loves us. He knows what we are really like. He knows the secret recesses of every human heart. He knows the things in us that we could not say to another living soul. He knows all these things – and he loves us in spite of them all.
Now this is a God we can believe in! To know that despite ourselves we are known and appreciated is profoundly reassuring. And as David suggests, such belief can make us take our lives and what we are doing with them more seriously. But for our beliefs to have lasting substance, something more is required – active expression through a relationship we call faith. That is why this sermon is called Beginning with Belief and Leaping to Faith.
Faith is a relationship rather than simply a belief. Faith is an ongoing relationship with a truly personal authority – and for Christians that personal authority is Jesus Christ. As Gerry says,
We need in Christianity personal commitment, not only to what Christ, our authority, teaches, but to Christ the authority himself. Because what we are talking about here is something far larger than belief. It’s what Christians call faith. Many people think that faith means believing something you know is not true, or at least very improbable. But faith really means being faithful, conscientiously committed, steadfastly trying to pattern your life after what you have accepted from and seen in the teacher. And that’s why Dietrich Bonhoeffer could say that faith is obedience and obedience is faith.
Looking at it this way, we experience faith as a set of expectations, hopes, challenges, ambitions, disappointments, and surprises encountered along the way, rather than as an unchanging, defining principle. When I live my life in faith, when I am being faithful, my decisions have consequences and my actions actually matter. “As Christians, we place our ‘bets’ on our belief in God – by seeing in Christ someone and something we can understand, someone with whom we can envision a relationship and, by building upon that relationship, come to know much more about the object and purpose of our belief.” Through Christ we can begin to understand the complexity that is God. It’s kind of like spending time on one of the small lakes that are so plentiful in Michigan. When we swim in those lakes what we see and feel in the waters is true of Lake Michigan. But there is so much more of Lake Michigan than the limited experience we get from swimming in one of the smaller lakes.
We need to believe in God and have a relationship with Jesus to call ourselves Christians. Somehow we have to believe that “when it comes to Jesus; something is indeed happening. And something is at stake.” So like the disciples before us we “must ask, listen and follow; and we must be open to change. We must, in fact, be open to the relationship of faith.”
I will close with another quote from David from his chapter about faith. Once again I thank David and his wise father Gerry for their help with this sermon. And I encourage you to consider reading Learning from My Father – Lessons on Life and Faith.
“Over time, I have come to believe with growing conviction that Christianity binds us to the miracle of God’s grace, but succeeds in doing so through the familiar pathways of everyday life. We believe in what, and who, we can encounter and engage. We are moved by relationships, by others who connect with us. And we move in faith because we believe in a God with whom we can have a complex, living, and hopeful relationship. Out of the assurance that we are known and loved, we can believe in a God who can teach us how to act – and how to love. Amen.
Resources:
All quotes and most of the content of this sermon come from: Learning from My – Lessons on Life and Faith, by David Lawther Johnson.