Renewing Faith: The Way of Being

Note: You can view this teaching on our YouTube Channel. Garrett Morgan saved lives. It is impossible to calculate just how many lives he saved – not just in his time, but even up until now. He will continue saving lives into the distant future, too. He invented the precursor to the modern stoplight that featured not just a red and green light for stop and go, but the yellow light, warning that the red-stop was seconds away. Some interpret the yellow light as instruction to slow down, while others as a challenge to put the pedal to the metal before the red. He invented the “stoplight with a warning” in response to deaths caused by people not being able to stop in time or others entering an intersection too soon. Morgan also invented the smoke hood, the precursor to gas masks. His hood was instrumental in saving lives when a tunnel collapsed on workers constructing a water pipeline under Lake Erie. His initial design led to more and more ideas that have resulted in better and better aspirators, including, of course, the ones you are used to wearing throughout the pandemic. Morgan invented other things as well, but these two are so easy to recognize for their global impact. We have a way to know to avoid crossing into an intersection. We have a way to breathe when the air is toxic. Health faith is like that. It acts as a guide to keep you alive and well, and also helps you breathe when it feels like you can’t.

The lectionary’s scriptures for this week are related, I think. The prophet Jeremiah and the psalmist agree that those who choose the way of life aligned with the Spirit of God find themselves rooted, nourished, strengthened, at peace in the face of trial. Jesus, in his great sermon, began with a related series of statements that do not make any sense at all to anyone except those who are fully invested in the way of the Spirit. The poor are blessed because they are more likely to live in the Kingdom of God. The hungry are blessed for they will be filled. Those who weep will laugh. Even those who are persecuted for living in the Way may rejoice, for it associated them with the great heroes of faith who “got it right.” There is a way that leads to life abundant – yet a different abundance than the world offers. So different that the world doesn’t know what to do with it.

The Way that we’re talking about is life lived by faith. As Marcus Borg notes in his book, The Heart of Christianity, the dominant way the word faith is defined does not reflect how it was understood by our ancestors. He provides a broader historical understanding of the word that goes far beyond what is popularly referred to as faith:

· Faith as Assensus. The closest English equivalent for this would be mental assent. This is how most people in the Western world interpret what it means to have faith: we believe in a particular doctrine, creed, dogma, etc. While this feels like the way faith has always been understood, it actually developed over 500 years ago from two contexts. First, Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation, detailed beliefs that needed to be challenged. Many new expressions of Christian community arose from that moment all the way up to today, with each group identifying what key beliefs represent their group. Faith equates with belief, and belief is in the intellectual positions of the group. The second context comes from science. Until the Enlightenment, science and religion were BFF’s. That all changed when science used its methodology on scripture and related doctrine, challenging heliocentricity and the story of creation itself. Sensing its beliefs being challenged, the Church double-downed on its commitment to its creeds. The idea of inerrancy and infallibility were born, and we’ve been stuck with it ever since. Belief came to include ignoring scientifically based reality. Luckily, faith as assensus was not the primary understanding for Jesus.

· Faith as Fiducia. Perhaps the best dynamic equivalent for this word is trust. Not trust in statements of faith, but trust in God to be God. Metaphors are helpful here (yet always limited). We trust God like we trust the ever presence of gravity, or the buoyancy of water if we don’t flail around too much, or that seasons will come and go, or that there will be air for our next breath, or in the love of a mother for her child, or the love between two lovers who know the other’s love will not fade. With this faith, we trust that God is with us, in us, surrounding us, and we trust that the character of God can be trusted as well. God, defined by a deep understanding of love, can be counted on to be loving in God’s presence with us, care for us, guiding of us – everything. We trust God to be fully God, which can give us a great sense of peace, strength, and hope.

· Faith as Fidelitas. The English equivalent here is faithfulness. Not to statements about God, but in our lives centered in God. The opposite is idolatrous infidelity – a choice to not be in or with God. It’s about loyalty. About living in healthy, united relationship with God. Loving what God loves – not simply loving God. We probably have an idea about what engaging in the opposite of faithfulness looks like – the Ten Commandments offer a good starting point. But what does loving what God loves look like? I grew up with older sisters who controlled the TV remote. On weekends when other boys were getting groomed to love sports, I was getting groomed to love musical theater. My sisters loved musicals, and I came to love them, too. My wife, on the other hand, grew up watching sports with her dad and became a true sports fan. I like sports, and grew up watching a certain amount of football, basketball, and baseball. Lynne’s exposure to musicals was minimal, but the few she saw, she liked. When we got married and our kids were old enough to play on their own, the battle of the TV remote was on. Except it wasn’t a battle at all. I love Lynne, and I know she loves to watch sports. So, we watch sports together and I have learned to love it more than I ever did. Lynne loves me, and has learned to love musical theater, too. Our motive was love for each other. When we love God, we learn about what God loves and learn to love it, too. It is a life of living in loving relationship with God.

· Faith as Visio. Vision, you might have guessed, is a close equivalent of this word, and refers to how we see reality. According to Borg, there are three ways we can see reality. First, we can view reality as hostile and threatening, which leads us to live defensively. Second, we can view reality as “indifferent” – the universe doesn’t care about your wellbeing one way or another – which will also lead us to live defensively (though not as paranoia-filled as the first). The third way is to view reality as life-giving and nourishing, which leads us to be more open, trusting, and giving with our lives (without being naïve).

The last three ways of faith are all more relationally focused than the first, although the assensus matters a lot because it tends to dictate the way we interpret the rest – especially in the Western world. Believing and beloving are deeply related – what we believe in is what we belove. To believe in God is to belove God. Jesus said that faith can be distilled to loving God and loving what God loves. This way of embracing faith, for me, is incredibly invigorating. It provides a basis for ethical living and is a breath of fresh air.

Sermon on the Plain and Jeremiah. The words of Jeremiah and Jesus are words of hope, especially for people going through difficult times. What makes the words especially powerful, however, is that they really are true in the experience of people who have been through the most difficult circumstances that life can throw at us. Jesus’ audience was extremely poor – almost everyone was – and worse, under Roman occupation. How about some salt to the wounds? The prevailing idea at that time – and now, too, in large measure – is that God’s favor could be recognized by material blessing. The wealthy and powerful were obviously favored by God given their wealth and power. This is still with us today, and some branches of Christianity promote it, too, with their leaders living in excess luxury as proof that God has blessed them. The power of this worldview is pervasive and is inescapable. I am sure that everyone reading this has felt it’s power at one time or another. We feel a little better about ourselves if we have a certain amount of money, or wear the right label, or drive the right car, or have the right address, or have the latest phone, or... And we feel a little less good when we don’t as the cultural pressure continues to rise. For many caught in this trap, Jesus’ words simply don’t make sense in the real world. One popular podcaster was simply puzzled by Jesus’ statements about the meek inheriting the earth, and after researching a bit concluded that Jesus was talking about people who chose to leave their sword in its sheath – an act of self-control. That helps some, but it needs to be recognized that the restraint noted isn’t because of some level of maturity on the part of the powerful holder of weapons, but the opposite – in Jesus’ context, a common person with a knife would not dare lift a finger against Rome lest they be immediately squashed like a bug. There is no making sense of Jesus’ statement based on a worldview that primarily sees life’s value measured in performance, material, prestige, status, etc. There is no reconciliation because it cannot be reconciled.

Jesus is talking about another way of being, oriented from a different foundation and guided by a different star. He is saying that those who don’t have what makes for success – who are left out and cannot even begin to build their lives around such things – have a capacity to experience the better, higher, deeper, truer way of the Kingdom of God because of their lack. We see glimpses of what he was talking about in the scriptures – disciples in a dungeon due to their faithfulness singing hymns to God out of their joy, for instance. This doesn’t make sense. Paul wrote that to live is Christ and to die is gain (Phil. 1:21) – this only makes sense if we understand that the Kingdom operates on a different level. We see it expressed in the songs born from slavery in America’s history – a hope for the more of God out of desperation. Indeed, we actually experience such divine seeing at certain times in our lives – moments where we are very aware of the importance and power of love, and that at the end of the day, nothing else really matters.

Garrett Morgan invented the modern stoplight and the earliest version of a gas mask, both of which served to help people live. Good theology is like that, providing constructs to help us live, and fresh air to breathe when it feels like we’re suffocating. When we find ourselves (and God) living in the Way that Jesus taught and modeled, we are grounded and guided, we are consciously aware that we are not alone, we are motivated toward loving behavior and attitudes because we are aware of how much we are loved. To live in that space requires discipline, however, because it is not the dominant way in our world, even though there is support. The more we remind ourselves and build practices in our lives that foster the Way, the more we will know we are in the Way, live in the Way, and be sustained by the Way – no matter what is happening to us. This is not a way of denial, this is the Way of truth and life, of reality itself. It is the Way that turns the world upside down because it needs to be turned upside down.

May you grow in confidence about your intellectual faith, but may you so much more grow in the Way through being faithful to God, loving what God loves, trusting God’s nature and presence, and choosing to see the world the way God sees the world. Such are the things of true and lasting faith.