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The Public Character of Faith
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis September 28, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 43:8-13 Luke 12:1-12
Last week, we placed the baptismal font at the center of our common life and declared that one of the most important tasks given Christ’s church by God is the task of introducing our children to the God who is God. Trusting God’s prior initiative toward us and our children in the inward and invisible baptism by God’s Spirit, we baptize our children with water as an outward and visible sign of God’s prevenient grace, introducing them to the God revealed in Jesus Christ long before they can understand or believe or decide anything at all. Our part in this introduction commences when, around the font, we turn away from all other gods to confess our faith in the living God, saying publicly in the presence of the church and the world, “I believe.” Privately, of course, we say other things. Privately we say we mostly wonder whether there is a God, and if there is, why is it we do not feel God’s presence or hear God’s address or see God’s hand in our little lives. Privately we say we are exploring our spirituality, whatever that means, or say we are living by the values of the Christian religion, whatever they happen to be for us. Privately we say, especially when it comes to Jesus, that we neither know him nor do we know what we believe about him nor do we know if we can ever really follow him. Therefore God forbid, publicly, we would be asked to do more than say for the sake of our children, “I believe.” So are the sins (in the sense of a distance kept from God) of the fathers and mothers visited upon the children, albeit with some notable exceptions: we are the offspring of parents who also said nothing much about God after saying, “I believe,” children of a church which bought into a culture’s narcissism and subjectivism while falling silent in the public square, citizens of a nation whose civil religion was taken to be both necessary and sufficient, making us unable to discern truth from the lie. All of which is to say that what was missing in the introduction many of us were given to the God who is God, leaving us vulnerable to every spiritual wind that now blows, was an insistence upon the public character of the Christian faith: faith, first of all, as objective rather than subjective truth…faith, in the second place, as an outward discipleship rather than an inward journey…and finally faith as a corporate witness to the God whose purposes have at least as much if not more to do with telos of human history than with the temperature of our personal and private human psyches. An insistence upon the public character of faith in the living God is grounded in the biblical witness, though curiously we turn, this morning, to a time in Israel’s history when God’s people had forgotten the objective truth of her faith, had abandoned her following of the one God for the many, had quit—for all intents and purposes--her corporate witness. The story she had told herself for years was the story of God’s saving purposes in human history, leading the Israelites out of Egypt, accompanying them in the wilderness, blessing them with a land and with a king. They were a people uniquely equipped to bear witness, publicly and among the nations, to the God of mercy and justice. But over the course of generations, their political consensus unraveled, their memory of God’s gracious acts faded and failed, the God whom they once had worshipped alone was now joined by other gods from other tribes. In due time, the structure which housed God’s presence and represented God’s favor—the temple in Jerusalem--was destroyed by the Babylonians and they were sent into exile. There, according to Second Isaiah, they lived as people deaf to God’s Word and blind to God’s presence. When we encounter them in our text, we recognize ourselves immediately as their postmodern counterparts, and so as witnesses with them—deaf and blind witnesses for the God who is God—in a trial among God and all other gods vying for belief. At issue is whether the gods were of help to the people who called upon them. The judge solicits testimony from the subjects of various national deities, seeking to ascertain whether the claims being made for these gods are true--or to translate Isaiah’s words into our own histories, whether the direct revelations received by this guru or that are substantial. Of these other gods on trial, Paul Hanson remarks that “Their witnesses may be better trained in the esoteric knowledge of their myths and rituals than the common people of Israel, they may be far more erudite in astrology…and soothsaying than the blind and deaf witnesses of the God of Israel, but their learned tongues carry little weight in court since they have witnessed nothing of the actual presence of their gods in the day-to-day affairs of the poor and needy of their people.” Or to put it another way, their gods were gods of the sentiment, the feelings, the private experience of the believer who, alone, was arbiter of a subjective truth. “Religion,” wrote Karl Barth, “has always to be properly defined as a private matter from the moment it becomes clear that it is understood solely as a sentimentalized thing inside us,” whereas, the truth of Israel’s God was a public and so an objective affair. For Israel and for us, belief in the God who is God is belief in God’s reality outside ourselves and other than ourselves and over/against ourselves, and so belief in the God who chooses freely to be for us and with us. Like the Israelites before us, my friends, we need to be reminded of the story whose history and characters wait outside ourselves to give sight to our blind eyes in the midst of our own histories and the claims of other gods. Thus reminded, we begin to understand the life of faith not as a feeling we must conjure up inside of ourselves but, in Lesslie Newbigin’s words, as a life lived “in the biblical story as part of the community whose story it is, finding in the story the clues to knowing God as [God’s] character becomes manifest in the story, and from within that indwelling trying to understand and cope with the events of our time and the world about us and so carrying the story forward.” But how, in the second place, are we to carry the story forward, making public claims for our faith in the midst of so many other claims to truth, and in the company of friends whose spiritual journey is an inward quest? The word that has characterized this public witness to the living God is obedience. Such was the word God spoke again, through Second Isaiah, to the Israelites, in the midst of one of the most devastating discourses on idolatry ever written, saying simply: “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other.” So also was obedience the heart of the matter for two authors of the Barmen Confession, a confession directed against the idolatry of a church privately bowing down before the Third Reich’s rise to power. Such obedience, says Karl Barth, takes place in “a stepping out of neutrality towards God, out of any disavowal of obligation toward [God] in our existence and attitude, out of the private sphere, into…responsibility and public life.” Such obedience, says Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is called discipleship: the following not of a program or an ideology or a cause, but a following of Jesus Christ. This, says Bonhoeffer, involves a first step, which “cuts the disciple off from his previous existence…placing the disciple in the situation where faith is possible. [Placing us where our only trust, in life and in death, is in God.] If [the disciple] refuses to follow and stays behind,” Bonhoeffer warns, “[the disciple] does not learn how to believe.” But, we say, we are not sure if we believe, so how can we follow, to which Bonhoeffer says, “You are trifling with the subject. If you believe, take the first step, it leads to Jesus Christ. If you do not believe, take the first step all the same, for you are bidden to take it. [Obedience!] No one wants to know about your faith or unbelief,” about your subjective feelings, about your private spiritual quest. Rather, placing yourself with the hungry he commands us to feed or the homeless he commands us to shelter or the prisoner he commands us to visit or the sick he commands us to heal, is to be placed, by his grace, in the public place where faith is possible, where our only trust is in Him. Then finally, if we are to do business with the public character of faith, we must do business with the public witness of the community of faith. For Israel, the return from exile was to be a flawed exercise in remembering who they were and to whom they belonged. But what of the church’s witness to the God whose purposes have at least as much if not more to do with telos of human history than with the temperature of our personal and private human psyches? When the gathered community tells the public truth of God’s saving purposes in human history, it proclaims to every present day exile abandoned to the lies of the present order that God alone is sovereign over all other gods, that the present power arrangements will not prevail, that the God who is God, even now, is doing a new thing! “Life under this sovereignty,” says Walter Brueggemann, “is shaped as equity, righteousness and truth. That is the real world, and any world other than this is a false world ordered by false gods…. A world of justice, mercy, peace, and compassion is created in the imaginative act of [God’s praise]. This is the real world…which asserts that every rival claimant and candidate for the real world is false and destructive.” Who is this community? Who are these witnesses? No one is here but us blind and deaf exiles. We are busy, we say privately. “So I see now,” says Annie Dillard, “were they. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead…and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us.” “You are my witnesses,” says the Lord. Thanks be to God. |