(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “When Your Faith Fails”, originally shared on June 14, 2021. It was the 122nd video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
What is the New Normal looking like for you?
Has your faith grown stronger in this crisis? Today we’re going to talk about
what to do when your faith fails.
We seem to be coming to the end of the pandemic, and many of us have
lost a lot. We’ve lost friends and family to COVID-19, we’ve lost time, we’ve
lost education, we’ve lost work, we’ve lost experience, health care, and we’ve
lost jobs and a sense of material security.
We’ve lost a sense of connection to other people and, for some, we fear
them.
We’re out of practice in reading body language, interpreting facial
expressions without masks, and the many conscious and particularly unconscious
signs that tell us how to understand our community, who will be our friends and
where we belong, how to travel and how to shop. The world seems to have devolved into even smaller
cliques than we remember, groups who shared our values seem to have gotten
smaller, and our national dialogue seems to have become even more adversarial.
But we have also gained. We’ve gained new skills and new friends, we’ve developed
our hobbies and taken on new ones, we’ve rediscovered family and friends
through Zoom and other apps, we’ve gained a new tool to share our faith with
digital media, we’ve gained new ways to work collaboratively, we’ve reconnected
with our families and whoever we’ve found in our pod, we’ve met our neighbors
and learned how to live with them, we’ve gained insight into ourselves and what
we want to do with our lives, we’ve gained money and time by not commuting. Oh,
and some of us have gained weight. 😊
And some have used the time away to loosen ties, including those to
their faith and their church. And some have used the time to reconsider their
need for something real and are looking for or will be returning to a church.
Some will have lost a sense of community and will be looking for that, at least
at first, in the hopes that what they find is something real.
I have long thought that crisis is an amplifier of who we are as
persons. What was weak gets weaker. What was strong gets stronger.
And so it is with faith.
But I think that when we speak of faith, we should first be sure that we
are all talking about the same thing.
So first, I want to emphasize what faith is not. Faith is not optimism, it
is not blind, and it is not a feeling. It is not something we work ourselves
into, or something we all have to figure out for ourselves. If it is any of
those things: optimism, blind, a feeling, an accomplishment, or something just
for you, it is your faith. And because it comes from you, it is not
up to the task of Life and sooner or later it will fail, and probably sooner
rather than later.
What is faith? Paul writes, in the 11th chapter of his letter
to the Hebrews, what many call the faith chapter, in the first verse:
*Hebrews 11:1
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of
things not seen.”
Faith is knowing things we don’t know, believing in things we cannot
see.
This makes us vulnerable in our
Post-enlightenment, Modern, and Post-modern culture. We are challenged to prove
that what we believe about God is true with only material arguments. Or, more
commonly, we are just blown off with the words of the Jeffery “The Dude”
Lebowski, in The Big Lebowski, “Well, that's just, like,
your opinion, man”. Or people inflate every bad experience they have
every had or heard about, every judgmental churchlady, or man, or every boring
worship service they ever sat through into evidence that the church is not for
them and they just form their personal religion, spiritual but not religious.
A colleague sat next to a person whose life
had come to this point on an airplane and, reflecting on their conversation,
she said, “I am always interested by people who find ancient religion boring
but who find themselves endlessly fascinating.”
Faith is none of those things. Faith is a gift from God. It comes as a
living relationship with the one true living God.
Faith from God never fails.
But faith from you most definitely will.
And when it does, where can you turn? How can a person return to faith?
First, if your faith was from you, don’t bother. If faith was something
you manufactured for yourself and your own needs, it wasn’t real to begin with.
Second, God never abandons us, but we can move away from God. There was
a bumper sticker stuck to the inside of the door to the emergency food pantry
of the church I served in Compton that said, “If you feel far from God, guess
who moved.” Turn your life around, that is, “repent” and allow God to draw you
to God.
Third, remember that it’s not about you. How many of us were confirmed
after some happy hours with Luther’s Small Catechism” Remember Luther’s
explanation to the Third Article of The Apostles Creed? Of course you do!
“I believe that I cannot by my own understanding or effort believe in
Jesus Christ my Lord, or come to him. But the Holy Spirit has called me through
the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, and sanctified and kept me in true
faith. In the same way he calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole
Christian church on earth, and keeps it united with Jesus Christ in the one
true faith.”
(If you don’t, buy the pamphlet online, or go the AugsburgFortress.com and
download their free digital version. Did I mention it’s free?)
Fourth, spend time in the Bible, the primary way that God speaks to us
in the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit gives us faith. How does this happen?
Faith comes by hearing. In Paul’s letter to the Romans, the 10th
chapter, the 17th verse, he writes:
*Romans 10:17 “So
faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of
Christ.”
The word of Christ is Christ’s living reality.
Are you missing a sense of the living reality of God?
Are you feeling dry as we come out of the pandemic? Do you know who else
felt that, well before the pandemic? Mother Theresa.
Mother Teresa was an Albanian nun who established an order of nuns who
cared for the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, India. She left instructions
that when she died, her journals were to be burned. They were preserved and
published, nevertheless.
The world was shocked when her innermost thought came to light. Her
journal was filled with a spiritual emptiness, a longing for something from
God.
Some read that and said, “See. She was a fake!”
Others read that and said, “What a saint, to be obedient and faithful while
getting nothing in return!”
Some people say that there is no such thing as altruism, of selfless
service to others. They say that when we do good, we feel good and that that
feeling is our reward and the reason we do the good that we do. Mother Theresa
got nothing while spending her life doing what is universally recognized as
good works.
Sometimes we just put our heads down and keep chugging ahead, only
later, maybe, realizing that the Holy Spirit was there within us all
along. We just didn’t have a word for it.
Fifth, we can be the means of the Holy Spirit when we exercise our
credible witness. Study after study for decades has found that 80-85% of Christians
come to faith through the influence of a friend or relative, someone whose is
seen has having nothing to gain, whose words are credible to them.
Sometimes, I have put a sheet over a chair before a worship service and
placed it someplace where it can be seen. During the sermon, I ask for a
volunteer to come forward. I say that I’m looking for somewhat who is willing
to risk public humiliation and personal injury while getting no reward. A
volunteer comes forward. I tell them that there is a chair under the sheet. I
ask them to sit down. Eventually, they do. They do so because I am a credible
witness.
We are the first Bible some people will ever read. God doesn’t see us
that way. But people do.
Sixth, faith comes from God in community, and it can be restored there,
too. Pastor Will Willimon is a Methodist
pastor who has also been a seminary professor, university chaplain, the Methodist
equivalent of a bishop and is a fine preacher. He tells the story of a young woman
who was a member of a congregation he served who made an appointment to see him
during the week. She came by his office and said, “Pastor Willimon, I just
wanted to say that I won’t be coming to church anymore. I’ve been struggling
with my faith for a while, and I just realized that I can’t do it anymore. I appreciate
everything that you and the church members have done for me, and I didn’t want
to just drift away. I just came to say goodbye.”
Pastor Willimon tried to address her struggles and encourage her to
continue, but she was having none of it. And, the next Sunday she was back at
worship. And the Sunday after that. And the Sunday after that.
Finally, Pastor Willimon asked if she could stop by his office again,
and she agreed. Pastor Willimon said, aren’t you the same person who came by
and said that she no longer had faith and wouldn’t be coming to worship anymore?
She smiled and said, “Yes.” “Well then I’m happy to see you, but could you tell
me what happened?”
“Well,” she answered, “It came to me that sometimes, if you can’t
believe for yourself, you have to be with people who will believe for you.”
That is the nature of the Christian faith. It is not just a gift to us
as individuals. It is a gift to the whole community. Sometimes one of us is
weak and others are strong, but we are only strong for one another. You have to
be a part of the community to know that.
Seventh be real, be transparent, live from the inside out, from the
transformed life within you. You are a new creation in Jesus Christ. Live from
that.
Faith that we generate for ourselves will fail. Faith that comes from a
living relationship with the one true living God never fails because it comes
from a place that is holy, pure, and transcendent. A place that ultimately true.
That’s how we know it is real, even when we struggle, even when we don’t feel
anything.
As Philip Dick, the science fiction writer, once said, “Reality is that
which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
Turn to God, to the Ultimate Reality of the Holy Spirit, the ongoing
personal presence of God for good in the world. Open your heart to receive the
streams of living water, the metaphor for the Holy Spirit used in both the Old
and New Testament of the Bible, to the presence of God to nourish you, inspire
you, push you sometimes, and to make of you a new Creation. God will make you into
something that is real, something that defines everything about you, something
that makes you a credible witness to others because your faith has not come
from you. It is real because it comes from God.
Faith is like a beard. Let it grow, and it becomes the first thing
people notice about you.
We are starting to emerge now from the
pandemic. Let God make your New Normal a life of faith. Get out of God’s way
today and let faith in God grow within you.
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