A Fourth Church Sermon by Carol J. Allen

August 15, 2004 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Keeping Faith in a Changing World

Carol J. Allen
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 80:3–19
Hebrews 11:29–12:2
Luke 12:49–56

"Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us;
looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith."

Hebrews 12:1–2 (NRSV)

If our world were nothing but a place of created goodness and profound beauty,
a space of flourishing for all, just and life-giving for all in God’s creation,
then Jesus’ challenge would be deeply troubling.
If, on the other hand, our world is deeply marred and scarred, death-dealing
for many life forms, with systems of meaning that are exploitative and nonsustainable,
then redemption can come only when those systems are shattered and consumed by fire.
Life cannot (re)emerge without confrontation.
This is the basis of the conflict Jesus envisions.
He comes not to disturb a nice world
but to shatter the disturbing and death-dealing systems of meaning that stifle life.

Teresa Berger in “Living by the Word”
Christian Century, 10 August 2004

Trust is the focus of this sermon. Trust is fundamental to faith. Can we trust that there is something at the heart of the universe that is working for our well-being or not? Trust in a loving God is at the center of the Christian faith. A life crisis can cause us to wonder, did we make the right wager? Keeping faith in a loving God in a changing world is not easy. The book of Hebrews, written on the other side of crucifixion, offers hope that we can.

When I was in the fifth grade, my dad was stationed with the Army at Fort Knox, Kentucky. From time to time during our family’s stay there, he would get homesick for Lansing, Michigan, our hometown. He would bundle us into the car and head for a quick trip to see our grandparents. We drove through the night, my brother and sister and I dozing in the back seat, my parents talking softly in the front. Now and then, we’d be awakened by the bright lights in the small towns along the way. We never knew for sure exactly where we were; we left that in the control of our parents and enjoyed the exciting and scary adventure of being on the road in the dark of the night, trusting that eventually they would bring us safely to our destination.

Several years ago, cartoonist Charles Schultz drew a Peanuts comic strip that reminded me of those childhood trips and how swiftly that sense of security passed away. Picture this: Charlie Brown is sitting under a tree talking to Peppermint Patty, who asks him, “What do you think security is, Chuck?” His answer: “Security is sleeping on the back seat of the car when you’re a little kid, and you’ve been somewhere with your mom and dad, and it’s night, and you’re riding home in the car, asleep. You don’t have to worry about anything—your mom and dad are in the front seat and they do all the worrying. . . . they take care of everything.” To which Peppermint Patty responds, “That’s real neat!” And Charlie Brown comments, “But it doesn’t last! Suddenly, you’re grown up, and it can never be that way again! Suddenly, it’s over, and you’ll never get to sleep in the back seat again! Never!” Peppermint Patty asks: “Never?” and Charlie Brown says, “Absolutely never.” To which she replies, “Hold my hand, Chuck!” (From an unpublished paper copyrighted by Darrell J. Fasching, “The Globalization of Religion and Politics: Gandhi and bin Laden,” 2002, p. 1.)

The writer of the book of Hebrews, a sermon really, was addressing an anxious and fearful audience. They were tired and under siege, on the verge of giving up on the faith they had acquired. At that time, Christians and Jews were still together, but Christians were in the process of redefining who they were in relation to both ancient religious tradition and to the new reality of Jesus. Because they had declared faith in an alternative authority and power, they were feeling pressure from within their community and externally from the Roman Empire. Their sense of security was being more and more undermined by the opposition and hostility aimed at them. They were beginning to feel like strangers and foreigners in their own home. They were being pushed farther and farther into an unknown and frightening future. Where was the hand to hold? Who could they trust?

The author of Hebrews was speaking to believers who were becoming disillusioned with the commitment they had made to the Christian faith. In the aftermath of 9/11 and our country’s going to war against Iraq and the polarized political life with competing worldviews that we are having to engage, I am sure that many people in our country are finding it hard to maintain trust in whatever and wherever they have placed it. Even more difficult, we are having to bear great anger and deep sadness because of the continuing loss and waste of lives on the streets of our cities and on battlegrounds where our citizens and citizens of other lands are put in harm’s way. Is there something at the heart of the universe for our well-being or not? Where is the hand to hold? In what can we trust?

Jesus commissioned disciples to go out and preach and teach the gospel in a changing world. Luke pictures for us how they had returned from their missionary journeys and were giving Jesus a progress report. As they traveled on together toward Jerusalem and his execution as a criminal, Jesus listened to their stories and taught them about the nature and demands of discipleship, On another level, Luke, the Gospel writer, was speaking through Jesus to a young church whose borders were changing and expanding to include greater racial and ethnic diversity. At both levels of the story, in Jesus’ own time and in the time of the early church, this change carried with it the potential for intense conflict and tension. Commitments are costly. Choices divide and send people in differing directions. Divisions may open the way to a new unity, or divisions may simply lead to more divisions. Keeping faith in a changing world is always the human challenge.

Theologian Letty Russell bets that a changing world is the very crucible in which trust can be strengthened and faith can mature. Some change, of course, is not for the better—accidents, ill health, violence, and injustice. These challenge the trust that nothing can separate us from God’s love. These realities challenge us to reexamine our basic trust in God and in our neighbor. At the same time, we can grow in faith in the midst of these very changes. One way we mature is to have to change our way of thinking. When a new situation makes no sense, we have to make new sense to keep going. Letty urges us to find ways to act our way into new ways of thinking. That means to live now, boldly, as though the future promised realm of God has already come. Listening to those who are defined as losers in society, she says, will help us do this. Noticing and listening to them as signs of our time will help us to hear the gospel with new ears and to rethink faith from new directions (Letty M. Russell, ed., Changing Contexts of Our Faith, Fortress Press, 1985, pp. 17–19).

How does this work? Darrell Fasching, a professor of religious studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa, in an unpublished essay titled “The Globalization of Religion and Politics: Gandhi and bin Laden,” offers a dramatic illustration of two ways of coping with the challenge to keep faith in a changing world. Both choices lead to division. One choice opens up possibilities for growth and reconciliation; the other leads to dead ends. Consider them. Fasching compares and contrasts the lives of Mahatma Gandhi and Osama bin Laden. As Fasching reminds us, Gandhi, a Hindu influenced by the thinking of Jesus, fought for the unity of the human race. With nonviolent means, or “soul force,” as he called it, Gandhi helped win, after a thirty-year struggle, India’s independence from British colonial rule. Gandhi believed that people could have their respective identities yet sit together at table and have access to basic resources. He tried to build bridges between Muslims and Hindus in the unified India (pp. 9, 10). Martin Luther King Jr., a Christian leader, was influenced by Gandhi’s soul force concept in his work for civil rights and racial justice. Later, when Hindus and Muslims separated and Pakistan was formed, Gandhi felt like a loser. In 1948, at age 79, Gandhi was assassinated by a fellow Hindu who felt Ghandi’s global thinking was not nationalistic enough (p. 4). On the other hand, Osama bin Laden, divides the world. He divides it into two kinds: believers and nonbelievers. He thereby justifies the killing of innocent men, women, and children who fall into the wrong camp (p.13).

Through his research, Fasching discovered that both Gandhi and bin Laden were educated for public service careers. Both experienced religious awakenings during their college years. Both turned to ancient scriptures for insight to guide their struggles against Western colonialism and Western global domination. Both can be described as masters of social organization and political strategy. Both inspired an international following and created international movements (p. 14).

Gandhi’s education, however, was cross-cultural; bin Laden’s was not (p. 15). Gandhi, Fasching wrote, “used the media to awaken consciences to the oneness of humanity, bin Laden to stir up hatred and division. Gandhi taught the transformation of society through one’s own suffering, bin Laden through the suffering of others” (pp. 14–15). “Gandhi is aware of his own fallibility and refuses to make others suffer as a result of any mistakes he might make” (p. 16). Bin Laden seems to believe he knows the mind of God and is infallible in that knowledge. In bin Laden’s thinking, God calls for holy war, and so bin Laden believes he is absolved from personal responsibility for the death and suffering he imposes on others. Success for Gandhi was creating cooperation and interdependence. For bin Laden it means “conquest of the other, or at least separation and removal of all who are profane from the sacred realm of [his religion]” (p.16). Osama bin Laden seeks to approach life through conquest, Gandhi through mutual understanding (p. 5). You and I are caught in the clash between these religious and political worldviews about the relationship between society and religion.

The sermon to the Hebrews was an account of those who kept faith, against heavy odds, in a changing world. How did they do that? Not because they relied on themselves alone. Not because they saw security as being only about their own. As biblical scholar Thomas G. Long puts it, they viewed themselves as links in an eternal chain of people across the generations, people engaged together in the struggle of holding fast to faith and fast to each other. Each believer and believing community in every generation is added to the chain and so strengthens it the more (Hebrews, John Knox Press, 1997, p. 127). Long describes the vision in Hebrews this way:

Under the pressure of testing and suffering, the naked eye can see only the oppressor. We can see only the jackboot of tyranny, or the scars of child abuse, or the x-rays with the spot on the lung. Faith sees all that; it does not pretend there is no Pharoah, no evil, no disease. But faith also sees God, the God who promises to bring an end to all that harms and destroys, the God who provided a great high priest, [Jesus Christ] “who in every respect has been tested as we are” and who enables us to “receive mercy and find grace to help in times of need.” (p. 122)

The vision of the book of Hebrews means that we are not alone. The writer likens our situation to a sports arena in which Jesus has already crossed the finish line of the race, urging and encouraging us on to complete our race. Through Jesus, God hands on the baton to each succeeding believer and generation to run the race, to keep the faith in changing worlds, relying on Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith (see Frances Taylor Gench, Hebrews and James, John Knox Press, 1996, p. 66). There is a hand to hold. It is the hand of neighbor and stranger as we strive together to become a community that works to keep the circle of faith unbroken in the fire of a world that is changing. This means, in the words of Elder Rick Ufford-Chase, the newly elected moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA) that “we need to continue to hold each other tenderly, since we are not of one mind” (Gale Morgan-Williams, “General Assembly: ‘Combination Family Reunion/Political Convention,’” Our Common Ministry, The Presbytery of Chicago, August 2004, p. 5).

As members and ministers of this congregation, we see clearly each other’s shortcomings. At the same time, we trust, support, and encourage one another. This is because we have learned that we are more than our limitations. We are larger than any one of us alone can be. We have seen glimpses of God’s realm and God’s Spirit at work, here and now, in the life we seek to live together and in our efforts to keep faith as one among the bodies of God’s people. Gary Gunderson, who has served as director of operations for the Interfaith Program of the Carter Center in Atlanta, summed up what I see as the true nature of Fourth Presbyterian Church. In his book Deeply Woven Roots, Gunderson describes what I see as the faith that Fourth Church strives to keep in a changing world. Gunderson writes,

Congregations make enduring contributions to their communities because they are healing places, reconciling safe places of renewal and recovery. And they are places of learning, safe for asking questions and for discovery, and even for debate because, in humility, we know only in pieces and search for the rest. . . . So we find time to accompany the lonely, to convene a meeting of neighbors, to connect someone in need with an organization that can help them. We expect God’s work to go on, so we go on, too, patiently telling our stories as best we can and welcoming the hopeful and the hurting into our safe space. We are witnessing the work of a loving God who has not given up. We continue to offer up a touch, a word of blessing and hope. Because we are broken ourselves, we pray and sometimes seeing our faith, weak as it is, others find their way to God, too. . . . Congregations who get it accompany, convene, and connect. They give context and sanctuary. They bless and pray. They endure and build healthy communities that endure too. (Deeply Woven Roots: Improving the Quality of Life in Your Community, Fortress Press, 199, p. 126).

This is how together we have become, and are becoming ever more fully, a trustworthy people of God, running the race with Jesus to keep faith in a changing world.

Thanks be to the God who has created you, the God who will not let you go, who keeps faith in you, especially when the going gets rough, and you are tempted to give up faith in a changing world. Continue to run with perseverance the race set before you, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.

Amen.