February 17, 2008 | 8:00 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.

Hear Me Now and Believe Me Later

John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Genesis 12:1-4a
John 3:1-17
Romans 4:1–5, 13–17, 20–25

The whole purpose of the Bible, it seems to me,
is to convince people to set the written word down
in order to become living words in the world for God’s sake.
For me, this willing conversion of ink back to blood
is the full substance of faith. In practice, this means that
my faith is far more relational than doctrinal.
Although I am guilty of reading scripture as selectively as anyone,
my reading persuades me that God is found in right relationships,
not in right ideas, and that a great deal of Christian theology
began as a stammering response to something
that had actually happened in the world.

Barbara Brown Taylor
Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

This morning I want us to think a little bit about faith. Now I know that we talk about faith every week, so this may not seem like such a bold suggestion. But I want us to think about the concept of faith, because I think faith can cause a great deal of consternation and confusion for us.

Faith is a concept so fundamental and basic to our religion and our spirituality that you may be surprised to hear me say that it could be a matter of confusion or difficulty. We are, after all, a “people of faith.” We often refer to our religion as “the Christian faith.” So what’s the problem?

I want to suggest to you this morning that what we mean by faith is often confused by how we use this word and the words we use to explain and demonstrate it.

Over half a century ago, the influential Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber wrote a marvelous book that was translated into English as Two Types of Faith. In this book, Buber proposes that there are two—and he thinks only two—types of faith: one that is based on trust and one that is based on belief. The former is more relational; the latter is more dogmatic. The one is grounded in relationships and community; the other is more individual and rooted in the acceptance of propositions as truth.

Buber argues that, in its most essential expressions, Judaism is the type of faith based on trust, whereas Christianity more often than not exemplifies the type of faith based on belief, especially belief in the divinity and resurrection of Jesus. Buber’s entire argument is beyond the scope of what we should dwell on this morning, but it is worth noting that in this way he distinguishes between the faith of Jesus and the faith of Paul and those who have been influenced by Paul. Buber considers Jesus more at home in the trust faith of Judaism and less concerned with the belief faith that would characterize later developments within Christianity. But for our purposes this morning, let’s just focus on Buber’s basic distinction, the distinction between trust faith and belief faith.

I’ve always been impressed by Buber’s claim, and while I’m not always sure that they are in fact mutually exclusive, I do think that there is something to this distinction. It seems to me that trusting in someone or something is fundamentally different than believing a proposition. Trusting a person seems like a deeper experience to me than believing what that person says. I may, in fact, believe someone’s words because I trust the person, but the two experiences aren’t exactly the same.

This distinction becomes important for our reading of the Bible and our use of the Bible in our theology and practice, because both types of faith are evoked in our translations of basic words for faith in both Hebrew and Greek. Depending on the context and the situation, words derived from the Hebrew and Greek root words for “faith” are rendered as both “trust” and “belief.”

In both the Old and New Testaments, the Bible speaks of people trusting in God. This is something that we might call “faithfulness” rather than simply “faith,” implying that we are talking about a way of being, not just a set of beliefs or practices. But at the same time, both Testaments also speak of people believing certain principles about God or believing that God has or will do something that God has promised to do. You can imagine as well that in some places these two types of faith overlap and are less easy to distinguish. The shared vocabulary of faith and the difficulty of translating concepts from ancient to modern languages will sometimes leave us struggling to figure out what was meant and what it means for us today.

Our scripture lessons this morning provide good examples of the difficulty of understanding what various biblical writers mean by faith.

In our gospel reading, Jesus’ exchange with Nicodemus culminates in what is without a doubt the most famous and oft-quoted verse of the entire Bible: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Central to this statement is the concept of belief. Belief in Jesus leads to salvation.

Now the Greek word translated as “believes” is derived from the basic root for “faith,” so it could just as easily be translated as “trust.” Does this sound different to you? “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who trusts in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” I think it does. Trusting in Jesus is not exactly the same as believing in Jesus, if believing in Jesus means that one has to accept all the things that the church happens to teach about Jesus. But trusting in the living Christ is something different altogether. It’s not about reciting a creed or going through a checklist of doctrines. It’s about being in a relationship.

So which did John mean? Belief or trust? Reading the entire Gospel of John leads me to think that it is belief. More so than the other Gospels, John seems especially concerned with belief and correct belief. This word for faith occurs eighty-five times in John, compared to just thirty-two times in the other three Gospels combined. In John, the work of God is defined as believing “in him whom [God] has sent” (6:29). Jesus repeatedly teaches that belief in him is the requirement for eternal life (5:24; 6:40, 47; 11:26). One’s relationship to God is defined in terms of belief in Jesus (12:44; 16:27; 17:21). The results of Jesus’ teaching are often described as coming to belief (8:30; 10:42). The famous story of “doubting” Thomas not believing in the resurrection until he sees Jesus, a story unique to the Gospel of John, is paradigmatic of how the reader is to respond to the gospel. Jesus says, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (20:29). And finally, John concludes by offering this reason for writing down the Gospel in the first place: “These are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name” (20:31).

What about our reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans? In this passage, Paul is making an argument that it is faith that justifies us before God; it is faith that brings us into a right relationship with God and reconciles us to God. To prove his point, Paul draws our attention to a paradigm of faith from the Old Testament, Abraham. Paul quotes the story of Abraham from the book of Genesis, which says, “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Here again, the word translated as “believed” is the basic “faith” word in both the Hebrew original and the Greek translation that Paul quotes. But this time, I think it might be more appropriate to translate it as “trust” instead of “believe.”

In the story Paul is quoting, Abraham is not being asked to believe a particular doctrine about God. He is not being tested on systematic theology. He has just been told that even in his and his wife’s old age they will be given a son. Even more, God has promised him that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars in heaven. In response to this, it is said that Abraham “believed” God. This type of belief, this type of faith, is more about trust than anything else. Abraham was faithful and trusted that God would be faithful too. “Abraham trusted God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.”

In these two stories, the story of Jesus and Nicodemus and the story of God and Abraham, I think we can find the two types of faith suggested by Buber. I think we can see the difficulty of translating these ancient texts.

But why does it matter? Why does it matter which of these understandings of faith we find in a particular story? Why does it matter which type of faith we most identify with in our own life?

It matters, I think, because the second type of faith, the belief type of faith, is often a stumbling block for those of us earnestly seeking to follow God through the way of Jesus. Some people wonder if they believe enough. When Christianity is reduced to a set of doctrines or a collection of creeds, it not only loses some of its life and vitality, it can easily become a litmus test for who is in and who is out. “Believe this and you can be a part of our community; if not, you don’t belong here.”

I, for one, struggle to find that message in the life of Jesus and in the community he tried to nurture. I think that Jesus was less concerned with what people believed and more concerned with trusting God and faithfully following where God leads.

I recently read Barbara Brown Taylor’s wonderful memoir, Leaving Church. Among the many treasures I discovered in this book, I was pleased to find this very same distinction between belief and trust. She writes that by the time she left parish ministry,

I had arrived at an understanding of faith that had far more to do with trust than with certainty. I trusted God to be God even if I could not say who God was for sure. I trusted God to sustain the world although I could not say for sure how that happened. I trusted God to hold me and those I loved, in life and in death, without giving me one shred of conclusive evidence that it was so. While this understanding had the welcome effect of changing faith from a noun to a verb for me, it was an understanding that told me how far I had strayed from the center of my old spiritual map. (p. 170)

Friends, as a pastor still engaged in parish ministry, it is my hope that we can conceive of church in such a way that you don’t have to stray too far to experience this type of faith. Like Barbara Brown Taylor, I too tend to find God more present in the experience of life than in my meager attempts to define who and what God is. And I think that this is the kind of faith that God invites us to follow.

I was intrigued by the Old Testament passage that the lectionary suggested for today. Instead of the part of Abraham’s story that was actually quoted by Paul, or instead of the part of the story where Abraham obeys God’s commandment of circumcision, the lectionary guides us to the beginning of Abraham’s story—God’s call to Abraham to leave his home and follow God to a new land. This is a story of trust.

I often use this story at the beginning of my confirmation class, when I invite our young people to join us on the journey of faith. I point out to them that the story of our faith doesn’t begin with a set of rules or a set of doctrines to believe in. The story of our faith begins with an invitation to walk. It begins with an invitation to trust God in the midst of life and to worry about the believing later. And I show them that this is just what Abraham does.

Maybe you remember the old Saturday Night Live sketches with Hans and Franz, played by Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon. Hans and Franz were Austrian bodybuilders that idolized Arnold Schwarzenegger and tried to get their viewers to “pump up” like their hero. As they spewed forth fitness advice and taunts about their physical superiority, one of their many catchphrases was “Hear me now and believe me later.”

This phrase has always stuck with me. It occurs to me today that it captures something of the essence of this dichotomy of trust and belief.

God says to Abraham, “Hear me now and believe me later.”

Jesus call his disciples and says to them, “Hear me now and believe me later.”

When life is difficult, God says, “Hear me now and believe me later.”

When illness and death consume our bodies, God says, “Hear me now and believe me later.”

When hurricanes destroy lives and we wonder if this is God’s will, God says, “Hear me now and believe me later.”

When a troubled young man shoots and kills innocent students and we wonder where God is, God says, “Hear me now and believe me later.”

The poor and the hungry and the homeless say, “Hear me now,” and God says, “Believe me later.”

The oppressed and the abused say, “Hear me now,” and God says, “Believe me later.”

Gays and lesbians feeling God’s call to ministry say, “Hear me now,” and God says, “Believe me later.”

People in need across our world say, “Hear me now,” and God says, “Believe me later.”

Friends, listen for God. Trust God and the rest will follow.

Amen.