March 17, 2013 | 8:00 a.m. | Fifth Sunday in Lent

The Color of Faith

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 126
Philippians 3:4b–14

“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”

Philippians 3:10 (NRSV)

Tomorrow is the most important thing in life.
Comes into us at midnight very clean.
It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands.
It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.

John Wayne

You may be familiar with the satirical story by Dr. Seuss called The Sneetches. Remarkably I came across this story for the first time only recently. In it, the Sneetches are yellow duck-like birds who come in two varieties: members of one group of Sneetches have a green star on their bellies, and the other group has plain bellies. The Star-Belly Sneetches think themselves far better than the starless Plain-Belly Sneetches, whom they never include at parties and picnics. Having internalized this sense of inferiority, the Plain-Belly Sneetches have no fun and instead just enviously watch the Star-Belly Sneetches having all the fun on the beach.

One day an entrepreneur named Sylvester McMonkey McBean arrives, bringing with him a very clever invention. He has invented a machine that can stamp a star onto the bellies of Sneetches. When the Plain-Belly Sneetches pop out of his machine, they are no longer plain, and as you can imagine, the number of Star-Belly Sneetches grows. This infuriates the original Star-Belly Sneetches, who can no longer tell the difference between the authentic and the artificially enhanced Star-Belly Sneetches.

This satire by Dr. Seuss not only points out the tendency groups have to differentiate between who is in and who is out, but also makes fun of the randomness by which things, often things that individuals never choose for themselves, determine peoples’ identities.

Throughout history, religion has often been one of those things that determine peoples’ identities. Even though people come into their religious identities mostly by circumstances beyond their own control—by the circumstance of their birth, the families in which they grow up, or the country into which they are born—religion often plays a powerful role in determining who people are, in relation to who is in and who is out, who is part of the family and who is a foreigner. Because religion is not at all a trivial feature of identity, like the stars on the Star-Belly Sneetches, it is even more important to consider the social divisions to which religion can contribute.

In the scripture lesson we read this morning, the Apostle Paul speaks of his former religious identity. He was “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.” Paul knew clearly who he was, and he lived his life accordingly. Paul’s sense of identity had been shaped by a version of Jewish religion that drew tight boundaries around what it meant to be a pure Jew—to be a Hebrew born of Hebrews and to be blameless under the law—and as such he knew who was in and who was out. Given the tight boundaries drawn around what it meant to be a pure Jew, and given how zealously Paul persecuted those who defied those boundaries, it makes sense to characterize Paul’s original religious stance in the world as one of defensiveness. He was defensive about Judaism. He was defensive about the law, and he was defensive about his own identity.

We know from the book of Acts that at some point Paul underwent a radical conversion experience. His conversion was so radical that not only the particular things about which he had been defensive but his whole defensive stance in the world fell away. No longer defending the need to be circumcised or the need to follow dietary rules, no longer making self-righteous claims about his own blamelessness in the face of the law, no longer defending himself as a pure Hebrew, and no longer defending Jews from everyone else, Paul began to say about himself instead, “I have become all things to all people.” Paul leveraged his ability to speak fluently in both Hebrew and Greek, making it possible for him to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ to any urban audience in the Hellenistic world. So that he could win over as many people as possible to the good news of Christ, he came to understand himself in a new way. Listen to how he described himself in his letter to the Corinthians: “To the Jews I became as a Jew. . . . To those under the law I became as one under the law. . . . To those outside the law I became as one outside the law. . . . To the weak I became weak. . . . I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some” (1 Corinthians 9:20–22).

Where there had been such defensiveness before, there seems to be no trace of it anymore. This is no small matter. In fact, it is perhaps the most telling sign of the depth and thoroughness of Paul’s conversion of faith.

In the many books he wrote on the experience of faith, the great American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr identified defensiveness not only as the root of all evil, but also as the opposite of faith. I cannot tell you how illuminating this insight has been for me, both intellectually and personally. So let me repeat it: defensiveness is the root of all evil and is the opposite of faith. As Niebuhr explains, if faith is trust and loyalty, the opposite of faith is not unbelief; it is defensiveness. Defensiveness is what stands in the way of trust and loyalty.

Trust and loyalty, on the one hand, and defensiveness, on the other hand—these are fundamental emotional dispositions by which we exist in the world. They are the general dispositions with which we face all the specific ups and downs, joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains of life. Given that we cannot control everything that happens to us, a general outlook of trust or a general outlook of defensiveness makes all the difference in how we conduct our lives.

A few years ago, two congregants of this church highly recommended that I watch a three-part television documentary called This Emotional Life. Originally shown on PBS, now it can be watched on video. Narrated by Daniel Gilbert, a social psychologist at Harvard University who is perhaps best known for his work on what makes for human happiness, this video walks you through the complexities of our emotional lives and exposes you to the various psychological theories and therapies that can help people to address their emotional orientations in the world. It begins with the commonly acknowledged metaphorical assumption that “life is a roller coaster.” Given the assumption that life does indeed consist of ups and downs, the question that the interviewed psychologists address is how are we emotionally to handle the vicissitudes of life?

This is not a new question. In one form or another, all the ancient schools of philosophy, Platonists, Stoics, and Epicureans, asked and answered this question.

Throughout history, all the major religions have raised the question and have provided different answers. For Christians the question is answered in the life and death of Jesus Christ. Jesus lived his whole life trusting God, his Father in heaven. It was this basic orientation of faith that colored the entirety of his life, what he taught and did, with whom he interacted, and whom he included. It was his trust in God that enabled him steadily to make his way toward Jerusalem, to endure every hardship he underwent, even to suffer and die on the cross. Completely devoid of any defensiveness, Jesus trusted God to the end.

The crucifixion of Jesus was a traumatic event. Unlike most traumatic events, which are repressed and rarely spoken of, the passion narrative is told and retold each year, generation after generation, by the church. The story of Christ’s passion is the church’s clearest answer to the question of how we are emotionally to handle the vicissitudes of life.

As we wrestle with that question ourselves, we should thank Paul for having made Christ the exemplar for us. Rather than repressing it, Paul took the trauma of Christ’s crucifixion and formed a lesson out of it for himself and for all of us. In his letters, he crystallized the significance of Christ so that his crucifixion remained not a trauma but became good news and so that it remained not just a story but became an example to follow. “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death,” Paul wrote.

For Paul and for us, becoming like Christ in his death means that we trust God to the end. It means that we undergo a conversion, not from one religion to another, but more radically from a stance of defensiveness to a stance of trust. If we were to assess our own lives, as Paul assessed his, what difference would such a conversion make? What would we say about who we once were and who we want to become?